[3.22] The Forbidden Build 10 - DoT-Capped Healing - Tainted Pact Forbidden Rite Pathfinder

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Simulacrum: If you literally AFK you'll probably die. Made it to Wave 29, where Kosis kept 1-shotting me. DPS is currently too low for comfortably killing Kosis.

Delve: Can survive the Darkness until 1 tick of it kills from full life, but only if there are enough enemies outside the darkness to poison. Enemies in darkness do not take damage, and therefore we cannot poison them, and therefore we will die quickly. Not suitable for extremely deep Delving, but is very good for a normal amount of Delving. Haven't attempted Aul but, in theory, it should be comfortable.

Shaper: Could probably AFK. Not sure how often the slam would 1-shot the build, but it's the only threat.

Sirus: Can laugh off most of his attacks, but the ground effect that turns off your life recovery will kill you instantly, and being hit by both the spinning beam and the Die beam is enough to kill if you don't have enough poison stacks.

Maven: Getting hit by the beams that turn your life recovery off will kill you. Memory game will kill you. The ground degens, however, are not a concern at all.

Cortex: Could probably do it blindfolded.

Elderslayers Invitation: Have to walk off Baran's tiles to have enough mana to cast, but otherwise can hold Forbidden Rite and stand still.

2023-10-10:
* Swapped To Dust to roll 2% higher, dropped Less Duration mastery and support gem to save 1 passive point and 1 gem socket
* Used that gem socket for Lifetap support so mana-draining effects won't end the loop anymore
* Used that passive point for guaranteed 100% spell suppression, and some evasion and strength
* Leveled Arcane Surge Support to level 8, up from 2
* Replaced Sacrifice Support with the Divergent version
* In the low-budget version, replaced Punishment (the useless 3rd curse) with a Lightning or Flame golem. There are other good candidates here, like Cold Snap or Frost Bomb.

Most Tainted Pact builds are content with leeching only if they've hit an enemy recently. This is not the case for us. If we stop leeching for even 1 millisecond, we will instantly die.

To achieve 100% leech uptime, we use this flask suffix:
It is a bench-crafted mod unlocked by unveiling Cinderswallow Urns. It allows us to leech life from hits we take, as opposed to hitting an enemy.

We need 100% flask uptime:


Now we just need to hit ourselves constantly.

By using a Heartbound Loop (with 20% physical quality), we take 420 physical damage when a minion dies. This counts as a hit, and it will be leeched using the flask.

Using Anomalous Summon Skeletons, a very specific amount of reduced skill effect duration (40% reduced from Anomalous Minion Speed Support, 32% reduced from 2x To Dust jewels, 25% reduced from the passive skill tree, 10% less from the passive skill tree mastery, and 59% less from a 20/20 Less Duration Support), and the bench-crafted Cooldown Recovery Rate suffix on our belt, we summon 2 Skeletons every 0.231 seconds, which die after 0.231 seconds, triggering a level 1 Cast When Damage Taken Support, summoning 2 more Skeletons, creating a Spell Cast Loop.

However, life leech duration depends on the amount of the leech. Is 420 damage taken enough?

First, we need to take into account our physical damage reduction. We are using 2 uniques that have armor, so we need to make sure they have as little as possible, even making sure they are 0% quality. We will also have permanent Adrenaline, which gives 10% physical damage reduction. I am also using the Soul of Solaris major Pantheon, which gives up to 8% physical damage reduction. With my gear, 420 physical damage gets reduced by 35%, to 273. This occurs twice, due to summoning 2 Skeletons at a time, but they do not add together to one larger hit, they occur as 2 separate hits of 273 damage. (Side note: We need to take a minimum of 528 damage per cast for the loop to work. In my setup, if I am near 8 enemies and Bleeding, I have 39% reduction, and the loop will end.)

So, we are taking roughly 273 damage per hit. How long does the leech last?

