[Build in Progress] [HC] Heartbound Loop CWDT

This leaves the question: "Is it possible to completely mitigate the damage from Heartbound Lopp?"

The answer is: "yes!". With immortal call, this is very easy, but also useless, since you don't get any damage and therefore don't proc any cast when damage taken (cwdt). Well, it is not completely useless, since the "damage", which is reduced to 0 in this case, still counts as a hit. So you can proc Vaal Molten Shell or Vengeance. But this includes Immortal Call and a Vaal Skill, both things you cannot sustain really good. So let's put this away.

The next question is: "Can we completely outheal the damage from the heartbound loop?"

The answer is again yes. It is possible with Maligaro's Lens. Through Necromantic Aegis, your dieing minions will heal you. A minion running out of duration counts as a death, the same applies for a minion replaced by a fresh one. So how hard is it to outheal the damage? Well, not as hard as you might think after the first calculations. These give you 2% heal of minion hp. You get 350 damage by the loop, which means you need 17500 HP on a minion, which is very much. But if you have damage reduction from armor, charges etc., you need less, of course. With 80% damage reduction, only 3500 HP on a minion are necessary. This is an amount you can definitely achieve. With Golems absolutely not a problem, but a cooldown of 6s destroys this approach. Guardians, Spectres, Animate Weapons and bow-based minions, are also not an option. This leaves Skeletons, Zombies and Raging Spirits. In fact it is possible for all of these to achieve a zero sum game. It depends on your damage reduction, increased minion life and very crucially the level of the said minion. Ok, this sounds really cool, all we need to do is set up an infinite loop of such a minion, every time it dies, we gain health.

Which brings us to the next question: "Can we sustain an infinite loop of dying and freshly cast minions?"
Well, now it really gets complicated. The thing is, you need to get damage, so that Cast When Damage Taken can trigger. For level 1 this is only around 500, but even without damage reduction, we only get 350 damage per death, with reduction, we end up with even less. Ok Skeletons give us 2 death per cast, so without reduction the 700 damage would be sufficient. But this is level 1 cwdt, skeletons can then be only lvl 38, which means they will never outheal the damage from the ring. So at this point, it seems like there is no way to circumvent these conditions, which point to StrangeCloud's solution, just going with massive ES and regeneration. But there is one more trick: You can link the same spell multiple times to cwdt. You can never trigger the same spell multiple times in the same frame but in different frames this is possible. Furthermore you don't lose the damage count, if another one triggers. Let me give you an example: You have 3 Summon Skeleton spells linked to lvl 1 cwdt. Every dead Skeleton gives you 200 damage and heals you for 100. You lose the first 2 Skeletons, end up getting net 200 damage, the counter goes up by 400. You lose the next 2 Skeletons, net 200 damage, counter goes up by 400, so exceeds 528, now all 3 skeletons can trigger. In fact only 1 triggers, leaving the other 2 with their damage counter up, so now 1 triggers, replacing 2 other skeletons because of the minion cap. This again triggers one of the other yet untriggered cwdt skeletons and these deal you damage and trigger the third and so on. Once the damage counter is full and a spell could not be triggered because the same spell was already triggered, any tiny bit of damage at a later point, will trigger it. That's pretty cool. Sounds like an infinite loop will be freaking out, once you start it, either killing you, if your net life gain is negative or infinitely heal you otherwise. But this is not case. In path of exile, each frame has only 1 "phase" of triggering. This means everything will be calculated and then all triggers are evaluated, then these triggers are applied but cannot be the cause of any new triggered things. Furthermore only 1 instance of each spell can be cast and Skeletons or anything else will be spawned in the very same frame. Therefore a skeleton spawned by cwdt will remove older skeletons because of minion cap, this will also deal damage to you through loop, but this damage cannot trigger any other cwdt, since it is in the same frame. Therefore you need some kind of delay. In StrangeCloud's build you can see this achieved by army of bones, reducing the duration of skeletons to a value as close to 0.25s as possible. This is the internal cooldown of cwdt, shorter makes no sense, since then you are again not able to trigger a certain spell. Also you can go with Raging Spirits and less duration, which stays above 1.5s always. So to answer the initial question: "Yes it is possible to sustain an infinite loop, but having a short cycle period puts new boundary conditions up.

From these learnings we come to a final question: "Can we sustain an infinite loop and heal ourselves with it?"
Finding a solution to this problem is rather complicated. I started off using excel for calculations, which is a great tool if you want to solve problems, being described by 2 free variables at max (2 dimensional problem). Unfortunately the level of cwdt, the damage reduction, the increased minion life and the number of skills associated with cwdt are all free variables to this problem. There are some other parameters, which even increase the dimensionality of the problem, so that I had to leave excel aside and use a real programming language to find solutions. What I learned is, that damage taken goes to mana, together with Mind Over Matter, is a great improvement, because this is essentially a heal. You get the damage, it counts towards your damage counter, but it is instantly healed on the mana side by dtgtm.
However, the dimensionality of the problem can be reduced by some other findings. For example the best ratio between Skeleton's life and damage necessary to proc is for lvl 12 CWDT (skeletons are lvl 60 then). If we use 13 Summon Skeleton spells on CWDTs and have 30% damage taken goes to mana, we end up with this plot:


x-axis: damage reduction, y-axis: increased minion life, red indicates that either the setup is not self-sustained (sub-critical) or net life gain is negative, so the yellow spots indicate where a setup would be running.

So with this configuration, the minimum requirements are 82% damage reduction and 110% increased minion life. I was able to achieve such values and when I started to test it, I realized the above statement, that you need some kind of delay. Unfortunately if I use army of bones, it is no longer possible for me to get past 100% increased minion life. Also my build was mainly designed to get above 80% damage reduction, which means I have picked up all endurance charge boni etc. in the marauder area. Maybe a new design with many minion life boni can get these values even with army of bones.

Another fix to this problem is using this item:


It allows us to have lvl 1 cwdt zombies (they will be lvl 38 then) with so much life, they can heal us and self-sustain. But for Zombies, there is no delay possible, so you always have to cast a Skeleton or Raging Spirit to trigger a Zombie. Of course you can also cast a Zombie to trigger another Zombie (this works since the self-cast is before the "trigger phase" of a frame). Furthermore you need to provide corpsed, for example via lvl 1 cwdt desecrate, but this takes about 1.66s for each corpse. So a fast cycle is not possible.

I ended up with a build that could trigger molten shell pretty fast, be very tanky but the killspeed is too slow.

Battlefront with this setup

So if someone has some more ideas for this core build with maligaro's, it would be pretty nice. Also if someone wants to build a champion, who focuses on minion life increase, while sustaining army of bones, also post here and I'd be happy to support you.

Skeleton loop with net life gain

https://poebuilder.com/character/AAAAAgAAvryQEYLkSsiKrzboWK-pbsAaeA218m6qFKlWLRLhouqE72EhGlUFLXTt2sHTby5TpBm2LCXfG_oB55_LpzDSIZ7NggfyQWhl85tXDZHOdqzPfuoYu-3z3fjrWfOsqnKp9zKfPi3SkFUaOCcvOtiCm-w473yf35o7wGY8BaIABLOFfWu3KU9o8vAfhTLr7jLRRUePGhzcZlSFe287e8OboY9GpwjYvTWSRmnyL2o7ah4=

Jewels are army of bones, 20%, 20%, 20%, 19%, 19% and one with res.