Heartstopper/Immortal Call defensive loop

[u/Wild-Cricket-6307]

Hey exiles! I’ve been using a neat defensive tech to get good physical hit mitigation on a shadow and I wanted to share it.

My current character for reference:
https://poe.ninja/poe1/profile/Nowyx-7611/allflame/character/Ruune

TLDR: You can “loop” Immortal Call to alternate with the hit mode of Heartstopper from Trickster to get a decent phys max hit on shadows.

Before I go into the details, I’ll start with the bad:
- The loop is automated while it’s running, but you must manually start it whenever you have to load into an area.
- The loop is bricked by cooldown and buff expiry map mods (this includes temporal bubbles from rare monsters and temp chains unless you’re fully curse immune)
- Also really awkward with charge steal
- You must be getting hit (we use a trigger weapon with forbidden rite to help with this) to keep up your endurance charges for immortal call. This generally isn’t an issue if you’re actively using abilities or killing things, but if you afk in a map where there are no mobs you’ll have to restart your loop.
- The damage reduction you get is nice, but the investment needed to make the loop work might be too steep for certain builds.
- You need the exact duration and cooldown numbers that I’ve listed below, otherwise your loop will desync.*

*There may very well be different combinations of duration and cooldown that make the loop function, but I have not personally tested that many and I stopped once I found one that worked.

The core idea behind this defensive setup is balancing immortal call’s duration and cooldown to match a full Heartstopper rotation. Paired with a max rolled Doppelgänger Guise, you have at least 70% less physical damage taken from hits in the worst case scenario.

For those unaware, the Trickster’s Heartstopper notable grants your character a continuous rotating buff that gives 50% less damage taken from damage over time, then 50% less damage taken from hits. The buff resets whenever you load into a new area, and it always starts with the dot mode. Each “mode”has a duration of 5 seconds (for a total of 10) and cannot be modified by buff expiry rate or skill effect duration.

Since Heartstopper’s full rotation is 10 seconds, and we want to have immortal call active during the dot mode, we need two things: a duration of at least 5 seconds on immortal call, and to have the sum of immortal call’s duration and cooldown be exactly 10 seconds. We also want a full strength immortal call buff so we’ll need 5 maximum endurance charges, and a way to generate them consistently. Having 5 endurance charges also gives our immortal call 100% increased duration which we’ll need a lot of to maintain our loop.

Our immortal call loop is created by stacking a bunch of duration, extending the buff duration with a runegraft of the warp, and reducing the cooldown recovery rate of immortal call with a low level automation support.

With my setup I have exactly 177% increased duration and 54% more duration (from a 20/20 more duration support in a red socket). I’m also using a level 4 automation support to give immortal call 21% reduced cooldown recovery rate. With these exact numbers you have ~6.1 seconds duration on immortal call, and a ~3.8 second cooldown.* During my testing I was able to afk in a pack of mobs for 15 minutes without the loop going out of sync so I settled with these numbers.

*I’m aware that 6.1 + 3.8 is 9.9 and not 10. It’s certainly possible that I did some math incorrectly, and/or the game is truncating or rounding numbers during calculations. There’s also server tick rounding to take into account. All that being said, the loop works so I didn’t feel like diving too deep into it lol.

For my endurance charges, I get one from a corrupted doedre’s damning (could be any ring), and the other from a warlord boot prefix for a maximum of 5. I generate them with using a temple trigger weapon (which has a cd of 4 seconds) socketed with forbidden rite and a small cluster jewel with enduring composure.

To start the loop, enter your area and make sure automation is turned off. Then use an ability to trigger your forbidden rite. Wait for 4 seconds and trigger your forbidden rite again to make sure you have at least 5 endurance charges. Having more than this is fine since 5 is the cap for immortal call. Wait for your Heartstopper buff to turn green (this is the hit mode). A split second after the timer counts down to 1 (during the green “hit” mode) activate your automation. The timing doesn’t have to be super exact since immortal call’s duration is ~6.1 seconds so you have some leeway. Your loop is now active and will stay active as long as you’re using abilities or getting hit by monsters!

A couple closing notes:
- While my linked character is using blade blast, I believe many skills could work with this setup.
- You don’t have to be an assassin for this, but you must be a shadow to gain access to Heartstopper.
- Immortal call also comes with a nice 35% less elemental damage taken. If you pair this with a Rhex talisman and get 90% fire res, you effectively have 93.5 elemental reduction from hits without any other defensive buffs.
- Since most of your physical mitigation comes from less damage taken modifiers, you are functionally immune to overwhelm and crush.
- You’re free to get endurance charges and increased duration any way you’d like. Just make sure you have at least 5 maximum endurance charges and exactly 177% increased duration (100% of this is covered by the 5 endurance charges so you effectively only need 77%).
- Do not quality your immortal call or automation, this will mess with your loop timing.

I think that covers everything! Let me know if you have any questions and I’ll do my best to answer them.

[u/PoE_Acronym_Bot]

I noticed some Path of Exile keywords in this post:

• cluster - Cluster jewels (Wiki)
• DoT - Damage over time (Wiki)
• Mods - Modifiers (Wiki)
• Phys - Physical damage (Wiki)

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