Individual life leech durations can be calculated using this equation:
(Hit Damage) * (% Leeched) / (2% of Max Life)
In our case:
273 * 0.15 / 120 = 0.34 seconds.

So, even in the worst-case scenario where we have 0% increased effect of flasks, and maximum damage reduction, the Skeletons alone are enough to give us 100% leech uptime.

This is great because it allows us to not need to use Forbidden Rite as part of the loop, which would cause some annoying problems.

Now, the only obstacle to 100% leech uptime is that leeches are removed when we reach full life. We solve this by using this shield:

This item looks very scary and hard to understand. I will only explain the relevant things it does for this build:
1. It prevents our life leeches from ending when we reach full life (or energy shield!)
2. It gives us Divine Flesh, which converts 50% of Elemental Damage Taken (including Damage over Time!) to Chaos
3. It gives us +5% to all Maximum Resistances (how we get 100% uptime to be explained later)
4. It makes all damage bypass our energy shield.
5. It gives us more energy shield, which translates to more Forbidden Rite damage.

So, using just Heartbound Loop, Mahuxotl's Machination, and a magic flask crafted suffix (with 100% flask uptime), we now have 100% uptime on Tainted Pact's key modifier. Along the way, we've picked up a lot of stuff that will be useful later.

Infinite healing doesn't matter if we can get one-shot.

This build has the most defensive layers of any build I've ever played.

We have:
- 100% Spell Suppression (56% suppressed)
- 95% Chance to Evade (Only every 20th attack will hit us)
- 88% Maximum Fire Resistance
- 40% Less Fire Damage Taken
- 100% of Cold and Lightning Damage taken as Fire and Chaos (50% each)
- 85% Maximum Chaos Resistance (which we reach)
- 100% Reduced effect of Curses on us (Flask + Jewel suffixes)
- Enemies cannot Critically Strike (Poison mastery)
- Punishment (Enemies that hit you will deal 10% Less Damage afterwards)
- Cannot be Chilled or Frozen
- Potentially 100% Reduced Effect of Shock (I only have 60%, dropped the rest for more cast speed)
- 5500-6000 Maximum Life
- Survive hits of up to ~70,000 Elemental damage, ~55,000 Chaos damage, or ~7000 Physical damage (~16000 if it's a spell)

We get 100% Spell Suppression almost entirely from the passive skill tree, as we are a Ranger and thus optimally-positioned to do so.

We get 95% Chance to Evade in order to avoid being shotgunned by simultaneous physical attacks. Chance to Evade is deterministic, so it is not possible to be hit by 2 attacks in a row. We will only be hit by every 20th attack. We achieve this by getting some good Evasion Rating from our gear, but mostly due to using a Jade and Stibnite Flask, with a good Evasion Rating suffix, and a Grace gem. We can achieve upwards of 57,000 Evasion Rating. We also use a Watcher's Eye with "5-8% Chance to Evade Attacks while affected by Grace."

Mahuxotl's Machination grants a buff that gives +5% to all Maximum Resistances when we reach full Energy Shield, lasting 4 seconds. Our pitiful amount of leech won't have good uptime. Instead, we take the Ghost Dance keystone. This means that every 2 seconds, we can recover 3% of our Evasion Rating as Energy Shield. So, as long as our Evasion rating is 34x the amount of our Energy Shield, we will receive this buff every 2 seconds, given we are constantly being hit by our Heartbound Loop. Therefore, we have 100% uptime on this buff for the price of 1 passive point.

Thanks to both Divine Flesh from the shield, and Tempered by War from our Lethal Pride jewel, the only resistances we need to worry about are Fire and Chaos. Cold and Lightning can be left negative, since we will never take any Cold or Lightning damage from any source.

Using Purity of Fire, the 5% buff from Mahuxotl's Machination, and 3% from the passive tree, we get 88% Fire Resistance. We have a Ruby Flask with 100% increased effect, so that's 100% Fire Resistance and 40% Less Fire Damage Taken. We don't need any elemental resistances on any of our gear.

