The Covenant Robe - What was the intented purpose of this item ?

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Zindax wrote:

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Saffell wrote:

I would guess that the intended purpose of this item is to allow usage of blood magic without having to spend points to get the keystone. Chaos damage is kind of the "cool" damage, and I think that items having built in was relatively new when this came about. So that's probably why +15 chaos ended up on there. Or maybe the creator felt that the flavor of making a blood pack with a high being to empower you spell with your energy (blood magic) and the entities energy (chaos damage) was cool. And they didn't have a goal of "it's needs to be a super leet high end item".

Mind if I ask you a personal question, Saffell? You have created a pretty cool shield that seems to deal with reflect damage quite well. I am not sure what you had envisioned your unique item for, but it certain seems to be quite good at dealing with high reflect damage that would come from spell damage. You must have some sort of opinion on this whole thing, like do you see your shield being used with an RF/PA build that uses shavronnes? And how do you see the person getting PA? Reserving auras with life to get to the low life build? I mean do you think people use the Covenant for that reason with your shield and what was your original thought behind it? Reflect damage is handled differently since you thought of that shield so I am curious.

I have never heard of my shield being used for spell reflect. I would think if you were running a discharge build or some other build where you were likely to one hit yourself with reflect the 95% block cap would make the build unusable.

I originally created my shield after they added PvP to the game, or maybe after they announced it, before they added it. In the hopes that PvP became popular, I envisioned it as a powerful metagame tool. If spell builds became too popular then it would act to keep them in check. However, since it cannot block attacks it wouldn't be the best in slot all the time, only when spell builds are OP. For instance, if the PvE metagame (Low life Shav) existed in PvP, my shield would be fantastic. But I don't think it could ever truly be OP in such a situation, as it merely limits other OP builds in PvP.

Equipment hot swapping and RF did not exist when I created the shield. I was a little disappointed by the addition of hot swapping, because I forsaw a lot of people just carrying the shield around then hot swapping it in when they needed it. This makes it a lot more OP against casters, and reduces it's drawback significantly. It's no longer a distinct choice, but "press x to beat casters". However, the PvP scene is not developed, and there is no real meta, so it may not play out that way. The stats are also low enough on it, that it will still be a conscious decision go give up armor/eshield/health.

RF was introduced later, and I was glad to see that the boost to max resist actually made RF builds work. I myself ran a high life / regen RF build. But the regen nerf made it unplayable. My shield was actually the shield for RF builds until the phoenix shield was created. I initially was a little jilted by this, but got over it very quickly. For a RF build I would expect most players to focus on the int part of the tree and pick up PA with a passive since it's nearby. However, I could see people using the unique to get PA.

However, all that is very different of the case of the covenant. If for instance a bug existed which let you keep the spell block after the shield was unequipped, I would be very happy that said bug was fixed.

I am happy that it currently fills the role of alternate shield on tempest shield builds when entering areas with high caster quantities. I actually have such a build as an alt and look forward to it some day, though tempest shield is touchy with swapping equipment sets.

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Shadowness_ wrote:

Shavronne's revelation. Which allows you to use skills instead of constantly running away.

Fair enough.. I didn't think about the Covenant Robe and Shavronne's revelation (left ring) combo. Probably because I play standard and it doesn't drop here.

So, if you keep your life regen and life leech to heal you from blood magic and you can also regen your energy shield without constantly having to stop casting and run, then the Covenant robe becomes interesting.

A Covenant + Shavronne's revelation build would stack both life and energy shield. No need to spend any points in mana or mana regeneration. The mana cost of the skill can be much higher than if mana would be spent because a life pool can be much higher than any mana pool. Also, you can leech life at a much higher rate than you can leech mana ((20% of max life per second, vs 12.5% of max mana per second). In addition, the life leech gem leech more life per cast than the mana leech gem (8.8% vs 5.1% at gem level 20)

So, what main skill to use ? A spell or an attack ? A spell would be the best choice since spells do not require much auras for max efficiency while most attacks are best used with all 3 elemental auras. Since the build would reserve auras on life, you definitively don't want to run too many of them. Also, typically, spells and support gems for spells are blue gems and you'll want to link your main skill in the your intelligence based (blue) chest.

