Edit; CONFIRMED NOT TO WORK AS BUILT. For some reason, Petrified Blood and Progenesis stack multiplicatively rather than additively, and so this build is just too squishy as currently built (dying to the CWDT loop likely). I think natural language of the items disagrees with how that works, but no sense arguing with their programming.

Hey everyone, I wanted to post this as a way to get some feedback around the new flask Progenesis as a way to replace the Ward mechanic in a Wardloop build.

POB: https://pastebin.com/wqy925Jz

As a summary, instead of using Olroth’s Resolve to grant enough Unbreakable ward to absorb the damage from Heartbound Loop, we stack flask effect with Progenesis and Petrified Blood to convert 95% of life lost from hits into life lost over 4 seconds. When combined with at least that much recoup, this damage is effectively mitigated WITHOUT reducing damage taken for CWDT tracking, allowing us to give the previous Wardloop build staggeringly high defenses against all hits without interrupting our loop.

In PoB, I’ve had to represent this as reduced damage taken, so some of the finer details might be off, but our max hits should be a fairly accurate metric of just how tanky this build is with ONLY 646 HP (recoverable). We use our extra recoup (we have 110%, and thanks to the extra mitigation on life lost over time from Petrified Blood we only need ~80% to break even) to give us extra protection against DoTs and sustain RF. Other than that, this is a more basic form of the Wardloop build.

One notable tech is that because we care very little about incoming damage, we use Vinktar’s self shock to actually increase it by 50%, allowing us to sustain our CWDT loops without using Forbidden Rite, and therefore we can actually invest in chaos res to give us some extra survivability in fights with caustic ground, or large chaos damage hits.

We have 0 base phys mitigation, so our skeletons deal;

3 skeletons * 840 damage per skeleton *1.5 for 50% shock = 3,780 damage to us per trigger.

This means we don’t need any alt quality gems, we can sustain level 20 (or even level 21) CWDT loops infinitely, with 100% uptime on Vinktar’s.

This also results in us taking approximately 16,000 damage per second, which means with a net life and mana recoup of 30% gives us 4,800 life and mana regen per second. This sustains our mana costs (weapon swapping one of our CWDT loops out to get started may be necessary) and gives us huge defences vs most damage over time effects, which Petrified Blood and Progenesis won’t protect us against. With a little more optimisation, I bet this build could easily facetank anything in the game (recovery rate modifiers and memory game slams notwithstanding), while still maintaining a decent movement speed and around 16 million single target DPS (in current form).

I’d love some feedback and some pointers on how to optimise the damage a little more, as well as pitfalls where I may have missed something (this is my first time making a CWDT loop build so my understanding of some mechanics might be a bit lacking).

My main concern is that our resistances aren’t fully capped, which is ok because of our sheer hit-based mitigation but still leaves us fairly vulnerable to Shaper Beam and the like.

Edit 1: we miiiiight need a bit more base life to stabilise our life recovery before the CWDT loop kills us. As I said, work in progress.

Edit 2: nope, our life recoup should stabilise us in less than a second, so we are a-ok to start the loop.

Edit 3: thanks to the commenters and Ben apparently himself who informed me that the effects of Petrified Blood and Progenesis were multiplicative with each other, not additive: https://www.twitch.tv/ben_/clip/LovelyAnimatedLaptopGivePLZ-uk7BkbaOXiQVJL-j Well, the build definitely needs a redesign, but I think the concept can be sound in some form or another.