Lets talk about Armour, Energy Shield, and Evasion.

Crit evasion is a great idea.

Also you can acquire 4-500 eshield within a reasonable amount of time, so I don't feel that's a problem.

How? At what level?

Repeating others in that Evasion must be buffed somehow (either critical damage reduction or some new mechanic added to it)
I wanted melee ranger so bad but it dies just too easily later >.<

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Slicer wrote:

How? At what level?

Well using all the level 60 items - helmet, body armour, gloves, boots, and shield - base ES from those items adds up to 489. That's with all white, 0% quality items.

Now if you had +100% ES on the body armour and +50% ES on the helm (not terribly hard to do), that's 701. +20% quality on all gives you 841. Finally the +12% class bonus if you're a witch gets it to 942.
Passives would obviously push this even higher.

Ah. That actually sounds nice, even if it requires a whole lot of particular specing to make it work. I can live with that. Curious to know how it does against level-equivalent enemies, though.

yeah I fear that on merci even 1000 ES will land you as a pink smudge on the sands of wraeclast.

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zeto wrote:

yeah I fear that on merci even 1000 ES will land you as a pink smudge on the sands of wraeclast.

Not if you've got ten minions and frostwalls tanking for you.

I definitely think that classes could use some more blurring of the armor types to help smooth out some of the major deficiencies. I brought this up in my passive tree theory thread in the alpha forums.

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Malice wrote:

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zeto wrote:

yeah I fear that on merci even 1000 ES will land you as a pink smudge on the sands of wraeclast.

Not if you've got ten minions and frostwalls tanking for you.

Yeah that jedi mindtrickery doesn't work on me :P Fact is, eventually you'll get into a situation where you are obliterated... a situation not possible with armored classes.

Staying 100% ranged and safe with no armor or evasion in this game just doesn't seem possible to pull off for 70-80 levels worth of play.

The thing is, if you spec your whole build to ES and it doesn't really help you survive, why do it? Put the points into minion tanking and cast speed instead. It's just annoying having to spend so many points to turn a build from "glass cannon" into "a cannon that does a lot less damage and is made of slightly more durable glass". If I can't keep the enemies off me, I'm going to get overwhelmed a lot more often, and a few mobs and a few crits into one of those overwhelms, that eshield is toast and my HC character is suddenly not so HC anymore.