Cannibalised Faith - Best spells

Hi, I've been very interested in making a warlock of the mists build using all 3 life/blood points and more specifically, Cannibalised Faith.

For those who don't know, it adds to any spell self cast 75% of the life cost of that spell.

At first I wanted to go Divine Ire as it has physical damage as baseline, but quickly realised that its mana cost is so punny that it adds nearly nothing.

Divine Ire costs 5mp, asssuming lifetape and 4 120%mod gem, we reach a lifecost of 31. So 23 more physical damage.

Divine Ire has 45% efficiency of added damage so that's about 11. With a base damage of 203-305, if I'm not wrong it means it'd bring the damage up to 214-316... So about a 5% more damage. Quite... mediocre

So I checked other spells and obviously ended up with the same actually costing life such as Reap and Exsanguinate with a lifecost of 46.

Now, doing the same thing, even with Lifetap for good measure, we reach 286 lifecost. So about 214 added physical damage.

Taking Reap, it has a base damage of 943) to 1414 Physical Damage and an Effectiveness of Added Damage of 210%.
So basically adding 664 damage, bumping the damag to 1607-2078, which is a substantially higher damage boost. Exsanguinate has it even better with a 270 added damage, altough it is slower.

Not sure how it affects the DoT part tho.

So... I then looked at all physical damaging spells and... well... nothing seems to come close to Reap/Exsanguinate, especially that Reap has the blood mechanic which increases the cost which, if i'm not wrong, increases the effectiveness of Cannibalised Faith.

Did I miss something or is this notable only meant to be used with Reap/Exans ?

I wouldn't mind if Divine Ire, the spell I wanted to play with, was slightly subpar, but tbh any physical spell, especially the channeling one, are subpar with this.

thoughts?

I asked myself the same and even made a similar post:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3452089
I mentioned forbidden rite but that's clearly wrong too since the effect is self damage and not cost of the spell.

Without blood magic, we could use archmage+lifetap. But that seems super clunky too. If we're not gonna go blood magic, we're gonna use auras and archmage doesn't do much.

Fevered Mind exists but we'd invest way too much to reach meaningful numbers...

Seems like our only hope is rathpith. If that sacrifice part works, great. If not (and I'm guessing it won't), then I just don't see how this node can be used meaningfully.

There is also Glacial Cascade, explosive trap, seismic trap and the new zombies.

"

Ulrira wrote:

I asked myself the same and even made a similar post:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3452089
I mentioned forbidden rite but that's clearly wrong too since the effect is self damage and not cost of the spell.

Without blood magic, we could use archmage+lifetap. But that seems super clunky too. If we're not gonna go blood magic, we're gonna use auras and archmage doesn't do much.

Fevered Mind exists but we'd invest way too much to reach meaningful numbers...

Seems like our only hope is rathpith. If that sacrifice part works, great. If not (and I'm guessing it won't), then I just don't see how this node can be used meaningfully.

Rathpith won't work, the damage output would become absolutely out of control granted that going ES you can now stack huge amounts of life.

My only guess is there might be a transfigured gem (exsang/reap, maybe another) that comes with a %max life cost. Else I fail to see how to scale life cost, as there is no mechanic similar to archmage for life-costing abilities.

realistically this only synergizes with reap

maybe https://poedb.tw/us/Replica_Covenant ? I imagine that if you don't have any shield, you'll have to pay it with life?