Blood Rage, CI and GR

Do I understand correctly that if I were to have CI and engage the buff Blood Rage, I would gain no benefit of 20% IAS while low on life, because I would not take life damage, and I would not gain benefit from life leech, since I have only 1 life, but I would gain the benefit of a frenzy charge when I kill an enemy?

BUT if I were also to have Ghost Reaver, the life leech bonus I gain from Blood Rage would apply to my energy shield -- correct?

These 3 things (BR, CI, GR) I guess go together, unless I am missing something and this is an exploit which won't work?

Thank you

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onomastikon wrote:

BUT if I were also to have Ghost Reaver, the life leech bonus I gain from Blood Rage would apply to my energy shield -- correct?

correct

Hmm thanks I never noticed this combo before. Think I'm going to try it out!
At about what level / amount of ES does CI become viable?
Thank you

By that I mean, isn't taking CI too early a serious error?

Yes this build is fine, you will need a ton of ES to melee with CI.

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onomastikon wrote:

By that I mean, isn't taking CI too early a serious error?

You don't really need that much ES depending on where you are farming and the rest of your stats (resists, armor, evasion, will you be having endurance charges, will you have +2% evasion per endurance charge, ...,). Right now I'm running a bit over 1500 ES and doing just fine in merci docks. I don't even really have that much ES gear or nodes, either. In fact, let me count it for you:



and +1 ES from my belt. That's all the ES I have. As for ES nodes:



I'm only level 69, so after 10 levels I'll have a bunch more ES, too.

Ok thanks. No, no endurance charges, but I will be investing a bit in Evasion and ES anyhow.
I think I tried CI once in Closed when I was very new and did nothing but die, but I had really no clue then.
I'm actually going to use a bow so maybe this could work. I've never actually found or payed attention to Blood Rage before! So that just gave me the idea...