A vision of a tanky Blood Witch build

1) First of all - this is a ranged build. I have seen many very tanky melee builds, don't get me wrong, but being a ranged caster, especially when there are many unknown abilities of mobs and bosses, already gives me a feeling of having 30% EHP more :)

2) I think all of you, especially those who had experience of monk tanks in WoW (or the Progenesis flask, of course), will be having a great time with the Grasping Wounds ascendancy mechanic

If your reaction second is about 1 second, you will still have about 20% more EHP for a single big hit, and overall more time to react for incoming strikes, which is ridiculously huge, comparing to many other new ascendancies

3) This point is very questionable, since we don't have many items or even the main passives tree.
However i hope it will be easier to invest points into strength, since you always can choose needed attributes, to allow you wear more armor, or at least armor-ES gear, reaching at least 50-60% phys. mitigation, which will help a lot together with other layers

4) As an addition to all of those ideas, since we are now able to swap weapons much more efficiently, you can have one set with, for example, a wand and a new offhand type for casters - focus, and another set with a wand/scepter and a shield, with more points invested into block - so you can swap for more damage when you have a dps check phase on a boss or a quickly regenerating mob (hello metamorph, burn in hell), and play normally with a shield, having in general much more tankiness with more armor and block.

Preferably we pick up glancing blows with this strat, because we want always to have many small sources of damage (the reason is bellow), but i haven't find yet any reason to go down the tree so far. Apparently it is now much harder to get far away from your starting point, because currently there is no path in the middle of the tree.

1) The most obvious thing to mention is the Vitality Siphon

Since we will be, for sure, using spells to deal damage, this is an easy pick.
NEVERTHELESS there is a big downside of this choice - in this case we will not be able to invest 2 labs into damage, which will be really important as you see later.
In my opinion, we can pick this for early/mid budget of this build, but later we need to either rely on other regen sources that i will mention, or find any way of smaller spell leach in any item or ability (which seems to be just impossible :c ).

2) Life recoup is the second most obvious way to gain health for this build. Together with investing at least some points into basic regen and using life flask wisely we can have an incredible life recoup all the time, which will combine very well with the Grasping Wounds ascendancy.

3) Last but not least - the not so obvious life remnants from our first ascendancy. We don't know yet how much life gains one remnant, and if we even will have time and space to collect them, but the ascendancy itself is a significant downside, so the remnants should be somehow good and usable for this build to work. One more argument for the remnants is that there are more mechanic for other remnants from other sources - mana remnants and i think i have seen somewhere ES remnants too, so this mechanic should make at least some sense.

Later we will be building many projectiles and crit to ensure a great spawn rate of those remnants. I did nor study very carefully the overflow mechanic, but i hope it will count to max HP to boost our % based regen and our HP based damage ascendancy Gore Spike - more about this in the next section

1) As discussed in the previous sections - we should have much HP and enough ascendancy points to go into a fully crit build. In Poe 1 it was always an easy option to ensure big and stable damage (if we will be able to push crit to 100%, which is surely possible).
The Gore Spike ascendancy will be a brilliant choice, since i hope it will be possible to push our HP count over 10 000 at a single point by using remnants from our first ascendancy, which results into over 250 crit multi just from this ascendancy, which is insanely good.


2) To reach a high crit chance we will be using a simple, but magnificent ascendancy - Sunder the Flesh

15% base crit is a very high amount to work with, hopefully needing a thinkable amount of currency to reach 100% effective crit chance (or near it).
This will work even better for skills with usually low base crit chance, since they are balanced to have a low base crit chance :D
If we boost it to such amount, they must get strong simply but itself, because of the basic damage.
Such skill is the Amber Fusillade

It has everything we need and even more - low crit chance, many projectiles and an incredible tool of accumulating charges and firing all at once - just perfect in the sight of our remnants mechanic, which will allow us to wait for the perfect moment to release the ability in the moment when we have the most life - which means the most crit multiplier (or crit bonus, as in Poe 2)

3) There is also a great potential for this build to switch into a CoC version later on, in the highest tier of the endgame, with such high crit chance and a mechanic based on the moving and collecting remnants together with a need of many crits to spawn the remnants.
But this is a pure speculation and just a small thought for future, there are other good CoC potential builds for other ascendancies.

I am not adding a section with "mandatory gems" or a way for the passive skill tree - this would be way too speculative even for me. I have talked basically just about ascendancies and possible ways of utilizing them, because the ascendancies are the only thing we know at the time for sure.
If i am not too lazy and have some good results on this build idea, i will add more info in the future.

The tree development will not be hard (in descending order of priority):
- For defensiveness aim for HP/recoup/regen/armor
- For damage aim for crit multi/crit chance/general spell and fire damage

I hope my ideas will help people to get a basic understanding of what they are planning to do in the first days, and maybe any interesting real build will be born from my funny little speculations with a help of any professional build and content creator.

Make your bloody witch happy and strong ^^
Good luck, my fellow exiles.

Thanks very much for this post. The life remnants remind me of something I enjoyed in a previous game. If this can work with Blood Magic would be my ideal toon. If you have to have mana seems like it not sure. I'm interested in a tanky blood witch build life this. Will try to keep those layers in mind maybe I will find something in the months to come like this.

Warframe Nekros no range mobs solo maps for fun o/ more life orbs more armor :P

For science, I plan to go fire/ignite early and eventually grab the extra as phys/elemental scales bleed node to see if I can double dip ignite/bleed which would seem pretty cheese considering final damage now impacts ignite. If this doesn't work, then plan to revert to high crit (which also boosts the remnant drops as you indicated)