Blood Mage Ascendancy Change

I was disappointed with the Patch Notes.

The Blood Barbs Ascendancy Passive Skill no longer provides 10% of Damage gained as extra Physical Damage. It now causes Bleeding you inflict on Cursed targets to be Aggravated.
Added a new Between the Cracks Ascendancy Passive Skill that causes Critical Hits to ignore Monster Armour. Requires Sanguimancy.


No changes to Sanguimancy, still mandatory, still a 100% increase to resource costs. I'd personally like to see Sunder the Flesh nerfed because it invalidates the Physcial Spell school which i feel is thematically aligned with the Blood Mage, but again, that's a personal gripe.

However,

I am actually very pleased with Between the Cracks. I thought it would be effectively useless because as damage goes up, armour contribution goes does. So Crits, by their nature, are sort of bypassing armour anyways. But with the rest of the patches changes monsters have felt tougher, not necessarily unwieldy health pools but they feel more armoured. and Between the Cracks has been carrying me through Cruel and making my damage feel great.

As my second playthough on Bloodmage (I love leech and progenesis) I had a much clearer build going in this time. I look attribute highway around the starting passive for life and then picked up almost every crit cluster first (plus 105% ES).

As I was picking my ascendancy point(s), I found the passive in crit made Sanguimancy actually not bad. Actually, good. It felt strong even. I had about 35% crit by the time I finished Act 2 and I had access to great recouperation from it and even burst healing when things got hairy by grabbing a couple globes. I regularly was above 100% health and could sustain through a lot of non-slams from bosses. I was very anti-Sanguimancy before, but this experience has changes my mind. I'm only mildly anti-Sanguimancy now.

After the Trail of Chaos in Act 3 my damage was feeling a little lack luster, but my defence was feel great (see above). So I opted for the Between the Cracks node, knowing I was about to head into Jiquani's Sanctum. Immediately, my damage was resolved. I was blasting through high armour enemies (on most hits). Between the Cracks has been amazing for going through the campaign, and I am very glad now for it's inclusion.

I still think it falls off in high tier maps when my damage normally will just be high enough to ignore crits (5 maps in with ~80% crit and ~400% crit bonus and considering swapping to Gorespike for a damage buff, at ~1500 life). But, like Sanguimancy, it has been a strong ascendancy for the campaign.

I don't think I'll lean into the bleed node, but it's more interesting than it was before and more thematically aligned. So positive movement there too.

In conclusion, I think both of these changes are good. I still think Blood Mage needs a little tuning (why is there a garbage curse node?) but for a patch not really concerned with Blood Mage this was a great set of small tweeks.

Campaign was totally fine (if a tad slow, no more than 0.1.0) with Bone Storm and Bone Cage.

I've been enjoying the patch, and like the direction and even the ongoing hot fixes. I think GGG's got an elephant to eat here but there definitely takes bites, intently and aggressively.