Just my two cents, but I personally always think it’s more valuable to select a good build under the same ascendency to league start, than to select something that are “more or less similar but worse” to what you want eventually. If you can save say 1 hour playing good build than to a scuffed “similar to reap” build, then as long as you can farm 1 divine with this extra hour, you can buy enough regret orb for the swap.

That being said, blade vortex occultist is pretty similar to reap and is very league start friendly.

Dissolution of Flesh synergises with PB good, when on low life your whole health pool gets the 40% less damage benefit. And with dissolution you don't take life damage, you reserve damage temporarily from max.

I'm leveling it right now with Arc on no gear to speak of... Works just fine.

Good point! I forgot about that. I'm a PB noob overall but now with Progenesis I'm pro-PB all the way!

If you dont spend much mana it won't get you below 50% for a while though.

You don't get a huge 50% aura in addition but without changing anything else I freed up 150 mana on my build and am able to sneak in both level 1 clarity and precision which can be quite a difference if you need them for a Watcher's Eye or 8% damage/aura mastery etc.

It does yeah, I mention it at the end of the video. It's an insanely strong flask!

For sure. It's the aspirational goal of the build. The Cold version was really me just walking backwards to see if it could work and it turned out pretty solid still.

@@subtractem Nice, looking at the PoB I was kinda thinking that. Think ailment immunity is important/achievable for this? Or chill and freeze is fine? Notice a lot of the blue altars do stuff like sap/scorch and what not.

@@djones1609 I went full immune on my frost blades build and I really like it. Stormshroud is great.

I'm using it now yeah, 30% feels pretty good...if I got up to 50% or more it would feel incredible.

@@subtractem thanks!

This build hits leech cap instantly, wurms molt and the flask mod wouldn't help for this situation. It's neat tech for non traditional build though.

You do want to level it, just hard to get enough strength in this build.

It's good with enough recoup/regen but it makes you take a lot more damage from the life loss after so it'd be rough in this build.

Yeah! The issue with Nine Lives (besides costing 70 divines) is that it'll recoup in 3 seconds so it'll stop while you still have 1 second of life loss from PB/Progenesis ticking. I opted not to go that direction but as long as more damage is incoming I think it'd make you nearly immortal.

@@subtractem Yeah, but that last second is only going to account for 11-12% of the original health damage (which will be much smaller due to both ES and Mana taking their chunks) and shouldn't be a problem if you have any life leach/regeneration. But yeah, pretty expensive it is.

@@subtractem The big thing that this does is plug the vulnerability to degens that it originally had.

Not great if you have a low cost skill and a life flask, you'll be losing your pain attunement damage quite often

its a stygian vise.

It doesn't do anything for your survival in RF since it's only for hits but many folks use it for LL damage.

Every single build out there pretty much. Just go check some top builds in the game and you will see.

it's a heavy belt that was crafted with abyss fossil which gives it abyss socket, then corrupted into rare yellow and then mythic orbed into MAGEBLOOD WITH ABYSS SOCKET!1!1!1

@@sunshawty3159 NO WAY THIS THING MUST BE WORTH 1000 MIRRORS

@@daaaaabom it's abys belt with mageblood skin transfer 🤦🏻‍♂️

Ye its so broken

I came here to mention Wurm's Molt and the flask mod. I suck at math, but if you take this PB + Progenesis + Recoup tech and combine it with Wurm's Molt, wouldn't you have insane big hit mitigation and insane sustain?

@@Nalixor Yes, everyone is months behind cuz almost every other ikon of poe is copy pasta builds. Everyone uses PB to mitigate big hits, idk where he got off thinking it makes you a 1 shot target. If your build is 1 shot able with PB its dam near 100% chance you will still get 1 shot because you just lack layers of mitigation with or without it. Plenty of PB videos that are very old that disagree with this guys opinions, and they show the math and they also show examples of with and without. Here is a link. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/iLNgZqhir5mvY2Q.html Its time people in the poe community got some integrity and stop lying without doing their homework. PB is meant to increase your effective hp pool; making you stronger vs 1 hits...

@@zandiskoul you're literally wrong though. PB with 20% quality prevents only 40% of life loss yet it eliminates 50% of your hp. No math needed, it makes you more susceptible to one shots by itself.

@@Lardbutt200 It does not eliminate 50% of your hp though and at full life it will make you tankier.

In terms of resource investment. Getting that damage multiplier means you can still have good damage while decreasing investment in other places.

Limited value for any on hit build that hits leech cap already. Fun tech for constant leech if you have lots of incoming hits somewhere but doesn't do much for a build like this that leeches already (esp with constant overleech).

