new bloodline ascendancies: mostly garbage?

I am looking forward to testing spark with the living lightning ^^ see what i can build of that, some sort of spark, summoner,lightning something something. i dont even know. and with the new things, i dont even know more. and that feels like a great thing.

I havent feelt like this since , well, closed beta times, i dont know how or what. just that i want to make many characters and test strange things :)

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VoidWhisperer42#5989 wrote:

Yes, there are players who stick to guides because they never fully learned the basics at all. That’s where takes like “bloodlines are bad” come from, or when people point fingers at abilities that supposedly can’t work. Meanwhile, you see others making those same “unplayable” abilities work perfectly fine.

I take some pretty strong offense to this broad overstatement. It is a shockingly narrow view of players with game knowledge.

Not everyone is a meme build creator, experimenting with weird mechanics and weird uniques and combining things in strange ways to create something viable that no one has ever done. That is probably more like a unicorn player among the masses, rather than the AVERAGE "experienced" player that you describe.

I can make builds. I have made thousands of builds, across 18000+ hours of game time over the last 13 years. I have no idea how long you have been playing or how many builds you have personally created that are "unique" to you....nor does that really matter here. But I can all but guarantee you that I KNOW the vast majority of the mechanics of this game, and I have created and tweaked many builds to the point of having near-unique versions of builds for every class of skill and classes themselves.

NONE OF THAT means I am interested in making barely functional experimental builds. NONE OF THAT means I can't read a bloodline and determine that there is absolutely nothing I want to make with it, just for the sheer sake of making an off-version of something else that may be comparable in power, or worse in power.....just to experience something new. To me, that is a waste of my time.


I created this thread, with the very first line ADMITTING that perhaps I haven't looked hard enough....and sure there were a FEW ideas (like...three) that came up in this entire thread that I hadn't considered at all. Great. I love to read that. And the first few pages had some decent conversation. And then your post comes in to do what exactly? Explain how great you are for creating niche builds?

" it’s interesting to see how the new ascendancy classes really highlight the difference between players who follow build guides religiously and those who skip the tutorial leash and experiment on their own. These classes open up so many new possibilities for creativity, it’s almost hard to ignore if you’re the type who likes to try new things"

really? do they ACTUALLY open up so many new possibilities? What are they? You offered none. Not that you really needed to, but if you are going to come in here and make a sweeping judgment on anyone who criticizes these niche, oddly designed ascendancy "replacements"......then put your money where your mouth is. Prove me wrong that they aren't "mostly" garbage. Because right now, PoE ninja and nearly everything I've seen and read on these forums and elsewhere have confirmed that....they are almost ALL garbage. A few good options exist, but I never really said they didn't.

Seeing many claim that only popular builds are viable really shows how watered down the mindset of the community has become. You can make practically anything work, and even turn it into something genuinely impressive if you actually understand what you’re doing. It’s not about creating something entirely new that’s never been done before, it’s about recognizing a use case, understanding its purpose, and knowing how to make it work rather than dismissing it outright as garbage. Popularity has simply shifted the spotlight onto a select few options, while a lack of knowledge leaves gaps, confusion, and misplaced judgments about what’s actually viable. The same goes for the new Bloodlines, each one can absolutely be used effectively in some way. Saying “I’m not sure how to use the new Bloodline yet” would be a far better take than “They’re garbage, I only play popular builds because everything else is trash cause nobody taught me anything about the unpopular nodes.”

Yup, there genuinely are some amazing builds not yet discovered simply because people don't even attempt to play around and theorycraft.

Like, I got this ring from my last Breach boss encounter:



Immediately, I was thinking about how best to utilize it, and checking other items I already found, well...



Death's Oath grants an Aura that scales with aura effect (essentially a more damage multiplier for the skill) and chaos damage, but not spell damage. I can get up to 240% chaos damage from dual-weilding those, which is then turned into aura effect for Death's Oath (with a better roll and catalysts it's 18% of chaos damage as aura effect).

So I started cooking some more. I now have a WIP PoB for a Chaos RF Occultist where the aura itself has over 2 million DPS with explosions.

This chest has been dead for so long because it had just fallen behind in the race for more DPS, but this league it has actually become viable again.

I don't have a great use for my last 2 ascendancy points on Occultist, so I am choosing "Otherworldly Appendages" from the Breachlord bloodline to fix up my physical resistance some more (grants me 15% less phys and fire damage taken) which rounds out my build.

Point is: think outside the box. Don't blindly follow creator's for your builds. And don't let your memes be dreams, they may just fly

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ArtCrusade#4438 wrote:

Death's Oath grants an Aura that scales with aura effect (essentially a more damage multiplier for the skill) and chaos damage, but not spell damage. I can get up to 240% chaos damage from dual-weilding those, which is then turned into aura effect for Death's Oath (with a better roll and catalysts it's 18% of chaos damage as aura effect).

You can go with global damage scaling for more damage. You don't need the Warcry explosions on an Occultist anyway. The Grey Spire with 300% is one example.

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BaumisMagicalWorld#0673 wrote:

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ArtCrusade#4438 wrote:

Death's Oath grants an Aura that scales with aura effect (essentially a more damage multiplier for the skill) and chaos damage, but not spell damage. I can get up to 240% chaos damage from dual-weilding those, which is then turned into aura effect for Death's Oath (with a better roll and catalysts it's 18% of chaos damage as aura effect).

