Chaos Inoculation vs. Blood Magic (long)

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SL4Y3R wrote:

Seriously Epsi, I never once died from chaos or ever came to it.

This was with 3k life to boot. I actually stood in front of some chaos spell, whatchamacalits, to see what would happen, and could effectively take 2-3 volleys before I came close to dying. That's a LOT of time to react to move and take cover.

Chaos damage was not at all a problem for me. The only thing that scared me was flicker strike packs. That's it.

Its not those things, they can hurt, if you don't see them and there is a metric ton of them, its PA specifically in packs when you aren't noticing or paying attention, and suddenly theres 3 or 4 clouds down and I am chilled or something like that. It's not THAT much of an issue, but can still be an extremely unexpected damage spike that is lethal to hp/armor. It's more that CI doesn't have the equivalent of an ohshitimfucked moment, although thats arguable with puncture, however on the same token, I never once had an issue with them on my witch as I kept granites running constantly.

@Neflak

Life leech linked to the spell in question allows said spell to apply life leech.

And to the armor part, armor is utterly useless, past 6k. For it to hold any meaning, you must have endurance charges, of which, there are only 3 ways of accumulating them while solo, end cry, warlords mark and ambus. Ambus is kind of unreliable and therefore inefficient; end cry is a melee skill really, and if it isn't, and you're ranged and have mobs inside the aoe, your doing something wrong; and iirc warlords is end charges on kill, which is kind of lulzy, as why do you need end charges to mitigate damage from mobs that are dead.

GR seems fairly overpowered in that situation. Slightly out of the way for my cold CI witch, but would provide some awesome survivability.

Why don't I see this in more CI-cold witch builds? Even if it is just for early on survivability and then later refunded when ES gets high enough.

Doubt anyone wants to give up a support gem for it. Plus if you're hitting things and leeching, that means you're also freezing them.

I think CI is when you got fully ES gear.

wait are u saying elemental dmg ES builds can use ghost reaver with a life leech support gem?
i thought ghost reaver was no option for elemtal dmg builds because life leech is based on physical dmg?

wouldnt that make my ice witch close to invincible?

It's basically a 6L scenario for crit witch. Problem is, for me. I'm already invincible,.so its either become "more invincible" or use that 6th for MF. I choose the latter.

It might make more sense in a PvP scenario though.

Nice analysis but you failed to mention 2 important things:

1. While a CI build have to focus on ES for defense, a BM build have 3 choices: Armor, Evasion or ES. In all cases, the total defense of the BM will be superior to what you described.

2. By focusing on life so much, the BM build becomes much less vulnerable than other builds to undesirable effects like stuns, chills, freezing and shocks. At the other end of the spectrum, a CI build, by ignoring life, is much more vulnerable than other builds to these effects.

In the end, I don’t think CI or ES in general needs another nerf, even with the availability of Ghost Reaver. The last nerf, a reduction to energy shield delay nods, was significant and enough in my opinion.

However, builds that rely on life, including BM builds, could use a slight buff. Personally, I’d simply increase the amount of life a character receive each level from 6 to 7 or 8.

Prior to the last patch, I constructed two different, but similar, Blood Magic builds. Using seventy something marauders in both cases. I took no offensive nodes of any kind, all life and life regeneration. One of them used the unique hat for BM, and skipped the keystone to free up points. The other was a more traditional build. Note here that it is not my advice to build an OB character in this manner. This was a test.

Using the unique hat ended up hurting my life total, even with several more points available. Because of the loss of stats a rare hat would provide, it was weaker than the traditional build. The double cost of spells was irrelevant.

In both cases my regeneration was the maximum 7.4%, and percentage of additional life was over 300%. My gear prioritized life > iiq > str > iir > resists. I play on legacy, so I have more options than the OB will provide.

Both characters had between 5,000 and 6,000 life in low mf gear, and 4,000 to 4500 in high mf gear. The life regeneration, ranged from a high of 450 to a low of 290. With casting costs running around 150 per/sec, net life regeneration was from 140 to 300. Yes, I understand these numbers are high. I also understand that my gear is substantially better than most people will ever have.

In my opinion, if a life based character has about half the effective health pool of an ES based character, it is a wash, all else equal. My original point, is that all else is not equal, or anything close to it. Those builds I described earlier require over 90 points. Some here have mentioned armor and evasion, or other defensive measures. There are absolutely no points to spare to acquire such things. My mitigation on both characters was around 5% to 7% on armor and evasion. Life was the defense. And it is all you can afford. Again, I do not recommend this build for OB, especially for new players. I intended to test survivability vs my other ES based characters.

Bottom line, for characters using the same offense, my CI characters, using ghost reaver, were just as, or much more, survivable than the BM characters with those monster "all-in" stats. The fact is, the CI characters had much higher mitigation than the BM characters, with armor reduction in the 20% range. The difference was, it only took 45 passive points, or so, to acquire the nodes necessary to boost my ES health pool over 10k. As I said, this is due partly due to the multiplicative nature of CI itself, and also to the massive amounts of local ES on armor. (My best piece was a 700 ES chest, but i also used many ES/evasion hybrid pieces, and still exceeded 10k ES).

Sooo, after all was said and done, I had BM characters with 5000ish life and aroun 6%/6% mitigation, and zero offense, for 90 points. And I had CI characters with 10K ES and around 20% mitigation, for 45 points. I consider these characters to be roughly defensively equal. But now, the CI characters had 45 points(fortyfivefuckingpoints) to poor into offense or more defense or not use at all (because who cares when ya got 10K ES and ghost reaver).

Again, I am not crying for nerfs, I am just saying there is currently one clearly superior build. And over time, most players migrate to the one superior build.

I think the comparison we are making is not so much BM vs CI, so much as high life/regen build vs CI build. In such a high life/regen build, BM is pretty much a given though.

And as anyone who has attempted a high life/high regen build can tell you, and as Randysatyr shows above, they are very gear dependent, and very hungry for skillpoints, as opposed to a CI build which can be built cheaper, and requires less specific gear to reach a safe point.

Rolling half decent +%ES mods on armor is not as hard as getting above average +life mods on armor.

But yeah, don't want to nerf CI, don't even necessarily want to boost BM or high life/regen builds. I'm thinking key might be a nerf to Ghost Reaver, require a more considerable investment, either in specific gear or skillpoints, to make it viable to be melee leeching CI build. If a high life/regen build should require this level of investment, why shouldn't a CI/leech build?

Who uses ghost reaver though? As slayer pointed out, for a caster witch its just a question becoming more invincible.

It's a passive meant for melee CI. Are we saying melee CI is overpowered? I can tell you it sure as fuck is not, because of stuns and elemental status effects raping you disproportionately.