Blood Mage Feedback - Experienced Player

Blood Mage does seem a bit weird at a glance. It sounds like a class that should be all about HP stacking as a spellcaster, which sounds interesting as hell, but it still has Mana costs..? Then there's the fact that all your gear and spells would require high Intelligence as well.

IMO, the answer I think should be have the starting node which defines its abilities as a HP spellcaster basically give you Blood Magic. Convert the Mana costs to HP, disable your mana globe. Then, have it cause your Intelligence to give inherit 2 HP instead of Mana, and you'd probably have the basis of a very solid HP caster that flavorfully works like they want it. For bonus spice, have it also allow any effects based off of your mana pool to instead apply to your HP pool.

Oh, and fix leech. My god my Hand of Chuyula would appreciate leech being fixed.

Greetings chaps,

I just wanted to give my 2 cents on the matter aswell. I am a lvl91 Blood Mage going Hexblast. I am not crit, using controlled destruction so I'm mainly going right side of ascendancy with Grasping wounds and Crimson power and finally the Spell leech.

I think for the most part, most of the gripes and complaints do have a point, but I also concede that the progenesis and crimson power nodes are actually super powerful and feel fantastic to play around, they make me super tanky and they feel great. I opted for these as initially I wanted to play a Contagion + Essence drain build, however I had to change to Hexblast as those ED damage scales terribly into endgame. Considering most Cold skills have 12-15% Crit already... kinda pointless going for base crit in those situations.

My main issue is how counter intuitive it is to play, I've had to put a lot into defences and especially recoup which pairs well with Grasping wounds once you have over 50%, however there is a huge opportunity cost in doing this since a lot of those points on the skill tree could be going elsewhere which is why I'm not breaking the game at high tier maps, just have comfortable enough damage and ok tankiness. Another HUGE issue is party play... I noticed when playing with friends that I wasn't getting as many life remnant globules and it turns out that I have to do the killing blow if I want a life remnant meaning that if anyone else kills the creatures, that entire ascendancy point (Sanguimancy) and some of the ones after become completely useless. So if I want to feel like I'm playing the class, I can't play with friends =(, it seems really bad.

Mana costs are ofcourse a point of concern on the class as has been voiced out by many others already. As well as investing a lot of gear and passive points into recouping and regen'ing life to sustain it, I've also had to invest more than I would have liked into mana aswell... I was hoping the Blood Magic keystone would have removed the mana problem for me, not double the cost for me in life which is simply too much to sustain. It would make sense in a slow casting build like Chaos Dot for example where I 'm not having to cast as often as long as my skill duration is high enough, I'd have chance to regen in between casts but as things are right now, this just isn't possible. So again, another huge opportunity cost, a lot invested into just life and mana sustain leaves very little for actual damage.

All these points above leaves the class feeling very hard to adapt and especially extremely limiting when it comes to build diversity. I don't want to go Crit, so why am I kind of forced into it? I have played POE 1 since open beta, nearly 12 years now and I loved being able to do whatever the hell I wanted but this class in it's current state feels very oppressive and limiting which is a shame.

I would suggest what many have already mentioned, make sanguimancy cause skills to split the mana 50%/50%, it would still be thematic to the class while also alleviating the hefty costs of the skills and wouldn't be too much of a burden to use Blood Magic. I mean come on, A blood Mage that can't use Blood Magic?
I would also suggest changing the infinite curses node to something else. I would expect the class to have more things related to bleeding or corrupted blood. As things stand, even if and when you implement Exsanguinate or Reap or those POE1 abilities, even then this class wouldn't be the best one to use those kinds of abilities, same way Occultist was one of the best ones for Chaos builds in POE1 etc.

I am still having fun though, especially because the right side of the ascendancy class is actually very powerful as a defensive mechanic. I'm taking the slow but steady approach and have given up on doing stupid amounts of damage like we've seen on other builds. It would be nice to see something more specialised and focused for the class tho

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Sm0lin#7816 wrote:

I'm surprised by the amount of posts complaining about Blood Mage. I have phenomenal time playing it. My build is Blasphemy with 2 curses and Hexblast as main damage skill. I basically roll into the middle of monster pack, press Hexblast once and they all die giving me instant life overflow. Clear speed is literally insane.
In boss fights I use Hexblast only when I grab enough overflow, otherwise its high cost would drain my life and kill me in few seconds. So instead I spam Chaos Bolt from my wand, because guess what, it has no mana/life cost.
It's so surprising to me, because I don't consider myself experienced player like you, I never made my own build in PoE1 and I can't understand why people can't make this class work, when even I can, really.

I would bet my nuts that the same setup with a demon form infernalist would do the same thing, but better, faster, heavier, and safer.

Check this: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3608770
Its a build around bonestorm + full crit and phys damage. And detonate dead for clearing.
it works, you get a blood orb from every cast because you sit around 70% crit chance

I am honestly having a lot of fun with Blood Mage, I'm not at endgame, only very early in Act 3.

I think it just works with my playstyle, against regular mobs I throw out my chaos DoT's, curse with Decaying Hex, Dark Effigy and then slowly walk in to the pack while spamming Unearth (with Pin, Lockdown and Leverage support) and I am constantly able to be running around with double my health (double energy shield as well due to Grim Feast) I am absolutely swimming in Life Remnants and Grim Remnants.

against single target I substitute Unearth for Bone Storm, bosses require a little more caution especially if there are no adds, but so far I haven't had issues progressing.

There have certainly been some close calls, If my health does start to get low I will switch to using Bone Blast which has no cost to generate more orbs, my crit is decent enough that it's a reliable way to get more for free.

I don't know how it will feel later, I just want to give my thoughts on how it feels at the start of the ascendancy.