[1.1.0] The Covenant Pulser (7,500 life/ES + 14,600 dps x 3) (Videos)

A couple of days ago, in this post, I was bitching about the uselessness of the Covenant Robe :



My main problem with the item was that blood magic and energy shield do not mix well. After all, when you are using any skill with blood magic, you can't regen your energy shield. So, what was the idea behing a 300 es/20 int item that grant blood magic ?

But then, I realized that there are now some solutions to this problem. First, you can use shavronne revevation :



The "right ring" version of this item provides a permanent 4% energy shield regen per second at the cost of 0% mana regeneration. When you use blood magic, this isn't really a cost. The real cost of this item is its price : several exalted in standard.

But you can also take the Zealot's Oath Keystone (Life regeneration applies to energy shield instead of life) and then take some life regen % passives.

Another solution is to take the Zealot's Oath keystone and then use the blood dance boots :



"Up to 30% chance to gain a frenzy charge on kill" + "1% life regen per frenzy charge". So, with 0 extra frenzy charges and the ZO keystone, you get 3% energy shield regen from this item. As a bonus, you also get +6% casting speed and +9% increased damage against enemies on low life.

So, with these solutions in mind, I decided to theorycraft a "Covenant Caster build.

This build would stack both life and energy shield. Using blood magic, no passives needs to be spent in mana or mana regeneration. Also, you can generally afford much higher mana cost spells with blood magic because a life pool can be much higher than any mana pool. In addition, 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). Finally, 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 because 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 intelligence based (blue) chest.

So, which spell ? A spell 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 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 Freezing Pulse. Why Freezing pulse ? Its the fastest spell in the game that doesn't have a damage effectiveness penalty. Also, at 6%, its base critical chance is high. And passives spent in critical chance/damage are good for this build because they also improve the chaos damage. I also like the defensive aspect of a cold-based spell.

In a 5L chest, I'd link Freezing Pulse (23 mana at level 20) with Critical Damage (1.3), Faster casting (1.2), Lesser Multiple Projectile (1.5), life leech (1.3) and the mandatory Added Chaos Damage (1.5 mana multiplier) for a grand total of 105 mana (or life) per cast.

With a life leech of 8.8%, that means that you need to deal at least 1193 damage per cast to recover the amount of life spent.

At level 20, Freezing pulse deals an average of 228 damage per cast. With a level 15 added chaos dmg, you add 117 damage to that amount, so 345 damage. Lesser Multiple Projectile reduces that amount by 30%, so 241 damage, but then multiply it by 3 (2 additional projectiles that can shotgun) for a total of 723 damage. Let's assume that you can get about +150% spell damage from gear/support gem. That bring us to 1808 damage per cast. Easily 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 more than 34% of your total damage output, so the best passives to increase damage are not +cold dmg or +elemental dmg, but rather +spell damage, +projectile damage, +cast speed and +crit chance and dmg.

[urlhttp://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgYBAnEC4wL-BLMHpQj0DkgRLxFQEZYUTRXnFm8WvxdUGYUaOBpsHwIigSSqJpUpTypbLJwtHzGINsU26TrYO-FBlkLDRKtJsk3YVUtVrlXGVkpd8mHiYqxmT20ZcFJw1XkDf8aBSYFvghCCm4fbi3qMNox2jjyOZI9Gj6aQVZUEmZqdo52qna6ePJ6hogCio6cIpyunhK-bsji0OLb3tvrAUcBUwfPPZdDQ0hnVT9ad1tHYJN5334TfsOL342rjhOQi5RnrY-w48B_z6vem-_X8qw==[/url]