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Will Apep’s Supremacy Bring Something New To Your Build In POE 3.24?

May 25, 2024

In this guide, we’ll talk about a forgotten unique item, Apep’s Supremacy. We’ll discuss the mechanics of this item and look at any synergies or interesting use cases they might have, especially given the many trend-changing or new unique items that have been added to the game recently.

Apep’s Supremacy is a unique shield introduced in Incursion League, located within Temple of Atzoatl, and is a combination of the predecessor unique Apep’s Slumber on Altar of Sacrifice, as well as Vial of Awakening.

This shield has unique modifiers that allow you to take physical damage from chaos damage instead of bleeding, while requiring you to be poisoned to benefit from its maximum resistance. This set of modifiers, along with Tainted Pact and other POE items, has some interesting potential.

This unique shield is exclusively dropped from a chest in Toxic Grove, a level 3 room in Temple of Atzoatl. Apep’s Slumber is a prerequisite to unlock it, and the other component, Vial of Awakening, can be dropped from the last boss of Temple.

Will Apep’s Supremacy Bring Something New To Your Build In POE 3.24?

Modifiers

Let’s first look at the modifiers on Apep’s Supremacy. We have a flat added damage modifier that adds (50-55) to (72-80) Chaos Damage. This is equivalent to a level 9 or 10 Added Chaos Damage Support.

Then there’s a very large flat energy shield modifier that adds 130 to 150 maximum energy shield. With a good base energy shield roll and 30% quality, you can actually get up to 280 energy shield from Apep’s Supremacy, which is pretty good. In addition, you also get 30% to 50% Energy Shield Recharge.

Chaos Damage From Bleeding

Now let's look at the special modifier on this shield that makes you take chaos damage instead of physical damage from bleeding.

Bleeding is a Damaging Ailment that deals physical damage over time, and is generally considered the most dangerous Damaging Ailment in the game. Bleeding deals 70% of the base damage of the blow that inflicted the ailment every second for five seconds, at least from the perspective of the monster that inflicted it on the player. But when the target is moving, the damage dealt is tripled to 210% per second.

Many characters will choose to use Soul of Ralakesh Pantheon Power to make Bleeding less dangerous. It essentially subverts the bleed mechanics so that it deals less damage to you when you move.

But now, Apep’s Supremacy will make you take Chaos damage instead of physical damage whenever you have Bleeding. The immediate synergy here is Chaos Inoculation Keystone, which sets your maximum health to 1 and makes you immune to Chaos damage.

By combining this Keystone with Apep’s Supremacy, you’ll be able to effectively ignore Bleeding. Sure, you may still be affected by Bleeding, but it won’t do any damage to you.

The modifiers on Apep’s Supremacy don’t just apply to Chaos Inoculation. In fact, it’s so strong that it can also be used on standard setups with capped Chaos Resistance. Because the vast majority of builds won’t have a lot of extra physical damage reduction to help mitigate damage from bleeding.

Apep’s Supremacy vs Soul Of Ralakesh

Next, let’s compare the modifiers for a character using Apep’s Supremacy to a character using Soul of Ralakesh Pantheon Power.

A character using Apep’s Supremacy takes extra damage from bleeding while moving. So they take 210% of the damage from hitting per second while moving. While stationary, they take 70% of the damage from hitting per second with Chaos Resistance at 75%. So they actually take 52.5% of the damage from hitting per second while moving, and only 17.5% of the damage from hitting per second while stationary.

POE 3.24 Soul Of Ralakesh

Meanwhile, a character with Soul of Ralakesh doesn’t take the extra damage from bleeding while moving, and they take 25% less damage from bleeding while moving. So in this comparison, they’re actually taking 52.5% of the damage dealt per second while moving, and 70% of the damage dealt per second while stationary.

You can see that a character using Apep’s Supremacy with Chaos Resistance capped takes the same amount of bleeding damage as a character using Soul of Ralakesh while moving. But they take much less damage while stationary.

