Ghostwrithe + Chaos Innoculation Works

Ghostwrithe has been my new favorite unique since it dropped for me in act 1. The chest converts 50% of your life to energy shield. At first glance, it allows for an easy way to get large amounts of base ES at the "cost" of life. In reality, you can scale your hit pool much higher by effectively applying %ES mods to life at 50% effectiveness.

The downsides of using ghostwrithe aside from taking a chest slot is: low stun threshold, low ailment threshold, and chaos damage. Stun can be solved on the tree, or abused with energy barrier for perma recharge. The only really dangerous ailment is freeze which can be mitigated with a charm. Chaos damage is the real annoying part with how much chaos damage there is in maps and how hard it is to get chaos res. Ghostwrithe has some built in chaos res, but even with capped chaos res, you are still really vulnerable with only ES. If only you could run CI to completely solve chaos damage.

Turns out you can. With POE2's new conversion rules, CI's max life modifier applies after Ghostwrithe's conversion. Any flat life modifiers you get from levels, strength, or gear still gets converted to ES. Now you can run CI while still benefitting from life mods on gear.

I have about 120% ES on the tree and even with pretty bad es/ev gear, I have about 3.5k ES. Before CI, I have about 1.1k life, so Ghostwrithe is giving a flat 1.1k ES before modifiers. I'm also using Eternal Youth, instant flask recov belt, and pathfinder for sustain, letting me tank through all non-one-shots. Its pretty good through early maps, but I imagine that this can continue to scale well into later endgame with better gear.

Better gear includes a corrupted Ghostwrithe with up to 61% life to ES corruption. Depending on how much ES you have on other gear, this is up to 20% more ES.