Chaos spells and blood mage

I have been forced to unspec out of all my bloodmage ascendency points just to make any progress as a chaos spell witch. I do not know whose bright idea it was to remove life leech from ED and to remove the AOE from contagion but this has been absolutely crippling for my character, and because you cannot respec your ascendancy and would instead need to reroll your entire character I am forced to either respec to one of the 'govt mandated' viable blood mage builds or remain without any ascendency on account of the lifetap effect baked in to this ill conceived ascendency.

Reasons why chaos spells are bad: extraordinarily low DPS and low duration with every spell. Contagion is bugged and will not target the enemy under your cursor, there is some kind of weird lingering hitbox thing going on where contagion will always prefer to target the first enemy your mouse touches in a pack instead of the one your cursor is presently highlighting. ED losing the life leech is kinda OK but I was hoping that it would still retain this ability so that I could use it to offset the BM lifetap effect. BM also doesn't defer the damage taken to ES so if you want to cast despair, for example, it costs 242 life which is about 20% of my hp pool. I have a level 60 and I have got 80+ life modifiers on all of my armor pieces, I cannot conceive of a way to improve my life amount any further, spells like despair cost 240 life to cast meanwhile ED costs 54 and contagion costs 58. despair lowers chaos resist by 67% for me, of course I want to cast it frequently, the issue is that the only GOOD chaos spell is HEXBLAST which means if you want to have ANY kind of DPS with chaos you need to run blasphemy and spam hexblast. Contagion at level 14 does 139 dps, ED does 1159* (actual listed average is 698) and the DOT is 978 for 3 seconds. Hexblast does 1722 dps and is an explosive AOE spell. Meaning it is better for single target AND for pack clearing, there is NO REASON TO USE ED OR CONTAGION AND THE META IS TO USE BLASPHEMY AND SPAM HEXBLAST. There has been a reduction in nuance over POE1 in terms of chaos spells, GGG translated over two of the worst and most boring chaos spells and left all the others behind. The fact that theyre all low dps DOTs in a game where most enemies kill you in just a few hits is a cognitive dissonance between design goals.

I don't care that you introduced dodge rolling - that does not justify basic white mobs doing 700+ damage per hit in act 2 cruel. It Does not justify Jamanra having a 1.8 second attack timer on his lightning spear. If you wanted to mimic some of the intensity of dark souls maybe actually play the game and pay more attention to the AI of Artorias/Sif/Quelaag/OnS/Gwen and SEE how the designers knew that endlessly dodge rolling would be a negative experience and compare to the criticisms laid against later bosses like Sister Friede who would be a BS-fiesta of spam rolling in order to avoid her chained attacks.

I know you talked about buffing chaos spells recenlty in a patch notes so here is my advice to alleviate how awful these spells are: double their duration, double their dps and give contagion back its AOE. If I am forced to cast despair just to get enough dps this is a poor trade on the action economy against other players just spamming a single attack like magnetic salvo or detonating arrow and doing 3.5k dps with stun and pinning baked in. If I am forced to perform more ACTIONS in order to do LESS damage this is poor action economy and I am not surprised in the slightest to see how you had to buff them so early and by so much. Chaos spells have been so awful that in combination with the mistake of going bloodmage has almost made me quit the game. I am spending a lot of time right now looking at hitboxes and particularly against those venom spitting snake zombies because its not apparent that my character is not a vertical pillar viewed at an angle and is actually some kind of egg shape whose hitbox occupies a physically impossible amount of floor space so now wonder why people are dying to bad hitboxes.

Bloodmage itself is an awful ascendency which needs to be overhauled completely. Many people are looking at it and can see it would be bad, the fact that you are immediately required to sacrifice the full cost of a spell with your first ascendency points relegates you to not slotting support gems on to your spells because they will increase the mana cost and therefore the lifetap cost as well. What kind of idiot determines that a spellcaster should be losing double digit percentages of their life when casting the despair curse tax? If one was to assume that they should be playing bonemage bloodmage instead, enjoy your 1-button build I guess but even this doesn't scale properly either since you will want to slot the pinning support on bonestorm and would be intended to cast vulnerability instead to reduce armour and thus increase dps. If that is how the system was intended to be used, it will cost you 140 life for an unlinked vulnerability and then 80 life per second for bone storm to charge up. If you're really clever and following a build guide like a good little lemming then you have stacked cast speed to reduce the charge up time, stacked crit to get more blood orbs to recharge your health and overcharge if possible.

I would have proposed that each of the notables increase the amount of life tapped from the player by 33% instead, so that a player with 4 points would be losing 66% life at most or be slightly gimped but only losing 33% while not investing too heavily until 6 points are acquired. If occult spells are intended to be used with curses and if bloodmage is intended to be used with bone spells (or mace attacks apparenlty if you're Quin) then I really question the future of this game because viable builds looks like it will be in the toilet just POE1. The unjustifiable damage numbers of the enemies which are killing max tanked players and the lack of thought given to bosses who attack relentlessly and extremely fast is boring and tedious to play and ruins my interest. I just can't be bothered playing an inferior hybrid of two games I already own.

Today I will push for finishing the campaign but I will be dropping the game for a few months while I play something I actually enjoy, might even go back to POE1 for a bit of a palette cleanser.