Path of Exile 2: Blood Mage Witch Ascendancy Explained

This guide focuses on the Blood Mage Ascendancy for the Witch, covering their Unique Skills and Skill Interactions.

Blood Mage Overview

Blood Mages spend their life to use skills, greatly empowering their skills with Extra Damage or Stronger Critical Strikes.

Blood Mages get access to the Unique Life Remnants Skill, allowing them to recover and Overflow their Maximum Life to help empower their skills. They’ll still require some balancing to what they cast and how often to manage their Life Pool.

In addition to the mandatory Life Remnant, they also have access to other options to help them manage their Maximum Life. Access to Life Leech as well as passively having the effects of the Progenesis Flask from POE1 can make the very self-sufficient.

Sanguimancy

Sanguimancy grants the Life Remnant Skill, which spawns Life Remnants when we hit or defeat enemies. Additionally, all skills gain a Life cost equal to their Mana Cost. This Passive is free to allocate.

As of Update 0.3.0, this passive is now free to allocate and spawns remnants on hit, rather than Crit. Being an on-hit effect now means we’ll get Remnant far more consistently, mitigating much of the additional Life Costs. The free allocation also means we can take Vitality Siphon on top of this to reduce the life costs further.

These changes together make it much easier to play a Blood Mage in the early game. Update 0.3.0 also came with some lower mana costs, particualr when going above Level 20, which helps keep this effect reasonable in the late game as well.

Vitality Siphon

Vitality Siphon grants us Life Leech from Spells.

While Life Leech can be a solid recovery option, we’ll need to heavily invest in making this Life Leech in particular strong enough to suit our needs. This isn’t insanely hard to do, but will take up a lot of points from our Passive Tree.

The biggest downside is that Leech stops working at Full Life and while Life is Overflowing. This ultimately makes Leech much less effective for the reasons we’d want it.

However, this does benefit us a ton, combined with the Couture of Crimson Unique Body Armour, which allows Leech to overflow our Life. This solves a lot of the issues with Life Leech for Blood Mages, at the heavy cost of a quarter of their Maximum Life.

Adding the Fast Metabolism Notable on top of this will just make the Leech even better, as it will continue even if we reach Maximum Life or Overflowing Life. While constantly spending Life for Spells usually prevents this, there can be rare times between packs when this can happen and instantly end our Leech.

Whispers of the Flesh

Whispers of the Flesh causes our curses to reserve 15% of an enemy’s Maximum Life.

Whispers of the Flesh is an exceptionally powerful Ascendancy, effectively making our curses instantly deal 15% of an enemy’s maximum life as damage. Granted that as soon as the curse wears off, they will get that Life back, keeping an enemy cursed is easy enough.

This is incredibly potent, particularly on Bosses.

Based on its specific wording of “Enemies affected by your curses,” it effectively says that this effect will not stack. So, trying to apply it with multiple curses for more Life Reservation will not work.

Blood Barbs

Blood Barbs causes Bleeding inflicted on Cursed enemies to be Aggravated, dealing double damage as if they were moving. Additionally, Elemental Damage contributes to Bleeding Magnitude.

Bleeding Aggravation is pretty limited and often relies on chance, or critical hits in many cases. With this ascendancy, however, we’re guaranteed to get this effect and make our Bleed Ailment even more potent.

Alongside some of the Support gems focused on Bleeding, like Haemocrystals, this becomes a way to indirectly scale their damage. This can allow for some very potent combinations for potential builds.

Blood Barbs, allowing all Elemental Damage to apply Bleeding, can potentially be very powerful. Allowing any Elemental skill to apply Bleed opens up a lot of strong combinations with many high-damage Spells being able to apply a stronger Bleed.

Gore Spike

Gore Spike increases our Critical Damage Bonus by 1% per 50 maximum Life we have.

This is incredibly powerful, as not only will we want to stack Life as it is, but we’re given even more damage for doing so. Our Overflow Life will also contribute to this, meaning this provides extra benefits for keeping Overflow Life high as well.

