Nickomang's Burden of Shadows Blood Mage

This build is based around using the Burden of Shadows unique staff to benefit multiplicatively from scaling gem levels. As gems go up in level, flat damage and mana cost both increase quadratically. Increased cost would typically be a downside, but because Burden of Shadows gains % Chaos damage based on skill cost it instead becomes an additional way to scale damage.

The obvious choice for ascendency with the staff is Blood Mage due to the spell leech. This build leans heavily into crit/Atziri's Acuity for instant leech, but the general shell can be modified for skills that don't need to crit. I've played a few variations of Blood Mage that use Grasping Wounds and it's a fantastic node that I'd absolutely love to run.

Using a staff puts a ton of pressure on our defenses. This build is viable for all content, but I don't consider it tanky by any means even with a 6k ES pool and grim feast.

The only additional defensive layers we use are leech (which functions more as a way to make sustained spellcasting possible than stay alive) Mind over Matter for a weak buffer against the damage that gets through our ES pool, and some increased max res.

This build isn't particularly fast, it's not easy to fit rarity, it's demanding to play, visual clarity is awful, and it has a very clunky weapon swap required for bossing, but the upsides are tremendous:
- Phenomenal full screen clear ability and massive single target DPS
- Engaging playstyle, fun to watch life globe pinballing up and down
- Viable in all content
- Functional on a budget and scales very well with currency investment
- Beautiful default MTX on unique gear
- Excellent power fantasy. I love the idea of the Blood Mage, and ramping into heavy life cost for spells to gain more power is super cool and on theme

And most importantly:
- The feeling of smug self-satisfaction that comes from playing an off-meta build with a staff and no Archmage

Weapon: Burden

Helm: Atziri's Disdain gives us a ton of energy shield. If you need to fill out res/crit chance/other stuff you can use a rare helm instead.

Chest: Covenant is the best in my experience. It gives us more damage and quality of life with the extra leech. We want a corruption with overrolled spell leech and higher life cost. Rare chest also works great, get big ES and res. Cloak of Flame with 90% max fire res feels good as well, but a bit too much investment required for the payoff.

Gloves: Atziri's Acuity is core to the build, we need the instant leech in order to pay for our spells while continuously casting.

Boots: Movespeed/res/ES/life. Potential for some experimentation in this slot where we get res on helm or chest instead.

Amulet: +3 spell levels is far and away the most important. Res, life, energy shield, crit chance/dmg, rarity, cast speed, spell dmg are all nice. Spirit is interesting because you can add some QoL to the build, especially if you can use +50 spirit shield in the weapon swap instead % life regen. I like anointing Spiral into Insanity- it's a great value node for us and it's a bit out of the way.

Rings: For prefixes get chaos damage/life and either rarity or mana. Rings are your main source of resist, so you may want to spend all 6 suffix slots to get capped. If you're there already, you can get rarity or cast speed.

Belt: Ideally Ingenuity with as high a roll as you can get, but the build functions fine with a rare belt. Get life and resists.

Jewels: Still tinkering with these, but so far I've liked rubies with increased area of effect, elemental damage, and life leech. The best remaining affix is max fire res. +3 Prism of Belief is also a huge boost- use Fireball for mapping and Comet for bossing. From Nothing on Blood Magic is an option to get some additional max res, and a time-lost sapphire with max ES, curse AoE, cast speed, and crit chance to take advantage of the high-density of nodes in the Spaghettification and Crit wheels.


There are a few general guidelines you should consider when gearing:
- You want your life pool to be at least as large as the cost of one fireball + one frost wall so you can reliably combo without needing overflow/flask charges. You have a few different ways to tinker with spell costs, so modify as neccessary based on what feels good for you.
- Capping res is usually the main priority after the life pool is sufficient
- Finally, start looking for quality of life and increased damage

Mapping:
- Press fireball on packs and in tight locations. If you're in the open, use frost wall to shotgun first. When on low life, you may need to lifesteal up with frost wall first, press a flask, or in really bad situations, regen with the weapon swap shield. Straggler trash mobs can be ignored or killed with frost wall/weapon swap ability. Takes some getting used to, but once you get a feel for things it's quite smooth.

Bossing rotation:
- Sigil > Despair > Flame wall (honestly not needed) > Eye of Winter until full stacks > Frost Wall > Fireball > Comets infinity

When you get to a boss, swap your items from weapon set 1 to weapon set 2 and change which weapon set your skills are set to cast with. This lets you use weapon set 2's passive tree to drop nodes that are mostly useful while clearing in order to maximize your single target DPS. Don't forget to toggle Grim Feast/Blasphemy for Cast on Crit, and make sure all of your skills are still bound. I've died a ton of times by not realizing that any one of these things was slightly misconfigured, so double check that everything's set up correctly before you waste a boss key.

https://maxroll.gg/poe2/pob/nydp70dn

https://streamable.com/9p9nez

2/20/25: First iteration