You can go with global damage scaling for more damage. You don't need the Warcry explosions on an Occultist anyway. The Grey Spire with 300% is one example.

Global damage does not give me aura effect on DO. So if I get to choose between just chaos damage and global damage, chaos damage will be way stronger for scaling. I'll also be somewhat starved for sockets so Grey Spire will cut into the gem socket economy quite deeply.

Ideally I'd like a Cane of Kulemak with Chaos Damage and Chaos Dot Multi roll which would be of some significance (2.6m total dps to 3.2m), and I could also swap my secondary DPS setup (ED of Desperation trap) into the 6-link.

More of an accessibility choice there, really. We don't have one like that in our private league and I'm getting very unlucky with finding Mastermind (0 medallions in 50 something safehouses lol)

Didn't really post it to open discussion about this build but to give an example on how people should approach bloodlines instead of calling everything bad but thanks for your suggestion

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ArtCrusade#4438 wrote:

Global damage does not give me aura effect on DO. So if I get to choose between just chaos damage and global damage, chaos damage will be way stronger for scaling.

? Global damage applies to everything. DoTs, ailments, Hit damage. It's additive with increases to Chaos Damage in your case.

Though I figured you might not approve due to lack of sockets. One of the reasons nobody ever cares about this item, even though it can also give +4% all max res. Niche, but I figured Death's Oath is also niche.

But yeah, Cane of Kulemak can get higher damage. Anyways, just my 2 cents. Cheers.

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BaumisMagicalWorld#0673 wrote:

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ArtCrusade#4438 wrote:

Global damage does not give me aura effect on DO. So if I get to choose between just chaos damage and global damage, chaos damage will be way stronger for scaling.

? Global damage applies to everything. DoTs, ailments, Hit damage. It's additive with increases to Chaos Damage in your case.

Though I figured you might not approve due to lack of sockets. One of the reasons nobody ever cares about this item, even though it can also give +4% all max res. Niche, but I figured Death's Oath is also niche.

But yeah, Cane of Kulemak can get higher damage. Anyways, just my 2 cents. Cheers.

Well, read the effect of the ring. Global damage doesn't give aura effect. Again, point wasn't to discuss my build but to show that by thinking outside the box, you can come up with unique, cool, yet viable build ideas

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ArtCrusade#4438 wrote:

Well, read the effect of the ring. Global damage doesn't give aura effect. Again, point wasn't to discuss my build but to show that by thinking outside the box, you can come up with unique, cool, yet viable build ideas

yes....but.....what does ANY of that have to do with this thread?

The point is the ascendancies. I am ALL FOR the foulborns. I think they are an absolutely fantastic and overdue addition to this game.

The ascendancies, not so much.



And...man Void....we have agreed in other threads but your take on this is so condescending and wrong its actually pretty incredible. And your willful "rewriting" and reframing of my post to its absolute extreme example shows this. And was there something in that post that was supposed to add to the conversation? Because I asked some genuinely simple questions.....and you just went for full blanket attack for the third time without offering anything. "Only popular builds are viable": seems like you have a bone to pick and just want to fight that one......even when it has pretty much no relation to anything I have said. Nor does it represent what I play. It has been years since I have played any "top 10 meta" build in any form (except for a singular armor stacker during Phrecia because I had simply never made one before).

While it was unrelated to the thread topic, at least Art supplied some cool food for thought. At least Baumis conversation about the ascendancy earlier (albeit proven to be a wrong interpretation, and kind of completely nixing his entire point against my thread) was a decent point to make.


I am not a slouch when it comes to build creation. I am not a novice when it comes to combining things to make GOOD things happen. Because of this experience, I can glean a lot of information from simply READING the mods that exist on the ascendancies. The "popularity" and actual quantifiable usage of the new ascendancies I pointed to serves as a reinforcement, not a explanation. There may be some things I haven't thought about, but the point is the GENERAL design of the ascendancies and the fact that MOST are terrible or downright unusable. Why introduce a MASSIVE system....when only a teeny tiny sliver of it is actually ever going to be used? That is my point.

Just because a handful of singular nodes might break that pattern......doesn't change anything I have said. And if you are specifically arguing that my take is simply that I "don't know enough" as you imply, then freaking show me what YOU seem to know that I do not. What YOU seem to know that the majority of those playing the game RIGHT NOW are showing they don't agree with.

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cowmoo275#3095 wrote:

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ArtCrusade#4438 wrote:

Well, read the effect of the ring. Global damage doesn't give aura effect. Again, point wasn't to discuss my build but to show that by thinking outside the box, you can come up with unique, cool, yet viable build ideas

yes....but.....what does ANY of that have to do with this thread?

The point is the ascendancies. I am ALL FOR the foulborns. I think they are an absolutely fantastic and overdue addition to this game.

The ascendancies, not so much.

They're not ascendancies, they're bloodlines. They are additions to character customization that fill in gaps where just your ascendancy wouldn't be as efficient. If you had read the post you'd have seen I mention how the build has DPS, but was lacking defence, and that's where the Breach bloodline came in. All part of the grander point I keep reiterating that people need to get more creative.