But one thing to note here is that Soul of Ralakesh reduces all physical damage you take by 25% while moving, not just bleeding. So it can be used to protect against physical damage from other sources as well.

Something else that might be useful is that the modifier on Apep’s Supremacy lets you take Chaos damage. But physical damage from bleeding is not actually a damage modifier taken. This interaction happens before damage modifiers taken are calculated. This means that technically, you can still shift that portion of damage to another damage type.

Slow Down The Expiry Time Of Poison

Now, there’s another potential use case for this modifier, and it takes advantage of another unique item, Tainted Pact Amulet.

Before discussing this synergy, however, we should first look at the other modifiers on Apep’s Supremacy plus the 25% Poison Chance. This modifier will give all incoming physical or chaos damage a chance to poison you.

The added Max Resistance modifier will increase all resistances, including Chaos Resistance, as long as you are poisoned. Meanwhile, Poison Expiry Rate modifier will effectively double the duration of poisons on you by slowing down the expiry time by 50%.

This differs from Poison or Ailment Duration modifiers, which are technically a multiplier of the poison duration, but do not actually increase the duration of the poison. This modifier stacks with other sources of slow expiry rate effects, up to a maximum of 75% slower expiry rate.

Tainted Pact Amulet

Now it’s time to discuss the aforementioned Tainted Pact. This unique amulet will make chaos damage heal you over time while leeching life.

Poison itself deals chaos damage over time and bleeds will also make you take chaos damage over time instead of physical damage. This is thanks to Apep’s Supremacy, and this combination of mechanics will allow you to potentially self-inflict ailment, which actually heals you instead of hurting you.

POE 3.24 Tainted Pact Amulet

Now the interesting thing about Tainted Pact is that the healing benefit gained from Chaos Damage over time is actually based on the damage mitigated, i.e. the damage you take from the source of Chaos Damage over time.

This creates an interesting balance after it’s been mitigated by things like Chaos Resistance. You want your Chaos Resistance to be high enough so that you don’t die immediately from Chaos Strike Damage, but low enough so that you benefit from the healing over time from Chaos Damage.

However, using Tainted Pact does have one very important prerequisite. For the healing to work, you must keep leeching life until unreserved life fills up. You will need a way to maintain life leech.

You can get this effect from some non-Ascendancy mechanics. For example, the Immortal Ambition Keystone can grant this modifier. To keep you from ever reaching full health, you can also use Petrified Blood and make sure you don’t have 50% or more of your life remaining so that the life leech effect isn’t removed at 50% of the maximum recoverable amount of life.

Divine Flesh

Finally, I’ll mention Divine Flesh because you might want to use this Keystone with Apep’s Supremacy.

But if you plan on playing a build with a capped Chaos Resistance, I recommend only using Tainted Pact and Divine Flesh in this setup. Because this Keystone turns 50% of elemental damage into chaos damage.

If you choose lower chaos resistance to ensure you get a lot of healing over time from chaos damage, you will inevitably die from the upcoming elemental blows. But without Tainted Pact, using this Keystone with Apep’s Supremacy and focusing on scaling your chaos resistance and other means of chaos damage mitigation is a powerful combination.

POE 3.24 Divine Flesh

Is Apep’s Supremacy Still Worth Using?

So why isn’t Apep’s Supremacy used more often? Honestly, I think this shield is seriously underrated right now.

But that being said, it has competitors like Saffell’s Frame, which provides an extra 1% max resistance compared to Apep’s Supremacy and doesn’t require prerequisites like Poison.

In fact, the need for Poison prerequisite is the biggest downside to this shield. Because it requires an investment elsewhere to really be effective and also makes it less reliable as a defensive mechanic.

So if you’re using a shield and taking advantage of other synergistic mechanics at the same time, it makes sense to really lean into this mechanic.

That’s it for our in-depth discussion of all the mechanics of Apep’s Supremacy. Hopefully, this guide will shed some new light on this for you!

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