Path of Exile 2 - Blood Mage Beginner Guide

Path of Exile 2 continues to captivate players with its complex and powerful Ascendancy system. The Blood Mage Ascendancy for the Witch class is a particularly exciting addition, offering unique mechanics that allow players to harness both life and energy shield to maximize their survivability and damage output. In this article, we will dive deep into the Blood Mage Ascendancy, breaking down each of its nodes and explaining how they impact your gameplay. 

The Blood Mage is a powerful Ascendancy for the Witch class in Path of Exile 2 that focuses on managing life and energy shield as resources to maximize damage, sustain, and survivability. It introduces new mechanics, such as Life Remnants and Energy Shield to Life Conversion, which give players unique options to build their characters in highly efficient ways. The Blood Mage Ascendancy is ideal for players who enjoy high-risk, high-reward playstyles, where managing your life is a key aspect of both offense and defense.

Here are the main nodes and effects within the Blood Mage Ascendancy:

Effect: This node grants a 25% chance to spawn a Life Remnant when killing an enemy, with the chance increasing to 45% depending on the quality of the skill used. Each Life Remnant restores 65 life to the Witch.

Critical Hits: You can also generate Life Remnants by landing a critical hit on an enemy, but only once per second. This means that if you're consistently landing crits, you can continually regenerate life, making this node incredibly useful for sustained combat.

Playstyle: The Life Remnants mechanic works as a self-sustaining heal, allowing the Witch to recover life during combat. If you have a high critical hit chance, this node becomes even more potent, as it allows you to constantly heal as you deal damage, which is especially useful in boss fights or against high-damage enemies.

Effect: This node mimics the Progenesis mechanic, which is typically available through specific passive skill tree points. It causes 25% of life lost from damaging hits to be delayed over 4 seconds.

Playstyle: This is essentially a free Progenesis, allowing the Witch to mitigate some of the incoming damage over time. This delay in life loss can be a lifesaver, especially in challenging encounters, as it gives you time to recover or react with other healing methods (such as Life Remnants).

Effect: This node converts Energy Shield from the equipped body armor into Extra Maximum Life. The more Energy Shield you stack on your body armor, the more maximum life you can gain.

Playstyle: This node allows you to scale your life even further, particularly for players who prefer stacking Energy Shield. By converting Energy Shield into maximum life, you essentially increase your effective health pool, making your Witch build more tanky. This synergizes well with high-Health and high-Energy Shield builds, giving you extra survivability.

Effect: This node grants curses applied to enemies an infinite duration. Normally, curses need to be refreshed every few seconds, but with this node, they remain active on enemies indefinitely.

Playstyle: This node is excellent for curse-based builds, allowing you to apply curses once and not worry about constantly refreshing them. You can focus on applying powerful debuffs, such as Vulnerability or Enfeeble, and benefit from their effects throughout the entire fight without the need to cast them repeatedly.

Effect: This node grants 10% extra physical damage and makes elemental damage inflict bleeding on enemies. This is particularly powerful for bleed builds, as it adds an additional damage-over-time mechanic to your arsenal.

Playstyle: With this node, your elemental damage not only hurts enemies directly but also inflicts bleed, which is a damage over time effect. This opens up the possibility of combining elemental skills with physical damage scaling, allowing you to craft powerful hybrid builds that deal both elemental and bleed damage.

Effect: This node provides a base 15% critical hit chance for spells, which is a significant bonus for spellcasting Witch builds.

Playstyle: If you're focusing on spell-based damage, this node greatly improves your chances of landing a critical hit, boosting your overall damage output. It synergizes well with the Life Remnants node, as crits can generate healing for you. The 15% base critical hit chance is highly valuable for any Witch looking to scale their damage through critical hits.

When creating a Blood Mage Witch build, you'll want to focus on the following aspects:

High Life Pool: As many Blood Mage nodes scale off your life, increasing your life pool should be a priority. This includes taking life nodes on the passive skill tree and ensuring you have sufficient life on your gear.

Energy Shield Stacking: The Crimson Power node allows you to convert Energy Shield into life, so stacking Energy Shield will further boost your survivability. Consider equipping body armor with high Energy Shield and life to make the most of this synergy.

Critical Strike Chance: Since Life Remnants can be generated through critical hits, increasing your critical strike chance and critical damage is crucial. Equip items with increased critical strike chance and multipliers to maximize the healing potential of your Life Remnants.

Curses and Debuffs: The Open Swords node makes curses permanent, so focus on applying high-impact curses to enemies. Vulnerability and Flammability are great choices for scaling damage, while Enfeeble can increase your survivability by reducing enemy damage.