Chaos Inoculation and the Incandescent Heart.

TLDR: Everything with horrible synergies with Chaos Innoculation is way better than Chaos Innoculation, buff Incandescent Heart to make Ci a stronger end-game option.

In my opinion Chaos Inoculation is one of the worst Keystones in the game as it is currently.
I feel like Incandescent Heart was a decent attempt at making Ci more relevant end-game, but it is far from enough. It should be buffed by a pretty sizable margin.

Why?

What happens to your character when you take Chaos Inoculation?

Pros:
-You become immune to chaos damage
-12% more ES
-Always at Full Life (unless dead)

Cons:
-You lose the ability to use effective mana-shield builds (EB/MoM/AA)
-You lose the ability to use effective dodge builds (Acro/pAcro)
-You lose the ability to go low-life (PA/Shavs/Prism/10AurasLOLwtfMEATBALLSfaceROLL)
-You lose the ability to go life build (which is 9*/10 better)
-You lose the ability to use life gain on hit and life flasks
-You lose the ability to regenerate and leech life (without a shit ton of passive investments)
-You lose the ability to use blood magic. (and do blood magic maps)
-Ci is very far away from armor nodes and nearby resistance nodes are subpar at best.

When you look at CI from this perspective you can kind of see why it's defense is negatively imbalanced in association with the other authoritative defensive builds. Lets do a comparison.


>Chaos Inoculation = 100% chaos immunity
-------(or 25% additional chaos resistance than other builds can achieve)

>MoM/Mana Shield = 30 to 40 to 50% of damage taken being removed from mana before life
-------(incredibly HIGH mitigation that even works vs Chaos DMG)

>Life Based = overall higher point effectiveness than Ci with built-in ability to resist status ailments, be regenerated constantly either by passives, flasks, or life leeched to, and it is very close to armor and EXTREMELY good resistance passives.
-------(Pretty much the greatest defensive path in the game, it covers every base with cost effectiveness being the pinnacle.)

>Max Block Builds = 75% chance to avoid dmg from attacks and spells.
-------(This does work with Ci, but to make that happen you really have to sacrifice a lot more than other builds)

>Max Block/Evasion/Dodge Builds = Three buffering rolls of 75% (from blind) 75% (from max block) and 50% (from acro dodge) chance to avoid attack damage. Two rolls of 75% and 40% chance to avoid spell damage. Throw in a Lori's Lantern and you can forget about being touched ever...
-------(This is a great build with enormous synergy with LIFE, it is very faceroll even if it is random.. Unfortunately Acrobatics gimps Energy Shield too hard to effectively build against that one hit that finally does make it through your block evasion and dodge. You would need to have upwards of 14~16k energyshield before taking acrobatics to justify it and I just don't see it happening when you need to get max block aswell for a reliable defense)

>LOW LIFE BUILDS = Shavs, Prism, Crown of Eyes + 30%more dmg Pain Attunement, 50% increased attack speed Blood Rage, 10 Auras>2Auras...Still able to reach 10k Energy Shield. Also, this build is able to use Righteous Fire on Standard with Shav's Revelation or on any other league with Ruby Flasks unlike Chaos Innoc builds..
------(THIS PATH IS ABSOLUTION. Nothing comes close to touching it's power, not even life based. Fortunately though, it's completely unrealistic and you need to spend countless hours farming or an insane amount of Exalts and more than likely a Mirror for the insane 1h weapon you'll need to do decent damage with. Unfortunately that 1h weapon is even more vital for Chaos Innoc builds)

TLDR: Everything with horrible synergies with Chaos Innoculation is way better than Chaos Innoculation, buff Incandescent Heart to make Ci a stronger end-game option.


Solution?

Buff Incandescent Heart.
Currently Incandescent Heart adds decent armor, very poor ES, and (with chaos innoculation) 25% reduced damage from ELEMENTS<.

What I think It should give instead...

