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

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Goodnametaken#0270 wrote:

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

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Goodnametaken#0270 wrote:

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.