Chaos Inoculation

Chaos Inoculation (often referred to as CI) is a Keystone passive skill that grants immunity to chaos damage, but sets maximum life to 1.

Although the character must survive entirely on energy shield instead of life, immunity to chaos damage can be a significant advantage.

Interactions

The chance and duration of both being stunned and receiving an elemental status ailments is based on your base life before CI takes effect. Maximum Life modifiers such as increased maximum Life, reduced maximum Life, etc. apply to the life before CI is applied. Since this base life value is then overwritten by CI, the only advantage life modifiers provide to a CI character is the reduction on stun and status ailment.

Chaos Inoculation no longer grants immunity degeneration effect of Blood Rage while retaining other benefits of the skill as of 2.0.0 with the Blood Rage degeneration damage type changing to physical.

Low life conditions will never trigger while CI is enabled. Effects such as Pain Attunement and On Low Life mods on gear will not activate. For these effects, you must have 50% or less of your current maximum life. Chaos Inoculation sets your maximum life to 1.

Full life conditions will always trigger because you are always at 100% of 1 life.

Interaction with life reduction

Life reductions apply before CI which resets life to 1. For example from Ephemeral Edge.

Blood magic

When linked with Arrogance Support, affected skills cannot be cast, even if it is an aura which would drain a relative amount of mana/health.

Chaos resistance reduction/penetration

Since CI grants a flat-out immunity to chaos damage, effects that reduce or penetrate chaos resistance (i.e. Occultist's Void Beacon) have no effect against CI.

CI builds

It is generally best to wait until you have high energy shield before taking CI because it's much easier to survive on life at lower levels. Don't be afraid to take life passive skills for survivability while leveling up, since you can remove them later.

Characters with CI are usually more susceptible to stun and status ailments because of their low base life. Rather than taking otherwise useless life nodes as described above, Stun can be mitigated by increasing the Stun Recovery stat with items and passives or unique items such as Eye of Chayula, Skyforth, and Valyrium. Status ailments can be reduced with high elemental resistances, Elementalist's Elemancer perk with at least 3 golems, or unique items such as Auxium or Dream Fragments.

Chaos Inoculation works well with some other keystone passives, such as:

• Ghost Reaver converts life gained from life leech into energy shield. Vaal Pact only disables any regeneration granted from passives that's converted by Zealot's Oath as of 3.0.0

• Zealot's Oath applies life regeneration to energy shield. Regen effects that are based on maximum life become based on maximum ES. Note that "regeneration" does not include life flasks, as they are just "Recovery".

Location

Chaos Inoculation is located on the northeast edge of the skill tree.

Related unique items

• Midnight Bargain

• Replica Midnight Bargain