Decent Armor, Decent ES, and 30 to 40% of ALL damage taken is converted to Chaos Damage giving Chaos Inoculation users a Physical damage buffer as well as an elemental one, but making them both significant is also paramount to making this item and Chaos Inoculation a comparable path of defense.



What do you guys think about giving a 40% total damage reduction chest to Chaos Inoculation users?

Do you think it would be broken in comparison to the other end-game defense options?

Would it have too much defensive synergy for people who find a way to run lvl 30 innerforce Arctic Armor with MoM from passives? 40+40% dmg mitigation and unlimited mana? I say no since a life base can get bunkloads of armor and max resist+ along with mana shield which would be, I think in theory, just as effective if not more effective, but what do you think?





TLDR: Everything with horrible synergies with Chaos Innoculation is way better than Chaos Innoculation, buff Incandescent Heart to make Ci a stronger end-game option.

So in case anyone is wondering I'm the supporter responsible for creating the Incandescent Heart.
(I really should get the unique artwork for my forum avatar - love the design)

Seeing this thread I figured it best to add some input as feedback good or negative is always helpful for GGG to make this game the best damn game out there.

I love playing this game, very casually these days but still keeping a lookout for updates and patches. Supporting GGG was just one of those opportunities I couldn't pass on and creating a unique for Path of Exile was a very tempting challenge for both myself and GGG.

One of my first original aims when creating a unique was to try creating an endgame unique for melee classes that wasn't just another super overpowered item like Bringer of Rain, Koam’s or Shavronne’s, but trust me the idea was certainly played around with in discussions and emails.

Kaom’s - Full Life builds
Bringer of Rain - Life, Block easy 7link
Shavronne’s - Low Life builds

Seeing uniques like this was one of the reasons why I became more interested in creating a unique around the elemental damage conversion into Chaos Damage. Which works very well with CI builds but isn't completely exclusive allowing for some interesting build designs.

One of the other key reasons I became interested in this mechanic was also because I knew this was possible to implement having already seen similar mechanics on unique items like Lightning Coil - this is important to remember for later.

The design process was quite interesting - let’s put it this way whatever your first idea is for a unique design you might as well scrap it - all those crazy, amazing player suggested uniques will probably never make it into the game. At least not in their first draft without some serious dev balancing.

I wish I could remember the exact post Charan made where he discussed the unique process but he was 100% spot on with the reality of the process being very back and forth with developers with ideas which can never be, for one reason or another. This was over something like 9 or so months with emails - now I live in the UK so for me the best time to try catching a response the same day was writing an email around about 9pm (which was probably early morning for the devs in NZ) and sometimes the response could be within an hour, sometimes at 4am and sometimes quite a time later and after several repeated emails waiting.

Now some of the above may sound negative just reading it from a forum post but understand that I really loved and enjoyed the entire process working with GGG - yes of course I wish I could have had the perfect godly unique but hey its GGG game and balance comes and goes - maybe one day the unique will go over more balancing that’s one of the great things about game design - nothing is ever really set in stone.

One also has to see the funny side of things having your unique item released the same time as Mjolner - that itself makes for an interesting discussion on balance especially when you look into the feedback of the playerbase at large which had many posts / builds highlighting perhaps too much power. Yet for Incandescent Heart its entry to the world of PoE was relatively peaceful - it has its niche, some power yet not extremely overpowered and the number of posts and player feedback largely reflects this.

Most design questions can always be answered with 'Dev Balance' ^^

Why the unique name 'Incandescent Heart'? Dev - Ingame lore, same with the flavor text.
For quite sometime I had my own unique name and ideas for the flavor text but decided ultimately it was just better to leave this for GGG so the unique works and fits into the developers 'Vision' of the world of Wraeclast.

So why the low energy shield?

Dev Balance - Originally one of the suggestions was using a higher ES base for example Vaal Regalia unfortunately too high an ES value was considered too overpowered, it was even suggested by the devs that it would end up having a LESS / Reduced Energy shield penalty and therefore more desirable to have a unique base which naturally has lower ES - so ultimately the direction of the base became AR/ES.

Why +Life?