So, which spell ? A spell that don't need any %aura (EK requires Hatred) and that works well with the mandatory support gem : Added chaos dmg. So, ideally, you want a spell with a fast cast time and not too much damage effectiveness penalty. You also want a spell-support combo that you would be difficult to support on mana only. Given these criterias, there are still lots of possibilities, but before building your passive tree, you have to choose. So I chose Fireball.

In a 5L chest, I'd link Fireball (32 mana at level 20) with Added Chaos Damage (1.5 mana multiplier), Fire Penetration (1.4), Faster casting (1.2), Greater multiple projectiles (2.0), life leech (1.3) for a grand total of 210 mana (or life) per cast.

With a life leech of 8.8%, that means that you need to deal at least 2386 damage per cast to recover the amount of life spent.

At level 20. Fireball deals an average of 371 damage per cast. With a level 15 added chaos dmg, you add 69 damage to that amount, so 441 damage. Greater multiple projectile reduces that damage by 50%, so 220 damage, but then multiply it by 5 (4 additional projectiles that can shotgun) for a total of 1100 damage. Let's assume that you can get about +125% spell damage from gear. That bring us to 2475 damage per cast. Enough to cover the life cost of the spell. I know, That doesn't take resists or crits into account, but it gives us a good enough idea to start building the passives tree. Another thing to note before picking up the passives is that chaos damage makes up almost 16% of your damage output, so the best passives to increase damage are not +fire dmg or +elemental dmg, but rather +spell damage, +projectile damage, +cast speed and +crit chance and dmg.

So, here's the passive tree of a Shadow at level 82 :



And the build summary :




In term of defense, we end up with a character with a respectable amount of life (+116% life with the Covenant robe), high energy shield (+144% with the covenant robe and shavronne ring), very good evasion (+88%) and the block% provided by a shield. The character also have 1% life regen, 30% chance to avoid being stunned and 15% increased block and stun recovery. Finally, the Shavronne ring provides 4% energy shield regeneration.

In term of offense, the passives provides +191% dmg to the fire portion of Fireball and +101% dmg to its chaos portion. With +125% spell dmg from gear, we end up with
4421 dmg per cast. But with +395% crit chance from the passive tree (and +100% from gear), the chance to crit are at 36% and when you do crit, your crit multiplier is 345% (1.5*2.3), assuming no crit-multi from gear. In other words, when you crit, you do 15,252 damage. The average dmg of crit/non-crit is 8,014 damage. With 61% faster casting from passives and support gem, the cast time of fireball is almost 0.5 second or 2 cast per second. That means 16,029 dps. Also, with quality fireball and the crit chance, the chance to ignite targets are at 66%. And burning damage is increased by 60% from passives. So, in term of offense, the build is in pretty good shape.

Auras : Grace and possibly Discipline

Offensive Curses : Flammability or critical weakness. Both increase chance to ignite (14% vs 9%). Crit weakness increase both the fire and chaos portion of the spell. Flammability only increase the fire portion. Personally, I'd pick Critical weakness. Fire penetration support gem already take care of a good portion of the fire resistance.

Gear : All pieces should have life. Defense should be energy shield or energy shield and evasion.

Totems : Devouring totem or Decoy totem would be good defensive options. Offensively, a flame totem would probably work very well (link it with blind and it becomes interesting defensively). A totem that would also provide both defense and offense is a cold projectile totem, Ice spear comes to mind. The spell would benefit from the many crit passives and would slow monsters down.


Hmm, that's almost tempting...

so each aura would be supported by a lvl 15 chaos damage individually? like wrath, hatred tec. would all get a lvl 15 chaos dam buff?

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Antigegner wrote:

so each aura would be supported by a lvl 15 chaos damage individually? like wrath, hatred tec. would all get a lvl 15 chaos dam buff?

As far as I know, you can't boost auras with +dmg support gems like Added Chaos damage.

And if you socket an attack in the Covenant robe (lets say Elemental Hit) and use the 3 auras, the added chaos dmg will apply only once.

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Antigegner wrote:

so each aura would be supported by a lvl 15 chaos damage individually? like wrath, hatred tec. would all get a lvl 15 chaos dam buff?

NO.

The advantage of Covenant was "Blood Magic". The blood magic gem has huge increased mana cost.



The only build I can think of actually uses would be a aegis aurora blocking build spending most of its point in witch/shadow area. Its the only way you can regen ES in combat? But those area lacks shield blocking passives, you basically just making it hard on yourself so you can use this armor.