As far as I know this is not correct. The chaos res won't stack but unique effects will still work.

@@subtractem You are correct! I just tested this with a rumi and a lions roar. I got the bonus for both melee dmg and the block. I didnt look at the armor though. But I imagine that they dont stack. I suppose I got a few things mixed up then ^^

@subtractem can correct me if I'm wrong, but: Initially yes he's not in Low Life, but Petrified Blood means that once he drops into LL, ONLY flasks can get him out of it. So as soon as he spends some life with Reap or Exsanguinate, he's going to stay right at 50% or below and LL will be active unless he uses a health flask, which he's obviously not. And that 50% has some headroom before he's "full", so any leech/recoup won't be cancelled and he'll be overleeching right back up to that 50%. It's a really clever way to get overleech which feels great to play.

petrified blood doesn't let you recover above 50% so once he casts one spell that costs life (exasanguinate) or takes any damage he is then stuck at 50/51% and has pain attunement active unless you use a life flask. Petrified blood technically works without reserving anything it will by itself just keep you at 50/100.

@@chriscarollo7816 Correct!

@chriscarollo7816 thanks for the explanation! I use Eldrich Battery, so this wouldnt work I guess? But this "overleech" works with EB because of ES leech I think

the one I bought 2 hours ago is already worth 4 divine more than I paid for it lol

Looks like it's only up 1-2 divines which could be a natural increase, not a big difference :)

@@subtractem Just funny how youtube affects the market. It looks like it even went back down today. Thanks for replying. I admire your work and positive vibe.

This is wrong. Please watch the video again.

@@subtractem yeah... figured it out but still it's too strong. I expect GGG to nerf this interaction.

PB without the flask made you squishier to one hits. The flask allows you to enjoy all of the benefits of PB (like using pain attunement, reserving life, overleech etc which is why I focused on it so much in the video) while not becoming squishier to one shots. You will be taking 60% of a hit's damage while at 50% life using only PB. With the flask this goes down to 45% which makes it less risky to use. Now, the flask ALONE (especially scaling flask effect) is ideal for just defense. However, the title of this video is more defense AND more damage. Taking advantage of Pain Attunement without increasing the risk of being one shot is half of the purpose of this video. Cheers

@@subtractem You missed my point. Since the flask is multiplicative, it adds the same amount of effective max hit whether you have PB or you do not. My main point was that the flask and PB have no direct interaction with each other as the flask adds the same amount of damage reduction regardless. Saying the flask somehow improved using petrified blood is the same as saying: 'Having maxed out resists makes petrified feel good' or 'Having determination makes petrified blood feel good'. As both how much resists or armour you have improve how much damage you can survive, but does not interact with petrified blood mechanic in any way. The biggest misinformation here is that using the flask "The flask allows you to enjoy all of the benefits of PB (like using pain attunement, reserving life, overleech etc which is why I focused on it so much in the video) while not becoming squishier to one shots.'" If you do proper math and look at PoB, you can clearly see that turning petrified blood on reduced your effective health by around ~9%. Flask or no flask makes no difference at all.

You're thinking about this backwards from what my point is: My point is that normally I would always LIKE to use PB but it makes me weaker than not using it because it makes me more squishy to one shots. I totally understand that the flask alone is BETTER than Flask + PB. But reverse it from the perspective of wanting to use PB for sustain and Pain Attunement and then getting the additional tool of the flask which now allows me to enjoy all of the benefits of PB without becoming squishier to one shots. Make sense?

I'll clarify in a pinned comment. I think the biggest takeaway here is folks are very focused on just the defense portion and ignoring the fact that we can now get Pain Attunement for only the cost of a flask and 2 gem sockets...WHILE getting tankier against one shots, which was not possible before.

@@garoukennekuorag4828 I would never normally use Petrified Blood on its own because it would make me too weak. (Although I believe there are some very niche ways of doing so where it still makes sense.) But adding the flask to Petrified Blood allows Petrified Blood to be used and would no longer make me so weak-assuming I wanted to use Petrified Blood in the first place for extra low-life damage. This also presupposes there is additional investment in other defensive layers, such as recoup, as described in the video. If I only wanted to be defensive, I would only use the flask. But if I wanted to do more damage from the enabled low-life mechanics that are possible with Petrified Blood (as well as benefit from additional auras in a way that can't be directly calculated here), using the flask allows that to happen. The combination of the two allows for both defence and offence that wouldn't otherwise be possible without the flask. In short, the flask is not improved from the use of Petrified Blood; however, Petrified Blood is improved from the use of the flask, while reasonably allowing an increase in damage. (Assuming you value the increased damage more than you do the issues with damage over time.)