TLDR - Spent 4 hours making a corrupted blood, dissolution of flesh build with 2700 life regen only to find that Essence Drain of Desperation still kills you extremely fast.

Essence drain of Desperation is exactly like normal essence drain except it does 30% more damage at the cost of .2% of tooltip damage taken as life loss.

This was extremely tantalizing as one of the 5 remaining essence drain users. 30% more damage would fix the primary ED problem - the extreme difficulty of hitting 2mil dps.

However try as I might, I cannot find any way to survive the self damage without making the skill strictly worse than the normal version of the gem.

Is it possible to survive the degen? Yes, but it seems like the only way to do that is toget ~2500 life regen then intentionally nerf your own damage to the point that you are doing less damage than a normal essence drain.

OR don't use contagion so it doesn't spread. But at that point just play Dark Pact.

All that this skill needs is the line Self Damage Cannot Kill, and it would be useable. Not good, but usable in the same way dark pact is.

POB For the working version of this build: https://pobb.in/tJs_Kcs4Bayb, which features a 6mil dps regular essence drain (in standard).