A few weeks ago, I had seen a wonderful build like this one, which cleverly used Olroth's Resolve to establish a permanent ward. Like some of my other experimental builds, I wanted to run with this to an extreme (how much permanent Ward can I get? and how much can I tank/kill with it?) and see what it was capable of.

The build idea isn't really about Forbidden Rite—you can substitute other damaging skills or mechanics, such as Heartbound Loop, as I saw in a different post recently—but Forbidden Rite appealed to me because of Ward's unique strength: it basically acts as a flat damage reduction to each individual hit applied right before your Energy Shield/Life. Meaning if we trigger Forbidden Rite a million times per second, with any other non-CI build, we would die, since even 1 damage per cast would turn into a million accumulated damage; but Ward would reduce each hit to 0, allowing us to scale Forbidden Rite's casts as high as possible without fear of hurting ourselves, while also allowing us to utilize their higher scaling value off of Life.

As such, initially, I intended to go for a cast on critical strike version to maximize the number of casts I could make, but the initial ramp-up cost proved very, very expensive. I only had a few exalt to my name, so I went with a self-cast Forbidden Rite build instead.

Before I get into how the build works, I'll review its strengths and weaknesses.

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Build Strengths

• Literally invincible in a good amount of content. I was able to afk in 100% delirious T16 maps against most mobs there, taking 0 damage, since the permanent ward reduced all their hit damage to 0, and 30% Life Recoup (which procs off of all that Ward-blocked damage!) was also healing me an absurd amount, in the event any larger hits or small DoTs came through. I never tried Simulacrum, but I suspect I could afk in those as well—except, perhaps, against certain bosses.
• Cheaper to start up compared to some bigger builds. It took me 3 exalts to get all the level 70 gear and jewels that would allow me to run the build successfully.
• Can scale Forbidden Rite's cast speed as high as you want, since all that self-damage is blocked.
• Can also use a 2nd flask spot to have permanent flask uptime. This build variant, for example, used Doedre's Elixir and kept all Power, Endurance, and Frenzy Charges at maximum, full uptime, which allowed me to scale damage and survivability heavily off of increased maximum charge count.

Build Weaknesses

• The invincibility is inconsistent against two damage types: very large hits and damage over time. I can mitigate the latter fairly well, as I had a 'Bleeding cannot be inflicted on you' ring, Purity of Elements to prevent any elemental ailments, such as Ignite, Pantheon to reduce poisons (could also get a corrupted implicit to prevent being poisoned at all), etc. And I stacked around 15k Armour to help with large hits, while also getting 100% reduced extra damage from critical strikes + 100% reduced curse effect to prevent extra scaling of physical damage or less resistances from map curse modifiers, like Vulnerability or Elemental Weakness. These absolutely improved Ward's invincibility when it comes to maps. Add in the Occultist's Malediction and I could, for example, facetank A8 Sirus' DIE beam and take no damage at all with high enough Ward! But other abilities, such as anything from Shaper or a lot of Slams from various bosses, will instantly kill you, because your mitigation isn't high enough. You are, functionally, either invincible or dead.
• This build experiment was focused around scaling permanent Ward to obscene amounts; hence, we used Faithguard to scale Ward off of increased Energy Shield. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to scale both Ward and damage at the same time, since no skill that I'm aware of scales off of increased Energy Shield/increased Defense stats. Instead, they scale off of Life/ES maximum amounts, such as Forbidden Rite and Righteous Fire, neither of which scales off of Ward/increased modifiers for Ward. As such, since most of my passive tree, and a good amount of my gear mods, are devoted to keeping the permanent Ward engine running, my main source of damage scaling for Forbidden Rite is through Intelligence, since it also scales Energy Shield and, thus, Ward, as well as Life, since I need more Life to increase my survivability against Damage over Time and to increase the max rate of Life Leech I could get from Divergent Void Manipulation quality. Which leads to the next problem.
• Scaling the build from roughly 1 to 2 million Sirus DPS up to 4+million Sirus DPS is a massive, massive investment. It would, however, increase your permanent Ward by over 50%; at my current 1.5 million or so DPS, I have around 1600 permanent Ward, but with upgrades, I can get near 2800! With a bit more investment, you can facetank Shaper orbs and smaller slams with that amount of permanent Ward, taking no damage at all. But at the cost of hundreds upon hundreds of exalts—hardly worth a 5 million DPS build!
• Some map mods can't be run well: 'Player gains reduced % flask charges' is real bad, and any big damage bursts can be tough if they scale the enemy damage above our Ward threshold. That will depend on how far along the build is, though.