Our Chaos Resistance is more complicated. Because of Tainted Pact, the less Chaos Resistance we have, the more life recovery we have. By utilizing the Golden Rule jewel, we can have ~0% Chaos Resistance out of combat, and capped Chaos Resistance in combat. The reason we do this is to have the right amount of life recovery at the right time.

When there are no enemies nearby, we are being hit by our spell cast loop, and we need some life recovery. It would be nice to be able to tank Labyrinth traps and on-death effects, too. So, we use Righteous Fire and these boots:

Because we are taking 50% of Elemental damage as Chaos, as long as our Elemental resistance is higher than our Chaos resistance, all sources of Elemental Damage over Time will heal us instead of damage us.

So, that 10,000 Fire Damage per second from having permanent Adrenaline (100% increased Damage, 25% increased Attack, Cast, and Movement speed, and 10% Physical Damage Reduction) is now healing us for 4400 Life per second instead. Righteous Fire is healing us for about 2800 Life per second as well.

This is over 100% Life recovered per second, passively. Think about how difficult it would be to achieve 100% Life regenerated per second.

Now realize that we can use the Golden Rule jewel to reflect our own poison damage back to us.

Enemy damage is balanced in order to scale to your roughly 5000 Life. Your damage is balanced around the enemy's potentially hundreds of millions of Life.

If we reflect a single one of our poisons back onto ourselves, we are now healing more life per second than was possible on any build before patch 3.21. Then we can achieve 100 times that.

If we have enough poison damage, we can easily reach the DoT cap (about 35.8 million DPS) on ourselves, and heal that much instead.

I must stress that, although we will then reach 85% Chaos resistance, and not all 100 of the poisons will be from our main DPS skill, and we won't always have 100 poison stacks, none of that matters at all. The difference between 50,000 healing per second and 35.8 million healing per second is purely academic. You won't be able to notice a difference.

So, if we hit a single enemy with a single one of our poisons, every roughly 3 seconds, we will go from ~6000 life recovered per second, to effectively infinite life recovery.

Additionally, because this healing is always equal to the damage we would be taking, it is not affected by Life Recovery Rate, and is not considered Life Regeneration. So, we can run maps with Cannot Leech from Monsters (we are leeching from ourselves!), Cannot Regenerate Life or Mana (we have enough Mana Recoup), and 100% Reduced Life Recovery Rate.

We self-cast Forbidden Rite as our main DPS skill because:
1. We cannot trigger Forbidden Rite as part of our spell cast loop without significantly increasing the possibility of dying.
2. It does significantly, hilariously, more damage than any other possible spell (in this setup.) It does something like 2.5x the damage of Dark Pact, the runner-up.
3. It allows us to conveniently re-start the loop in many adverse scenarios, like a Temporal Bubble or Mana Siphoner rare.

Forbidden Rite is an amazing DPS skill. It had better be, with that self-damage. But because we instantly recover to full life within the same tick, we can even link Sacrifice support and be totally fine.

Forbidden Rite is a spell that fires a projectile at the ground, which then explodes. This allows it to shotgun, so we can run Greater Multiple Projectiles to multiply our DPS by 5 (if all hit. The spread isn't perfect.)

Additionally, it fires up to 8 projectiles by targeting nearby enemies, including the one you are aiming at, so even if we didn't use Greater Multiple Projectiles, we would already be doing double damage. This also means that we don't have to aim while mapping.

Bonus points for using the Celestial Cat MTX to throw exploding kittens to poison your enemies.

Since we are scaling poison damage to abuse Golden Rule, we need 100% chance to poison. Thankfully, our chest is absolutely perfect for this.

