Is Rite of Ruin Useless?

Rite of Ruin is a strange skill in an ascendancy I have never played until now. The hemorrhaging of life is not inconsequential and so I am wondering what the utility in the skill is. Sure you have massive increase in Rage based boosts but at the cost of almost certain death. I am currently topping out at 70 rage and at the RoR rate of degen I would loose 7% of life per second and be dead in 11 seconds if I dont have enough regen but getting enough regen to stop that is not trivial.

So I am sure I am missing something. The question is what? Perhaps I need up up my regen to handle the degen from decay? For reference I am building 2h with Terminus Est and Infernal blow.

Thoughts?

Rite of Ruin is one of the strongest nodes for any skill using Rage. However, you have to deal with its downside.

Usually stacking some regen, life leech and life gain on hit/kill, can make it more bearable to sustain.
Warcry mastery for recover 15% of life when using a warcry is also good (General's Cry builds use this a lot).

Its usually combo'd with Berserk, which usually works as a sort of limit on the duration of rage.

Also you can just spam health flasks and go fast... cuz you're a 'Zerker. Boom Boom Splat ;)

Hi There,

I recently included rite of ruin into my build via Forbidden Jewels. It's incredible! I was using Blitz though because I'm obsessed with theory crafting, I thought I'd give it a test. Turns out I'm pumping out significantly more uber pinnacle boss dps with it and the minor changes that followed. 10's of millions more. Not only that, the ramp up time to getting enough attack speed for my general's cry blade flurry build has been cut in half. I'm almost at 10 aps before I even get a single blitz charge. All the other effects outside of blitz still need time to proc - Pride, crushed, intimidated, bleed, etc. I'm also faster now too!

My build does not have massive amounts of regen, though as I'm always casting berzerk, the only time I'm usually losing health from the degen, is when berserk is on Cooldown and I haven't been hit recently. Or in a reduced life regen map.

Remember there's so many ways to get quite considerable levels of regen my friend. The 2% on being hit enchant on boots is my favourite precisely for situations like this one. If you're lucky enough to have a mageblood, the 3% recovery during flask effect can become 5.85% from a single flask. With that flask and my build's tree, I calculated I'd have about 15-16% recovery before blood rage and rite of ruin.

WHEN you can afford a mageblood, anything's possible. 351% increased global crit chance from a single flask for example.

TL: DR
- if you want to use it, just go for it
- Blitz charges are better if you have mageblood with crit flask
- you can have both BLitz and Rite of Ruin, though patching to Blitz is much better

Rite of ruins draw back only applies while you are not losing rage. This only happens when you gain rage or have been hit recently i.e it only applies during combat where your life leech should overcompensate it by a large margin and for 4 seconds after combat ends. That phase can be compensated with a bit of regen or a single use of a life flask.

Generally speaking, if you make a melee build that doesn't have enough recovery to make RoRs drawback trivial then there is a very high chance that the build will not work anyways. High sustain is a core point of any viable melee build, if RoR makes you sweat you likely have another big problem waiting for you.