[PoE2] Blood Mage - Sanguimancy Hexblast/Chaos Bolt - Constant overflow - Stop killing yourself

I'm at level 66 in act3 cruel struggling with this build in a way i've never experienced playing poe. Even without casting any spell but chaos bolt, my life drains to zero in high speed and i really don't understand when and why and what's causing this at all. Sometimes during a boss fight i need to pop 4 life flasks to make it stop. There are no ailments active at these moments, nor have i been hit. I have two ascendancies, invested in grasping wounds. And it's not damage spreaded over time that's causing this.

I either can chose passives to force life regen which causes me to do no damage or invest in chaos+crit and die without using any spell or being attacked. I'm completely out of ideas, i was at 40h reaching act 3 cruel and since then, i invested 60 more hours not finding any possibility to make this build useful in any way.

What i'm most worried about: the behavior feels like a bug, but i don't know if there's a reason for this that i cause. Now, at 100h total invest, i just give up. It was a complete waste of lifetime. I had some fun at the beginning, followed by 60h of pure frustration being not able to kill any act3 cruel boss is too much wasted time for me.

I hope, you get this class working, all the build tips didn't work out for me as if i play a completely different game. But i guess, it's all about having five trillion hours of poe1 experience, because this is what poe2 is still about, cause nothing explains itself despite it's complexity. I'm totally frustrated quitting the game now.

Edit - this is the build:
https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/yr9qw01v

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AngryGekko#0233 wrote:

Even without casting any spell but chaos bolt, my life drains to zero in high speed and i really don't understand when and why and what's causing this at all

I see you have two spells on Cast on Crit and that's what is draining your health probably.

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HagePuff#5773 wrote:

Your damage is absolutely weak compared to monks, warriors, mercenaries, rangers, sorcerers, and infernalists (all of whom were buffed even more with the latest patch (E)

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immortalq#5973 wrote:

if you want to compare to other characters class/asc - Blood Mage imo is MID and that's fine.

I agree with that. Is Blood Mage a perfect class with no issues? No. Can it reach Spark levels of power ridiculousness? Probably also no. Can it be solid enough to clear all content and be fun to play? I think so, yes. As I said earlier, purpose of this thread is to help people find fun in playing Blood Mage. I agree this class is more demanding to make it work, and not necessarily more effective in comparison. I find this gameplay very rewarding, but if you only can have fun playing the strongest, highest dps, one shotting builds only, going different class would probably work better for you :D


As a side note, thank you guys for lively discussion and great ideas. I'm gonna post an update soon, I did switch few gems around, but currently on t15 and it's a breeze, really.

Can't wait for your update man. Been switching back and forth between bonestorm and hexblast and I got into enjoying blood mage after emulating your hexblast build. There is an easy to play build going around for blood mages-- the crit DD one. Not into it, but for the sake of argument on not having an OP build, blood mages get one, but can't say it's better than the infernalist version outside of the base crit chance from the ascendancy node. I'd also hazard a warning against it as it looks dangerously close to being a nerf candidate.

As for me, I'm liking the non-crit version someone else mentioned here and I'll try a variation of it without bloodmagic.

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Sm0lin#7816 wrote:

I see you have two spells on Cast on Crit and that's what is draining your health probably.

No, even if i remove any spell from coc, i'm still having this issue of health draining rapidly. I try to fight chimera, i need to pop 5-6 flasks there to stabilize the health drain without being hit.

So instead of essence retention, you have energy drain?

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Ghioluh#6003 wrote:

So instead of essence retention, you have energy drain?

No, clicked on the wrong icon, corrected it. Thank you.

Hey guys, again thank you all for great suggestions and discussion. I updated my original post with new video, as I made it to t15 maps and got my full ascendancy. Gem list is also updated, quite a lot changed here. Thanks for taking interest in my build and I'm glad it helped some of you. Cheers!

Link to the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtCIDkPEc_c

Thanks for the update. I will be taking a look. I'm having difficult time at level 53.. really need that cast on crit... also haven't' gotten the LVL13 gems to get Temporal Chains.

Just looking through it.. Did I miss Contagion somewhere?

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Alelock#9551 wrote:

also haven't' gotten the LVL13 gems to get Temporal Chains.

Alternatively, you can use the same curse on Blasphemy and on manual cast with Cursed Ground. Without Deodre's ring you can't have three curses active anyway, so you can try that.

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Alelock#9551 wrote:

Did I miss Contagion somewhere?

I replaced it with Essence Drain. Most of the monster packs die with one Hexblast so it wasn't really that useful. ED helps with single target damage and with Chaotic Freeze it's usually two Hexblasts to freeze a rare monster. I may put Contagion back if I get Perfect Jeweler Orb, will see.