POE 2 Blood Mage Deep Dive - Why I'm Playing It. (Ascendancies Are Announced). Path of Exile 2

I keep seeing people talk about POE1 levels of life. I may be wrong but I think our life is going to be much lower than POE1 levels. Fine so long as all the incoming damage is also scaled down. Percent life scaling from the tree is massively limited so unless more gear comes with percent life increases, or flat life on gear is much higher than POE1 we are looking at lower life pools. I realize strength gives 4x as much life per point but even this does not get us the big numbers. With the limited numbers we have currently I've estimated 2500 life for a Titan and that's using the 15% more multiplier.

Is this video just for complete noobs to ARPGs? It feels like every take is extremely obvious.

I'm confused about the "Gain 10% of damage as extra physical damage" stat with POE2 damage calculations. If I have a base hit of 1000 fire damage before scaling, but all my scaling is scaling only fire damage, am I only getting 100 extra phys damage or is the 10% extra calculated based on the scaled fire damage?

Overflow is not max life, its double max life as current life. You cannot leech overflowed life, you cannot regen overflowed life. Most likely will need to run Zealots Oath mandatory to keep overflowed life at max value as much as possible.

My big question about Blood Barbs is if it applies to minions. Do they gain the extra physical damage? And do the caster minions contribute to bleed as well? Will be defiantly trying that this weekend.

I'm gutted: they originally announced all platforms for EA, but now they're saying no MacOS support. And no clear time-line.

Open Sores could potentially be good if there is some unique or passive that makes curses more powerful the longer they have been applied, or potentially some way of translating curse duration into damage with certain abilities/setups. If that is the case it could even be OP since the duration is 'infinite'. I'll be keeping an eye out for any mechanics like that, but otherwise I wont be taking that node; there are just too many other powerful options with this ascendancy.

I don't care how strong this ascendancy is won't be playing a female vampire.

Arc bleed would be such a cursed build for people who are used to PoE 1 if it works.

Could be some unique that scales based off curse duration? But making it infinite makes me question that.

This class seems amazing ... living life on the edge! The real question for ANY class is how it can sustain a long difficult fight.

I love how much flavour the ascendancies add. Oozing personality. And I hear they change the exile's dialogue in the acts, so I'm super excited to see all that.

Idea for thumbnail you knighted as Sir Gog

I read mageblood. facepalm

Gore Spike doesn't say Maximum Life, so with 90% certainty it will count the overflowed life.

Do you have any plans to do a similar breakdown as this for other ascendancies? Your insight on when to take nodes based on progression is top notch as always. Personally, I'm utterly enamored with the idea of chayula monk. I think the breach minigame sounds incredibly fun and powerful.

Aint Vitality Siphon useless if you are in overflow?

if you don't take 5 and 6 early (because low crit) you don't have damage from your ascendancy. Are you sure you want ascendancy without damage? Also your 1 needs crits for bosses to get more orbs. You're pretty much pigeonholed into it.

4th ascendancy behind the tower with 3 keys you need from the leaders of the 3 factions? Just guessing.

This ascendencies looks really good. Especially under the aspect that life leech is not as common as in poe1

I think my biggest issue is that Blood Mage is a sorc ascendancy tossed onto the witch. If I am picking a witch, I want to use witch skills. The class fantasy set for the witch is minions, chaos degens, and debuffs. None of these things scale on your crit, none of them can leech, and as an added kick in the junk the bleed is only given to elemental (not chaos) skills. I like ascendancy nodes being flexible for off-class skills like the gemling, but at the expense of not interacting with 90% of your own class skills feels really bad.

I have a serious question. The first ascension appears to be a buff skill. Is this going to be required to be toggled on? Will it be supportable? Will it cost spirit? It might make sense to turn it off

For those into spell cast or ignite, Stormweaver is very strong numerically.
She has ES recoup and strong exposure, combine with overcap es and you have both damage and recovery mostly solved with a decent max hit too.

Then you can have either Arcane Surge that scale with mana for cast speed and archmage, stronger shock/chill, or a strong trigger skill that will help ignite builds do single target.

