Chaos Inoculation questions from a noobie.

again, I'll defer to those that have played ci, but it doesn't look like kripp's getting stunned that much.

you get a base 50% stun avoidance with es, and there are some nodes by ranger, I believe, to help increase that, if you happen to start on that side of the tree.

I'm about 99% sure kripp didn't take those, though --- ohhh, now that I think about it, he's templar, so maybe he did go down to unwavering stance.
youtube doesn't look like it, but think he did go down to ir.

now, there are a thousand ci players out there right now wondering htf kripp suddenly became the ci authority, but he's really the only guy I've see play ci, as I play solo and duo with a friend, so I just use him as an example.

anyway, before people rage about kripparian, at least somebody figured out a way to make it work

Update: I'm currently at lvl 47 on the final bits of act 2 in cruel. I took your advice and am currently carrying around 5 spare passive points in reserve for when I actually do take CI and the accompanying ES boost passives.

In general, I'm doing okay-ish. Had maybe 5 deaths or so since lvl 40, but most of them were due to cockiness and/or desync. I do start to dread encountering several ranged mobs split up across a whole room, esp. those blasted Vaal construct thingies.

Things that I found helpful:

+ Upping the crit chance on freezing pulse, by passives and, recently, an increased crit chance gem. It noticeably reduces kiting time, thereby increasing time-on-target, reduces the chance of getting stunned by incoming damage, thereby increasing survivability.

+ Having a totem of summon skelly was a *really* helpful tip. I love it, that one totem has saved my ass quite a few times, esp. fighting the bandits in A2.

Things that I'm getting annoyed with:

- Split up ranged mobs. Rargh I hate those, esp. if they come with the exploding arrow or poison/chaos damage variety. I've been stunlocked to death twice by them (after forgetting to use the totem. Sigh. Darwin at work, I guess ^^)

- Inability to fire through doorways or close to pillars/walls. That really annoys the heck out of me. Look, I am standing RIGHT in front of the door, and while mobs can happily pelt me with arrows from all corners of the room beyond, I cannot hit the skelly staring me right in the face. (Also, GGG, please provide skellies with a dental hygiene plan, they smell. Badly.)

I still don't know about:

? Will it be possible for me to reach a high enough ES soon-ish? Somebody in this thread advised to take CI by A2 merciless with about 3k ES, and I think that makes sense. At A2 cruel I currently am scraping around 600/700 ES only, that is with the Discipline aura. I'm starting to hope for some imba drops now >.>

? I'm getting increasingly worried about getting blown up in a single stun 'cycle'. I've since become more careful but sometimes (e.g. killing the bandits in their camps), there's no real avoiding an initial damage burst. =/

kripp does have unwavering stance on his ci discharger specially since the fact that he uses IR unwavering is only 13 point investment and for the unstunnable effect is completely worth it. but as a caster i dont know if its worth investing all the way to US since i dont think u take IR

Another update on the validity of CI from a new player perspective:

My witch is now 70. While the nerf of the ES nodes behind CI has hit my survivability proportionally more than players with a lot of high-end gear (why GGG decided to do this instead of nerfing the maximum ES values on armor is beyond me), it's not as it has made a huge difference.

So CI... worth it?

Yeah, I'd say so, but I'd probably only use it on a ranged build without leech, and definitely not on hardcore. You give up a lot of stuff to buff your ES as much as you can, and the stuns from just about anything can and will very well kill you if you don't pull carefully. That said, CI makes sense. It exemplifies the classic D&D caster cliche (tough magic defenses but if those are negated somehow, a bad cough will kill them).

I absolutely love having a big "health" pool (well, just the ES) that regenerates in but a few seconds of taking no damage. I cannot stress this enough -- it makes you immortal if you can avoid taking damage for just 4s or so. There are mobs that can make it very hard though. Lightning Piety at the start of A3 merciless gave me a lot of trouble because of her unreal lightning that extended well beyond the screen AND did not respect LoS.

Tips that I'd have been grateful for if I'd known them when starting out:

- Have a summon skill ready to draw aggro -- skellies work well, maybe even summon zombies in areas where you need to get rid of corpses. They don't need to be enhanced by support gems or passives. I use them to probe areas before I run in, but also liberally as meat shields against archers. They are also excellent defense against heavy hitters, such as Oak and some melee exiles: even if they die in one hit, 6 skellies give you about an 85% effective evasion chance. Granted, with fire puppies in the Docks, for example, they die faster than you can summon them, but that's where you need to be ready to throw down some heavy burst/CC or run like a little witch ;)

- Don't waste your precious totem slot on summons. I did that at the start, and it's not ideal. Summon your meatshields, and use your totem for either CC via Ice Spear, for example, or for heavy damage. Resummon if needed. (Note to Int-heavy casters: as support gem for an Ice Spear Totem, use Elemental Proliferation, and forget about Lesser Multiple Projectiles.)

- While you kite around, waiting for ES to regenerate, keep summoning and cursing. Then when ES is back up, you can lay down some heavy burst damage. This is better than stutterstepping to dps, esp. against regenerating mobs.

- Grab every ES boosting passive you can humanly reach. I especially love the ones that reduce the delay until ES regeneration, since I find they make much more of an inpact on gameplay than the simple size-increasing ones. Also, it's important to only use ES armor (= cloth armor in other games) with as high int and ES modifiers as possible (unless you want to make sacrifices for specific purposes, e.g. mf in farm status areas). I know that armor + ES gear looks shiny, but no. ES only. One strong defense is better than two shitty ones.

- I would pay a lot for stun immunity for those moments where everything fails. If you can grab stun reduction/immunity nodes, do it and thank your lucky stars. I personally haven't and will live without stun immunity -- grabbing Unwavering Stance or the new Heart of Oak simply is not worth the HUGE point investment that would be better spent in either boosting your ES or your damage output. After all, you have three lines of defense: a) summons b) totem c) ES. If all three fail to prevent stuns then maybe I deserved to be stunned ;)

Edit: Also, re the advice to only take CI with 3k ES in A2 merciless: That person must have been very, very rich, or extremely lucky with loot drops. I had about 1.2k (self-found) pre-CI, and then maybe 1.5k or so post-CI with the saved up points. I'm now at around 2.4k including aura.

Have fun with CI :)

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EomMage wrote:

you get a base 50% stun avoidance with es, and there are some nodes by ranger, I believe, to help increase that, if you happen to start on that side of the tree.

The nodes don't do the same thing as the inbuilt stun avoidance with >1 ES, they are separate things.