Build Design

The design of the build has two elements: the engine (Olroth's Resolve, Iron Flask + flask passives/The Traitor keystone) and the car it propels (Forbidden Rite + max charges + high Hit damage mitigation). Like any other car, you have to start the engine—in this case, you have to click Olroth's Resolve once you enter a map. Then the flask will perpetually be active, self-activating when it reaches the end of its duration. You can do something similar for Doedre's Elixir for permanent max charges.

Once the engine's running, the rest of the build works well. Forbidden Rite doesn't lose us any health, but it does count as damage taken (since our Ward took it), so it turns into Life via our 30% Life Recoup. If we get the expensive Divergent Void Manipulation support gem, we also get Life Leech off of that damage, making us quite tanky against smaller DoTs.

From there, as long as we keep the engine going, we can even face full screens of monsters, taking no damage at all... as long as none of the monsters have big slams, big buffs, or big DoTs.

This is 100% Delirious; could barely damage anything, but never died till I got boss slammed a bunch. Didn't think to screencap earlier when the whole screen was filled with monsters, but I was taking 0 damage through it all. Makes for very relaxed maps!

Path of Building

Current PoB: https://pastebin.com/Wvmnhze0

- Cleared A8 Sirus, facetanking all but DoTs and debuff beam and big maze slam.

- Rare deaths in red maps; mostly due to DoT or boss slam.

3ex level 70 starter build PoB: https://pastebin.com/a1geZt12

- Mostly invincible till you hit harder hitting mobs in maps; never had cleaner Acts clearing than from the moment I switched to this

I had a higher level PoB, but I accidentally overwrote it. The main differences were: increased Intelligence, Life, and "increased Damage for each 16 Intelligence" mods on amulet/rings, increased Ward/Abyss jewel slot for increased Life/Intelligence for gloves and boots, and a T1 attribute belt + maybe Life/Intelligence instead of T2 attribute belt. If we get our Intelligence up to 1200+, we have around 5mil Sirus DPS once we stack Withering for a few seconds (Withering Step gets us halfway there), along with around 2800 permanent Ward, for much more consistent tankiness against everything but the most absurd slams and DoTs.

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Conclusion

Ultimately, I am posting the build now instead of a full video showcase showing me killing Uber Shaper, The Feared, Maven, and so on, because I don't want to grind for the many, many exalted orbs I would need to scale the damage that high. I'm still fairly new to PoE, so I don't have the super currency skills to get rich fast, nor have I ever fought those bosses before, and I am too happy with my day job and other hobbies to divert too much additional time to PoE, so I doubt I can really do this build justice at a higher level yet. But even at that higher level, I could see that it would be underwhelming compared to how other builds scale—stuff like Flicker Strike and int wander surpass this far quicker and cheaper.

But the build idea is really, really cool. And when you first adopt it, being able to just afk with a whole screen full of enemies, taking 0 damage, is a really awesome feeling! If any of the following buffs are given to the build in future leagues (something I will certainly be keeping an eye on!), then this build has the potential to become incredible:

• Additional sources of 'reduced flask effect': this is effectively directly applied to increasing your Ward, since Olroth's permanent ward effect is not changed by 'reduced flask effect', but the -70% Ward effect is reduced by this modifier, meaning we lose less. The same is true for Doedre's Elixir: the charge sustain is not affected at all by the modifier, so it only has positive effects. We can scale Ward over 5,000 if this modifier becomes much more common! We currently only have one such mod that I could find: Survival Secrets with a 20% reduced mod.
• Additional Ward gear/uniques
• Additional self-damaging-via-hit abilities—preferably ones that can be scaled with same Ward-scaling modifiers
• Additional Damage over Time mitigation/conversion into Hit. If a 'reverse' Petrified Blood existed, for example, making a DoT apply instead a Hit every second, we would become immune to all but Shaper beam-level DoTs.
• Additional damage overall

But for now, the build is more of a meme/novelty build, unless one scales back the Ward investment, which opens up a lot more builds. The conditional 'invincibility' the build offers can only be realized at great cost to a lot else, which greatly limits the content the build can do without massive investment. Overall, I consider the build experiment a success, since it does have endgame content it can clear well. It just isn't universally applicable to all content, nor is it particularly strong. It's really just a cool and fun niche build.