Eldritch Battery vs Chaos Inoculation vs Pain Attunement

This thread is to present my experiences with, and conclusions concerning these three mutually exclusive Witch keystone passives.

In light of how these keystones interact with mana flasks, it's ironic but Chaos Inoculation actually presents comparable mana regeneration to Eldritch Battery. Chaos Inoculation allows you to devote all your flasks to mana, while Eldritch battery requires you to sacrifice your mana flasks for life flasks. I would argue that Eldritch Battery's mana recovery is not significantly better than Chaos Inoculation's due to this issue. That's to say nothing for the fact that Chaos Inoculation improves your survivability while Eldritch Battery penalizes it.

Some might criticize Chaos Inoculation for not allowing players to use life flasks, but with it being possible to reach over 3,000 energy shield using this passive, I can't see that being necessary, especially with how easily a witch can get stunlocked or one-shotted if her energy shield goes down even without this passive.

For Pain Attunement, double mana recovery from Cautious Mana Flasks is the best way to offset the cost of 5 and 6-linked gems. While Pain attunement requires you to use a Panicked Life Flask and Caustic Mana Flask in order to control your life, the doubled capacity from the Cautious mana flasks can make up for that so long as you make sure you don't cap out your mana and waste the regen. Ideally this allows pain attunement builds to obtain the best flask mana regen of any build. On the other hand you can't take advantage of this benefit if you're in an area with chaos damage mobs, since it's too dangerous. Spare catalyzed flasks can mitigate this problem, but it's a definite con.

Eldritch Battery
PRO:
-More Max Mana
CON:
-Fewer Mana Flasks (in favor of life flasks or vials)
-Less Survivability

Chaos Innoculation
PRO:
-More survivability
-More Mana flasks (no need for life flasks)
-More damage (via penaltyless Blood Rage)
CON:
Life Flasks Useless

Pain Attunement
PRO:
-More damage
-Low-life flasks (Best mana income rate available)
CON:
-Less Survivability
-Fewer mana flasks (Requires a panicked life flask and caustic mana flask in order to control HP levels without tons of tedium.)
-Low-life flasks not practical in maps with chaos damage.



Overall I've settled on Chaos Inoculation. In I rarely ever used Health flasks anyway, and Chaos Inoculation gives me more HP than I had before, even with +291 Life on my gear. The free frenzy charges with Blood Frenzy were gravy.

My biggest disappointments with Chaos Inoculation are

1. That Shadow Fragments can't hurt me anymore. I honestly think they're one of the most fun enemies thanks to their extremely fast projectile, high damage, and extremely long range. I always had to switch up my tactics whenever I came across one, which I felt made the game more fun.

2. That it's harder to tell that I'm on low HP since the current effects apply only to low life, and because the energy shield graphic on the life orb doesn't get any wider.

While I tried Pain Attunement, I decided against it because with Voll's armour and only three supports on my main attack, my mana capacity was too low and my main attack cost too little mana for me to make effective use of cautious mana flasks. (they'd cap out my mana too easily) I also decided against it because, while losing the extra damage when entering an area with chaos damage enemies wasn't too bad, it was too annoying to keep a set of catalyzed/bubbling flasks to swap out with my cautious/panicked flasks. If the game changes so that I can effectively get power charges without Voll's Armour, I expect the first problem will likely be a non-issue while the second problem will become more pronounced due to heavier reliance on high mana cost skills and cautious flasks to support them.

Eldritch Battery, I found to be the weakest of the three. While it allows you to reach mana levels of over 3,000, which with my current mana regen (+174%) would give me about 140 mana/second, there's no skills or supports that can really take advantage of such an enormous mana pool. As I demonstrated in this thread, it's possible to sustain very high mana costs with much less, so Eldritch Battery is rather redundant. High risk, no reward.

While there have been several well reasoned posts about the weakness of Eldritch Battery, there is one thing that prevents us from making it better.

By far the most abusive, overpowered character we have ever seen used Eldritch Battery (and no other keystone would have worked for what the build needed).

The person with that character (actually they built it twice, in different release versions), never shared their secret, and its not that easy a build to get right.

"

Qarl wrote:

While there have been several well reasoned posts about the weakness of Eldritch Battery, there is one thing that prevents us from making it better.

By far the most abusive, overpowered character we have ever seen used Eldritch Battery (and no other keystone would have worked for what the build needed).

The person with that character (actually they built it twice, in different release versions), never shared their secret, and its not that easy a build to get right.

What, do I need to one-up my previous video and find the most mana inefficient combination of five supports possible and show that it's still possible to sustain it using only three flasks? I'm already up to supporting 325 mana per second with a 5-linked Ice Spear, do I really need to go higher?

