The Covenant - Theorycrafting

Yes, this armor is not good. Yes, it needs to be buffed. Yes, it will not be optimal compared to other options. Now that we've gotten that out of the way...

I still want to figure out how to make it work. It's an interesting unique with a bunch of counter-intuitive effects that makes it really hard to work with. I would really appreciate a discussion into this. I will try to lay down what I have done so far in terms of theorycrafting and would appreciate any thoughts.

Yes, I want to make this work on HC, not SC.

The best way to make use of any unique is to optimize it's strengths and cover up it's weaknesses. Let me see if I can list out the strengths and problems as concisely as possible by going down the list of affixes and writing some comments about this.

- Gems in this item are Supported by level 15 Added Chaos Damage
This essentially turns our main spell into a 7L. It means the spell we build around has to be something that scales well with added damage type effects. The disadvantage is that we don't get a 20/20 added chaos gem, and the 150% mana multiplier is added with a level 15 added chaos gem.

- +(20 to 30) to Intelligence
Basically irrelevant in this discussion, but it does boost our ES somewhat.

- 20% reduced maximum Life
While this drawback looks harsh, it is not as bad as it looks. It is overcome by roughly 3-4 passive points. Not that I wish to undermine the drawback, it is big, especially with the nerf to life nodes on the tree. However, it is not LESS life, it is REDUCED life, which is a lot more manageable.

- (180 to 220)% increased Energy Shield
This is an awkward mod. It means the chest actually gives us a lot of ES. It remains to be seen if we can do anything with this. However, this is counter-intuitive with the next mod and makes this incredibly difficult to make use of.

- Blood Magic
Finally, the most important mod for our discussion. This means we cannot use auras for the most part because we have Blood Magic WITHOUT Mortal Conviction. Our main ability has to be good without the use of auras.

Alright, now that we have the mods we have to work with laid out for us, let's see what we've learned so far.

- We have to figure out a way to recover life because we are using Blood Magic for our main spell.
- We have to figure out the best spell for this purpose. It has to scale well with Added Chaos damage type effects.
- We have to figure out what we are doing with our spare ES. We need life, but we also have ES available.
- We need to use a class far away from Blood Magic because otherwise we could simply take Blood Magic on the tree.

Here are some thoughts I have on the defenses.

- We could ignore ES completely, and just go a pure life caster-type build.
- We could use a little ES, use Aegis Aurora and go block and use that sort of defense.
- We could use low life with high chaos resistance, but we'd need a way to constantly recover life when we use it on spells.
- We could go hybrid and recover both somehow, although this feels a bit wasteful. Shavronne's Revelation is an option to recover ES, but it's a league-only unique and I'd rather not.

Here are some thoughts I have on the spell.

- I think we have to use a spell. Some options include Freezing Pulse (boring though...) or something like that.
- We can also make this a totem build because then we need to use spells less frequently, just need to find a spell that has decent damage effectiveness. Spark isn't the worst maybe, or EK, or Flame Totem.
- We can use Apep's Rage (dual Apep's Rage?) to further boost our chaos damage addition. Maybe we can get an entire chaos damage theme going on.
- I think we have to go crit in this sort of build.

Thoughts? Ideas? Concerns? Anything I missed? I'm opening the floor to this discussion. I understand once again that this will not be some kind of meta-breaking build. This might not be optimal. I want to find a way to maximize this unique's strengths and undermine it's weaknesses. If anybody has tried it before, do let me know. If anybody has any ideas on how to make this work, please share!

Reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/30qtmu/discussionthe_covenant_theorycrafting/

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enveratise wrote:

Velkor's Blood Pulser? quite outdated, though I remember it a bit.

That was the first (and only link) I could find on ANYTHING relevant too. Unfortunately this does appear to be dated and also uses Shavronne's Revelation which is a league-only unique which makes it really awkward. I was hoping to hear about other ideas too.