Dark Pact

Dark Pact is a chaos spell that removes some life from one of your Skeleton minions near you or the targeted location to deal chaos damage in an area around it. This effect will chain to your other nearby skeletons. If you have no skeletons near you or the targeted location, it will sacrifice your own life to deal damage instead.

Skill Functions and Interactions
Life Removed: If self cast, Dark Pact will sacrifice 6% of the player's maximum life in a manner similar to spending life with the or the Blood Magic Keystone. Since this sacrificed life is not considered damage, it cannot be mitigated with chaos resistance and will not trigger. If 6% of maximum life cannot be removed (for example, maximum 1 life due to Chaos Inoculation) the spell will continue to function but with a smaller damage bonus.

Life Scaling: Dark Pact deals additional damage equal to the amount of life removed from the target of the spell. This means that Minion Life nodes and the will increase the damage dealt when cast on skeletons, while self-casting scales with the player's maximum life. Since the spell does not know whether a skeleton is in range until the moment of cast, the in-game tooltip will only consider the spell's base damage and any external sources of damage.

The totem will first attempt to target any skeleton in range. If none are found, the totem will sacrifice 6% of its own maximum life. This means that in order for a totem to cast on Skeletons effectively, the skeletons, totem, and enemy must all be in close proximity of one another. Totems that self-sacrifice will receive the more damage bonus.

Minion Instability: Dark Pact can be used to forcibly lower the life of your Skeleton minions to low life. Doing so will trigger the effect of the Keystone passive Minion Instability. Using can effectively speed up the rate at which skeleton life is removed, in order to trigger this effect faster.

Minion Supports: Despite having the minion tag, there are no minion specific support gems that impact Dark Pact. However, the Reanimator's and Summoner's mod found on helmets, as well as uniques that raise the level of socketed minion gems (,, , etc.) will increase the level of Dark Pact.

Chaining: Dark Pact will chain from one skeleton to other nearby skeletons the designated number of chains. Each Skeleton used to chain Dark Pact will suffer the 6% life sacrifice from this skill. Additional chains can be added to help cover a larger area or return a chain to a previously targeted Skeleton using, Ricochet from the Deadeye Ascendancy, or items such as. Note that Dark Pact is NOT a projectile and is not affected by projectile speed or other projectile modifiers, including the quality properties of. Also, note that it is impossible to chain to or from the player in any way using Dark Pact as the chaining property of Dark Pact only triggers with Skeletons.

Divine Shrine: As Dark Pact sacrifices life rather than deals damage to the player, being affected by a Divine Shrine will not prevent life loss.

Version history

 * Mana Cost at gem level 20 is now 13 (was 14).
 * Now has a radius of 26 (from 24).
 * Now deals 24 to 36 Chaos damage at gem level 1 (from 20 to 30) and 241 to 362 Chaos damage at gem level 20 (from 201 to 301).


 * Dark Pact cast using your life no longer has bonus radius.
 * The damage bonus has been reduced from 95% more damage with hits and ailments when using your life to 76% more damage.
 * Dark Pact now counts as being a Minion skill gem, and will thus interact with effects such as the one found on.


 * Dark Pact has been added to the game.
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