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A Discussion On An Extremely Underused Unique Body Armour In POE 3.21 - Doppelgänger Guise

May 27, 2023

We’re going to be talking a bit about the Doppelgänger Guise, which is a unique body armor in POE 3.21.

This unique item is Maven’s exclusive drop. It has about a 2% drop rate, so it’s quite rare. You’re going to need some good fortune to pick this one up if you’re playing SSF

Doppelgänger Guise

This body armor has a few special mods on it. It grants you a new skill called Unhinge. Then there’s a few mods here that have prerequisites that you need to meet.

The first mod is “40 to 60% more Critical Strike chance while insane,” and also “Enemies killed by your hits are destroyed while insane”. And then, we have the “30 to 40% less Physical and Chaos Damage taken while sane” and “Regenerate 10% of Life over one second when hit while sane.

The way this works is the skill that you get from this item, the Unhinged skill. It’s basically like a Toggle, which is an instant skill and has a five second cooldown. And as a baseline, while you’re wearing this body armor, you’re considered being sane and then you can use this skill to toggle the Unhinged skill and you become insane. And then, of course, you can use it again after that to go back to sane and so on and so forth.

The actual skill itself doesn’t provide any additional upsides or downsides. It’s basically just a toggle. So, you can choose which of these modifiers are active on you at any time.

A Discussion On An Extremely Underused Unique Body Armour In POE 3.21 - Doppelgänger Guise

While Sane Mods

The more Critical Strike chance and corpse denial are really strong mods, but the main use case for this body armor is going to be the defensive properties, the two While Sane Modifiers.

These are both really strong. The “30 to 40 percent less Physical and Chaos Damage taken” is just crazy. This applies to all Physical and Chaos Damage you take even damage over time. So, stuff like Bleeding, Corrupted Blood, Poison and so on is going to be massively reduced by just this one modifier. What I mean is 40% less is such a huge modifier when you think about it with crazy amounts of damage reduction. 

And then is the “regenerate 10% of Life over one second when hit” mod. That one is an incredible source of recovery and it’s really useful, especially good for those builds that don’t really have very good recovery. As long as you’re occasionally getting hit or whenever you do get hit and take a bit of damage, you’re just going to recover it back up again with this regeneration mod. So, that’s really nice.

Forbidden Rite & Boneshatter 

This item has really good synergy with both Forbidden Rite and Boneshatter where both of these skills actually deal damage to you while you use them.

That damage is considered being a hit. So, Forbidden Rite deals Chaos Damage to you and Boneshatter deals Physical Damage to you. And that self-damage is going to be mitigated by the less damage taken modifier. Because the damage was the hit, you’re going to be able to recover 10% of Life over one second every time you use those skills. That’s really great synergy there.

Self Damage Items 

There are some unique items that have a similar effect to the Eye of Innocence amulet, which would take 100% Fire Damage to you whenever you ignite an enemy. 

There’s the Scold’s Bridle helmet that will hit you for Physical Damage whenever you use a skill. The Heartbound Loop ring will also hit you for some Physical Damage whenever one of your minions dies. And the Storm Secret ring that will deal a hit of lightning damage to you whenever the Herald of Thunder strikes an enemy. 

POE Scold’s Bridle

There’s a few others like this, too. But these could be used in combination with the Doppelgänger Guise to enable some really good recovery that doesn’t rely on actually being hit by an enemy.

Divine Flesh 

Then, there’s the crazy synergy with Divine Flesh too where half of all the incoming Elemental Damage that you take is actually taken as Chaos Damage instead.

So, all of those big chunky elemental hits that are coming in and going to have their damage split in half and half will be taken as chaos. And then, that half is going to be mitigated by that massive less damage taken modifier, which is really strong.

But it’s not just hits. Because Divine Flesh also works for damage over time. That means all of those pesky elemental dots the ground effects in the Shaper and Maven boss, fights, for example, or ignites and things like that. All of that damage over time is going to be split, with half of it taken as chaos. And once again, that’s going to be largely reduced by that less chaos damage taken modifier.

POE Divine Flesh

Armour/ES Masteries

Of course, if you’re using flesh, you can also make great use of the two new armor and Energy Shield Masteries. The “10% of physical damage taken as chaos damage that works from hits” is really strong to further mitigate that damage. And the “10% of armour applying to chaos damage once again for hits” is really strong as well if you’re stacking a bit of armor.

Use Cases

Both of those are great, but actually I think one of the best use cases for the Doppelgänger Guise is actually when you lack armor and your lack of physical damage reduction. And you’re just going to be able to use this body armor in combination with some additional physical damage reduction mods, like a shield mod or the reduction that you get from Endurance Charges.

This means that you may even be able to completely forego using Determination or anything like that. Because with this kind of setup, you’re going to be so strong against those really dangerous physical dots like Bleeding. 

I actually remember a hardcore build. The Octavian played a while back and it was a self-cast Forbidden Rite Occultist that used this body armor to help mitigate the Forbidden Rite self-damage. But it also just didn’t use anything like Determination and it got by just fine without it thanks to the less damage taken mod on this unique.

Popularity

And I’m really surprised at the relatively low popularity of the Doppelgänger Guise in this league. In Softcore Trade Crucible, only 0.3 of characters are using it and you could make the argument that players’ value defenses a little less than in hardcore. 

But even when we look at Hardcore Trade Crucible, this is even lower, with just a 0.1 percent representation of characters using the Doppelgänger Guise. 

Doppelgänger VS Fourth Vow 

I think in a lot of ways, the Doppelgänger Guise has some similarities with the new body armor and the new unique body armor in this patch, the Fourth Vow.

But the Fourth Vow is significantly more popular in both leagues, with two percent of players using it in Softcore Trade Crucible versus the 0.3% using the Doppelgänger Guise. And in HC Trade, the difference is far greater with six percent of players using the Fourth Vow compared to the 0.1 percent using the Doppelgänger Guise.

POE Fourth Vow

Conclusion 

Overall, I really feel this unique body armor, the Doppelgänger Guise is very underrated right now, and it’s significantly easier to slot into a build than the Fourth Vow is as it doesn’t really need any kind of armor scaling to really benefit from it. You can just slot this in there and you’re going to have that massive less damage taken modifier on both physical and chaos. If you don’t have this item yet, I suggest you use your POE Currency to purchase one now.

And as I said earlier, that’s going to really help you out if you don’t have any other kind of additional way to mitigate Physical Damage. And a lot of builds do struggle with that. I mean, you do have a lot of builds where you’re either not running Determination or you are running Determination. 

But you don’t have very much armor scaling, so your armor is not very effective and this less damage taken modifier is really going to help you out and it’s going to cut a massive chunk off of that damage taken as physical. So, I am unsure as to why this is not used very much.

Finally, I want to talk about a digression. Path of Exile’s serious rival, Diablo 4, is about to be released. If you also want to dominate Diablo 4, then you’d better buy Diablo 4 Gold as you did before playing each new POE expansion.

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