DD Bonestorm Crit Blood Mage | Showcase and Early Guide

Hello, Kusnier here with a DD (non-sacrifice/minion variant) Bonestorm Blood Mage showcase.

I've been having A LOT of fun with this build over the past few days, one of it's main strengths is how satisfying it feels to play.

We use Detonate Dead (+Bone Cage) for mapping, and Bonestorm for bossing.

Build is very simple to play, pretty tanky (life overflow + grim feast is 10k+ EHP), has great clear & bossing. Overall just feels like a solid, well-rounded build, even if it's not some zoom-zoom-map/boss destroyer.

Campaign/Levelling is also super easy and straight-forward.

Whilst I'm working on a fully detailed write-up/video (ETA 2 days~), basic reference with items/gems/tree can be found here: mobalytics link.

I'm playing this as well. It's been super smooth, even before the bone skills buffs. I haven't had any of the life/mana issues people have raised concerns about, even with level 20 skills.

I’ve only had time to level one char, and this is basically what I made. I got it into maps but the playstyle got stale to me. It was plenty powerful and safe, if a bit slower. I didn’t mind that at all, but something about it just felt too… clunky? I’m not sure what exactly it was since it’s so powerful and satisfying to cancel the sleep movement speed while channeling and walk with a power charged bonestorm at full speed toward the next group.

It didn't seem like heft actually increased the max physical damage for spells like dd? Does it change the max damage in the details for you?

Sorry cant watch the video right now but a good defensive option for that build is grapping those small MoM nodes and get 24% MoM because with bonestorm and DD you dont really need a lot of mana anyway. Combined with the 25% damage taken as dot node you take only 51% hit damage to life directly, makes you really tanky.

Another good def. option are the pin boots or add pin as a support gem to DD. Nothing moves while you map, super save.

Interesting, I haven't tried the bone skills to theory craft yet. I'm infernalist, looking at those nodes, I'm sure that it could potentially be also used in a infernalist build. I'll try some stuff out!

Good guide. I've been running basically this build (just with a bunch more ES nodes over mana-recoup) and have had a few issues with it.

1. DD clear is surprisingly clunky because packs are much further apart than in POE1, so you have to restart it with Bonestorm or similar very often. Also, sometimes corpses become unavailable, such as if there is a DDing enemy which gets annoying because it is often impossible to tell at least for me with other spell effects + dynamic culling.

2. I have a real problem with getting chain stunned with this build because it has to run in close. That said I haven't switched to stun charm from freeze-charm so that might fix it. I am only assuming it's stun because the symptoms are the same - I get stuck and can't roll or move away and when I try to cast any spell nothing happens. Then mobs just kill me. Happens like once every 6-7 maps and it's not like I always get bursted down, sometimes it takes like 5+ seconds and I just can't do anything.

3. I've noticed that often with Ritual I just...don't become able to cast DD for some reason. It's not a stun like above because I can roll around and - if not interrupted - cast bonestorm and the like. I notice it's mostly when rituals are in very tight corners so I am wondering if it's some kind of weirdness with targeting or the like when mobs are packed like sardines over the corpses.

One thing I haven't figured out for this build is how to use spirit. I just don't feel like there are any good options. Blasphemy was my first thought too but A: I don't feel like I need curses while mapping and B: I don't have anything good to use for the second weaponset which means it's free to put curse nodes there and get 20-30sec+ curses there which also get increased effect compared to Blasphemy and works when the bosses are off-screen unlike Blasphemy. I grabbed 2nd curse and have 23 second Enfeeble + like 35 second Temp Chains on hardcast. I also happen to have spirit on both my amulet and my chest so I am at about 180 spirit and only really use 90 for Grim Feast + the supports. I tried dropping Cannibalism and using CoC + Profane Ritual to help with clear but it was pointless - it doesn't work well with DD since DD has low crit% and ritual steals the corpses for itself, and since Bonestorm uses ALL your powercharges when cast you just don't have high uptime on the charge-boosted Bonestorm at all.