Well this was largely part of keeping the unique open to build flexibility - yeah it would be so much easier to just have +ES but there we go ^^

Why 25% Elemental damage to Chaos?

Again dev balance - this was one of those safe values. The mechanic is very powerful and the devs don't want players to become completely unkillable... One of my earlier suggestions was playing around with far higher conversion ratios like 75%+ elemental to chaos with restrictions like being unable to use it with CI – which was never going to happen because that’s just one of those ideas on the list which can never be. Restrictions are something GGG generally want to avoid creating on unique items as it can severely limit the item and its flexibility to work into various builds both new and old.

Why only 5% physical leech?

Dev Balance yet again... I would have loved so much to have seen this as the following
'Supported by lv15-20 Life Leech' but sadly minutes before midnight and the deadline for the release of the unique I got the email back saying it was just too overpowered after testing - it would have allowed for elemental leech as a 7th link effectively which I thought would have been pretty damn awesome for a lv70 unique but it was just too overpowered and therefore changed to only 5% physical - great for melee as a free life leech but sadly nothing for any builds on elemental/casters...

The artwork? 100% GGG artist whose Signature I can't easily make out, but damn I love the artwork and as others have mentioned yeah he could easily be a Dark Souls fan and I look forward to seeing the 3D model ingame when it’s complete ^^

I will take full responsibility for the Arcane vision / Light mechanic though I just personally loved that passive - It creates a very unique flavor to the overall design of the item which impacts more on the players experience - One of my most memorable moments playing PoE was releasing the shadow and playing in that darker environment battling my way through the temple. I'm still hoping one of these days to see my unique recreate that shadow experience... ^^

Well anyway that’s my feedback and input for the unique - now back to playing games :D
(btw I'm not going to do any Q&As on builds etc I enjoy leaving that for the players)

Cool, thanks for the background on the unique. I'd like to make a CI character someday and was planning on getting this unique for it. Looks like fun!

It's always sad to hear how the development process goes with the team. It feels like an armor that gets dragged in far too many directions and doesn't excel at any of them. For a nonCI build, the elemental conversion is always a downside: the best you could ever do with Chaos Resistance is get 79% with a Saffell's, yet you could get 79% elemental resistances even easier with the same unique. In every other case, you take more damage instead.

For a CI build, it just has far too little ES. 200ish ES on a build that relies on big ES values? Not a good sign. Especially not with how CI is these days. Sure, you take 25% less elemental damage, but you lost over 25% of your energy shield. After the changes to gloves/boots/helms not being able to roll high flat values anymore, you really do depend on both your chest and shield for ES now. The Arcane Vision ability also makes it worse for CI builds - from never losing vision to becoming blind when near death.

It's pretty sad to hear how it went for your idea. It sounds like it would've been a unique that actually makes CI competitive with Low Life builds (without snapshotting). Having a decent ES pool with an effective "elemental damage reduction" would finally offer CI users something other than rares to use while providing a unique advantage (full life is pretty damn useless outside of Melee Phys on Full). It could have had an even better synergy with CI GR builds with the life leech, though the free gem would have been even more interesting, though definitely overstepping the bounds of power (like every other endgame unique you listed doesn't...).

TLDR: Sad that it couldn't have more ES or the extra gem. As it is, it's subpar for CI and has a painful downside for any nonCI build. The unique creation process is a bitch.

"In my opinion Chaos Inoculation is one of the worst Keystones in the game as it is currently."

Er ????
Besides the "lose the effective of low life (which 99% of your ave Joe cant really do ), you casually left out the ability to stack twice as much of the base pool ? All the effective node is irrelevant if you have a base pool twice as their. MoM/EB build, how much life can they reach with that 1.42/1.67 (Cloak ) effective hp ? How much life can a Kaom's build reach ? How much life can an Acro/Phase Acro char reach with that 1.67/1.42 ehp ? Given that CI has an inherent twice the pool, and still more than a life build with all that ehp modifier, the downsides are justified.

