[3.4] The DarkRunner - 1HP "pacifist" build with damage immune option

- September 23rd, 2018: Added a whole new section (Damage Immune setup), chaned a bit the passive trees, the gear and the gems suggestions (reflecting the requirement of just 25 life regen)

- September 20th, 2018: Added few informations about the levelling process and the transition into this build

- September 18th, 2018: Made more tests and noticed that things are working properly now, therefore added the "IMPORTANT" note at the beginning of the guide

This build is something to have fun when you wanna take a break from the usual gameplay. You do not kill anything, you do not interact with any monster, you just run around and grab loot for free or throw some dynamite when required.
You need to have another "real" build to do everything else, to go deeper into the delve and to unlock checkpoints, allowing you to start new and profitable adventures into the darkness.

Pros:
- Stupidly fast and evasive (about 400% movement speed and 96% reduced visibility to enemies)
- Super easy to farm fossils and stuff with no sulphite investment
- Can "tank" darkness forever (right now the darkness cap is 5000)
- Effective on a very low budget
- Requires 4links at most and uncapped resistances
- Potential to be immune to damage (expensive and slower)

Cons:
- Cannot do anything else by itself
- Every single hit is going to kill you (generally speaking you should not get hit)
- You deal no damage (I mean literally zero)
- You need another character to actually play the game
- Has to be levelled using some other build and then respecced
- Low HC viability (the "Damage Immune" version could be HC viable)
- Good chances of gettin nerfed/destroyed by GGG in the future

The main idea is that the Darkness debuff deals a percentage of your EHP (Life + Energy Shield) as damage over time, it does stacks over time and generally speaking is not sustainable for more than few seconds. As long as the amount of life/ES regen you have is higher than the degen you are suffering, you will not lose any life/ES (sometimes there are "visual bugs" or some strange stuff going on, like when using blood rage or RF).
Ok.. but as you can see in the link above, the debuff stacks very fast and therefore it's pretty much impossible to counter it with generic % life/ES regen.
This build manages to have just 1HP and no ES (therefore your EHP is 1), while stacking enough flat life regen to beat the darkness degeneration.

How do you obtain 1 EHP?
That's actually pretty easy. First of all you grab Chaos Innoculation and then you pay attention to not have any ES on your gear.

How are we actually mitigating the darkness?
Well first of all we want to have 75% darkness resistance (not mandatory, but it helps).
I'm pretty sure that at the beginning of the league the degeneration was not working properly, so a massive amount of life regen was needed to survive the darkness, but right now things seems to work as they should.
With 1 HP and capped dark resistance, we lose just 25 hp/sec at 5000 stacks (which is the cap right now); this means that we just need to have at least 25 life regen and we are done forever.
If you do not want to invest heavily into darkness resist, you can just raise your life regen accordingly; for example, with 50% dark resist you need 50 life regen, with 0% dark resist you need 100 life regen, with -100% dark res you need 200 life regen and so on.

How are we not dying?
Well yeah, that's a pretty fair question. We run around with 1HP and no real defences, that's not a good way to survive in Wraeclast.
We use Phase Run with two Ichimonji to gain 96% reduced visibility, this means that most monsters do not even have any clue we are near them. Phase run also allows us to move through enemies (Phasing). Since phase run has a base CD of 4s, we need to extend its duration beyond that threshold; there are few ways we can do that and you can combine them as you prefer (also depending on your budget):
- Support gems like Increased Duration and Efficacy (both mandatory in my opinion)
- Passive duration clusters (at least 1 of those is mandatory in my opinion)
- Helm enchant with increased duration for phase run (expensive)
- Belt and/or booth with % increased CD recovery speed (a shaper mod, you can get cheap belts with bad mods)
- Socketing the setup into a +2 duration gems item
- Watcher's Eye with % increased CD recovery speed for movement skills while using Haste (might be expensive)
With just a duration cluster and the gems (20/20) you should have a phase run lasting about 4.3s, so you have 0.3s window to cast it every time; it's doable but it can be a little stressful, so I suggest you to also use at least one of the other options.
We also obtain a ton of movement speed (through passives, items, auras, flasks, etc.) to run very fast and physically avoid most troubles.
We also have an good amount of evasion to avoid most attacks and we can use blind to lower the enemies' accuracy while we are gathering stuff from the ground. Since we have some passive points left, we also grab Acrobatics and Phase Acrobatics to make us a little safer.
Since gettin faster than this becomes pretty hard and/or expensive, we decide to slow down the enemies; we use Temporal Chains (with Blasphemy) for this purpose.

