Zealot's Oath

Hey guys. I'm looking at a Ghost Reaver + Zealot's Oath + Chaos Innoculation build, but I was curious... with CI your life flasks are no longer useful and you have no way to regen ES besides just ... waiting.

Does Zealot's Oath make it so your life flasks apply to ES as well? If not, are you just completely reliant upon passive ES regen and life regen from ZO?

Any advice appreciated.

Zealot's Oath only covers passive life regeneration effects and not flasks.

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SongofSaya wrote:

Zealot's Oath only covers passive life regeneration effects and not flasks.

So, in the case of a Chaos Inoc build, how are people surviving with no flasks?

Ghost Reaver, Granite Flasks and a healthy amount of kiting are pretty typical for survival in a CI build.

1

Your witch is fragile because (you most likely) don't have life nodes. Get a ton of life nodes. If it's 1-2 nodes away just go for it. You should also get some passive Life/s and either evasion or armor; personally tried evasion a few times (and died every single time), evasion is kind of unreliable and don't really see it working (as in literally don't see when it's working), armor on the other hand is pretty reliable (you just get hit for less from trash, done). For HC you probably want armor over evasion almost any time since you can't afford to "sometimes die from bad luck". So, Life/Armor/ES or Lots-of-Life/ES.

Again: the most important stat for survivability is life.

Life prevents you from dieing, massing no other stat does that. You can double your armor if you have crappy life it's the same as having double life with almost no armor. The more non-life-stat you mass while keeping your life low the more ineffective that stat is. Say you have a ton of ES or armor but crappy life, the moment you encounter some hard hitter or chaos damage mob, you're dead.

Life doesn't have any "drawbacks". Energy shield doesn't regen in combat it's a buffer and timer (kill in this time or die), evasion can just fail to work, armor is ineffective against big blows. Never have good <insert stat> but bad life. Life is just good against everything.

Life prevents you from getting stunned.
Life helps you not get freezed (for long).
Life buffers chaos damage.
Life makes your flasks effective.
Life is pretty easy to regenerate (because of passive Life/sec, and passive Life/sec is easy to get on items).

Crit also helps you survive if you're an ice witch; since crit = freeze. Though bear in mind that freeze duration is proportionate to life of the target, so mostly effective on trash; which is good enough for a lot of situations.

As for other things.

Always have a quick silver flask (pick it from quest if it's your first character).

Get an escape skill (whirling blades, lv4 green gem, instant cast, goes though mobs).
Get a 360 aoe skill (freeze nova). Freeze nova on totem should be good too.

If you don't get the two types above, you should still have some defensive skill setup (ie. exploding minions, skeleton totem, wall of ice, mines/traps, etc) besides your DPS skills.

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The moment you encounter something you can't DPS down in a few hits, and which either two shots you or is extremely annoying, you'll die if you slacked off on your survivability. :)

2 questions:

1) Works with vitality aura?
2) Which happens if you use vitality aura with 1 life?

Thanks.

1) I really don't see why Vitality wouldn't interact with ZO and regen ES instead of life.
2) Last time I checked, any %Life effects work with the amount of life you would have if you hadn't taken CI, although you probably shouldn't take my word for it. It is also entirely possible that Vitality would then just look at your ES and regen a percentage of that.

I would think the first possibility is more likely.