[Theorycraft] - Breaking the Unbreakable (or how to get stupid amounts of flat regen) (>15k)

Hi there! This is just a theorycraft since I'm poor and I'm pretty sure that if this works and people use it it'll get patched out eventually somehow. I'm not willing to make that kind of investment.

TL;DR for the madness below:

Lots of flat life regen can be achieved, which means almost infinitely tanking the darkness degen is possible, and also means fast high level cwdt loops are possible to automate just about any spell in existence.

In theory, flat life regen upwards of 15k is possible!

(Testing with a "proof of concept" setup yielded 1-2k flat regen, with the math seemingly checking out with what I use in this thread, so with investing into a properly optimized setup, this should definitely be functional.)

My math might still be wrong, however. If so, feel free to correct my mistakes.

On the other hand, if you want any information / video proof to show that the basic concept behind this does in fact work, I'd put something together so long as I'm asked to.

Anyway, onto describing the madness that the title says this thread is about:

Juggernauts have access to the "Unbreakable" node. This node grants 1.5% of physical damage prevented from hits in the past 10 seconds as life regeneration per second. The goal of this theorycraft is to see how this could be exploited.

Now, one thing is obvious. We'll want a LOT of physical damage mitigation, and after that we'll want to take as much damage as remotely possible.

Mitigation is achieved by using either armour or stacking absolute % mitigation. For the sake of math and consistency the later is much better. So a lot of endurance charges will be needed, alongside every other available source of absolute % mitigation such as soul of steel, chaos golem (and chaos golem buff effect), Transcendent Flesh, Soul of Gruthkul, etc.

The cap of 90% can be reached, and since more mitigation means more regen, reaching it should considered a must.

Now, some preemptive math:

Regenerating 1.5% of any physical damage mitigated within the past 10 seconds directly translates to regenerating 15% of any damage mitigated. Pairing this with a 90% physical damage mitigation means that a hit of 100 damage is mitigated down to a hit of 10, and we then recover 90*0.15 = 13.5.

Suffice to say: This is absolutely awful. 100 incoming damage yields 10 damage actually taken, from which we only recover 13.5 life, which means an effective regen of only 3.5% of damage taken.

We must go further.

A less and reduced duration (swift affliction) low level blood rage can be used to forcefully proc and maintain the Soul of Arakaali pantheon upgrade that grants 50% increased life recovery, which acts as a 50% more multiplier to our regen (note: this requires not killing enemies directly, which basically forces this to be a minion build, but that's fine considering other necessary investments).

For the same reason a vitality watchers eye would be nice to have, increasing that multiplier by an additional 30%.

The Flow Untethered unique belt further increased this by another 20%, yielding a total of 100% more life recovery.

With these upgrades, the conversion rate is increased to 17%.

Now, 17% is much better than 3.5%, but it's still far from enough.

We must go even further.

Mind over Matter and a few sources of damage taken gained as mana when hit can be used to effectively mitigate 30% of the damage we end up taking as far is effective regen is concerned.

But why stop at 30%? 50% is still achievable, 10% alone being obtainable on body armour through mods or just using the Cloak of Defiance.

(As for the mana recovery, 8% are available on tree, an additional 8% on gloves, an additional 10% on victario's flight, and up to 3% can be rolled on jewels - a clarity watcher's eye also has an applicable mod.)

With redirecting 50% of all incoming damage to mana, and subsequently gaining that much mana back, the conversion efficiency would be boosted to 22%.

22% is good, but still not enough.

The Maw of Conquest helmet can give up to 20% of damage taken gained as life over 4 seconds. The increases to life recovery apply to this, meaning a perfect roll would result in recovering 40% of damage taken gained as life.

(Fun fact: chieftain (and to a far lesser extent hierophant) are notable for being able to exploit the interaction of this with MoM in some rather interesting ways, but that's not the focus of this thread.)

With the Maw of Conquest, the effective regen becomes approximately 26%. Acceptable.

Now onto actually taking damage. Probably unsurprisingly, the answer is heartbound loop. 700 damage per minion death with 2 of them.

(Another solution is scold's bridle with high mana costs and cast / attack speed, but that's not convoluted enough.)

This being said, we'll want as many minions dying as possible. All automated by cwdt of course.

