Why the "You need more health" paradigm is bad

One thing I keep reading here over and over is that any high level build is only viable if it has lots and LOTS of health (or ES if CI). Many builds have passives allocated almost entirely to health nodes, and little else.

I think that's bad, actually, and a bad way to see the game.

Imagine a very, VERY bad player. One that just walks, then stands there spamming a single skill over and over, without paying attention to what's going on. What would that player need to avoid being one-shot everywhere? Many things, but a lot of health would be fundamental in his/her survival.

Now imagine a very, VERY good player. One that has amazing field awareness, that has great knowledge about every map, that can use mobility skills very well, and thus who can avoid almost all enemy attacks. That player needs very little health, because he/she can use skill to avoid taking damage in the first place.

It would be expected, then, that most players would begin with builds that use a lot of health, and, as they become more skilled, they can leave behind the crutch that is having a lot of life and instead use those resources (passive points, mods in gear) for other things.

It doesn't look like that's what people are doing, though. It looks like people are eternally stuck relying on the crutch, and never interested in becoming better so they actually don't need all that health to win.

I think that point of view is only holding people back.

I would love to see a race in which all characters have CI and EB. THEN we would see people trying to become skilled.

This borders on comparing play styles and you can now get in trouble if you start putting down people based on their play style.

In such, the "you need more health" idea isn't "bad". It's good advice for players with a certain play style. You might think it would be better to advice them to "learn to play better", but that's really not your call.

I disagree. As players become 'better' and more experienced, they will tend to drop life nodes to pick up more damage. Do all players do this once they become better? No.

Why is this? In my personal experiences, if I'm satisfied with my kill speed, even if I know it can be increased, I will stick with a slightly higher life pool simply because sometimes I do just want to stand there, be 'lazy', and spam skills and be able to tank some hits.

But that's part of the game. If you want kill speed, you may have to decrease your survivability and be a little more active as far as avoiding enemy attacks.

In the end, grabbing a ton of life is a smart route to go as a beginner until you hone your abilities to avoid high damage situations. There's nothing wrong with that, simply a different play style.

E: also, telling someone who is struggling to "grab more health" is an easy, yet usually effective, resolution. It's a whole lot easier than trying to explain how to avoid situations, manually dodge attacks, and to not just sit there and take damage.

It might be different when lockstep is in the full game, maybe we'll see the trend you're looking for. With desync, however, you have to be able to take a hit and survive no matter how skilled you are. And worst case hits in poe are BIG when you can be cursed and shocked and the monsters can crit. More health always equals less chance to get one shot.

You dont need more health. Play SC. I have a blast sometimes as super glassy, pure DPS only life is what game gives free. One shot by everything but whatever its sc. PPL chose more health though most of time or just balanced toon to conquer the game.

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Erasculio wrote:

It doesn't look like that's what people are doing, though. It looks like people are eternally stuck relying on the crutch, and never interested in becoming better so they actually don't need all that health to win.

So what?

Consider the possibility that a great many players are not playing this game in order to feel skillful. Consider further that some players greatly dislike losing experience upon death rather than viewing it as a challenge to overcome.

I am one such player, possibly an extreme case, though I suspect it is common.

I play this game to relax, not for an adrenaline pumping exercise in skillful play, not to climb ladders showing I'm better than others, not for the sake of cunningly interweaving multiple skills with awesome manual timing to achieve stupendous results, and not for the boss battles either.

I play to relax while I slaughter hordes of enemies that follow simple attack patterns, regularly receiving rewards in the form of leveling up or finding new items to use, and find a lot of fun in creating effective one-button builds. To me the best part of the game, by far, and the one I have most fun trying to optimize, is the passive skill tree. Optimizing it for the best damage I can get while survival is pretty much assured even when I'm not playing optimally.

It makes for a nice breather from the games I truly enjoy, deep strategy games like Europa Universalis IV, Crusader Kings II, or Dominions IV.

I'll start experimenting with characters that have low life or ES the moment I no longer take an xp loss when I commit a small mistake or are distracted during combat while playing such a character and, until then, I'll leave the joys of playing such builds to the players who consider skill in Path of Exile to be important to their enjoyment of the game. :-)

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Pi2rEpsilon wrote:

Consider the possibility that a great many players are not playing this game in order to feel skillful. Consider further that some players greatly dislike losing experience upon death rather than viewing it as a challenge to overcome

Fine by me. I'm not bothered by the idea that people who want a more relaxed playstyle would prefer to go with more health.

What I am bothered with is the opposite idea - that going with a lot of health is the ONLY way.

Which is pretty much what is said all over the place here. We get a lot of people patting themselves on their back for making "amazing" builds that are basically 200% increased maximum life and nothing else, while ignoring how that's not really skill - skill is playing well so you don't need much life to begin with.

To point out 1 thing, you probably play SC right? (Dont get me wrong I mess around alot in SC myself) Keep in mind that a lot of players play HC and there you need a lot of health. I mean how many times in Races even now the 1m flashback HC, players die even with 200+% life and capped res. (Top 3 actually died at some point all lvl 90+). So basically my point is even with that much Life and Res you can still easily die if you aren't careful and they still kill even unique bosses/exiles in about a few seconds. So explain me why would anyone go for more dmg to kill mobs in 2-3 seconds instead of 4-5 seconds while risking to die in HC or even just lose 10% exp in SC on lvl 90+ is pretty painful. The result is if you go full dmg and die like once every 10-15 maps you don't even make any progress when you start getting closer to lvl 100.

Why you worry about how others play? If they pump up 8000 life so be it. If they want to play glass so be it. Since we all play a different game anyway being online game with drastically different connects and parts between I don't worry about it.

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Aim_Deep wrote:

Why you worry about how others play?

Because GGG does: They use these other players as yardsticks to balance the monster damage around. So unless you want to die fairly regularly to one-shots, you have to get your life levels up as high as possible. The one-shot mechanics is the single most annoying aspect of POE to me (yes, including desync, because without such one-shots, desync wouldn't often have such catastrophic consequences).

This is a vicious cycle only GGG could break, but they haven't...