Vitality Siphon

[Jim the Gardener]

Playing a witch and I picked Blood Mage. seemed cool at the time. But after gaining 4 ascendancy points to see if Vitality Siphon was worth it, it does not seem to work with chaos damage. Is Blood Mage just a wasted ascendancy tree or am I missing something? I have an ass ton of chaos and spell damage, but my curses and dots do nothing but hurt me with nothing in return. so whats the point of this ascendancy as a witch?

[Drake]

Leech only applies to hits. Dots don't hit so they can't leech. Chaos skills use dots for the most part (especially if you use the combo essence drain + contagion), it might work better if you did an hexblast build, focusing on hitting chaos spells.
For leech to work better you also need to invest into life leech nodes on the tree, since mobs have leech resists in high levels.

Otherwise, you're better off using grasping wounds instead.

The blood mage overall is not really a dot friendly spec, especially chaos. Chayula monk would be more in line with that.

[Jim the Gardener]

Originally posted by Drake:

Leech only applies to hits. Dots don't hit so they can't leech. Chaos skills use dots for the most part (especially if you use the combo essence drain + contagion), it might work better if you did an hexblast build, focusing on hitting chaos spells.
For leech to work better you also need to invest into life leech nodes on the tree, since mobs have leech resists in high levels.

Otherwise, you're better off using grasping wounds instead.

The blood mage overall is not really a dot friendly spec, especially chaos. Chayula monk would be more in line with that.

That's what I thought and that's very much a bummer. I'll just stick to the first 3% life node lol. What a waste for a character based around minions and chaos damage.

[Hiroko]

Originally posted by Jim the Gardner:

What a waste for a character based around minions and chaos damage.

fyi, minions only benefit from affixes that say "minions" or "allies" on the affix, with very few exceptions (rarity is inherited). So any damage based nodes you have there are not effecting minions.

[wulfster42]

Blood mage needs crits to really work. You want to def get your crit chance up and do attacks (spells or otherwise) that can crit.

DoT's can't crit.

You can still use minions very succesfully and them killing things will still net you blood orbs.

You can then focus on spells, bow attacks, melee attacks whatever, but you want them to have decent crit chances. Spells are the easiest to get a very high crit chance with.

You want to pretty much always be critting every 2 seconds.

Outside of that other things you def want to get if you can are:

More max health, the more max base health you have, the more (over max) health pool you have which both makes you tankier and covers the health cost of spells nicely.

Skill boosts. Higher your sanguicity skill, the more you heal per orb.

As always resists are vital throughout the game. You want maxed or near maxed elemental resists and as high chaos as you can get without sacrificing too much.

Spell cast speed, spell crit chance and additional spell crit multiplier (you will get alot from your ascendency but you also can get a ton from nodes near the crit chance ones).

Remember your wand/staff (can have 2 setups one in each weapon slot) spells are FREE. No spell or health costs, you can use this to start off and max out your over max hp before using spells that will cost health.

For minions, I suggest focusing mostly on offense, late game you can have other minions with a cleric to keep them alive, early/mid you can focus mainly on SRS for additional damage, and depending on how much spirit you have on equipment toss in a few damage/tanking minions. You can have 2 weapon setups one with a staff for high free damage spells and one with sceptre/shield or focus for alot of spirit (or sceptre wand for a different free attack type).

That is pretty much it to make bloodmage work well. It's a significant boost to your health pool. Blood orbs eventually become the highest health healing at least in the game.

Even right after finishing the first trial and getting sanguicity, you can add significantly to your survivability. At that point say you have.....800 max health (if it isn't obvious max health does more for blood mages so socket armor for it, get it on eq etc). Sanguicity will give you almost 2k health pool. Things that would 1 shot any other character at that point, will do a bit more than half your max health and you can get that back pretty fast.

Few things to note though.

Health regen, life leach and your flask, will not heal over max. They are therefore far less useful than they are for other characters.

Eshield is an additional pool that will protect you from damage attacks to your health, meaning you can stay at cap easier while using spells. Even a bit of eshield can help alot because of that.

Evasion works very well especially with a decent amount of eshield. If you get enough spirit and can run wind + ghost + SRS...it's a great combination for a blood mage. Wind helps boost your evasion so that without acrobatics or anything else dropping it down, you can have a good evasion rating. Ghost makes it so you regen eshield significantly when hit if your evasion rating is high. SRS does continuous damage (Especially if your staff/wand etc does free fire damage spells).

Free fire damage spells can keep you killing monsters constantly and getting crits vs bosses so you have blood orbs constantly.