I am particularly proud of this build perfectly utilizing every mod on this chest. Because our spell cast loop can cast a curse every 0.231 seconds, this chest gives us 100% chance to poison by itself. If we unequip it, we lose >85% of our DPS. It also ensures that Hexproof enemies can't trip us up, and an additional curse is quite a bit of damage. Temporal Chains (level 1) and Despair (level 20) remain our best curses, and I got a +1 curse corruption implicit on my Tainted Pact, allowing me to also use Punishment, which is our 3rd-best damage curse, and also provides some indirect damage reduction, so it doesn't mess with our loop.

Another good thing about scaling poison damage is that we can use the Pathfinder's poison damage nodes. 20% chance to deal 100% More damage is, on average, 20% more damage, and the poison proliferation is excellent for our clearspeed. Additionally, assuming we deal enough hits per second (hence the other spells in the loop), we can maintain 15 Wither stacks and make our enemies take 135% increased Chaos damage. For these nodes, as well as the flask nodes, Pathfinder is by far the best Ascendancy to use with Tainted Pact.

The rest of our damage just comes from the support gems, skill tree, and weapon. I explain the weapon and how to craft it later.

It is very important that you follow the correct loop-starting procedure in every new instance of every area you enter, or you will nearly-instantly die and be very sad.

Every time you enter a new instance and gain the Grace Period buff, make sure you do this:
1. Ensure your boots are toggled off.
2. Do something to end the Grace Period, like moving, or toggling the boots off.
3. Wait for your flasks to activate (if there are enemies nearby you can kill for flask charges, you can manually activate them.)
4. Cast Forbidden Rite.
5. Immediately after you see your health go down, activate Righteous Fire and your boots.

Every time you enter a transition within the same instance (like a staircase or arena entrance), you must hold the Forbidden Rite key to cast it immediately upon entering the other side. This will maintain your 100% leech uptime, and restart the loop.

Note that the boots have a 5-second cooldown on the toggle, and they will stay toggled on, through instances, like an aura, until you turn them off.

There are many scenarios in which you must turn the boots off or you will die.

For example, if you try to enter an Incursion, you will be stunned and unable to cast Forbidden Rite for long enough that the boots will kill you. For best results, toggle the boots off, cast Forbidden Rite, then enter the Incursion while holding the Forbidden Rite button. Follow the same procedure to exit the Incursion.

I can assure you that, no matter how mindful of these things you may be, you will die far more often to forgetting to do these things than to any enemies in the game. I am the one that created this, and I still die to doors.

I can however, attest that it is still very fun to play. We have 240% movement speed permanently, decent clear speed, decent single-target DPS, and enough defenses to level past 90 without trying or noticing (a rarity for my builds.)

I die when I cast Forbidden Rite multiple times with no enemies nearby.



My Skeletons do not loop.



I am dying with no enemies nearby.



Some of my spells aren't casting.

Tainted Pact - ~1 Chaos

Heartbound Loop with 20% physical quality: ~20c. Try to buy one with a good corruption, since Wardloop builds make and sell a ton of these.

Magic Utility flask with crafted suffix: ~30c
Note that there are many prefixes on the flasks that can result in 100% uptime. The Stibnite is the hardest, the others can be more lax. There are more flask nodes nearby on the passive tree if you are having trouble with the gear.

Rare Belt with at least 20% increased Flask Charges Gained, T1 crafted CDR, and Life: ~50c (and the 1-Exalt bench cost), ~1c for a really bad one on trade
Again, you could probably make it work with Flask Effect Duration or Reduced Flask Charges Used instead. As long as POB says you have 100% uptime, you're good.

7x Flask Effect Duration tattoo: ~10c each (This is to avoid requiring a very expensive Rare Belt.)

Anoint Natural Remedies: ~50c (Indigo, Opalescent, Silver)

Mahuxotl's Machination - ~3 Divines (buy the worst one, we want as little armor as possible.)

Lethal Pride with Rakiata: ~30c - ~2 Divines (There are 9 seeds that give 12% max life in the socket I chose, the best are 15770, 16016, and 17697 because they also give +20 Strength. Avoid increased Armor.)

