Blood Magic is a keystone passive skill in Path of Exile that fundamentally alters how your character’s skills function by removing mana entirely and instead using life as the resource for skill costs and reservations. It also grants a 10% increase to maximum life, making it a potent choice for life-focused builds.
PoE Blood Magic
Mechanics
- Removes All Mana: When Blood Magic is allocated, your character’s mana pool is completely removed. This means you no longer have a mana resource to manage, and all skill costs and reservations will instead use your life pool.
- Skills Cost Life Instead of Mana: Every skill that would normally cost mana now costs life. This includes active skills, as well as triggered skills and any other abilities that typically consume mana. The amount of life consumed is equal to what would have been the mana cost.
- Skills Reserve Life Instead of Mana: Any skills that reserve mana, such as auras and certain buffs, will now reserve life instead. This reservation is a fixed percentage of your total life, similar to how it would be a fixed percentage of your total mana.
- 10% More Maximum Life: Blood Magic grants a 10% increase to your maximum life, providing additional survivability to offset the fact that you are now using life to power your abilities. This bonus makes Blood Magic particularly appealing for builds that already focus heavily on life, such as those utilizing high life pools and life regeneration.
Interactions with Other Mechanics
- Mana Cost and Reservation Modifiers: Any modifiers that affect mana costs and reservation efficiency, such as increased/reduced mana cost or increased/reduced mana reservation efficiency, do not affect the life cost and reservation of skills when using Blood Magic. This is important to consider when planning your build, as traditional methods of reducing mana costs will not apply.
- Eldritch Battery Interaction: If you have both Blood Magic and Eldritch Battery allocated, your energy shield will still protect your mana pool, but since Blood Magic removes your mana, it will not be spent. This interaction is generally not practical, but it’s worth noting that energy shield can still protect your mana if needed for other mechanics.
- No Suicide: It’s impossible to kill yourself through the life cost of skills. Blood Magic ensures that you always have at least 1 life left, regardless of how much life a skill would normally cost.
- Full and Low Mana Conditions: With Blood Magic, you are neither considered to be at full mana nor at low mana. This can be relevant for certain conditional effects or passives that require these states to trigger.
- Sanguimancy Interaction: Taking Blood Magic alongside the Sanguimancy keystone from the Warlock of the Mists grants a 50% increased life reservation efficiency for skills. However, it doesn’t provide any additional benefits beyond this, meaning you won’t gain extra effects from other life reservation modifiers.
Build Considerations
Blood Magic is a powerful choice for builds that want to focus entirely on life as their primary resource. It works particularly well with builds that have high life pools, strong life regeneration, or that can mitigate the loss of life through other means such as leeching or life recovery on hit.
This keystone is commonly used in certain melee builds where life sustain is plentiful and mana management can be a hassle, as well as in builds that want to use auras or buffs without worrying about managing a mana pool.
However, Blood Magic requires careful planning, as the life cost of skills can quickly become dangerous if not properly managed. Ensuring you have enough life recovery, leech, or regeneration to counteract the costs is crucial for survival.