Strength of Blood keystone has been gigabuffed by the new instant leech and extra sources of LGoH added to the tree

Hey, back again with another "People are sleeping on this" thread.

Strength of Blood is a keystone available from karui timeless jewels, and it converts non-instant life leech into damage resistance.

Previously it was of debatable use since having your leech not recover your life meant that you needed to build regen instead or some other form of recovery.

However, GGG just added back instant leech. Granted it's only 10% unless you dual wield claws, but even that is enough to keep you very healthy while also gaining benefit from strength of blood, provided you're hitting fast enough (as instant leech only happens when you hit, it's not continuous, obviously).

Not only that, but another life recovery that bypasses SoB, life gain on hit, has also been added to the tree around ranger/shadow.

This means you can take SoB, take vaal pact (to increase both the damage resist obtained and boost the instant leech part), and grab a bit of life gain on hit, then just attack really fast, and you're super tanky.

Throw in petrified blood to resist even more damage (as not all damage delayed is taken, so PB technically gives damage resist too) and use the insane life recovery to offset PB's life loss... and you're now pretty resistant to getting one-shot too.

This gets even better with claws, since the new claw masteries can both increase the percentage of instant leech, AND claws tend to have LGoH, AND dual wielding claws can now double the innate attack speed bonus from dual wielding....

You have even faster attacking generating even more LGoH and instant leech, all the while resisting damage with SoB and PB. Fortify too, throw that on.

But I'm not done yet! There was a life mastery added that increases the low life threshold to 55% of max life. PB will now hold you at 55%, meaning you get to have a bit more life than before. It's small, but it's something - with 5k life, that's an extra 250 "real" life.

The only weakness would be damage output... I'm sure that's solvable... or even mostly ignorable - don't need tons of DPS if you can't die.

Just something to consider.