Less Damage Taken Assassin

Hey exiles! Just wanted to share a build that kind of started as a meme but turned into a tanky beast. As stated in the title, the main defensive backbone of this build is stacking a bunch of less damage taken multipliers to get a solid max hit on the right side of the tree. I pair this with the new Rhex talisman (shoutout Conner Converse and poopbutts), 90 fire res, and a bunch of different recovery mechanics to make the build feel comfy in juiced content and even uber bosses.

First I’ll go over some of the pros and cons of the build.

Pros:
- Pretty tanky for an assassin
- Around 30m average dps? Feels like a little bit more sometimes due to enemies being on low life and variable wither stacks
- A lot of damage is solved by your ascendancy, so you can focus on qol and defense
- Very good multi hit mitigation with life on block and recoup
- High physical hit mitigation for a right side build
- Immune to cold and lightning penetration and mostly unaffected by crush, overwhelm, and pdr ignore
- Uses neat defensive tech*

Cons:
- Some defenses are conditional (arctic armor, opportunistic, flesh and stone)
- Low dps compared to most SC trade assassin builds
- Essentially melee if using EK of lingering blades for single target
- Not a good starter build. You can get it going with a low amount of currency, but there are certain items that make the build feel way better
- Clearspeed is pretty lackluster, and mainly carried by unspeakable gifts
- You have to press buttons/clunky playstyle
- Uses neat defensive tech*

*This build uses immortal call and automation support to create a ‘loop’ with the Heartstopper notable from trickster. In short, while Heartstopper is in its ‘dot mode’ immortal call will be active. You need specific duration and cooldown breakpoints to make the loop and work, and it must be manually started whenever you enter a map. More details in the link below:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PathOfExileBuilds/s/ArOYoh9eVB

There are five primary less damage taken multipliers in this build:
- 35% less chaos and physical damage taken from Doppelgänger Guise (can normally roll up to 40, I’m just using the middle roll here)
- 21% less fire and physical damage taken from hits while stationary from arctic armor (since we take all elemental hit damage as fire, this is effectively 21% less elemental hit damage taken)
- 50% less hit damage taken from Heartstopper (only 50% uptime and barely active during immortal call)
- 36% less elemental and ~83% less physical damage taken from immortal call (need 5 or more endurance charges for max physical mitigation, and the buff is meant to alternate with the hit mode of Hearstopper)
- 35% less damage taken when 2 or more rare/unique enemies are nearby from Opportunistic(this will lower your damage)

Along with all this mitigation I have 5700 life, 75/68 block (this is using glancing blows, and spell block is capped if you’ve been hit recently), life on block, some recoup, regen, leech, and life gain in hit from a shaper ring.

Uber Exarch/tank showcase (my gameplay in this video is not optimal):

https://youtu.be/_POCsYT6Yv8?is=163VFyq2_T3wOjve

Pob: https://maxroll.gg/poe/pob/s748ip0qm

A couple closing notes:
- I was using a Doedre’s Damning with a max endurance charge implicit for normal content, but switched to a Zana’s Ingenuity (with the cannot pen mod) for ubers since a lot of their abilities have penetration. Since I had to drop an endurance charge, I spec out of unspeakable gifts on my cluster jewel and grab two duration nodes south of the scion start. This ensures my immortal call/Hearstopper loop is able to function.
- The pob ehp numbers are pretty low, but in practice you have enough mitigation and recovery to make the build feel borderline immortal against many small hits.
- My gear is pretty good, but the build is not super optimized. For example; my gloves could have the cold res temple mod, my ring could have recoup as a suffix, my belt has a useless prefix, my cluster could have better chaos res, my amulet has no eldritch implicit etc.
- Bladefall works well for mapping and has pretty good dps even on nightmare map bosses, but I personally prefer EK of lingering blades if I’m doing bossing.
- I’m playing blade blast since it got buffed, but with some modifications you could probably use a different main skill.
- I estimate the cost of my current setup to be around 150 - 170 divines.

This build was super fun to put together and has done all ubers except Maven and Shaper (this is due to the fact that I’m bad and currently poor). Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll do my best to answer them!