Blood mage has alot of potential but it's more of a hybrid minion user at best. Take the most important/powerful parts of a minion build and mix it with high spell damage/crit basically. Add in a ton of healing/max health and that is a blood mage.

Sounds like most people go sorc and focus on MoM instead and are still very defensive. Higher max health gives higher stun threshold etc though, and sanguicity can heal you consistantly for 200+ health per second over max later on.

[thawn4444]

Originally posted by Jim the Gardner:

Originally posted by Drake:

Leech only applies to hits. Dots don't hit so they can't leech. Chaos skills use dots for the most part (especially if you use the combo essence drain + contagion), it might work better if you did an hexblast build, focusing on hitting chaos spells.
For leech to work better you also need to invest into life leech nodes on the tree, since mobs have leech resists in high levels.

Otherwise, you're better off using grasping wounds instead.

The blood mage overall is not really a dot friendly spec, especially chaos. Chayula monk would be more in line with that.

That's what I thought and that's very much a bummer. I'll just stick to the first 3% life node lol. What a waste for a character based around minions and chaos damage.

it is almost like you don't know that witch will be getting a third ascendancy in the future. . .

[Jim the Gardener]

Originally posted by wulfster42:

Blood mage needs crits to really work. You want to def get your crit chance up and do attacks (spells or otherwise) that can crit.

DoT's can't crit.

You can still use minions very succesfully and them killing things will still net you blood orbs.

You can then focus on spells, bow attacks, melee attacks whatever, but you want them to have decent crit chances. Spells are the easiest to get a very high crit chance with.

You want to pretty much always be critting every 2 seconds.

Outside of that other things you def want to get if you can are:

More max health, the more max base health you have, the more (over max) health pool you have which both makes you tankier and covers the health cost of spells nicely.

Skill boosts. Higher your sanguicity skill, the more you heal per orb.

As always resists are vital throughout the game. You want maxed or near maxed elemental resists and as high chaos as you can get without sacrificing too much.

Spell cast speed, spell crit chance and additional spell crit multiplier (you will get alot from your ascendency but you also can get a ton from nodes near the crit chance ones).

Remember your wand/staff (can have 2 setups one in each weapon slot) spells are FREE. No spell or health costs, you can use this to start off and max out your over max hp before using spells that will cost health.

For minions, I suggest focusing mostly on offense, late game you can have other minions with a cleric to keep them alive, early/mid you can focus mainly on SRS for additional damage, and depending on how much spirit you have on equipment toss in a few damage/tanking minions. You can have 2 weapon setups one with a staff for high free damage spells and one with sceptre/shield or focus for alot of spirit (or sceptre wand for a different free attack type).

That is pretty much it to make bloodmage work well. It's a significant boost to your health pool. Blood orbs eventually become the highest health healing at least in the game.

Even right after finishing the first trial and getting sanguicity, you can add significantly to your survivability. At that point say you have.....800 max health (if it isn't obvious max health does more for blood mages so socket armor for it, get it on eq etc). Sanguicity will give you almost 2k health pool. Things that would 1 shot any other character at that point, will do a bit more than half your max health and you can get that back pretty fast.

Few things to note though.

Health regen, life leach and your flask, will not heal over max. They are therefore far less useful than they are for other characters.

Eshield is an additional pool that will protect you from damage attacks to your health, meaning you can stay at cap easier while using spells. Even a bit of eshield can help alot because of that.

Evasion works very well especially with a decent amount of eshield. If you get enough spirit and can run wind + ghost + SRS...it's a great combination for a blood mage. Wind helps boost your evasion so that without acrobatics or anything else dropping it down, you can have a good evasion rating. Ghost makes it so you regen eshield significantly when hit if your evasion rating is high. SRS does continuous damage (Especially if your staff/wand etc does free fire damage spells).

Free fire damage spells can keep you killing monsters constantly and getting crits vs bosses so you have blood orbs constantly.

Blood mage has alot of potential but it's more of a hybrid minion user at best. Take the most important/powerful parts of a minion build and mix it with high spell damage/crit basically. Add in a ton of healing/max health and that is a blood mage.

Sounds like most people go sorc and focus on MoM instead and are still very defensive. Higher max health gives higher stun threshold etc though, and sanguicity can heal you consistantly for 200+ health per second over max later on.

Im not playing minions nor do I want to play around constant crits. I do appreciate the wall of frefresher though. There were a couple things I forgot from poe1. Im playing pure chaos, so using this ascendancy is just a waste. If what the other user is true and we get a 3rd ascendancy maybe based around chaos, ill remake this witch and shift the gear over.