What Iron Reflexes should be

I will take the opportunity to educate you lot once again in the basics of PoE. Roughly following the design phases of the game. Some stuff is guessing work and only the developers can explain and tell us what choices they wanted to make or why. I am aware of some design choices they made on how they want it to work, some of these I think are badly executed and merit some rework, the biggest one is crit and accuracy.

Ozgwald's magnificent Starters guide to Path of Exile:

Each character in PoE is made up out of 3 elements. Three elements which get boosted as they level up. Life, Evasion and mana.

There are 3 colors or 3 nodes on the passive tree. Strength (RED) which gives life, dexterity (GREEN) which gives evasion and intelligence (BLUE) that provides mana.

The color theme is the first thing to make GGG hearts tick and they decide on aliging elements to it. RED will be fire, GREEN will be cold and BLUE will be lightning. Unfortunately both lightning and cold have far more in common with blue than with green and thus we have piety in act 3 stepping on blue circles instead of green circles.

Colors and elements, what a mix up, lets start the clean up:


The next issue is the basis of life, evasion and mana. Mana is the only one that does not generate defense, directly. For this something gets added and we get energy shield, it also becomes the wizard and magic combined in intelligence. Strength gets associated with melee damage and receives a melee physical dmg boost, while dexterity becomes ranged and get accuracy. The latter is a new thing that will tie in with evasion. There is a lot going wrong here.

Intelligence: Mana and Energy Shield. It sets-off from strength by making intelligence give %es and making an alien system to life. This is successfully achieved by the gear in the game that give large boosts of raw ES. ES does not protect you from chaos damage unless you have CI. Over-time the alien system is trashed, giving it life regen instead of good passive regen and of course life leech. Chaos resistance is added and chaos damage without this becomes a burden on hybrid builds. Damage comes in the form of crits and no misses.

Strength: The life and melee corner. Life regen, life leech all is in this corner. To mitigate damage elemental resistance is more abundant, you find here elemental adaption and also the strongest armour nodes. The melee physical is an odd-ball directly pushing strength users in one direction. Support gems and a keynode add some flavor to strength, such that the build diversity of the game is kept. Damage comes from large flat hits.

Dexterity: Evasion never sets of as a plausible defense and immediately relies on life. Normal slow regeneration doesn't work due to the nature of evasion and short big boosts work the best, Flasks come to mind but over-time no new flask tiers get added and the system deemed unreliable due insanely high hits. Due to 0 mitigation evasion builds in fact rely more on life than life builds themselves. Accuracy is introduced, which is an odd system related to evasion and which causes offensive gear to become less useful (less damage) while you progress through the game. Damage comes from attack speed, though the accuracy system best scales with crit and crit damage and a mediocre amount of accuracy, due to the nature of the system.

The issues of the tri-factor, mistakes at the core resonating throughout the game:



and I am done, maybe will finsish it someday, still got to discuss damage systems, go to the tree lay-out melee vs ranged, build diversity how there are conflicts between these systems etc. etc.

Finally at the end you get at the keynodes like IR. Anyways I wrote what should be done about it in the other topic (link), but really even that suggestion is something questionable after a long list of other changes at the core are needed.