Blood Mage Thoughts

First off, I want to say that I love the idea of Blood Mage and I think this ascendancy has a lot of potential. Trading a necessary downside that changes how you play for power is so cool and I want to love this class.

From how the ascendancy is structured, there are 3 general areas that I believe the class is built around: Life as a resource, Crit, and Bleed.

I want to go over each of these areas from a design standpoint and describe why I don't quite understand the implementation of them. My goal here is to open discussion on this, not to say that I'm right and GGG should do what I want.



1. Life as a resource
Sanguimancy is a great idea thematically. Blood magic always comes with sacrifices and this is no different. Killing enemies and taking the blood from their corpses is really cool.

I have a big issue with this node, that being the resolution for bossing. At max level, Life remnants spawns an orb on crit every 2 seconds. This means that for bossing, if you don't want to or can't take the spell-only leech node, you are forced to spec into having a high crit chance. This is a core part of the class, but the problem I have is that, aside from one 12% crit chance increase, the only sources of crit chance on this ascendancy tree are for spells. If you want to do bossing with a martial weapon, you have to pretty much forego the tree for solving the life cost/crit chance problem that the ascendancy has posed to you. This *is* a solvable problem by the player, but it feels like an odd choice to me that is intended to shepherd you into playing spells from the get go. I also want to reiterate that the notable life leech node further impresses this direction on me by doing nothing for non-spell life recovery.

Also, it seems like a strange decision to me to have the overheal life not directly interact with the rest of the nodes. Overheal is a mechanic you absolutely must interact with by the very nature of sanguimancy being a required node. It's just strange to me that the only synergy with it is that stacking more life naturally allows for a higher overheal cap. I don't necessarily want, for example. the overheal to just straight up double your hp cap for leeching, that would probably have really serious consequences. But I feel like there's a lot of creative space for baking this *necessary* identity into the rest of the ascendancy that should be explored.

As a related aside, I think it is a little odd that the life cost here is only a downside across the entire ascendancy. There is nothing that gives you power for spending more life, which is thematically what I would expect from a blood witch. Greater sacrifices should give greater rewards, but instead all that's there is the usual "higher level skills cost more mana/life".



2. Crit
Crit is really important to this ascendancy. Sanguimancy needs it, Between the Cracks needs it, even the small node before Blood Barbs needs it. This is great. It gives you a direction that other classes share, but a new way of being better at it than other classes, so there's a real decision in theory between "do I want to do amazon crit based off accuracy, or blood mage crit based off life?" This is a big place for Blood Mage to carve out its niche, and it currently does, but I have some issues here.

Gore spike is probably the node I'm the happiest with in the tree. It ties your power directly to your life, and incentivizes you really well to build both crit and life, going great with the idea of Sanguimancy. Importantly for me, Gore spike also does not have a restriction to only spells, something that cannot be said for the rest of its branch. Even the small nodes before and after Gore spike say "Critical hit chance for Spells", which further suggests to me that Blood Mage does not really want you to play martial weapons.

Also, Sunder the Flesh is even more restrictive in its use than it originally seems, which might be by design, I don't know. It sets itself up as a way to boost your crit chance for spells, but on looking into it more, setting your spell base crit chance to 15% is only really impactful for non-physical spells. In fact, the only purely physical spell that gets any benefit from this node at all is bone blast, which has a 14% base crit chance as opposed to everything else that has 15% base. (I'm not including Detonate Dead's 8% here as it is mostly a fire spell). I'm fine with this node's purpose being to enable more elemental builds since that's clearly the intent, but it and the mini nodes only being applicable to spells seems to impose yet another restriction on over most of the possible builds for this class.

It's possible that the intent here is for Between the Cracks to be the paired offensive node with Gore Spike for martial crit builds, but again it only helps martial crit builds that are physical since armour doesn't apply to elemental hits.


3. Bleed
Blood Barbs wants to really tie a strong bond between bleed and element damage here, which enables element bleed builds but does kinda little in my opinion to make a physical bleed build more appealing. It seems like Between the Cracks is intended to be more helpful here than Blood Barbs for physical builds, actually. You can make a case that the curse aggravation part of Blood Barbs is enough, but I don't know if that is compelling enough to justify including here when Between the Cracks, Gore Spike (they want you to proc bleeds with crit with that small node), and Grasping Wounds/Vitality Siphon in competition here.

Also, it's noteworthy to me that witch has quite few options to actually get bleed chance on the tree. The best way for witch to get bleed chance is really with physical spells, which runs into the same concerns as earlier, or lacerate, which limits what you're bleeding with to one spell for both bossing and clearing. Element can get to high bleed chance off of the tree if they take the physical focused nodes, but it just seems a little off to me.



