Pain Attunement

I've been looking at this keystone, and trying desperately to find something to synergize. While I haven't made a character with it yet, I'm finding it nearly impossible to get something based on having low life near there. It's in the deep int/dex area. All of the health and health regen is in the strength area (and deep str/dex and the 1% in templar). The only real form of health renewal that would make it useful is in claws, but then there's the problem of if you're attacking why do you want spell damage. Not only that but the int defense is energy shield, and people casting spells usually also rely on not getting too low. And being in int/dex there will be little strength at all, meaning very low maximum health.

The point is, pain attunement is probably the least synergistic keystone in the game by far because of its placement and what it boosts.

Requires loss of life and boosts spell damage... Sounds like a melee/caster hybrid passive to me, so it may be great for a dex/int character.

As far as the synergy with energy shield, I think that's the best part. You can get yourself in a low-life condition (less than 35%), then recharge your shield. You get 25% spell damage all the time as long as you don't heal.

Yeah you pretty much need to use energy shield, no life leech, no life regen, and no gain life on hit/death.

It pretty much removes the possibility of having any of the keystone passives: acrobatics, eldritch battery, blood magic, and chaos inoculation.

Pretty huge price to pay, but the damage gains are pretty good too.

There is one more thing to mention, and it is the most important:
Chaos damage absolutely obliterates this keystone.
One would need to spend many many passives (and equipment) into getting lots of health, even though 65% of the health wouldn't even be used. Pretty wasteful, and even then it probably wouldn't be enough to survive the strongest chaos damage hits (bosses, or particularly PvP)

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Xapti wrote:

Yeah you pretty much need to use energy shield, no life leech, no life regen, and no gain life on hit/death.

Life Leech and Life Gain on hit don't apply to spells so you don't have to worry about them.

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It pretty much removes the possibility of having any of the keystone passives: acrobatics, eldritch battery, blood magic, and chaos inoculation.

Pretty huge price to pay, but the damage gains are pretty good too.

And the mana bonuses as well. Low-Life flasks are very good.

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There is one more thing to mention, and it is the most important:
Chaos damage absolutely obliterates this keystone.
One would need to spend many many passives (and equipment) into getting lots of health, even though 65% of the health wouldn't even be used. Pretty wasteful, and even then it probably wouldn't be enough to survive the strongest chaos damage hits (bosses, or particularly PvP)

I'm using Pain Inoculation at the moment and I can tell you that the objective is not to get more health. All you need is a Panicked Life flask and good reaction time or advanced knowledge of which enemies deal chaos damage.

does this work in conjuntion with chaos innoculation?

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BismarckSD wrote:

does this work in conjuntion with chaos innoculation?

I really wanna know the answer!

That question has been asked many, many times. It does not. When you take CI, you are either at full life or dead and nothing in between.

More life/regeneration would benefit this build greatly. Because id imagine ANY sane person running it is going to run blood magic support gems on auras to get their life to permanent low status, otherwise, its pretty useless. That being said, there is crap for life/regeneration in the witch area to make it remotely effective. Imo spell damage builds are probably the weakest damage dealers due to complete lack of passive skill and mainly gear synergy all around. Sure you can have tons of energy shield with this, but without a decent max life total/regen, chaos will rip you into tiny TINY pieces, cause being one shot is NOT cool.

lol try soloing a low-life build in vaal/pyramids/dark forest, gl w that. needs a buff.