Blood mage issues early ascendancy

First off, I love the game.
Just to be clear, I'm giving feedback because I hope it improves certain lesser parts of the game.

There are two main issues I have with Blood Mage early ascendancy in particular:
1. There are absolutely no merits in taking Sanguimancy before you have 4 ascendancy points, in fact there are only demerits.
2. There is no real synergy between 90% of Occult skills for a good portion of the ascendancy line.

I will try to explain as thoroughly as I can what I mean by these points:
1.
- Instead of halving or replacing the mana cost with half life or full life, it now costs BOTH life AND mana at full cost.
- Instead of giving 100% chance to get life shards on killing, it's a mere 25% chance (+10% from quality).
- Having spell crits give life shards once every 2 seconds is harsh, and crit works poorly on the class for multiple reasons.
- Crit chance modifiers from gear/passives are not additive, meaning 50% on a pre-existing 7% only gives 10.5% rather than 57%, and the nodes are far apart and the stat is rare on gear to begin with.
- There is not enough healing from the life orbs to begin with, on average you need 200+ mana and health to kill something, to maybe get 85 health back.
- There is not a single life leech passive what so ever on any of the upper part of the skill nodes which make up (assumedly) 750-ish nodes, the closes one is like 30 nodes away.

2.
- Most skills in the Occult category have low crit chance (7~15) or none at all.
- Most skills like minions or damage over time don't proc spell crits (this makes up the majority of the Occult class), for damage over time only initial hit damage if applicable which is just one spell.
- Certain skills like curses are extremely mana costly (and thus life costly), even more so with certain support gems.
- There are no life leech skills.
- The only gem with a life leech support passive doesn't work on damage over time skills.

TLDR

You get nerfed taking this before you get 4 ascendancy points as there is nothing to support it, and it does not provide anything that is beneficial to begin with.
I know you can convert damage taken to drain mana instead with a major passive node a bit later down the line, but that basically doubles the mana cost while reducing recovery by 50% which again begs the question, why would anyone pick this early on if it only brings demerits?

On a side note, I think Trial of Ultimatum (Chaos one) is absolute RNGfest garbage (no offense) so I'm basically locked out of the entire ascendancy as I can't do Trial of Sekhemas again to get my next set of points.
I pretty much gave up on ascending for these reasons.

This is accurate and I hope they fix this ASAP, as I was enjoying the game but then bricked my own character.

I decided to refund Sangquimancy until I could get the points to spec into the spell leech node. Refunding Sangquimancy will stop the health globes from spawning, but you still incur the life cost on skills (WITH IT UNSPECCED). I went back and specced back into Sanguimancy so I could at least get the globes and it DOUBLED THE LIFE COST ON SKILLS. So now instead of killing myself at a normal speed, I'm killing myself twice as fast.

Additionally leech does not work at all, so even when you get the leech ascendency node...it does nothing. The entire Ascendency is a nerf to your character.

Don't really feel like rerolling so probably just going to call it quits until this is addressed.

I dont understand why GGG even released bloodmage ascendancy in such sorry state. No one playtested it even for 15 minutes.
Huge disappointment from GGG.

Enix's situation sounds like a bug where it applies twice, however it does feel like you brick your character by taking Sanguimancy.

Small update, even with the Life Leech and Vitality Siphon from ascendancy points 3 and 4, it is still not nearly enough to offset the life loss.
Combined with the fact it will take up to 27 attribute nodes (pretty much not getting any damage or utility nodes) to even get to the closest life leech increase node from the witch's starting point on the passive skill tree, I feel this is a moot ascendancy.

Note that I have every possible support gem to regain health passively and on damage.
I even have recoup life nodes to regain some lost health.
The bigger recoup life nodes of 15% however don't even work as the life loss is neither Physical or Elemental damage in nature.
I feel almost everything is detrimental to this ascendancy the longer I try it.
For now I'm just playing ascendancy-less because there's no working with this.

Can anyone confirm if Spell Damage Life Leech is even working at the moment?
Because I tried it again, it does not seem to work with DoT's and effects from support gems even though it clearly states Spell Damage and not "hits".

Sanguimancy is an abomination and in its current form bloodmage should not have been released for EA.

A suggested fix for Sanguimancy to make it actually "viable" would be the following:

"

Sanguimancy splits up your spell cost in 50% mana and 50% life. X% of the life cost is added as physical damage to the skill, if used directly by you.

And make it so that blood orbs which spawn are vacuumed to the player: slowly at the start, but constantly accelerating until the player absorbs them.

If they do that, the ascendency might actually have a use, granted leech in poe2 is still buggy as hell so that would need to get fixed, but that's a gameplay wide issue, not bloodmage specific.

"

YukiyaKitsuNebi#6596 wrote:

Can anyone confirm if Spell Damage Life Leech is even working at the moment?
Because I tried it again, it does not seem to work with DoT's and effects from support gems even though it clearly states Spell Damage and not "hits".

Life leech never worked with DoT's You need a skill that hits, in this case for spells you need a hit spell like firebolt

So basically this ascendancy locks you out of 90% of Occult builds?
That's pretty pointless then, also why is a DoT not considered spell damage?
They are already pretty weak compared to direct spells, if they can't even interact with any stats like crit and apparently also leech, who would use them?
Most useful support gems don't even work with dots as they have "hits" as a requirement.

"

Ashgan9#6435 wrote:

"

YukiyaKitsuNebi#6596 wrote:

Can anyone confirm if Spell Damage Life Leech is even working at the moment?
Because I tried it again, it does not seem to work with DoT's and effects from support gems even though it clearly states Spell Damage and not "hits".

Life leech never worked with DoT's You need a skill that hits, in this case for spells you need a hit spell like firebolt

The leech just plain doesn't work I'm using hex blast 4.5 k damage with a 140 mana cost and I still have to flask to keep my life up. 4.5k doesn't even take in to account a level 19 despair with 50% wither. ( p.s I'm mind over matter so I'm not being damaged by mobs on my life) packs aren't bad cause I can use harvest to recover the. Cost but single targets I get no leech that I can see or the leech recovery rate is far too low not sure which

Stack on top curses on blasphemy doesn't work with impending doom or decaying hex.
Using them on self cast has a stupid mana cost making the whole curse blood witch a broken path. If switching ascendancy where possible this would prevent build bricking from closing the wrong ascendancy due to poor wording.

P.s i love ggg and am fully aware this is ea. They just need to do a couple of things allow ascendancy switching and reduce respec gold cost significantly, changes in skills are rapid currently and bugs are being found that might take time to fix we need a way to allow people to reroll with out an additional 10 hours investment