Cospri's Will: ~1c, but high Chaos resistance and Evasion is preferred. To get the right colors, first craft 2 blue and 1 red socket at the bench, then alternate crafting 3 sockets and 4 sockets until the 4th is blue, then craft 6 sockets to get the last 2 green. Between that and linking it, expect this to cost 1-2 Divines.

Annihilation's Approach: ~30c (we want the lowest armor possible.)

2x To Dust jewels that total 34% reduced Skeleton duration: ~10c each

Anomalous Minion Speed Support: ~2 Divines

Anomalous Summon Skeletons: ~1 Divine (not strictly necessary but you may die occasionally without it)

Note: We want all our rare armor to be Evasion + Energy Shield bases. We can't get any armor, and we want rolls that are only possible on those bases.

Weapon: +1 all Spell/Chaos gems > Cast Speed > Chaos/regular DoT Multiplier > increased Chaos Damage. No other stat matters at all.
Until you're ready to spend ~ 3 Divines on a rare wand, use a Singularity or Obliteration (rolls don't matter) for ~1 alch.

Medium Cluster Jewel (~20c): Chaos DoT, Circling Oblivion, Brewed for Potency. Dexterity is nice, we're missing 1 Dexterity from the passive tree.

+1 curse Tainted Pact: ~3 Div (will become unobtainium if 1-2 people buy out the whole market corrupting them.)

Rare Gloves (~50c): +2 AOE Gems > Maximum Life > Cast Speed > Damage while Leeching/Damage during Flask Effect > Intelligence (solely for Wand/spell requirements)

Rare Ring (~50c): Life > Cast Speed > Reduced Effect of Shock/Curses craft > Mana cost craft > Intelligence (solely for Wand/spell requirements) > Chaos Damage > Chaos Resistance

Rare Helmet (~20c): Life > Duration of Ailments while Focused craft > Intelligence (solely for Wand/spell requirements)

Rare Jewel: Life > Cast Speed > Damage with Poison > Chaos DoT Multiplier > DoT Multiplier > Reduced Effect of Curse/Shock on you

Forbidden Taste (~5c): The Chaos DoT heals us instead, and being triggered on a Savage Hit means it helps us out at the start of the loop when we cast Forbidden Rite for the first time, and occasionally saves us otherwise.

Other Flasks (~30c each): We want the Reduced Mana Cost crafted suffix, % Increased Evasion Rating, and the last suffix is up to your preferences. I liked being immune to Curses.

Watcher's Eye (~2 Div): +8% Chance to Evade Attacks while affected by Grace > % Chance to Suppress Spell Damage while affected by Grace
No other modifier helps at all.

1. Start with preferably a Profane Wand, preferably with fractured Chaos DoT Multiplier or regular DoT Multiplier. It should be as high an item level as possible without exceeding 82. If it's ilv83, this won't work.
2. Spam a 3-socket Resonator with Shuddering, Corroded, and Metallic Fossils. This gives a 1/12 chance of getting both +1 all Chaos and +1 all Spell skills, with a boosted chance at Cast Speed. At ~30c per attempt, this should take ~2 Divines of currency on average.
3. Either stop there, or Annul or metamod-scour (craft Prefixes Cannot be Changed and using a Scouring orb, the fractured mod and Prefixes will remain) undesired modifiers until you have only 3 modifiers remaining.
4. Craft "can have up to 3 Crafted Modifiers", increased Chaos Damage, and Cast Speed. This is BiS without getting the non-crafted T1 versions of these mods.

If you're really dumb, like me, you can use T4 Aislings with 3 Crafted Modifiers, a crafted Prefix, Prefixes Cannot be Changed to force a veiled suffix, unveil chance to trigger Blood Rage, then craft Cast Speed and slam Mana, only to remember that Blood Rage won't trigger if there's a Cast When Damage Taken socketed in the Wand. Behold, 10 wasted Divines: