Chaos Inoculation vs. Blood Magic (long)

And bow CI leeching is ____________________.

Fill in the blank.

Probably unnecessary? Just like with FP witches, being at range means that all you need is that big ES buffer and you're ok. Even with just 4k ES on my bow character I don't feel the need to spend 3 points and give up a support slot for Ghost Reaver/lifeleech (though it would be nice vs elemental reflect, I'll give you that).

You wouldn't need to give up the support slot for physical bows, and I could see it being quite useful there, but physical bow builds need all the help they can get right now.

EDIT: Actually the fact that ghost reaver is extremely powerful but 'probably unnecessary' for FP and elebows speaks to the general power of ranged over melee.

A while back I created a thread regarding CI's effectiveness over BM especially in terms of location. The top half of the tree appears to have many more global modifiers (not to mention critical mods, which is where most people are currently getting their high "dps" values from). As you already stated, CI builds require far less passive investment, though I would argue are more gear dependent. I solely play life-based builds (with BM if possible), and I don't find they're immensely gear dependent until the maps portion of the game...at which point most everyone is gear dependent anyway.

I also aim for only about 100-120% increased max life with ~3% regen; any more than that seems like too much of an investment and starts cutting too much into DPS. This leaves me 2-3k HP (and generally around 4-6k armor) depending on my gear which is usually plenty enough for ranged characters, or so I've found. I've never been a fan of life leech in this game, so I've never used it. However, I don't use MF stats at all unless they happen to be on a good piece of gear. I prioritize life/armor/resists above those by far, which I understand most people don't seem to do. I believe my legacy marauder (close to level 76) had 0IIQ and 15IIR.

One important factor that wasn't mentioned was the bandit quest rewards. I've not played much since the resistance penalty was introduced, but before it the Oak passives were almost a necessity to life builds...that meant 4 less passive points in comparison to the CI players.

Just my two cents on the matter. I've always felt CI players had much higher potential, but I never liked how unforgiving the CI builds were as well as the fact they have to be micromanaged more (especially in regards to mana)...so I simply play life builds because I'm lazy like that. :P

I honestly don't want to offend anyone, but I sincerely want to call you all clowns for comparing CI to BM based solely on the fact that they allow you to spend more nodes on offense, then if you would not have them, and the fact that they're mutually exclusive.

CI and it's corresponding superiority is not a byproduct of it being more powerful specifically, it comes from the fact that armor and evasion are both broken in different ways, which require overhauls or fixes respectively. Armor is worthless against high hits, evasion is worthless against the opposite.

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aimlessgun wrote:

Probably unnecessary? Just like with FP witches, being at range means that all you need is that big ES buffer and you're ok. Even with just 4k ES on my bow character I don't feel the need to spend 3 points and give up a support slot for Ghost Reaver/lifeleech (though it would be nice vs elemental reflect, I'll give you that).

You wouldn't need to give up the support slot for physical bows, and I could see it being quite useful there, but physical bow builds need all the help they can get right now.

EDIT: Actually the fact that ghost reaver is extremely powerful but 'probably unnecessary' for FP and elebows speaks to the general power of ranged over melee.

Range vs melee is another beast entirely, and you likely know this. We can say something like this, armor is worthless for range, but semi-to-worth it for melee, as the only way to fully utilize armor is to use endurance charges. Guess what builds can most easily utilize endo charges? Yes melee. So while melee are survivable with armor, end charges and life, melee have severe issues with ES, due to a plethora of previously stated issues; Range are supremely survivable with ES, but rather terrible, by comparison, with armor and life.

The introduction of Ghost reaver, and of course, the reduced supply of kaoms (Really a huge unique for life based archers specifically) has utterly upset this balance. Now we are seeing melee ES toons taking themselves to be nearly on-par with armor melee. This alone makes ES much more plentiful, in the general playerbase.

so i just ran through the thread real quick and noticed that the OP is comparing blood magic to chaos innoculation.

i'm .. honestly not sure where to start picking that apart but lets go with the most obvious one first:
blood magic and chaos inncoulation serve very, VERY different purposes and builds

that being said, they are both major keystones and are often the things that builds are quite literally built around, but they are completely different in terms of function.

one maximizes the use of energy shield as a rapidly recovering, high quantity defensive 'health' pool, while the other uses availability from rapid health regen (at least when compared to mana) and a number of nuances in how aura reservation/life on hit work to enable you to essentially remove mana cost as a factor for your build.

CI has nothing to do with mana unless you pair it with eldritch battery, and.. well, don't do that. blood magic is not a defensive keystone, it is a mana efficiency keystone.

if you want to compare blood magic to something, the equivilant keystone would be eldritch battery, which would be great if it also provided chaos immunity as having a low health pool without chaos immunity means instant death later on in the game, even if you do have energy shield, so you are relegated to going CI or full life and there isn't really any in between for characters that don't have absurd gear.

some people here are saying CI requires less of a passive skill point investment to make it effective, and that is complete and utter nonsense. to effectively run CI you not only need outstanding gear but also every single 'energy shield cooldown recovery' node available, unless you like being hit for most of your shield, running away, waiting 5 seconds and being hit again and dying due to taking too long for it to regenerate. it isn't fun, and it doesn't work.

you'll also want to maximize your evade as that is typically a lot more important for CI than armor, but in terms of skill point investment it exceeds blood magic drastically. for blood magic to work, all you need is blood magic, gear for health, a few health % nodes and golems blood or better, and you're looking at WAY more 'mana' regen than you'd have otherwise.

these keystones aren't comparable, its just not how they work, they are seperate and shouldn't be discussed in regards to each other when talking about balance.

If by "gobble up" ES cool down nodes, you mean 3.

I agree.

Which btw is negated by the fact that I can take the extra skill points from the bandit quests.

EDIT: Further, you will pretty much never see me run away. Ever. That's even with running a 6 man instance by myself....

CI has no real mana issues, between the native int giving mana, and mana leech, it requires no specific mana investments. Though some witchs do prefer to add some mana regen, it really isn't a requirement, in any sense.

As a CI Cold witch, or CI caster in many senses, you don't need any other defense. Evade is pretty terrible in low numbers, such as what a CI witch could get by focusing on it secondarily.

Let's be honest here, mana management is an early game concern, not a late game concern.

I think I started this thread as a concern for how Ghost Reaver affects CI, relative to leech with high life regeneration builds. I see now that my concerns were misplaced. As SL4Y3R points out, ES is so powerful that Ghost Reaver doesn't even matter.

If I were advising a newcomer under current circumstances, I'd have to say "go CI or go back to angry birds".

A very interesting topic if I ever seen one on these forums ; I would very much like a staff member to acknowledge what is been discussed here.

As far as I'm concerned, while there is more variety that there used to in term of viable play style, we're still far FAR from a balanced game.

Pvp factor aside, this is and will always remain an item-grinding oriented game at its core. Varied quests and storyline are neat but they will hardly be responsible for replayability and player base retention once the game is released.

CI is strong, but probably not as much as you think. I still was able to maintain basically same DPS while stil having 8.5-9k ES Even after getting rid of CI

EDIT. Just to make it clear, one only needs around 8k to feel "defensive'. Even if CI offered no bonus, I can still hit that number with ease.