The Blood Mage: Its current state, what's causing it, and suggestions for how to improve it.

Judging by the ladder, the Blood Mage is neck-and-neck with the Acolyte of Chayula for weakest ascendancy in the game. There are a lot of people talking about this, but I think the discussion has become scattered and unfocused, so I wanted to summarize my thoughts in case GGG is watching. The ascendancy is weak at every stage of the game at the moment, and the few players/streamers/build-makers that are using it, (Goratha for example), are mostly getting by on the strength of soon-to-be-nerfed skill interactions rather than anything having to do with the ascendancy.

Here are the major problems with the ascendancy right now:

1- Siphon Vitality is currently broken and doesn't actually function: This has been tested many times and GGG has acknowledged they are looking into the issue. This is a big deal because without the leech node, Blood Mages have essentially no good way to deal with recovery, which is critically important for them because of problem number 2. Additionally, many players are reporting that ALL instances of leech are doing nothing. It is possible that the issue is monster leech resistance is tuned so high that leech doesn't have any effect. In this case, I would strongly suggest revisiting the current tuning.

2- Sanguimancy is a net large negative in its current state: Currently taking this node makes you weaker than if it granted nothing at all, because it forces you to deal with twice the normal resource cost of using your abilities. The current state of PoE has a HEAVY focus on recovery and sustain in general, and suddenly forcing Blood Mage players to deal with double the recovery demands is a tough ask. Also consider that most boss fights are balanced around players having a certain number of life flask uses over the course of the fight. Well, Blood Mages have to spend a non-zero amount of those flask charges simply to pay for their spells even before they can consider using them to recover from boss damage.

Ostensibly, the Life Remants ability that is stapled to this node is supposed to help with this problem, but it has some major issues. The Remnants spawn at the location of your target, meaning they are useless on large bosses where the globes spawn inside their hitboxes, and they are very dangerous to collect in large groups of enemies or bosses that attack frequently. It's a nightmare trying to collect these things. On top of that, they do very little to help you when you need them the most, which is when you're actively fighting enemies and desperately need recovery. The vast majority of time these only actually get picked up after a fight is over.

3- The Blood Magic keystone doubles the HP cost of your abilities, rather than just removing the mana cost as it does in PoE 1: This is a big deal because the Blood Mage already has to deal with more resource recovery issues than every other class in the game. Being forced to pay life as a cost is already a very heavy price to pay on a character. Punishing players who choose to spend 20+ otherwise useless talent points in order to address the issue by doubling cost is really overboard.

4- The current numbers on Gore Spike are hilariously undertuned: Gore Spike gives 1 crit multi per 40 current HP. Most life stacking characters on the ladder right now have just about 3k max HP. That means that in ideal situations where you somehow manage to stay at full HP the entire time, (which is functionally impossible because of problems 1 and 2), Gore Spike would still only grant 75 crit multi. 75. That is ridiculously weak for an ascendancy node. You can literally get that much from three small passives on the tree. Then consider that the vast majority of the time you will be casting with health well below 3k, and the node looks even worse. In my experience, the actual bonus you get from this node averages somewhere around 30-40 crit multi, which is just hilariously shitty. You could triple this and it would still be marginal, especially when you consider that the unique Maligaro's gloves give you 300 crit multi for a way smaller investment. Even if you fixed all the other problems with this ascendancy this node would still be exceedingly weak.

5- The Progenesis node (Grasping Wounds) sucks if you can't reliably recover the staggered damage: Progenesis is awesome in PoE 1 because most characters have a viable way of recovering the staggered damage within the 4 second stagger window. PoE 2 has much more difficult recovery options, and the Blood Mage basically has no viable way to take advantage of this node. With Siphon Vitality not functioning, Grasping Wounds essentially does nothing but make you die 4 seconds later than you normally would have.

6- Blood Barbs is cool, but has almost no support from gems or the tree: This is a really great idea for an ascendancy node, but it just currently doesn't have enough supporting it to shine.

There are other minor issues, but these are the major ones. So, here are some suggestions on how to improve the ascendancy:

Fix Siphon Vitality so it actually functions, and insure that it provides enough leech to actually combat the extreme health costs of the ascendancy. This is pretty straight-forward. Giving Blood Mage proper recovery will go a long way to making it competitive.

