Hi all, Surgeon General here.

There’s an interesting, probably unintended, interaction between Scold’s Bridle and Bladefall of Trarthus. I was tipped off to this interaction by Jungroan’s recoup looper video and a reddit post by u/greenkee. Both players made archmage autobomber’s that used BFoT to automate self-damage from Scold’s to set up CwDT loops which sustained life / mana with recoup.

You can use the same interaction to get an obscene endurance charge generation rate. In theory, you can get over 200 endurance charges per second, but for practical reasons you’re better off around 90/sec. This has implications for Discharge, Consecrated Path of Endurance, and Eternal Apple autobombers.

The Mechanic

Scold’s Bridle deals self-hit physical damage to the player whenever they spend mana on upfront skill costs. Bladefall of Trarthus doesn’t have a flat mana cost; instead, it spends mana per second. From my testing, it seems that the game calculates this by charging a small mana cost on every server frame (every 33ms).

Since you’re spending mana on every server frame, Scold’s Bridle deals a self-hit…on every server frame. 

Note: this is likely unintended; Scold’s Bridle deals damage based on “upfront skill mana costs” and the tooltip on Scold’s specifies that upfront costs are “all costs that are not paid per-second.” Yet, here we are.

You can use this to proc “when hit” effects automatically at an extraordinary rate. Specifically, it’s straightforward to build a significant chance to gain an endurance charge when hit and then proc that effect constantly.

You can calculate your charge generation rate using the following equation:

Charges / sec = 30.3 C (1 - U - UN)

Where:

C = % chance to gain an endurance charge when hit
U = % chance that if you would gain Endurance Charges, you instead gain up to maximum Endurance Charges
N = maximum number of endurance charges

You can get these stats from the following passives / uniques:

Charge when hit:

• Inexorable: 25% chance to gain a charge when hit
• Juggernaut’s Unflinching: 30% chance to gain a charge when hit
• Replica Ambu’s Charge: 100% chance to gain a charge when hit

Up to maximum charges:

• Juggernaut’s Unflinching: 25% chance to gain up to maximum charges
• Precursor’s Emblem: 15% chance to gain up to maximum charges (per mod)
• Elevated Crusader boot mod: 10% chance to gain up to maximum charges

These numbers get out of hand pretty quick. A Juggernaut with Inexorable and 7 max charges (which you’re probably going to get anyway) gets over 40 charges per second from this. At the cost of just the helmet slot and a gem socket.

SO WHAT?

Theres a few mechanics that require expending endurance charges and they can be pushed to the extreme with this.

Consecrated Path of Endurance scales its damage off of endurance charges and also expends them to bypass its cooldown. With the Scolds/BFoT mechanic, you’ll always have charges available and you can play CPoE at high attack speeds, like a slam version of Flicker Strike.

Discharge can get crazy base damage if you expend charges. The comfiest way to play it is CoC or CwC but you need pretty insane charge generation to sustain that. A Juggernaut with Unflinching and Inexorable will fill their endurance charges on average every eighth server frame, faster than the trigger rate on Awakened Cast While Channeling. This is far more convenient and reliable charge generation than the typical setup using Voll’s Devotion / Voll’s Protector. 

More generically, you can use this with any skill and use Eternal Apple and Kingsguard to cycle your endurance charges very quickly. This does two things: first, you’re automating three warcries (and their buff effects) with a straightforward path to 100% uptime. Your charges cycle so quickly that with even a small overlap between warcry cooldown and warcry duration, you’re nearly guaranteed to retrigger before the buff expires. Second, every time your endurance charge cycle ticks over, you gain 100 life per endurance charge. This can get you thousands of life recovery per second. The best part is that it’s instant recovery so it bypasses annoying map mods like “cannot leech” or “reduced recovery rate.”

Build Demo

To demonstrate, I packaged this interaction into an autobomber build which uses Kingsguard recovery to sustain a CwDT spellcasting loop. Since we’re already using Scold’s for the charge generation mechanic, you can just pump up the self-damage by stacking mana.

An interesting wrinkle is that since you’re dealt a self-damage hit on every server frame, those hits end up being quite small, even if you’re taking thousands of damage per second. This means that any amount of armour ends up getting you close to the 90% PDR cap which reduces the trigger rate of your spells. I ended up getting around this by using Transcendence to shift armour to ele hits. With Ralakesh’s Impatience and 9 max endurance charges, I take a predictable amount of physical damage from my self-damage loop but also have enough physical damage reduction against enemy hits to not fall over to a stiff breeze.

Life is sustained with a Kingsguard / Eternal Apple loop. I managed to snag an unethical Precursor’s Emblem, so my apple loop heals for over 7k per second, enough to sustain the self-damage and Righteous Fire with 61% fire res.  Mana is sustained by recoup alone, although some tricks are needed to get the right amount needed.

I don’t actually recommend playing this build, it was just a fun problem to solve and getting the loop to work was very rewarding. I think if you want to play around this mechanic, CwC Discharge is the way to go. I haven’t PoB’d anything for it yet, but the napkin math suggests it should be good.

Let me know if you think of any clever ways to implement this or fun things you can do with it.

TLDR: Scold’s Bridle + Bladefall of Trarthus deals a self-hit on every server frame. You can use those hits to generate an obscene number of endurance charges by getting “endurance charge when hit” which can be build-enabling for mechanics that want to consume charges.