Well, Dreamcore beat me to the race to get this tech published (go watch his video, it gives an excellent breakdown of the mechanics), I was working on the guide for my build. Thought I'd share what I had so far rather than letting it go to waste, if you want some inspiration to try something before they inevitably patch this out. I've been running this tech since like day 3 of the league, its stupidly OP. Note that this guide is still incomplete.

Introduction:

• [Transfusion] is a new exceptional support gem that grants a nearby a soul for every 200 life you spend with a linked skill. Souls are used to grant the Soul Eater buff, which grants 5% increased attack and cast speed per stack up to 45.

• For a player character, that is all the buff does. But Soul Eater has an additional effect on non-player entities - 2% reduced damage taken per stack. If you've ever run into a juiced up Soul Eater rare you'll know this all too well. At 45 stacks, this is 90% reduced damage taken.

• [Soul Ascension] is a pair of unique gloves that grant -10 to +10 maximum souls. Which can be worn by Animate Guardian. An Animate Guardian with these gloves and at least +5 souls will have a maximum of 50 souls, which results in a damage negation of... well, I'll let you do the math. Full credit to this comment by u/Zargat where I learned of this interaction.

• It is trivially easy to sustain maximum souls on AG with a combination of Corrupting Fever, Automation, and Transfusion - provided AG is your only minion.

• We now have a completely immortal Animate Guardian with 0 investment into passives or supports, universally accessible on any class and ascendancy. Mercenaries are back.

• A completely immortal AG with 0 investment opens up infinite possibilities. But there is one interaction in particular that completely breaks this even further.

• Affliction is a skill that was introduced in - well - Affliction league. It now exists only in the form of the ritual exclusive ring, The Selfish Shepard.

• Affliction afflicts minions with a debuff that deals 8% of their life as damage per second, accelerating by 8% every second, and grants you this damage as life regeneration.

• For any normal minion, this debuff will eventually scale beyond their recovery and eventually kill them.

• On a completely immortal AG, this debuff will keep stacking forever. Resulting in an infinitely accelerating life regeneration.

• The cherry on top of this is that you can safely remove the ring after applying the debuff, so there isn't even the opportunity cost of the ring slot.

Before I go dive any further into the rest of the guide, I want to pump the brakes for a second. If you've played PoE for any amount of time, you'll know how obscene this level of power is for the opportunity cost. This interaction, while not a bug, is 100% getting patched. Whether that happens this league or next is another question. If you do choose to build around this, accept the risk that GGG may very well drop a patch tomorrow to kill this interaction.

You could stop reading here and slap this tech onto your existing build and tweak it as you please. This can be applied to virtually any build on any ascendancy, with some notable exceptions. Minion builds (ironically) cannot utilize this tech well since the souls will be split among other minions, and Chaos Inoculation builds cannot sacrifice life for Transfusion. Of course, there will be other exceptions.

What follows next is my actual build, and some more theorycrafting.

Core Concept:

• Infinite life regeneration lets us sustain some absolutely ridiculous degens and life costs, and this is what I wanted to abuse as much as possible.

• This league introduced two new exception supports in Vaal Sacrifice and Vaal Temptation. One letting you repeat Vaal skills at the cost of all but 1 of your life and ES, and the other removing the Soul Gain Prevention at the cost of a hefty self degen.

• Running just one alone requires hefty investment into recovery, let alone both at the same time. But with this tech, we can (eventually, after a bit of ramping) sustain this absurd cost.

• My Vaal skill of choice is Vaal Blade Vortex. Vaal BV scales incredibly with duration, as there is no upper limit on the number of active blades. It is also excellent mechanically, perfectly autotargeting and clearing multiple screens.

• The Chaos bloodline is perfect to enable the vaal skill spam, giving us Vaal soul generation, soul cost reduction from Shepard of Souls, and chance to regain souls.

• The Runegraft of Soulwick generates another soul per second, and the Atziri's Reign jewel gives some more BV duration and chance to regain souls.

• This setup lets us spam Vaal BVs freely. The limiting factor is only soul generation, which is not an issue for mapping but is slightly slower for bossing. But with the combination of Vaal BVs being duration based and chance to regain souls, our natural Vaal soul recovery is perfectly adequate.

Animate Guardian Concept:

• An immortal AG lets us build it differently from a traditional AG setup, eschewing the usual defensive items for it.

• As we saw back in Mercenaries league, the biggest abuse case for an immortal follower is, of course, Doryani's Prototype.

• While we can't easily get an AG to -200 lightning resistance, we can still easily get it to -100 with a combination of [Maligaro's Lens] and [Refuge in Isolation].

• Technically this can be scaled further by using another Maligaro's Lens and giving it to AG with Necromantic Aegis, and volatile Vaal orbs can scale the negative resistance further.

• That leaves the AG's helm, chest, shield and gloves spoken for. For the weapon, I run Sign of the Sin Eater for pseudo ailment immunity, and for boots I simply run a rare with sapped ground (make sure no lightning res).

Damage Scaling:

• Naturally, our offensive scaling wants to take advantage of lightning damage which leads us to the popular Energy Blade Spellblade Battlemage Inquisitor shell.

• Life stacking with Foulborn Ghostwrithe is a well established concept - scale life, which gives ES for Energy Blade, which is not reduced due to Ghostwrithe fixing ES to 40% of life.

• Energy Blade with Battlemage and Spellblade provides a lot of flat added lightning damage to spells.

• Life stacking also gives efficiently gives increased spell damage and crit with Rathpith Globe. We can also conveniently ignore the downside of Rathpith's life sacrifice thanks to our insane recovery.

Defensive Scaling:

• Of course, life stacking is excellent for defense as well. Once our recovery is sufficiently ramped up, we are quite literally recovering our entire life pool in a single server tick. This means we can only die if we get one shot, so life stacking just makes our max hit better.

• Inquisitor uniquely allows life regeneration to also apply to energy shield while on consecrated ground. Since the life recovery from Affliction is life regeneration, this can apply to ES as well effectively doubling up on the effective recovery.

• The Chaos bloodline is excellent defensively as well, as we can take full advantage of Everlasting Sacrifice and Sacrifice of Blood.

• Everlasting Sacrifice sacrifices all your ES when you hit full ES to grant +5 to all resistances, but our insane life regeneration applied to ES with Inquisitor means we have permanent uptime and that ES still defensively contributes to your effective HP.

• Sacrifice of Blood provides a Blood Barrier equal to 30% of your max life, which is filled based on life regeneration at full life. This is basically filled instantly once your regen has ramped up. Another win for life stacking, as a larger life pool means a larger Blood Barrier.

Gearing:

• Gearing is rather restrictive considering we run a lot of uniques, and require at least 8 of them to be corrupted for the bloodline (and energy blade doesn't count).

• This is further complicated by the fact that I need to balance my strength and intelligence for Rational Doctrine, and hit a taxing 155 dex for BV.

• Foulborn Ghostwrithe is a mandatory core unique for Energy Blade.

• I run a Screams of the Desiccated with Massive and Shocking Shrine, giving a solid increased life and phys as extra lightning which is nice for BV.

• This is further scaled by The Gull for some shrine effect.

• Rathpith Globe is another core part of the life stacking package.

• The rings and amulets are to fix attributes and resistances, while getting as much life as possible. And you'll have to risk a corrupt on them for the bloodline, so be prepared to recraft or settle for less than ideal rolls.

• The weapon for Energy Blade can be any 1H weapon with an abyssal socket. Note that corruption doesn't count, EB is always uncorrupted.

POB: https://pobb.in/N0qXQCBlwUmn