Change Sanguimancy by removing the additional health cost clause and instead just give them Blood Magic. This kills two birds with one stone. It makes all Blood Mages have to play with the life-as-power fantasy and it gives you the Blood Magic effect without having to waste 20 points on the tree for no good reason. This is simple, elegant, and extremely thematic. I mean the class is called Blood Mage for god's sake. Shouldn't they all have Blood Magic?

Literally triple the value of the Gore Spike node. It might actually have to go even higher than that. It's insane that Maligaro's gives you more than 6 times the in-practice value of this node. There are actual 1-point small passives that rival it.

Fixing leech will go a long way to fixing the Progenesis Node. I suggest not changing this until those fixes shake out.

Add more options on the tree to engage with the Blood Barbs playstyle: I imagine this will come with time. It would not take very much for this to become a very intriguing option.

TL;DR



-Sanguimancy is extremely punishing and should be replaced with a Blood Magic + Life Remnants node.

-Siphon Vitality should be fixed to actually function and provide the leech it says it should.

-Buff the crap out of Gore Spike.

I don't know as forcing every blood mage strictly into Blood Magic is a great idea, much as the two seem like they should be married at the hip. That locks Blood mage out of stuff like Arcane Surge, Archmage, and other options down the line that could provide avenues for the usual bass-ackwards PoE nonsense. To say nothing of Eldritch battery/Mind Over Monkey builds. An easier fix is just "half the Mana costs of your spells become Life costs, instead". Same resource spent, just split across two buckets instead of one. That's already kind of an upshot, presuming the character can recover both life and mana. Always better to be spending and recovering from multiple buckets rather than just one.

the rest seems reasonable enough at first blush, methinks.

I will post a reply to bump this. :)

i.e. +1

Totally agree

Agreed. I've been struggling with this for some time now because going through the company again would be like torture, but I can't think of anything

I was thinking the same this for Blood Mage early. I even played up to T3 maps completely unascended with the 3% max life node only. However after being one shot a few times by the purple balls I said, fuck it, I'm going Progenesis. And you know what? It's not bad at all. At 2k life, 55% phys dr and 55% block I can sustaian the life costs by picking up the blood remnants. And I havn't died a single time since I spent my ascendency points. So with gear it's not too bad, but in campaign it's absolutely atrocious.

I'm not a fan of replacing the first node with Bloodmagic. As another commenter said above, it removes synergies with Arcane Surge and making one of your flasks useless is not good imo. Making it so the costs are 50/50 or at worst 75/75 would go a long way to make the node playable in acts though.

I don't think the crit multi node is that big of an issue. Remember you can double your lifepool with life remnants (it happens to me from time to time in maps). At 2k life that's 100% crit multi at full overflow. It could be buffed but considering the general power level of ascendency nodes in PoE 2 it's alright.

Overall Blood Mage needs some work but it's not as bad as I thought it was when I was playing 10h ago.

I'd be totally fine with this. The Blood Magic thing was just a suggestion. Although I will say it fits so well thematically that perhaps they could add an additional node that grants it along with something else attached.

The 50/50 thing would work just fine though, I agree. And it would alleviate (but not completely fix) the Blood Magic keystone doubling your costs problem.

I think part of Sanguimancy or part of life remnants should just give you a very large increase in picking up remnants of all types. So it can also be used with grim feast and mana remnants as well. Basically make it pick up any remannts on the screen (even half a screen), and let bloodmage being the "pick up stuff to get stronger" ascendency from crits and killing.

PoE2 i think could do with gameifying more of the ascendancy mechanics.

For example it would be great if we could bind Life Remnants to the hotbar, and then channel the skill in order to pull the orbs to us while channeling.

Something like that would also open up design space for ideas like a node that triggers a blood explosion based on the number of remnants you suck up at once, or allowing the remnant suction ability to work with Energy Shield and Mana remnants created by other skills.

That's too much effort for a counterbalancing bonus to a mallus that is mandatory. Some weird situational thing would be too awkward to force onto players to make the class fun... Just change the first node to something that isn't a net negative in most cases like it is now, and fix the leech node and the Blood Mage will be much better already