What is a “sustained Indigon” build? Indigon is a unique gem that scales Spell Damage based on the most recent (last 4 seconds) Mana consumed.
Since your skill costs scale with the total Mana you spend, Indigon’s mana costs also scale very quickly in POE The Forbidden Sanctum league. Naturally, this leads to a problem: we’re increasing mana cost beyond what we can spend for exactly two reasons. Either because we don’t have enough regeneration, or because the mana cost is greater than our max mana. Because of this, sometimes there is some uneven gain in Indigon. If these buffs are massively increased through Indigon, the damage you unleash can become very erratic. Also, since Indigon can increase Spell Damage by up to 2000%, it has very high potential.
So, what we need to do is to keep our Indigon builds within a certain cost as much as possible. If this could be achieved, then we could keep the Indigon buff on indefinitely, and continuously provide a large Spell Damage buff to amplify our damage.
If we ramp up Indigon’s cost quickly with Flameblast and Archmage, this will quickly deplete our available mana. If we switch to Scorching Ray and keep accelerating until we reach a convergence mana cost value of 494 Mana. If we want to cast 17 times in 4 seconds, we need to consume 8398 Mana. This means we need to restore more than 2000 Mana per second. If you check the PoB, you’ll see that Indigon does the most damage to builds by far. Specifically, if the Indigon falls, the structure will lose over 70% of its damage!
From the above problems, it is not difficult to see that there are actually many problems in the current version of Indigon, so I do not recommend novice players to contact Indigon builds too early.
What Are The Difficulties With Sustained Indigon Builds?
*The amount of investment required to expand and maintain mana precludes adequate investment in defense. Unless your mana regeneration is higher than the level required to sustained Indigo and proportional to your Life, this must be a double truth. If you don’t interrupt your damage as a form of damage mitigation, you won’t be able to use Mind over Matter. This problem will persist unless Grinding Gear Games lowers the damage requirement, adds more damage mitigation through mana/mana regeneration/Indigon synergies, or drastically reduces the investment of POE Currency to get the mana regeneration we need.
*You need very precise mana cost management abilities. All you need to do is try your best to control the extra mana cost. If you need to cast movement skills, you’ll need to use Lifetap to cast them with or without mana cost. If you need to cast Molten Shell you still need to use Lifetap. However, since the Lifetap cost itself is scaled by the Indigon, you’ll spend hundreds or even thousands of Life to cast these spells. Some might argue why not use something like a Battery Staff. That’s because, when you run out of Energy Shield and cast mana, it causes the mana to be in a different order. That way, you lose a bunch of damage uptime and have to start over and ramp back up.
*If we want to achieve sustained Indigon mana values, we still need to spend more time. That being said, for now, I’ve found that using Arcane Cloak along with a mana ramping skill (like Flameblast + Archmage) can speed things up. But that’s still not fast enough, and it’s not immediately ready to buy poe currency and take maximum damage.
Future Considerations For Sustained Indigon Builds
*During testing, I found that if we used Witch’s Nine Lives and self-damage in the form of Heartbound Loop, we would spawn a lot of Life, Mana, and Energy Shield Recoup. This means that our defenses will be greatly increased, and our damage will gradually increase over time. So, when we take Petrified Blood one step further in combination, not only do we have strong defenses, we also automatically receive mana regeneration proportional to the amount of self damage we take. Of course, if you combine Indigon with Wardloop, you will definitely get better results. But this will lead to a problem, that is, if there is too much investment in the self-damage and recoup loop, there will be little investment in Life, Armour, or damage scaling.
*If we use Battlemage’s Cry to increase Spell Damage, then Attack Damage will be hyper-buffed. This was used extensively in previous Occultist Replica Alberon’s Warpath Cyclone builds, where they stacked warcry effect and Spell Damage and Strength (converted to Spell Damage, then converted back to Attack Damage, then multiplied by the Chaos Damage from Replica Alberon’s which Warpath is scaled from Strength) deals massive damage. We could do something similar: scale Strength, add 1000% Spell Damage via Indigo, then scale it all back to Attack Damage. This works well with abilities like Doryani’s Touch, which struggle with damage scaling. suffers from the same defense issues, as well as uptime and ramp issues.
*Auto-casting perpetual Indigon engine now keeps the spell always on, so it’s always at max power, solving the ramping problem for us! This is probably one of the most promising concepts, but I’m not sure how to implement it.
In general, no matter what kind of builds you need to take a lot of effort or Divine Orbs to construct. I believe that if you insist on testing your own builds in all aspects like me, you will definitely be pleasantly surprised!
