Help choosing the best flasks

I may be addicted to health pots.

I play on HC, and whether I play ranged or melee, all my chars have 3 life flasks, a mana or a hybrid, and a quicksilver.

My thinking is that I would rather take a few big hits and be able to recover quickly, rather than slightly increase my chances to evade or reduce phys dam, take a few big hits and not be able to adequately and quickly recover my life pool.

I'm also confused when I would pop a jade or basalt, do I need to perfectly time them when a boss is doing something scary, or would I try and keep them up almost constantly?



Do I have a shitty mindset when it comes to pots, is my thinking valid or is there a reason literally no one else seems to play the game this way?

I just get myself in many situations where I think “I didn't have 3 health pots I'd be dead right now”.

im useing these flasks right now i recommend them to you too

It depends on in what situation you need flasks. I'm currently playing a CI character with low mana needs, so I'm using only utility flasks, and I discovered that while I have no problems with 100% uptime while clearing, I'm missing charges / types of flasks against bosses. Especially resistance flasks were necessary for some encounters, rather than the stibnite and jade that boosts my survivability against common trash by a lot.

I'm playing SC, so take it with a grain of salt, ofc.

Another thing I saw today was a non Shavronne's low life char, who used Coruscating Elixir while clearing and reserved his life against bosses, because he knew there wouldn't be chaos damage. I think this sort of situational awareness is important when it comes to flasks.

Generally, if you can keep up flasks all the time, great. They are a huge bonus to defences whether you use physical reduction with basalt and granite, evasion with stibnite and jade, or resistance flasks (like those 100% immune to damage pathfinders). If not, use them when you anticipate damage. Of course if possible, just avoid the damage in the first place, but if you can't, something like a basalt flask can save your life against hits that life flasks won't heal.

Oh, before I forget, the utility flasks all last a couple of seconds, so you don't need exact timing, because chances are, if the big hit is properly mitigated, there's not going to be much other damage in the second before and after.

I was like you. Leani g on the perceived comfort of life flasks. I have an evasion character and i am running with a quicksilver of heat, a jade of reflexes, and a silver of reflexes. The other two are various life flasks, not because i feel i need them, but because keeping 2-3 flasks up is as much flask management i can handle. I basically never use the life flasks.

The constant up time on the others means i almost never take damage from attacks and can manually dodge most everything else.

If you have good life recovery you could drop 1-2 life flasks for some utility flasks. On HC you probably want to aim for ones that synergize with your defenses.

That being said, an instant life flask of staunching is a nice thing to have on hand.


Wolf

While we're going into that level of detail, I do recommend to get the Staunching suffix on a utility flask so you stay immune to bleeding at full life, and I personally find it questionable to use Reflexes on both Jade and Silver (Silver is offensive and Jade is defensive, so I suppose it can make sense if you alternate them rather than using them at the same time though).

My experience with trying to stomp out bleeding with life flasks hasn't been great.

Since you play HC, at least one of your health flasks should have Bubbling (half instant recovery) or Seething (instant) prefix.
Just in case.
Even better if you can get a Staunching (bleed removal), Dousing (anti-burn) or Warding (curse removal) suffix on the same flask.
But that is harder to do.

Utility flasks like a Quicksilver with Resistance or Iron Skin
Or a

Also help a lot.

There are entire builds that rely on flasks and on timing their usage correctly.
But even if your build isn't - take a few minutes to allocate your flasks in a way you can easily remember and use with precision.