Which is why soulwrest is amazing. It converts corpse consumption into minions!

cwdt - desecrate - spell cascade - volatile dead is 10 corpses each cycle. (and also consumes them)
cwdt - uneart - gmp - greater volley - lmp is another 10 corpses per cycle.

That's easily 20+ minions per cycle! The gems here can be level 1 too, since all we care about is taking the damage.

Sadly, due to how cwdt works, a gem will not count the damage that occurs right after it procs, so the corpse consuming skills will not get the damage from the phantasms that get replaced.

I used to think that there was a simple way to bypass this through just using multiple copies of summon skeletons, but that doesn't work, so until further notice I'm stuck with cast while channeling.

The usage of blood rage can also be automated, although doing so is tricky. By default, it will inevitably be cast every second, since during its 1 second cooldown all damage increases the cwdt counter. Since getting blood rage to below 1 second duration is basically impossible without using Timetwist rings however, it'd mean it would be up all the time. Immortal call could be used to stop taking damage and proc soul of arakaali, but the damage immunity would break the cwdt cycle. That could be prevented by using physical damage taken as elemental, but doing so would require adjustments that would greatly lower the life conversion efficiency. Because of this, sadly, it will be necessary to periodically press the blood rage button to maintain maximum efficiency.

At this point, the build is pretty tanky against physical damage especially, and has used up a 6l and 2 or more 4 links just for the core loop.

There is however at least one remaining 4/6 link in which a max level CWDT loop can be maintained at 4+ casts per second. Additionally the build has permanent uptime on 10 phantasms, which could create 10 additional phantasms that will not be continuously replaced and could therefore actually deal damage. (The short lived phantasms could too, with high enough cast speed, I guess). So I'm pretty sure getting this to be able to deal some amount of damage should still be possible.

In addition to that, depending on the exact setup and number of minions created each cycle, the build can reach upwards of 16k effective life regen per second, with each minion death per second translating to about 180 life regen per second.

That's the end of that. As an afterthought, chieftain with MoM and Maw of Conquest can get some pretty high effective regen too - while the "overregen" wont be as high, since no mitigation is involved there, super high cwdt loops become far more easy to sustain.

On a related note, if using armour to achieve 90% mitigation, endurance charges can be discharged without affecting mitigation, which means kingsguard can yield an additional 600+ absolute recovery per cycle (based on the number of endurance charges) for an additional 2.4k recovery per second.

Although I have no idea if this would work, it'd be awesome if that many interactions would work in sync flawlessly. Typically something will go wrong but I dont wanna be a debbie downer.

Sounds like it'd be a great beginner friendly build! /s

Good luck friend.

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HunterLoL13 wrote:

Although I have no idea if this would work, it'd be awesome if that many interactions would work in sync flawlessly. Typically something will go wrong but I dont wanna be a debbie downer.

Sounds like it'd be a great beginner friendly build! /s

Good luck friend.

I mean the individual pieces have all been tested already. The Summon Skeletons loop core using To Dust is a tried and true concept, unbreakable just works as described, and everything else should also fit into place quite nicely.

If you want a video to showcase the unbreakable regen doing its thing:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/174994219390337024/560184984523243535/test.mp4

Cool concept, tho going for Indigon + Enduring Flask + Mana Flask Nodes + Essence Extraction gives almost 30k life regen, as seen here.

PoB Screenshot of the regen such build can achieve.

So, I've decided to level a build attempting to use this gimmick after all. Let's see how it goes.

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D4RK_S0RC3R3R wrote:

Cool concept, tho going for Indigon + Enduring Flask + Mana Flask Nodes + Essence Extraction gives almost 30k life regen, as seen here.

PoB Screenshot of the regen such build can achieve.

Actually, 28385 over 2.90 seconds translates to about "only" 9.6k per second.

I don't know if this is with / without sources of increased recovery rate (though I do know quite a few uniques are needed to boost the life recovery rate that much)- not that it really matters though, since the simplicity of the Indigon + Flask approach makes it inherently superior, and free mana and life flask charges also allow for near indefinite sustain.

Not to say that it isn't possible to use both, however.

Ultimately this is just me trying to get the most out of a specific node for no real reason.

How did you make out with this build? Was the regen effective?

I'm debating whether to go straight regen or a Indigon enduring flask setup.