Pain Attunement

Try lots of ES, life leech, Soul Reaver, and Blood Magic supported auras (Discipline for one..) Your auras will keep you below the 30% life threshold, while ES and ES leech keep you alive.

Of course, you'll die in one hit from anything that deals chaos damage.. So the build isn't viable, imo. It's a huge buff for extremely limited circumstances... Things you shouldn't go out of your way to try to achieve..

Pretty useless keystone mostly. Not worth the points used in other places to make it work by a longshot.

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Badmotorfinger wrote:

Pretty useless keystone mostly. Not worth the points used in other places to make it work by a longshot.

This.
Even when the devs tried to mark it out in a build of the week video it still big fail because if you look real hard you'll find that even their gems are level 20...not something you will easily achieve.

Maybe a reduction to chaos damage by say 60% is ok?
And even then it would still suck.

It's far from useless.

1.3x final damage multiplier is humongous, and if you run totems and/or frost wall then you can keep yourself at arm's length from most everything.

1-2x Redbeaks provide endgame equipment at an extremely low cost as well.

Lastly, Redbeaks and Pain Attunement are one of the very few ways to super-buff the damage on Bear Trap, Ethereal Knives, and Shockwave Totem.

Redbeak's low life damage increase is global? I thought it was local, and would have thought building with Ephemeral Edge / Saffel's Frame would be preferable.. The latter I would think is necessary to afford some protection against chaos damage.

For this to be worth anything we need stuff that scales with missing HP (not more "when low life" stuff).

To illustrate:

Rage support gem
- increase damage (not specific to physical or magical) by x% of missing HP.
- lose y% of mana cost to HP

Keep yourself permanently in the low-life region by using a "reserved mana" skill + blood magic support.

Be careful, blood magic support has 250% increased mana cost, so putting it on a 40% reserved mana will use 100% of your life and insta kill you when you activate it. So use it on flat reduced mana cost auras or 30% mana cost auras (will yield 75% reserved life). You could also try to add a reduced mana cost support to get closer to the low life limit, without going over.

Then it's justified to use tons of life on hit/leech/regen, since your reserved life will keep you in the low life zone. Or, rely entirely on your energy shield.

Now that I've said that, I'm feeling the need to try this on a Shadow...

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Thalandor wrote:

Now that I've said that, I'm feeling the need to try this on a Shadow...

That's what I thought too, until I realized chaos damage would rape low life character regardless of defenses.. That makes the build very difficult to maintain after level 50..

I almost think a series of chaos resist nodes should follow Pain Attunement to mitigate the one glaring weakness that prevents the keystone from being viable.. Either that or xp loss reduction notables scattered about.. I really want to us PA for a build but it'd be impossible (imo) to level past 70.. Which kills viability in my mind.

It can still be taken for non-CI builds, as a circumstantial emergency dps boost to save you from imminent death.. But this keystone just cries out to me to be built around and I would like to see that potential realized.

Edit: I should also add that I really like how certain map mods really challenge builds, everyone has their weakness... This encourages specific defense building to compensate, which by consequence affects dps potential by occupying skill points that could be used elsewhere. I wouldn't want a "fix" to compromise that. The problem as it is now, is that chaos damage it all or nothing, there's no way to compensate for it. Perhaps GGG already has plans to fix this in the future (I've heard mention of adding chaos resistance being in the works).. But really, that is the only problem with PA. Solve chaos damage 1-hitting any PA build, and you've got an excellent keystone right here!

Edit 2: Oh! Also wanted to post that this would also be a good idea. It seems that the "all or nothing" nature is really the culprit here.

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c2games wrote:

For this to be worth anything we need stuff that scales with missing HP (not more "when low life" stuff).

I wouldn't mind seeing all "on low life" replaced with something scalar to %life missing under a certain threshold (50% seems right)

This keystone really needs to have Chaos damage immunity/something.

suggestion:
Rename it Chaos Attunement, give it X% (30-50%ish) boosted damage on Low Life and Directs Chaos Damage to Energy Shields (or Mana if you want to get cool).

This makes it mutually exclusive with Chaos Inoculation but actually useful.