How much %Armor is too much / counter-productive?

High %Armour could work well for a build that uses hybrid defence (armour/ES or armour/eva). Instead of stacking your armour to the point of diminishing returns, it lets you reach a moderate amount of armour easily while having plenty of room left for your other defence. This is particularly relevant for ES-based characters, as their devotion to ES gear naturally leaves them with poor mitigation. Of course, you probably still don't want to take pure armour nodes, but hybrid nodes are good value: the new Duelist nodes are especially strong if you're making a genuine armour/eva hybrid.

I would like to see a skill that eats Endurance charges in order to make yourself temporarily highly resistant to the elements (or one element at a time, although the fire version could be problematic with Righteous Fire), but make it so that it overwrites Immortal Call. That way, if you wanted to use both you'd have to cast them intelligently instead of relying on trigger gems, and there'd be an incentive to reduce your reliance on IC so that you can use the elemental version more.

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Incompetent wrote:

High %Armour could work well for a build that uses hybrid defence (armour/ES or armour/eva). Instead of stacking your armour to the point of diminishing returns, it lets you reach a moderate amount of armour easily while having plenty of room left for your other defence. This is particularly relevant for ES-based characters, as their devotion to ES gear naturally leaves them with poor mitigation. Of course, you probably still don't want to take pure armour nodes, but hybrid nodes are good value: the new Duelist nodes are especially strong if you're making a genuine armour/eva hybrid.

I would like to see a skill that eats Endurance charges in order to make yourself temporarily highly resistant to the elements (or one element at a time, although the fire version could be problematic with Righteous Fire), but make it so that it overwrites Immortal Call. That way, if you wanted to use both you'd have to cast them intelligently instead of relying on trigger gems, and there'd be an incentive to reduce your reliance on IC so that you can use the elemental version more.

I was always under the impression that Armor+ES is the absolute worst combo in the game? I have never made a "classic" melee templar due to this.

Not sure if my train of thought is correct but...

...you enter combat. ES needs time to replenish, so when ES is down - that "life" wont come back before after combat in most cases. Unless you start running around to regen it (which makes for extremely tedious gameplay) in a fight.

Life flask heals life, but not ES. So why not just go pure armor+life?

I never saw a single - and I really mean not ONE - advantage of Armor+ES. It seems:

1: Skill intensive
2: Investment in ES can not be healed
3: Utterly horrible and tedious for melee to run around and regen ES

If I'm wrong tell me. Because I never really tested it. But on paper it seems to me that armor+es is by far the worst hybrid survival build for a melee class out there.

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Ouroboros226 wrote:

I was always under the impression that Armor+ES is the absolute worst combo in the game? I have never made a "classic" melee templar due to this.

Aegis Aurora disagrees.
But yeah, other than this "unique mechanic" scenario, stacking those two defenses doesn't make too much sense.

Life based EB witches are fine with it. They usually explore the templar area, so str requirements and armor nodes are not a problem. Armor/AA work good together.

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torturo wrote:

Life based EB witches are fine with it. They usually explore the templar area, so str requirements and armor nodes are not a problem. Armor/AA work good together.

Still doesn't say anything about "standard" life + ES builds.

Though I think it would be interesting to use that new unique belt and a heavy investment in ES reduction to try to make it viable. You could bring the ES cooldown to 3 seconds easily - enough to ensure you're fully charged between packs at least.

Got nothing to say about hybrid ev/ar/es non EB builds in general. They don't work good. Nor it's the point of the discussion.

Thing with the left side of the skill tree and armor nodes is that there is also plenty of health nodes nearby and more importantly % health regen nodes.

High health and health regen is imo one of the best all around defenses in game.

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Ouroboros226 wrote:

I was always under the impression that Armor+ES is the absolute worst combo in the game? I have never made a "classic" melee templar due to this.

Do you mean Armour+ES+life? The issue here seems to be more that ES+life is difficult, not the Armour+ES part.

If you're an ES character, I think it's a good idea to have some kind of mitigation, even if it's just a Grace aura or something. ES+Eva is probably more efficient (given low amounts of mitigation), but depending on your build it might not be an option. As a typical melee character I don't think you can rely on ES recharge either way, so you will need Zealot's Oath and/or Ghost Reaver whatever you do.

The theory behind ES+life (discounting special mechanics like Aegis Aurora) is that you have the highest total hitpoints of any character, so you can survive a big burst of damage as long as you start out healthy. The disadvantage of course is that your recovery of hitpoints is less efficient due to the split resources, so you can be worn down by damage spread over a long period.

The ES is meant to be your 'working' HP pool and the life is for emergencies. So you would use ZO/GR for steady ES regain in combat, but keep some life flasks for when you need to dip into the life pool. The main problem seems to be dealing with chaos damage.

What doesn't work is playing a life build and then casually throwing some ES on top (again, assuming you don't have Aegis Aurora). A thin sheen of ES is indeed useless without the relevant passives.

IMO you shouldn't have any armor. It's a wasted passive and or gear slot when a cloak of flame has more armor than 20,000 armor. Until Armor is buffed you're much better off relying of deferment in coil, flame. Immunity in IC. Or just stack a ton of EHP in ES or health or health mana like Cloak of definace does for you.

I face tank trio no armor I use carcass jack. 4750 life and cant recall last time i died to physical. Not since I started using a CWDT setup for sure.