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Path Of Exile: The Forbidden Build Of Wardless Ward Loop - My Advice

Jul 19, 2023

Salutations exile been a while, for several leagues, now Ward Loop builds have been meta and expensive.

I aim to change that, to afford this build, you must first acquire Mirror of Kalandra that a high-end Ward Loop build would require, then vendor it to get POE Currency that this build requires. 

Path of Exile

What I Have Done In The Past Year

Over the past year, I've made three iterations of the build, and it's been so long, that most of the things I used have been changed. So rather than go over my exact build, I'm just going to give a broad overview of the build concept. A traditional Ward Loop build uses Olroth's Resolve for permanent Ward, so we can face tank an infinite number of forbidden right casts without actually losing any life, then use cast when damage taken to create a Spell Cast Loop

Because the self-damage is completely negated, it can use as many spells as will fit in the sockets, at the highest gem level possible as fast as possible. This is quite powerful in combination with Annihilating Light and Crystallised Omniscience, as Ward mods are all prefixes, leaving the suffixes up button for Attributes modifiers. This is by far the best use of cast when damage taken, and there is little advantage to using anything else. 

Path Of Exile Annihilating Light

Try To Create A Similar Build

I set out to create a similar build that is much cheaper, and in some ways better. We will not be using Ward at all, Awardless Ward Loop if you will instead. We will face tank all of the damage, and simply recoup over 100 of it, using a combination of at least 60 life recoup, mind over matter, and at least 40 percent Mana recoup

We will also be theoretically harder to one shot than a traditional Ward Loop, by having higher maximum life and more damage reduction. One of the only problems with the traditional Ward Loop, is that it is prone to getting one shot by physical or chaos damage. Spell Cast Loop depends on heartbound Loop, so any armor would ruin it, and there's no room for armor on Ward gear anyway. 

Path Of Exile Spell Cast Loop

It also relies on forbidden right, and since the build has so little life, it requires Negative chaos resistance to function. We solve this problem by using the doppelganger guys unique chest, by having a percentage damage reduction instead of Armor's flat reduction, we can have a reasonable amount of physical damage reduction against big hits, while allowing the self-damage to still be high enough: 

  • With Regular Caster damage taken gem, we can have up to 35 physical damage reduction. 
  • With Divergent Caster damage taken, we can have 40 percent on the doppelganger guys, and take gruffalo pantheon for an additional five percent. 

Some Differences Between Them

Unlike armor, this physical damage reduction also works on damage over time. We also get some handy chaos damage reduction, which we offset by simply having more life to increase the self-damage of forbidden right. The more life we have the more chaos resistance we're allowed to get

The constant 10 life regeneration is nice, but roughly 600 life regeneration per second is nothing. Compared to the over 13000 per second from recoup, so we're harder to one shot. But Ward Loop can tank an infinite number of hits that are smaller than the ward amount, having over a hundred percent recoup is nice, but four seconds is plenty of time for the enemy to simply hit you again before you've healed. 

The Way To Solve The Problem

We solved this problem back in Sentinel League, by having five Max rolled pre-nerf flagellant flasks and taking the Pathfinder Scion node, which had the four percent life recovery flask mastery on it at the time. Essentially we would recover 20 life whenever an enemy hit, note that the Spell Cast Loop doesn't count as being hit by an enemy. 

Path Of Exile Sentinel

Speaking of those flasks, that's also where all of our Elemental resistances come from, Annihilating light makes it difficult to cap resistances, so we use Ruby, Sapphire and Topaz Flask. One of which has a tier 1 resistances role in order to cap our resistances without relying on our gear. Having 100 uptime on these flasks is much much easier than all Olroth's Resolve. 

We also use purity of elements, because ailment immunity is very nice, and we don't have many other options anyway. While we've spent a dispro fortunate amount of our budget merely surviving our own damage, the build is actually pretty good at clearing content, one to two million DPS seems low on paper, but being constant and fully automatic makes it feel much higher. 

Outro

This is the first build I've ever done, that is both great to map with and capable of completing most Endgame content. Unfortunately, because recoup takes four seconds to ramp up, we kind of have to start the loop like a lawnmower. 

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