This is easily one of the best Ascendancy points for a Blood Mage to take in the end game, as by that point, they should have fairly high Crit Rate with most spells. If not, they can grab it earlier and also pick up Sunder the Flesh to improve their Crit Rate.

With Update 0.3.0 it’s also much easier to pair this with Crimson Power, granting a significant boost to the scaling of this passive. This does mean forgoing all of the other passives unless we skip out on Sunder the Flesh. Though really, only the new Sanguine Tides node feels like it may be worth using if we have the gear to skip Sunder the Flesh.

Sunder the Flesh

Sunder the Flesh sets the Base Critical Strike Chance of all Spells to 15%.

This is insanely good for the majority of spells, often adding 50-100% of their standard Base Critical Chance. Modifying the Base Crit acts as a multiplicative boost to our overall Crit Chance, making this effect very powerful.

However, if we’re using a Cold Spell as our main Spell, this will end up being less impactful overall. While Fire Spells typically sit at 7% Crit Chance and Lightning Spells sit at 10% Crit Chance, Cold Spells sit around 13%. While Cold Spells still benefit from this, it’s much less compared to the other Elements.

Regardless of the skill, even a small amount of Base Critical Chance makes it even easier to scale Critical Hit Chance enough to reliably lean into Critical Damage.

Grasping Wounds

Grasping Wounds prevents 25% of Hit Damage, instead dealing it as Damage over Time over 4 seconds.

For those not familiar with POE1, this the the effect of the insanely powerful and expensive Progenesis Flask. Often regarded as one of the best defensive Flasks in POE 1, it should come as no surprise that this is a powerful effect.

The most important thing that this does is prevent most hits that would instantly one-shot our character from doing so. This gives us a chance to recover from heavy hits more reliably, so long as we have our Life Flask ready or other forms of sustain.

Crimson Power

Crimson Power grants us extra Maximum Life based on the Energy Shield of our Body Armour.

Since this effect isn’t converting our Energy Shield to Maximum Life, instead adding it as flat life on top, this effectively doubles the Effective Life Pool we gain from our Chest.

With a well-rolled Energy Shield chest easily reaching 500+ Energy Shield, or nearly 1000 Energy Shield for a near-perfect one, it’s very easy to get a lot of life out of this. On average, this will have a significant impact on our Life Pool in general.

Add in the fact that it also pushes the limit for Overflow Life as well as the bonus from Gore Spike, and it’s exceptionally powerful. Making or buying Body Armour just for this will be an expensive endeavor and be a very endgame optimization.

As og Update 0.3.0 and Sanguimancy becoming free to allocate, this has become a very attractive late-game option. While there are a lot of great nodes in the Blood Mage Ascendancy, the way this synergizes with Gore Spike just provides far too much to pass up on a cast build, especially since we no longer have to drop Sunder the Flesh to get access to it.

Sanguine Tides

Sanguine Tides will restore 1 Life Flask Charge per 4% Life Spent, at the cost of 50% less Life Recovery from Flasks. Additionally, when Life Flask Charges reach full, it will consume 40% of Maximum Life Flask Charges to grant 1% Damage as Extra Physical for 3 seconds per charge consumed.

Sanguine Tides is a very interesting effect, as often the Blood Mage isn’t relying on their Life Flasks for recovery, generally letting Life Remnants from Sanguimancy do most of it. This allows them to instead be used as a buff.

Since Blood Mages are constantly spending Life on casting spells, this leads to a ton of Life Flask sustain. With a bit of investment, we can even speed up this generation, providing higher uptime on the buff in situations where it’s needed.

At the absolute maximum, assuming a perfect Life Flask (128 Max Charges), this will end up providing 51.2% Damage as Extra Physical. This is by no means a small damage buff, and if we’re already heavily leaning into and scaling Physical Damage, this just end up being even stronger.