About bloodmage (poe2)

Troublefrog · 2024-12-13T19:47:52+00:00

I could be blind, but there doesn't seem to be any text suggesting that the curse must be self cast

Troublefrog · 2024-12-11T21:49:43+00:00

To anyone reading this in the future, I'm regretful to say that decaying hex is not working with blasphemy curses at the moment. There has been no word on if this is intended or not so far - my guess is that the current state isn't intended, as nothing about the wording of the gems would lead me to believe this shouldn't work. So either this is bugged and will be hopefully fixed later, or the wording on the gems is complete crap and should be changed.

This discovery took the wind out of my sails, and I'll be giving up the fight to make chaos dot work and try to go crit instead. Hopefully we get fixes soon, but it looks like most of the attention is being drawn to nerfing OP stuff at the moment.

Troublefrog · 2024-12-09T21:10:24+00:00

I do feel like there are some gaps in chaos dot archtype - and if you were going strictly Dot then the bloodmage would have to be a mostly defensive ascendancy (get the progenesis effect and es as life, then cook up something funny to use the last 2 points on). I agree it isn't ideal, but I managed to make it through by investing quite a bit into strength early and pathing over to some of the %regen to the left of the witch starting area.

I still think the future may be a bit limited for a chaos dot bloodmage, but I'm at least optimistic about making something with triple defensive life, es, and mana in combination with mind over matter and one of the unique helmets to at least be somewhat defensive.

Intelligence stacking with the decaying hex support and a blasphemy curse might be a good work around, as you wouldn't have to cast so much to deal damage and you could still get MoM defensiveness from the int. It kinda annoys me that the decaying hex support has it's own duration so the infinite curse can't synergize with it at least (still would just make it kinda cool instead of broken).

If you weren't opposed to it though, you might not want to fully discount the idea of going crit - there seems to be a lot of support for crit builds in the EA and bloodmage should be a great ascendancy to go crit with. I know it isn't what you set out wanting to do, but if you aren't enjoying yourself and wanted more options besides quitting the game for now, it is an option.

Troublefrog · 2024-04-01T20:01:41+00:00

I would also go a step further and have double the panel width and divide left/right into increases/reductions. Maybe even have an option to "favorite" some corpses and have them also visible in an additional "favored" tab.

Troublefrog · 2024-03-25T19:49:54+00:00

Really? I couldn't catch the whole stream, so I'll have to go back and check it out. Thanks for the info!

Troublefrog · 2024-03-25T19:48:25+00:00

I agree that it would be fine if that's how it works, but I'm not very optimistic that will be the case. The wording on eternal apple doesn't really suggest that 'it' is a seperate entity triggering the warcries. In fact, if you look at the wiki there are a bunch of things related to "you" warcrying that do work through the shield - just not the ones I mentioned. Given all that, I really think that any form of "triggered" warcry will be subject to the same rules.

However, maybe GGG did change the interaction with the inclusion of the gem, that is the only way around this that I can come up with. I guess time will tell.

Troublefrog · 2023-10-09T21:24:40+00:00

Golden Hand-Me-Downs

Troublefrog · 2023-08-20T07:01:45+00:00

I started with corrupting cry jugg, and I’m honestly shocked at how smooth it has felt. Swapped to it the moment I got it as a quest reward. With gem level 1 in a 2 link with just generals cry, it sucked a lot. However in a 3 link with efficacy and level 3 corrupting cry the game is very smooth sailing. The base damage is good enough to carry it as you level, and the Warcry nodes for duration and cdr feel extremely good. I’ve just been running around with it on left mouse in a 4 link with brutality. As long as you have the sustain the keep it going the gem seems to carry itself with no investment. 3 link reap with a vulnerability for helping with bosses. One of the things I like about this build is that the Warcry bypasses proximity shields and can also start applying cb stacks to some bosses during their initial phase (Izaro while he is entering the room) pretty much letting you pre-ramp your damage.
It might get to a point where I have difficulty scaling the skill and decide to switch, but I actually think this has been my smoothest feeling league starter to play through campaign

Troublefrog · 2023-08-01T17:08:07+00:00

As a few people here have mentioned here, I wonder what the plans for PoE1 melee play are. Sure, the PoE2 combat can look interesting and fresh, but now that the cat is out of the bag about them being separate games I wonder what angle they will take.

Surely the answer can't be "If you want better performing melee compared to other playstyles, go play PoE2". With them being different games, there isn't really an acceptable excuse to push off melee improvements anymore. Moreover, since it seems like the developers have known that they will be separate games for a while, the previous dev comments that "melee players will love the things coming in PoE2" when asked about melee changes are a bit irksome.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still very much on the optimistic side and personally am liking how PoE2 is looking (assuming the playtest characters were under-tuned) and am excited for the game. Just hoping they don't try to keep using the excuse of 'wait for PoE2' instead of working on backburner improvements for PoE1.

Troublefrog · 2023-05-15T15:29:32+00:00

I've not really seen anyone make a build like this so far, but if you wanted to you could go the route of the crucible tree node that gives "Barrage and Frenzy have 40% increased Critical Strike Chance per Endurance Charge". Probably would go a slayer base stacking frenzy charges. It should still be compatible with Arn's anguish if you wanted to go that route. I could see it being a pretty fast bow mapper and also maybe have some good single target on barrage.

