Chaos Innoculation: For the rich?

I'm thinking of making a CI build for the upcoming hardcore league. But I wanted to know whether of not CI was a currency-sink for anyone who wanted to build it. Also, I wanted to know if CI items were super expensive early in the league or later? or in the middle? or never?


I've only made a handful of 60~70 characters, none of which were CI.
I'm used to not spending any currency until 60+, or until I've accrued maybe 20~40 chaos.

bump

Traditionally CI has been a late-game build, associated with a high damage buffer but equally expensive gear. Early-game CI in particular is really not a thing. People used to spec into Life nodes and respec them once they switched to CI, not sure if that's still done.

However, in the upcoming version of the passive tree there appears to be significant encouragement for the Witch and Shadow classes to go CI, or at least take a hybrid Life/ES approach from the beginning. This, alongside the newly introduced Crafting system, leads me to believe that CI gear and therefore CI will be more accessible as a mid-game (Level ~40-55) option than ever before. Because those parts of the tree were particularly overhauled this patch, not only in terms of node quality but also in terms of directing new players to useful builds, it would seem that GGG has a plan for assisting those players who follow the natural, ES-heavy pathing.

Note that the changes to Life per Level (up to 12 from 8) also help CI players in terms of reducing the duration of stuns and status effects. In addition, it's likely that there are other tweaks to be revealed in the patch notes that are going to be posted on the day before the patch.

Wow, thanks for your reply. I'm pretty excited to try out CI. I'm just hoping it'll be fine under my budget and at least equal to a life build. I am, however, worried about the difference in gameplay.. seeing as I will be lacking armor/evasion, and the whole stun/freeze locks.

Going CI early on is silly, because you're throwing away too much life and keeping too little ES. Even with no life passives, base life in the early game is a big deal.

However, on a 'pre-CI' build, you can start going hybrid in a serious way towards the end of Normal difficulty, relying on ES passives to bolster your pool of hitpoints and taking the Essence Surge cluster early to smooth over any healing issues. ES then gradually becomes more important than life as you progress. I would only actually take CI when you can get about 3 times as much ES as life. Before then, having a bigger total pool of hitpoints is probably worth the inconvenience of having to drink flasks whenever you take chaos damage. I don't know if a big respec is necessary, but you might at least want to save up some points so that you can rush to Infused Shield as soon as you take CI.

Going CI is not an excuse to completely ignore armour/evasion, by the way. You need good mitigation as well as a big pool of hitpoints; it's just that much of it will come from off-gear bonuses like Grace, Molten Shell and flasks. (On a CI build, instead of drinking life flasks to heal, you drink Granite/Jade/resistance flasks to stop taking so much damage.) ES/Armour is easier to stack, but ES/Eva is potentially quite strong for ranged builds, as rarely getting hit means your shield has more chance to recharge.