The Sanguine Spear - Blood Mage Melee Crit Bleed + Near Unkillable
The Vibe
I wanted to leverage the new Blood Mage Ascendancy nodes and general tankiness with life remnants and combine it with super high crit bleed build. This is what I came up with. 4-5k+ health with overheal, feels damn near unkillable (I haven't even maxed resistances yet), and does satisfying damage w/ some nasty crit pops. For me, its all about Blood Barbs granting guaranteed aggravated bleeds on cursed enemies, running Blasphemy with a curse, and just Raking them down and letting herald of blood + crystals go crazy***.***
Its a mix of a lot of health, armor, evasion, and block chance. I'm not saying you can't die, but once you things really come together, its comfy as hell*.*
Build
https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/hekou002
Video (I'm playing it super slow just so you can clearly see what it is like, maybe I'll add a breach video, but it's what you imagine, everything just fucking pops after a combo or two)
Early Game
Just go rake with stomping ground. Stack strength.
When it gets GOOD
When you get a nasty spear with highest phys dps you can find and importantly high crit modifier. High base crit on your spear will end up over doubling your crit chance in the end because that's what it scales off of. My crit chance is ~ 50% now for most abilities, higher on others.
Horns of Bynden Unique helmet is really nice just to keep rage up (and cheap), but I also put rage gem on Spearfield to stack it up quicker. Rage is multiplicative I think so, big damage increase.
This is gonna be even better when they let bleed apply on Energy Shield which I think is soon.
Playstyle
Honestly, I mix it up a lot. You can just chuck a bunch of spearfields down and watch them walk to you and die. Really nice for chokepoints. Or you can just rake around with disengage with the occasional blood hunt. For single target though, its Bloodhound's mark and then maybe a few spearfields and then rake in and disengage out. If you're feeling frisky, you can Blood hunt and if you crit on any decent bleed they just disappear. Or just watch them bleed out like a masochist.
Tips
- I maybe wouldn't grab Sanguimancy until you have done 2nd ascendancy to get Blood Barbs with it in one go. The health loss on cast sucks until you are ready for it.
- Try to get Blasphemy at level 8 so that the int requirement is low. Same with Enfeeble for low int requirement. Its just about applying a curse, doesn't really matter how strong the curse is. This is pretty important because otherwise you are gonna be strapped for stats.
- Max life on everything you can, because it counts for 2 when you are full
- Please shower, you have been grinding this game for too long and you smell
- You can kinda use rake's janky animation to target far enemies and just let the game teleport you around dense mobs, its kinda fun
- Magnitude Bleed on jewels
- Tame beast is cool if you can afford it. Physical damage/haste/invuln aura
Other Shit
- Okay so, for the other ascendancy points, you can go Gore Spike for more crit damage (50-100% extra), or Grasping wounds for even more tankiness. I choose to go Between the Cracks right now so that all crits ignore armour. I KNOW THAT IGNORING ARMOUR DOESN'T AFFECT THE MAGNITUDE OF THE BLEED. But... ignoring armour is nice for the actual physical damage you do as well, and when the bleeds pop with herald of blood and haemocrystals, they turn to physical damage so I feel like it just shreds mobs. It's probably not needed, but its just nice. For single target, you can break armour easily with Bloodhound's mark. So do what you will, you will probably be fine either way.
- I decided to not go for the magnitude of bleed nodes because they were a bit far, so I just cranked physical/attack damage and crit. I think this makes sense because if you increase your physical damage you increase the bleed so, why not just do that instead of trekking over to those nodes right?. Idk. Inform me.
- I tried Berserk skill to increase rage effect even further, the health loss is manageable for me, but it just seemed annoying. I'd rather be at comfy max health and lose out on ~13% extra rage damage. So i just tamed a beast instead.
AND MOST IMPORTANTLY.... I don't know fuck all about this game for the most part, I don't usually play ARPG's so feedback is welcome, I just wanted to be a tanky blood boy so I tried some shit. Teach me something.
Comments
I mean, I appreciate the effort and the enthusiasm, but being "unkillable" in a T4 map is basically meaningless, since it means you're literally just starting the endgame.
Typically, when people are providing evidence for a build working well, they're using T15-18s to demonstrate.
Good to see a different take using a caster (which happens to have one bleed ascendancy for spells).
I will try this for sure :)
Bleed magnitude is good because it interacts multiplicatively with the initial bleed inflicted by your hits.
Tkx for the build, bro... lets see how it works on endgame.
Pretty much this minus the health with my huntress bleed
Cool guide, I really enjoy the added flavour pic to see what you are getting at here.
Man, these new bleed skills are so satisfying. Spearfield and Herald of Blood animations are top-notch.
Upvoting and commenting because I love the bleed power fantasy and I really want big brains to make it a true meta build equal to LS+rhoa
Love that you said "teach me something" and everyone just shits on you while offering nothing because they don't know any better either
Was thinking of something like this with tangletounge (the double crit spear) and bursting decay (flat phys damage scaling with life ring)
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Rake builds are good for bossing but mediocre at clearing tho.
Let me check it later...
did you try the forking crit spear allowing you to double crit with up to ~28% base crit chance or is the the base dmg to low (1/4th of best available spear) but aplying your crit multi twice