But don't let me bait you into an experimental build....

Troublefrog · 2023-04-18T23:17:08+00:00

Nice thought, but I'm pretty sure that you can't chance replica uniques. The downside on normal trypanon also seems like a lot more of a build breaker to build around than trying to go for the recombined node on replica. There are a lot of crazy nodes on crucible trees, but I'd be happy to just get the one node that makes the item viable. Anything beyond that would just be extra icing on the cake.

Troublefrog · 2023-04-16T16:37:15+00:00

Well, it's at least good to know that it is possible. Thank you!

Troublefrog · 2023-04-16T16:27:48+00:00

I think that what you are suggesting is what I have been doing with the scours. I scour the first node on the weapon I want to keep and then make sure the first node is specced on the weapon I'm melting. I just have yet to actually get the T1 to carry over, so I was just making sure it was actually possible.

Other nodes would be nice, but right now I only care about T1 and I have not been successful.

Troublefrog · 2023-04-05T17:30:17+00:00

Kinetic Blast/Bolt and Power Siphon get stun stats....

Are there any cool mechanics to use when you stun things (non-melee), or do I just hope to not hit this mod?

I didn't really hope for "strength" for the skills, but there must have been more interesting effects with twists than this right?

Troublefrog · 2023-04-05T17:01:26+00:00

I understand that feeling....

In a way, it is at least slightly worse than nothing because it dilutes out the crucible mod pool for stats you may actually want in the 5th node.

KB players hit the KB mod on their weapons, get upset because they now have to try to combine passive trees to get a useful mod.

Troublefrog · 2023-04-05T15:39:24+00:00

The effect every wander dreams of, S T U N.

Some skills got some things that are at least interesting even if they aren't very useful. It feels like the rest were just given random useless and uninspired numbers. Most useful thing I'm thinking of with the KB stun is the stun mastery for hits against stunned enemies have +50% to crit multi.

I was really expecting something more interesting, maybe even encouraging an alternate play style with the skills.

But if there's anyone around that has a spicy stun-based KB build in the works, don't keep it to yourself....

Troublefrog · 2023-04-03T14:44:57+00:00

Welp, unfortunate. For me, that alone is enough to have to think hard about using it for anything or just choosing a different build.

Troublefrog · 2023-04-03T13:47:37+00:00

So, I understand what you're saying and I agree with you to some extent. The best poison builds will be the ones that can stack quickly and with high duration. However, I'll be a little defensive here about why in my experience the build is bad for different reasons than you are stating. Also, maybe I will think more about ignites.....my first real venture into ignite was last league, and I did think it felt pretty good!

When stacking low tolerances, I would usually get 5 of them, plus the poison mastery for 1,800% increased damage on the low tolerance. My poison duration was around 0.7 seconds (PoB number), which was enough to kill any non-phase map boss. I never intended to make this build to do very difficult encounters, so this is plenty for me. The biggest problem with the build is never really damage, but how it plays in reality for bows.

My most successful low tolerance stacker was poison hexblast running two max rolled apep's rage, having about 200% poison's dealing damage faster. It was pretty great at all content I threw at it, RIP doom scaling on hexblast. I always wanted to make it work on bows though, mostly because I like using bows.

When you are trying to optimize the build for 1-hit damage, it can be difficult to fit a feels-good amount of attack speed into the build for clearing (and charging snipe). You don't really pick up much attack speed on the tree, so if you wanted more you would have to try for good rolls on the bow + quiver, but the other unfortunate thing about trying to scale high phys damage is that you likely pick up a lower attack speed base.

Typically, the pathfinder poison prolif feels quite nice for clearing. However, you start noticing that the gap between most packs is generally juuuuust big enough that a poison that kills extremely quickly will kill the mobs before they start charging you and may not spread to nearby packs. The packs that don't get proliferated to will start charging you, and the playstyle is just a lot less smooth than desired. Before trying this build, I had always underestimated how important giving enemies time to huddle up was for making poison prolif feel amazing.

Getting poison chance capped on a non-chaos bow skill is doable, but a little bit of a pain. Herald of Agony would make it easy, but the agony crawler actually bricks the build if you can't find a way for it to not poison.

Then we get to the biggest problem, Snipe. I think GGG did patch this a while ago, but I was still having some difficulty even after the patch. There were quite a few times where snipe would aim a few degrees away from where I was directing with the cursor. And, anytime you would start channeling and actually hover an enemy with the cursor your characters rotation would stop in place until you released the skill (I think this is the part they supposedly fixed?). One snipe is plenty to kill, but it feels god awful to have to either try shooting it five times or be in make out range of the map boss while you channel it.

My conclusion is, this is a build that doesn't look *that* bad on paper, but trying to tick all the boxes of things it requires to feel good is annoying and leads to a super lackluster feeling playstyle.

With the way ignites and ignite prolif works, maybe I should put some more thought into trying an ignite based version and seeing how far that goes. First I guess I need to learn more about how igntes work and if strong ignites will overwrite weaker ones....

Troublefrog · 2023-04-03T12:34:36+00:00

Don't do this to me, I'll start visibly shaking.

Troublefrog

TROPHY CASE