Noteworthy Interactions | Episode #17 - 10k Life Dark Pact ft. Dissolution of the Flesh

Dissoultion of the Flesh is a new jewel added in 3.17 with some very interesting effects. For starters it gives 30% MORE life! However, it makes you reserve life instead of losing life when you take damage, and it stays that way until you haven't taken any damage for 2 seconds. This means that normal life recovery methods are useless, and avoidance is king.

I decided to do a Dark Pact build around this jewel because it fit perfectly. Dark Pact sacrifices some of your life to deal extra damage based on the amount sacrificed. That means 30% more life is a huge damage boost. We also completely ignore the downside of sacrificing life because we only care about how much of our life is reserved, not our actual life value.

NOTE: Forgot to mention that life reservation from Dissolution of the Flesh is NOT affected by any sources of reservation efficiency.

Noteworthy Interactions:

• Dissolution of the Flesh causes us to reserve life instead of losing it when taking damage. Petrified blood causes us to only lose (or in this case reserve) 60% of life from damage dealt to us with hits. The other 40% of the damage is lost over the next 4 seconds. The two work great together, since the life loss over time is not a direct result of damage (it comes from the PB buff, not the damaging hit) and thus doesn't cause us to reserve life. It can mostly be ignored, though you probably want about 30% life recoup to counteract it on this build. This effectively means we only take 60% of damage from hits against our entire health pool.
• Dissolution of the Flesh also grants 30% MORE maximum life. This allows us to scale our life total to over 10,000. Perfect for a skill that scales damage off of life, like Dark Pact and the Rathpith Globe shield.
• Dark Pact and Rathpith Globe both sacrifice life when casting. In total we sacrifice 14% of our maximum life every cast. We can safely ignore this downside, since sacrificing life does not cause us to reserve life.
• We still want some life recovery so that we always have life to sacrifice, otherwise Dark Pact won't gain additional damage. For this, we use Eternal Youth to make energy shield recharge apply to life instead. Because we never take direct damage to our life pool, the life recharge is never interrupted.
• We scale % increased armour and use the armour/es mastery that causes increases to armour to also apply to ES recharge rate at 20% of their value. This increases our life recharge rate to keep up with the cost of Dark Pact.
• Since we don't care about life recovery apart from recharge, we use Strength of Blood timeless keystone to convert life leech into damage reduction. Combined with Vaal Pact from Atziri's Acuity and Eternal Youth on tree it grants 10% less damage taken.
• In order to avoid taking damage for long enough to reset our life reservation, we go for max block/spell block. Red Nightmare gives us 10% block chance from the Sanctuary cluster and Watcher's Eye gives us 8% block chance while affected by Determination.

PoB for this character: https://pastebin.com/G01VgUJX

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