Blood mage was such a bad pick. SO bad. I picked it initially because I wanted infinite curses on the field for my Chaos DOT build, and I REALLY wish I hadn't. You literally get nothing but a detriment with your first two Ascension points, so I literally left points on the board for 20 levels so I didn't have to deal with life drain without mitigation. I got ascension 2, that means I get spell leech to deal with the inherent life drain and can finally play my class, right?
There is practically no benefit to going blood mage. Functionally nothing. Even now at Ascension 3 I can't afford the points for infinite curse and spell crit because I have to go into leech + life to make it playable at all. And playable is a stretch, frankly. There is no point at which I'm getting reliable overheal, most of the time I'm weakening myself for no feasible gain. The only times I've gotten full overheal out of this ascension was against baby mobs which were never going to injure me enough to need a doubled life pool anyways. Against rare monsters you get obliterated, because you can't approach to get your overheal orbs without getting obliterated by one of the 24 different modifiers which punish you for getting close to a rare monster. Against bosses you can
kind of,
occasionally, get a little bit of overheal. Which immediately goes away when you cast a spell.
Who thought this was a good idea? What is the point of an ascendancy class that is better to
not use until endgame and beyond, just so you can win slightly more against small enemies? My lord, at least give the Life Remnants aura some unique support gems to make it less useless, or SOMETHING. I can't imagine a less useful class in an ARPG than this, the "good" stuff is marred by such a huge detriment that it's unusable in almost every scenario. Also, there are fucking uniques that do the exact same things as the capstones in this ascendancy anyways, so you could literally farm for items while playing Infernalist instead and actually enjoy the game.