Damage Immune setup
This is something I'm still working on, but it could be the best way to approach this kind of character, allowing the build to be viable even in a HC environment. Builds that are 100% immune to damage are not really a new thing in PoE, but they generally are "real" builds, meaning that they actually have some sort of interaction with the enemies (they attack, kill stuff, and so on). It's a bit more challanging to make a build which is immune to all damage types and is also totally passive (except flasks, obviosuly).
This kind of setup is definitely more expensive and hard to pull off, moreover it requires some advanced knowledge of the game mechanics, therefore I wanna talk about it in a more detailed way, but in a separate section of the guide. If you are interested into this, check that out.
Keep in mind that to be actually immortal you need to have good flasks management and avoid areas with elemental penetration mods (they appear in deep levels of the Mines).

Style points
We will use the Pathfinder Ascendency to have almost permanent uptime of all the flasks we are using (without killing or hitting anything). We have the option to also be immune to ailments (doesn't really matter, since we are dead anyway if we get hit).

Bandits:
We kill all bandits, just get those two skill points.

Ascendency:
Pathfinder is probably the best option, since we do not really care about damage or survivability, we just want as much speed and QoL as possible. Pathfinder allows us to have pretty much permanent flask uptime without killing or hitting anything, which is just too good.
We actually need just two notabled:
- Nature's Boon for infinite flask uptime
- Nature's Adrenaline for the movement speed
The other notables are 100% useless, so you can just grab whatever you prefer, I suggest to grab 4 minor nodes just for the additional flask effectivness.

Pantheon:
As major god you can take Soul of Lunaris for the extra movement speed.
Minor gods are useless for us, pick whatever.

Levelling:

As said at the beginning, this build must be levelled as something else. You can play some DoT based archer or whatever you like to level up.
I provide a pretty basic PoB link (https://pastebin.com/RJAGDzei) for a generic Toxic Rain build; it's not a min maxed version or anything crazy, just a simple build with cheap items to allow you to sprint through low/mid tier maps while levelling.
If you want a more detailed guide, I suggest you to check Angry_Roleplayer's guide or any other well done guide you can find in the forum.

Transition:

You can transition into this build from level 70 or so, but considering that with this setup you won't be able to farm anything and progress in levels, I suggest you to reach higher levels before the respec. I consider the build to be pretty much completed at level 83 (if you manage to push ita fre levels further, you have a bit more points to grab here and there).
If you follow the tree progression I'm providing down here, you need 99 skill refund points, 20 of those are available through quest rewards. Which means that you need about 79 Orb of Regrets to complete the respeccing process; the good thing is that they are pretty cheap right now, so it should't be a big deal.

Passive tree progression

I also provide a PoB link if you wanna play with it: https://pastebin.com/A9GgYbG6.

Read the "IMPORTANT" note at the beginning of the guide.
TLDR: right now you just need 25 life regen to survive 5000 stacks (with capped dark resist).

Talking about the gear, we have quite a good amount of freedom i our choices, since we have to stack just a bit of life regen and then focus only on movement speed. We do not care at all about resistances or life mods. You should avoid any ES bonus, we want none.
The setup I'm providing down below is the old gear I was using, which was stacking an unnecessary amount of life regen, you do not have to invest that much into it, since you just need 25 hp/sec.


Let's discuss every slot briefly.

- Weapons: you need two Ichimonji, the buff effectivness is mandatory to be as much evasive as possible (96% reduced visibility with Phase Run). You can look for some fancy corruption like Increased AoE. Cheap items anyway.

- Body armour: Queen of the Forest is a must for any build relying on fast movement speed, since we can easily cap the evasion required (45k). Rolls and link are not really important, just grab the cheapest you can find.

- Helmet: Devoto's Devotion is another must have for speedy builds, good evasion is nice too. Cheap helmet anyway, look for good corruptions or a good enchant (like the increased duration for phase run or higher effectivness of temporal chains).

- Gloves: you can use Craiceann's Pincers to solve the life regen requirements, but it's a Bestiary specific items and a bit expensive (you can probably gra the life regen you need in the following slots). Otherwise you can use some random gloves, maybe with a good corruption.

- Boots: here you have some cool choices. You can use Saqawal's Talons (another Bestiary item) to gain Aspect of the Avian, which provides me some extra movement speed, life and mana regen during the Avian's Flight phase. You can also use Atziri's Step for some extra spell dodge and a lot of evasion. If you are using cheap boots, you can look for some good corruptions (such as +2 to Curse/AoE gems).