It is one of the worst. An Average Joe can't get decent CI gear because it has to be well rolled to be decent. It's expensive. If you're going to buy expensive gear, though, why not just buy a Shav's and get at least one free aura as well as 30% more damage? ES and CI have taken one for the team more often than Irelia. The end result is that it's for the rich, but they introduced an even better option afterward.

Well if you want tank, go CI. If you want dmg, go low life ? Both with currency will excel and what they do. I dont get why you would compare them in the same boat.

CI does not function as low life, it's there to provide the one who can afford an ultimate hard hit tank pool.

The problem is that you benefit far more from getting low life than going tank with CI. Sure, you get 24% increased and 12% more ES... So you might get 15% more ES compared to a build with the same flat ES, and another 400ish flat ES compared to having on a Shavronne's Wrappings. So you wind up with about 2.5-3k more ES on a heavy ES build? Then you reach the issue of actually getting to the ES nodes on the tree and how weak most of them are. Low life offers 30% more damage, which means you can clear faster and actually reach your maximum leech rate...

Going CI will let you ignore chaos damage fully while you don't even deal enough damage to make up for the choice. Low life builds can also use Lioneye's Paws for free Unwavering stance and a cheap unique to get +1 gems corruption on. CI gives you the choice of using Rainbowstride or hoping someone, somewhere finds a decent pair of ES boots and doesn't want them.

Before I can say CI stands up against Low Life in its current state, Full Life will need some love. I still advocated the removal of Ghost Reaver and Zealot's Oath as passives, but I'm an old person who actually remembers when ES gave incentive to playing smart and using crowd control, overwhelming damage, and manual dodging to avoid damage and regenerate the buffer. But I can't in good faith support this change while CI and ES both provide such pathetic numbers in comparison to what they used to be.

"

Xikorut wrote:

The problem is that you benefit far more from getting low life than going tank with CI. Sure, you get 24% increased and 12% more ES... So you might get 15% more ES compared to a build with the same flat ES, and another 400ish flat ES compared to having on a Shavronne's Wrappings. So you wind up with about 2.5-3k more ES on a heavy ES build? Then you reach the issue of actually getting to the ES nodes on the tree and how weak most of them are. Low life offers 30% more damage, which means you can clear faster and actually reach your maximum leech rate...

Comparing the numbers with shavronne is kind of weird. You can get more than 400 flat ES when you compare the price of shavronne with comparable options. And when you do that, CI gets a MUCH bigger pool to take that damage from and can become much tankier from a "hp" pool standpoint.

"

Real_Wolf wrote:

Comparing the numbers with shavronne is kind of weird. You can get more than 400 flat ES when you compare the price of shavronne with comparable options. And when you do that, CI gets a MUCH bigger pool to take that damage from and can become much tankier from a "hp" pool standpoint.

You're right, you can get about 430ish ES more. There are literally 7 chests on XYZ with 900+ ES, and all three that are over 930 are mirror only. As for the price, a mirror actually costs more than what it would take to get a 6L Shav's at this point. 89 ex for a 6L Shav's or 65 and a lottery versus 90 ex for a mirror then a fee to worry about.

If you are talking about a 930 ES chest, a 305 int build, and literally every ES node outside of the bottom 6% nodes of the Scion (taking the 6-12-6 trio), you get 2320ish more ES from the chest and 12% more from all other sources. So you are right that I underestimated the actual numbers. But if I had the choice between 12000 ES with Low Life and 17000 without, I'd take the 12000. You can already facetank about anything at 12000. The extra 5000 is an insurance policy that is on top of the Vaal Discipline insurance policy. Unfortunately, the second layer will cost you can easier form of stun immunity and a rather hefty amount of potential damage. If you're talking about an attack based build, you're losing a large amount of attack speed from BR as well.

As it is, Low Life has a myriad of good options... Full Life has next to none. On top of this, CI only gets a relatively small increase in power outside of the chest slot. Nerfing Shav's helped widen the gap on the chest, but the problem still lies in the ability to get a massive enough pool in either case, with Shav's enabling more powerful options.

E: Did not mean to press enter :D