What am I doing wrong? Rory's Energy Shield's Bathwater

When I see the arguments behind upcoming changes to 3.0, I get confused. The kernel of the argument made by Rory is:

"

Rory wrote:

We've seen characters reaching over 25,000 Energy Shield while still having the damage output to sufficiently complete all of the content in the game, compared with the 9,000 Life that a very heavily invested Life character with perfect items could reach.

In addition, the Vaal Pact, Ghost Reaver and Zealot's Oath keystones could be used to compensate for any situation where the build found itself lacking, with the small exception of Life Flasks.

There are 2 things I do not understand.

#1. I have pretty mediocre gear in general, and am not a top player for sure, but on one of my chars I have a little bit more than 9k life. I am sure by changing things around a bit I could easily reach 10k, but have chosen to invest in 10 charges instead. My items are FAR from perfect. But it seems that others should get more than me easily. Then I have a CI character that has about 8k ES (staff-wielding) and a more traditional one with 12k ES. No doubt far from perfect gear, but still I have less than half of what Rory claims the best folk have, whereas my 9k life guy spent much less to get what Rory claims is about that which top life players have. How can Rory claim that the disbalance is so large when a mediocre player like me can get 9k-10k life but only 12k es? Should I really be able to get, analagously to my life guy, about 19-20k ES? I don't see how that's possible without spending 100x or more what I spent on my life guy. What am I missing?

#2. If Rory is right, the big problem seems to be the interplay between CI and VP. I've no doubt he's right. But if so, why shouldn't changes to CI and VP be enough? The global changes to ES surprise me, they seem to treat ES primarily as an alternative to life via CI instead of as one of the three main damage mitigators alongside of Evasion and Armour. By changing ES so greatly in addition to making (much needed) changes to VP and also to CI, won't this be casting away the baby with the bathwater?

well he compared a CI Rf char with a normal life based build...


and the rf builds only focus on es and ignore pretty much everything else...



so just wait... what they rly do in the beta, but with the current changes to CI or Es in general -> thes shifted the es meta to life meta...

Well the first problem is that you're comparing apples to firetrucks.

Well both are red so they are comparable! No, no they are not.

Your "mediocre gear" life build with 9-10k life is a RF with 90% of its passive points invested in life. If you were to build one of the lowlife Guardians RF, then yes you would likely hit 15-18k. I know I can hit 18.5k with gear I have stored based on Path of Building, and it's not especially expensive gear.

Try to hit 9k life on the right side of the tree when going crit based. Or 9k life as mostly any build that doesn't only take life nodes and wears a Kaoms for that matter.

My life based pathfinder is at 5.2k right now and I could maybe hit 6k if I changed a lot of gear and a few passives. Crit based ES builds on the right side though I'm at 9k easily and 12k+ if not going crit.

So yes the 20k ES is not standard, but neither is 9-10k life.