While discussing the curse aggravation, I want to mention that the Open Sores seems a bit out of place to me. I don't really see how it ties into blood mage identity but that's a very subjective point. It just doesn't make sense to me to take the three areas that I believe blood mage embodies of bleed, life as a resource, and crit, and to somehow get curses out of that.




tl;dr: I think that blood mage has a ton of potential but, while it is definitely usable right now, the decisions with what nodes support what builds seems minorly questionable to me.

This build is going to see its greatest leaps as they add in more defenses LIFE to be exact. RN one of the largest complaints is that there is no reasonably strong MAX HP passives....THEY SHOULD EXIST, but let's see if they come!

Next items. When swords, daggers, and axes join into the game....well it is almost a guarantee there will be crit ones that have a high crit base (probably swords and daggers). This will be where we see more crit melee builds arrive.

Items continued....
If they add more cast x spell on crit items like "choir storm" ESPECIALLY if they are a different slot as this opens up numerous possibilities

Gems/SKills
I agree on the phys spell damage having potential, but it isnt there yet...That is because literally every phys spell worth anything (not many) have some crazy cast time, wind up, or minion condition.....HOpefully, there will be additions later like a "BONE SPEAR" or "FAN OF KNIVES" spell.....this will be where we see BM climb to meta if they tweak a few things.....

The biggest problems casters are having RN is that they nerfed the dog crap out of spell user's when they removed jewel sockets, and nerfed items like ingeniuty. Yes, for rings added damage is basically like another weapon for attack builds, however, most casters really needs the higher % ingenuity for damage scaling. ATM, this is why almost every meta is some kind of SPEAR, BLEED, or LIghting spear build because the damage you get from 20% fcr and 20% to an element is NOTHING compared to like adds 9-20 phys and 1-41 lightning and such on each ring. Unfortunately, it is just much easier when damage for attacks scales so freaking high from rings and weapon alone bringing almost any 1 div build to the 30K+ range where as having 300% spell damage and +7 skills seems lackluster in comparison across the board ( THis is why fire builds and most cold are just sitting in a failed state)

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D00MBR1NGER#1746 написал:

This build is going to see its greatest leaps as they add in more defenses LIFE to be exact. RN one of the largest complaints is that there is no reasonably strong MAX HP passives....THEY SHOULD EXIST, but let's see if they come!

Next items. When swords, daggers, and axes join into the game....well it is almost a guarantee there will be crit ones that have a high crit base (probably swords and daggers). This will be where we see more crit melee builds arrive.

Items continued....
If they add more cast x spell on crit items like "choir storm" ESPECIALLY if they are a different slot as this opens up numerous possibilities

The problem with Blood Mage would still be there.

You HAVE to take "Sanguimancy", no matter what build you are planning, and this gives you the life/mana cost on all skills (not only spells), BUT the leech and crit nodes are ONLY for spells.
Furthermore, the leech node is kinda trolling. You don't leech when you have an overflow of life, and you normally want to stay in overflow.
They probably won't add life nodes anyway because ppl already asked many times and GGG said "nope".

They should just redo the entire ascendancy to something that makes sense.
Let Blood Mages scale their life with INT instead of STR, make the nodes work for attack and caster builds, and so on.

In 0.2 I have been playing bloodmage for "fun" pretty casually, using the bow skill snipe as my damage dealer and checking out the bleeds.

Mostly SSF but with currency exchange. My gear is still bad; it's mostly from act 2 cruel. Now at map lvl 4-5, but I don't play everyday or that much. Still at 4 ascendancy points (Blood Barbs) even if I could easily do 3rd trials (Open Sores maybe), maybe will this weekend.

It's bad and tedious. Not at all hard for now, but kinda slow. I have to combat the bosses meaningfully; and clearing trash I need to rely on Adam and Steve to soak some hits for me.
Steve is a Vaal Guard and Adam is Faridun Heavy Infantry.

Will update if the build blows up in some unexpected and crazy way, but don't hold breath. Crit damage is at like 500% now and I maybe have very bad tree.
Oh and I do use a timed macro for snipe. I'm eccentric, not crazy.

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JakkerONAIR#4902 написал:

They should just redo the entire ascendancy to something that makes sense.
Let Blood Mages scale their life with INT instead of STR, make the nodes work for attack and caster builds, and so on.

Nah man, it definitely works. Yes, you need crit, but it works in spades. It could use some tweaks, but this is definitely a strong class ascendancy. I literally use it as we speak (no spear)

Yeah, I explicitly didn't bring up balance and how strong Blood Mage is because that's something that's really just a numbers game. A class that is strong doesn't necessarily make sense in its identity. The issues I have in particular with blood mage are not about how strong or weak it is, but rather how it doesn't feel like a cohesively put together class.

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HuntarBarbarian#1627 написал:

Yeah, I explicitly didn't bring up balance and how strong Blood Mage is because that's something that's really just a numbers game. A class that is strong doesn't necessarily make sense in its identity. The issues I have in particular with blood mage are not about how strong or weak it is, but rather how it doesn't feel like a cohesively put together class.

This.