DotH Blood Mage Feedback

TL:DR, Blood Mage is fine, playable, but the QoL is in need of some attention.

Sanguimancy is fine. It puts pressure on having crit from Sekhemas to Chaos, then you could drop for leech if you wanted. If you do your ascendancies just balance out maybe with slight upside, so meh. If you play as crit Sanguimancy is good, effective 200% HP and new supports contribute a lot. Especially the pick-up range. But again kinda forces a crit play style, which I like, but does feel forced. Would not take, if that was an option.

Syphon Vitality does not feel good with Sanguimancy. If I have over health from Sanguimancy, this node does nothing. That sucks. A modification to allow leech to over heal (maybe that's too good) or allow leech effects to occur even at full health (Fast Metabolism) would give a lot more "uptime" to the node instead of it only being active while your already at risk.

Curse Node, why? It's bad. It feels bad. It obsoletes the already crushed hexblast. It's not thematic. It's bad, make it spicier or replace it. Blasphemy out preforms this node by every measure except spirit cost & magnitude. No cast time, no eruption time, no mana cost, greater area. This curse node is just not offering enough to be interesting or powerful.

Blood Barbs is cool and thematic and received a lot of new support via support gems. The new es change also helps! Good stuff. Rather it not be curse aligned, but maybe curses just need more support.

Between the Cracks is niche. It's good, until it isn't. During campaign it was very impactful, but as I got into maps and stronger scaling it feels not good because of the interaction between armour and crit. Armour has lower reduction against larger hits, crits are definitionally larger hits. So as crit damage scales, this node offers less and less. As a campaign node it's great, and falls off towards endgame. It has a purpose and does it well.

Grasping Wounds is fantastic! With 50% damage taken recouped as life, it becomes an effective 25% mitigation on hits! With an extra 25% regained as life! Love it. No notes.

Crimson Power sounds exciting and I want it to be. I want to stack health. But because Sanguimancy is mandatory and Crimson Power is locked behind Grasping Wounds I can only take 1 additional notable. I definitely want Gore Spike, but then I have a significant gap in my resource management, needing a notable amount of mana Regen and health Regen to be stable, specifically the Crimson part. Especially if I'm playing at distance. But if I take Syphon Vitality I lose a large part of the reason I want Crimson Power, specifically the Power part.

Gore Spike replaces Between the Cracks at endgame. Both are just damage scales, one scales with crit chance, the other crit damage. This is fine. Gore Spike feels a little weaker than desired, but if more life scaling comes into play that'll balance out. Well see.

I do not like Sunder the Flesh. Strictly because it invalidates the school of spells most aligned with the Blood Mage thematically, and mechanically. The flat 15% crit removes the whole premise of Bone Cage and Bonestorm as crit aligned spell, via a crit aligned ascendancy node branch. It also incentives over powering crit builds by giving spells that shouldn't be crit aligned (and are not power budgeted for it) access to overwhelming crit (think auto-bomber). This just gives more reason to tone down crit which will disproportionately affect the actual crit align spells. I am highly advocating for redesigning this node to a 3% more crit node, maybe make it conditional on targets bleeding or some such.

Overall I think Blood Mage is cool and feels good after getting a build fulfilled lategame. A little slow, but very resilient. I love my Soul Tether, Zealots Oath, Syphon Vitality, Fast Metabolism (anoint, but why is it so expensive?!?!) build. It can wade through a mass of swarming creatures with reasonable damage output and it can chunk down bosses very well. It's a very positional play style for maps to always have a movement option to slow the pace of life loss, to balance with the leech. Itemization leans very heavy into life stacking, even with nerfed Atziri's Disdain. Some armor buffs would make it feel even better too.

I'm looking forward towards exploring new uniques and some of the new crafting mechanics in endgame. I've got a plan for a mirror able Phys/Crit wand (although I doubt many people are looking for that).

Keep up the great work.


P.s. Occult has too many minion spells, it crowds out chaos and phys spells that have no other home. Put them ele-skelys together and give them a support to chose the element, or chaos, or phys.