Blood mage ascendancy feels restrictive and punishing.

Sanguimancy feels way too punishing the further you get into the game. Life and life regeneration does not scale as fast or as easy as mana regen + mana so the life cost quickly balloons into being unsustainable.

At level 68 my spells cost between 170-250 life per cast and my life is around 2000. The life remnants barely help to sustain the costs. Life remnants also spawning in or at the mobs make it a big risk to pick them up in order to even sustain the life cost of the spells.

Because of this, Blood mage becomes incredibly pigeonholed into a few specific spells because a lot of them become unsustainable to play.

There is the leech node, but the player power earned from that node is not worth it, it becomes 4 ascendancy points just to counteract the negatives that Sanguimancy gives you which does not feel like a power-up, the leech nodes just feel bad, also leech does not work if you are overcapped on life so it basically only works for the scenarios where you drop below overcap.

If you play a skill with a nova, the leech node become useless since you are picking up remnants all the time, then this node basically only works for the long-range casters, which as stated above, just feels bad because it is a choice to fix a problem that another node causes.

I have 2 suggestions to alleviate this, either make the costs of the spells become a 50/50 split between life and mana or have the cost be 75% of base mana cost as life / 75% of mana cost in mana.

Or make the life remnants spawn close around the player so they are less risky to go and pick up for long range casters since now they are way too risky and hard to get unless you play a spell that's also a nova around you, which also has its problems.

Infernalist feels the same way! The vast majority of nodes are crap in the early game. Maybe....maybe at max level by investing like 3 ascendancy nodes you could get something decent. But thats just a big maybe.
Thats hardly giving a good gameplay experience for new players.


Infernalist has like multiple nodes damaging you. Demon Form removes your weapon aka your summons and damage your character, your recommended to have the follow up point for it to be kinda viable. Still meh.

Then we have Ascendancy that ignites you over time for what? some crit! And there really seems to be nothing at low levels that can give you an advantage to be ignited like in PoE 1.

Then we have Infernal flame and several subnodes that...guess what. Deals more damage to you! Woopie! Maybe it works if you invest 3 ascendancy specs into it...who knows. Point is...it hardly gives a good experience.

Atm there are only really two nodes that seems kinda solid for early game Internalist. Hellhound and the one that converts some damage taken to fire/chaos.
Rest is all kinda meh or downright build breaking.