Dissolution of the Flesh

Dissolution of the Flesh
Crimson JewelRemoves all Energy Shield
Life that would be lost by taking Damage is instead Reserved
until you take no Damage to Life for 2 seconds
(20-30)% more Maximum Life"We awoke to a sudden dawn cresting through the mountains.
Each peak rose into searing fire, a massive roiling tide.
A great eye gazed upon us, and we became known - utterly."Place into an allocated Jewel Socket on the Passive Skill Tree. Right click to remove from the Socket.

Acquisition
Drop restricted
Drops from the Searing Exarch.Vendor Offer
16x Alchemy ShardMetadata
Item class: Jewel

Dissolution of the Flesh is a unique Crimson JewelCrimson JewelPlace into an allocated Jewel Socket on the Passive Skill Tree. Right click to remove from the Socket..

Mechanics

A character that reserves 100% or greater or their life will die. After Life becomes unreserved, your life does not replenish to full automatically; however, the missing life can still be reserved on top of.

Life that would be lost by taking Damage is instead Reserved until you take no damage to Life for 2 seconds is unaffected by any currently existing modifiers to Reservation Efficiency, as it is not a skill. Modifiers to Skill Effect Duration or Temporal Chains do not affect the 2 second recovery window for the same reason. The reservation is unaffected by Temporal Rift's rewind effect. Modifiers to Life Recovery Rate will have no effect on the reservation.

Damage from hits and degeneration will reserve life, but effects that cause you to lose or sacrifice life (such as Dark Pact or ) will not. Items and skills that hit the player (e.g. Forbidden Rite will continually reserve life, preventing the player from being able to unreserve their life.

It is generally advised to have several sources of damage avoidance (e.g. block, spell block, Elusive, evasion) or damage mitigation (e.g. Armour, Max Resistances, spell suppression) to mitigate the rate at which life is reserved and to increase the window between taking damage from consecutive hits. Ward also synergizes well with this playstyle, especially if using .

Dissolution of the Flesh has synergies with Eternal Youth and Petrified Blood, providing powerful build archetypes to an otherwise awkward mechanic.

Eternal Youth

Eternal Youth allows Life to recharge instead of Energy Shield, and as with Energy Shield recharge, any damage taken will cause it to be interrupted (unless one uses the keystone Wicked Ward). A character with Dissolution of the Flesh does not technically take damage, but reserves life equal to damage taken. This means that the Life Recharge that Eternal Youth provides is never interrupted, and the player recovers a significant amount of Life per second (33.3% by default). This value can be modified by modifiers to Energy Shield Recharge Rate. Although this Recharge serves no purpose defensively, it allows sustain of high Life Costs or Sacrificed Life, making it synergistic with Dark Pact, Lifetap, and Rathpith Globe.

Petrified Blood

Petrified Blood provides a buff that says When taking Damage from Hits, 40% of Life loss below half Life is Prevented, then (100-81)% of Life loss prevented this way is lost over 4 seconds. As the player will always be considered below half life due to PB, this effect will apply to the entirety of incoming hit damage. Effectively, the player will only take 60% of the hit's damage immediately as a reservation, then a percentage of the other 40% is spread out as life loss (not damage) over 4 seconds. As long as the player has no other Life reservations, the Life reservation from Dissolution of the Flesh starts from the player's maximum Life, even when using Petrified Blood, effectively increasing the total effective health pool of the character by spreading the damage over one and a half health bars.

Additionally, having enough sources of damage taken recouped as Life to fully counteract the life loss from the Petrified Blood effect will prevent the life loss from being able to kill the player other than reserving 100% of the player's Life, even when the actual Life value is at 1. For example, at 20/20, regular quality Petrified Blood will cause the player to take 76% of the 40% of the hit as life loss; a player would theoretically need at least 30.4% Life recoup in this scenario to counteract the loss. Modifiers to life recovery rate will affect the needed Recoup value.

Strength of Blood from a can also provide a significant boost to damage reduction, synergizing well with Vaal Pact from the Keystone or . As long as the player does not reserve over half of their life, Petrified Blood enables overleech, allowing consistent uptime of the damage reduction. Eternal Youth may be skipped if attempting this method, as it cuts the maximum total recovery from leech (and therefore the damage reduction) by half.

Version history

Version	Changes
3.17.0	Introduced to the game.