"

Strill wrote:

I'm already up to supporting 325 mana per second with a 5-linked Ice Spear, do I really need to go higher?

Yes.

"

Qarl wrote:

"

Strill wrote:

I'm already up to supporting 325 mana per second with a 5-linked Ice Spear, do I really need to go higher?

Yes.

Well too bad because Pierce is the best option for my last support and it only increases mana cost by about 5%.

Now I'm curious.

And the first thing I thought of was chaos innoculation + eldritch battery, which would just be a really amusing challenge to stay alive, not an OP build.

Edit: Would having 1 hp and 0 mana shield make someone immune to reflect (does the reflect cap round down)?

"

RabidRabbit wrote:

Now I'm curious.

And the first thing I thought of was chaos innoculation + eldritch battery, which would just be a really amusing challenge to stay alive, not an OP build.

Edit: Would having 1 hp and 0 mana shield make someone immune to reflect (does the reflect cap round down)?

I can't say for sure, but I'd suspect that the reflect cap would round down. Not that it would matter since you'd only be able to use normal attack anyway.


As for this mystery Eldritch Battery build, my guess is that the person got a hold of a 6-linked armor, went with

Ice Spear
Crit Damage
Faster Casting
Chaos Damage
Pierce
Multiple Projectiles

Or some other combination of strong, high mana cost passives. Assuming they boost Pierce's mana cost multiplier to 1.5 or 2.0, the mana cost of such a skill would be around 234 to 312. Combine that with 2.1 casts per second or so, and that comes out to 491~655 mana per second.

With my +171% mana regen, if I had 3,000 mana I would regen 143 mana per second. Pick up the mana on flask passives for +24% mana, then throw in some Catalyzed vials for +180 mana per second more, and you'd have from 9 to 18 seconds until you ran out of mana, and an extra +1 second or so for each Seething flask you used.

It would certainly be sustainable, but I'd hardly call it overpowered, and I honestly can't think of any other way to use that mana. Is there anything other than 6-linked skills that uses lots of mana? In the end all you'd be doing is sacrificing your energy shield in exchange for the convenience of not having to use curses, if you use them at all. I mean, I know some people whose builds just one-shot everything in chaos already without even needing to resort to some silly gimmick. It honestly seems pretty weak.

EDIT: Oh I know. It was a wand witch. With mana leech at a limit of 12.5% per second, that's 375 mana per second from leech and 143 passive regen, which is way more than enough to support any skill. They found some item with some mana leech and built around that. They probably got some life leech too to offset their limited health. I still don't understand how that could be considered the "most abusive build ever" though. Plenty of other builds one-shot everything just fine too.

Strill, you're thinking Chaos Inoculation + Blood Magic only allowing normal attack. Chaos Inoculation + Eldritch Battery would still let you use any attack, but you just have to try and kill everything from offscreen and never get hit w/ your 1 life.

The only wand witch build that works with non-support leech is Power Siphon, and mentioning that the build was made on two separate versions makes me doubt that was the case.

How can a build abuse not needing flasks for mana?
> 5 surgeon's granite flasks for perpetual max armor?
> 5 surgeon's diamond flasks for crits (would this even work)?
> 5 small mana vials of X in order to have a constant buff from the X flask mod?

...I'm out of ideas.

Who knows for sure what the build was.. by why are you guys ONLY assuming it has to be a Witch build? Seems to me that a bow user can create some pretty hefty mana cost skills. Can a bow user not also take advantage of Mana Leech?

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FaceLicker wrote:

Who knows for sure what the build was.. by why are you guys ONLY assuming it has to be a Witch build? Seems to me that a bow user can create some pretty hefty mana cost skills. Can a bow user not also take advantage of Mana Leech?

The build in question had Eldritch Battery. A bow build would be decisively not OP due to the number of points it wasted to get to Eldritch Battery.

"

RabidRabbit wrote:

Strill, you're thinking Chaos Inoculation + Blood Magic only allowing normal attack. Chaos Inoculation + Eldritch Battery would still let you use any attack, but you just have to try and kill everything from offscreen and never get hit w/ your 1 life.

The only wand witch build that works with non-support leech is Power Siphon, and mentioning that the build was made on two separate versions makes me doubt that was the case.

How can a build abuse not needing flasks for mana?
> 5 surgeon's granite flasks for perpetual max armor?
> 5 surgeon's diamond flasks for crits (would this even work)?
> 5 small mana vials of X in order to have a constant buff from the X flask mod?

...I'm out of ideas.

Elemental Hit deals elemental damage IN ADDITION to physical damage. Why would it not work?