- Belt: this slot can be helpful to solve our regen requirements, using an Immortal Flesh. You can also grab a rare belt with flasks' related mods, a shaper's belt with % increased CD recovery speed and/or something with good corruptions.

- Rings: we can solve all our regen problems with just one right slot, using a Kikazaru. In the other slot you can use whatever you want. Keep and eye open for good corruptions.

- Amulet: here we have a lot of freedom, just grab something with no ES and maybe a good corruption. You can use Hinekora's Sight to boost your chance to dodge stuff.

Talking about flasks and jewels:



You kinda need those types of utility flasks, pick the mods as you prefer. Increased duration affix is pretty good, allowing you to spam them less frequently. You do not really immunities, since you have just 1HP. Overflowing Chalice is really good to achieve permanent flask uptime.
Talking about jewels, those 4 unique jewels are almost mandatory for this build to work. Conqueror's Efficiency and Potency provides really useful buffs to auras, curses and flasks. Inertia is really good if you need to obtain a lot of STR without investing too much (and you will probably need it, depending on your gear). The final piece you can add to your build is a Watcher's Eye, this jewel can have really interesting mods realted to the auras you are using (perma-phasing with haste, movement speed with grace, dodge and spell dodge with haste, % increased CD recovery speed for movement skills with haste, or whatever you like); keep in mind that this jewel can get pretty expensive with good mods.

As you can see, we do not use many skills. We just need some auras and buffs, that's it.

- 4 links: Phase Run, Increased Duration, Efficacy, Enchance
- 4 links: Temporal Chains, Blasphemy, Enhance, Enfeeble
- 3 links: Grace, Haste, Enlighten

The Enhances and the Enlighten are fine even at level 2.

Ok, this is something I'm still working on and figuring out the best way to approach it. It's going to be way more expensive than the normal setup, but could potentially open up the playstyle to Hardcore players too.
Keep in mind that to be actually immortal you need to have good flasks management and avoid areas with elemental penetration mods (they appear in deep levels of the Mines).
Builds that are immune to all damage types are nothing new in PoE, but they usually are "normal" builds. This build has to satisfy few requirements though:
- You do not want any ES, for obvious reasons
- You want good movement speed, for obvious reasons
- You want to perform as few actions as possible, since the main goal is to run around and not waste time

To make an "immortal" build you need to be immune to all types of damage:
- Chaos damage: take Chaos Innoculation, easy
- Elemental damage: push your max resistances to 100%, this is a bit more tricky
- Physical damage: here you have two main options, either you manage to have 100% uptime of Immortall Call, or you have to convert 100% of physical damage to the other types of damage (chaos and/or elemental)

Immortal Call option:
I personally do not think the Immortal Call option is optimal for this kind of build, since you need to waste time casting it on cooldown (which is the minor problem) but also you have to generate the 4 Endurance Charges needed to make it last at least 3s (which is the IC cooldown). Therefore you need to cast Enduring Cry on cooldown and hope there are enough enemies around you to gain all the charges you need. Immortal Call also costs a lot of mana, which means you need to have that mana available (I'm gonna come back later on this topic). It's just too clunky in my opinion and you will probably die a lot anyway, but it's pretty cheap to build.

Conversion option:
So let's move towards the other option, converting all the physical damage to other types of damage (mostly elemental), which is the way to go in my opinion. I've come up with two different approaches, each with their own pros and cons, but both very expensive (talking about 10+ ex with the current prices). The main difference is the use of the unique flask Divination Distillate.




Note: after some test, I've noticed that the Gluttony belt is causing some unexpected problems and therefore I would be careful with that option (it's used in the version with the Divination Distillate).

Defence unbuffed:
[url=https://ibb.co/fGGZme][img]https://image.ibb.co/dLX76e/defence_no_flasks.png[/url][/img]

Defence buffed:
[url=https://ibb.co/cE4Mjz][img]https://image.ibb.co/enfu4z/defence_buffed.png[/url][/img]

5k darkness stacks:
[url=https://ibb.co/e413We][img]https://preview.ibb.co/gcccre/stacks_Moment.jpg[/url][/img]

5k darkness stacks with just 25.6 life regen:
[url=https://ibb.co/eu0ynK][img]https://preview.ibb.co/cEgSge/5000_stacks_25_6.png[/url][/img]

Just a quick video of a journey into the darkness, I think I had already looted the area previously 'cause most of the common spots where already cleared.
https://youtu.be/dv41Di7CKbI