Extremely versatile and allow you to try pretty much any elemental skill you want in poe2.

Do you think party members can yoink life remnants off the floor to overflow their health too?

I think a lot of people are underestimating the crit chance node @sirgog Correct me if I am wrong but most spells have base anywhere from 7% to 12% base crit. Extra base crit of 8% is huge but even if you are using a spell with base of 12% isn't 3% additional base crit still a massive amount?

Do we think life remnants are going to cost us spirit? I think it might be free which will give us zero cost to supporting it like vitality support

I also love the fantasy of ice spells shattering and cutting like shards of glass

How cool would it be to have a unique that allowed you to leech a percentage of bleed damage. That would be the perfect item to pair with Blood Barbs and would fit the blood mage fantasy perfectly.

I am prettu sure this will be strictly reroll/2nd char ascendancy... you really dont want the first node early game. its gonna be terrible.

Maybe we get some items or support that increase curse effect but decrease curse duration then in that case open sores seems good but maybe adding something in the manner of like %increase of curse effect also doesnt seem too out of line.

Spend all weekend playing PoE 2 or reading Wind and Truth... What a great problem to have

With the life remnant, i assume if you kill a weak mob with a crit, it still only drops 1 orb and not 2.

This one caught my attention indeed, specially the spell leech and the progenesis. I'll start with gemling summoner even considering the early game is bound to be rough af and most likely try this one after, seems extremely good.

Ok so I got a couple things to say. Cause this is my choice as well.
The life remnants mechanic is a clear rip from the D3 globe generation mechanic. That one threw the globes a decent distance from the generator. They also had a pick up radius stat that you could obtain and you NEEDED to have a minimum threshold to pick up radius to make it feel good.. so 🤞🏽.

Side note SPELL BLEED!?!?!? Finally??!?!??

On the curse doesn’t expire maybe it could somehow be abused to proc the doom blast skill

Progenesis on a stick 😂

its a solid start. can go spell or melee, ele or phys, heck you could do bleed ele attack or other crazy things.

has options and a theme - love how the new ascendancies are shaping up

Seems like a good ascendancy to do a crit flameblast build with ignite and bleed but still probably not as good as how archmage is looking.

This guys thumbnails are hilarious.

As for the Curse node, maybe they have brought back the Doom mechanic, where curses gets stronger the longer they have been applied

I would like to point out that Jonathan wants to make the trade off for specializing in crits more severe so it isn't the go to option for every build. Obviously this ascendency is one of the examples where those tradeoffs are more favorable towards crit because of the two crit nodes, but I wouldn't carry that assumption into ascendencies that don't directly offer critical bonuses.

We shall see how well they strike that balance, but given the wide base crit ranges I imagine there is less availability of boosting critical rate. I'm willing to bet that even 15% base crit will still take heavy investment to reach 100% crit rate, similarly investing in low crit weapons might be limited to 30-50% as their upper limit. Very curious to see how this plays out.

May your first attempts at making builds in POE2 have interesting results

Best thumbnails in the game.

Mr. Sir Gog, I remember hearing in an interview that we would be unable to respec ascendancies. Was this meaning CHANGE to DIFFERENT ascendancies? or moving points around?

Me tryibg to find anyone talking about melee blood witch or dot chrono

Are there Forbidden Flesh/Flame jewels in this game?

My friendship ended with sirgog going blood
Titans are coming for you

... I am changing my build plans daily, and after seeing this, Bloodmage is on the table again, with a destructive Bleed Ignite Flameblast Setup, provided I want to feel terrible dying continuously in the endgame because I fail to build any form of defense or survivability :P

... yeah nevermind, I will stick to the actual Minion Ascendancy: GEMLING LEGIONAIRE LETSGOOO

Curses are only like 5 or 6 seconds aren't they? So that seems like a big loss to have to reapply all the time, somewhere from 15-20% to keep high uptime? ... dono. Too many sick nodes on this ascendancy, sanguimancy requirement is a crime against players :D

Hi, do we know if elemental ailment magnitudes apply to Bleeding magnitudes? The way Blood Barbs reads is very confusing to me.