Let's talk about defense (ES, AR, EV)

First off. I would like to try and keep this thread AS CIVIL AS POSSIBLE. I know that this can be somewhat of a "hot button" issue for some. So, in saying that, let's keep discuss it a friendly manner.

I will say that I have not played a pure EV class. So someone else will have to post about their experiences on that.

I however have played both a mara during HC races, and my main is a lvl82 CI Crit Witch. This is her gear:

I only recently quit using a shield, and was in the process of looking for a high end tri-res ES belt. As well as a casting ring to finish the build.

All of my armour is some of the highest in game. The helm is AFAIK, and possibly the boots. Not sure about the gloves (which I found). I crafted both the helm, boots, and chest in about 3-4 weeks.

My skill tree is mainly offensive. I used to be defensive, until I managed to get my gear, and I have been slowly using regret orbs to ditch +mana and mana regen nodes. Now, I only have have 2 pure ES% nodes left. Arcane focus(?) which is 18% and the one leading up to it 8%. My INT is 360. After all is said and done, my ES pool is around 11k w/ my FP doing 8k.

I say all this to show, that before I managed to get this gear, it was still very easy for me to get killed by stuns/freeze. This was of course before I got my Dream Fragments ring.

What can do tons of dmg and kill me? It's funny. It's not bosses. Usually, it's the wimpiest enemies in the game. Skeleton archers and the burrowing crab things. Why? Stun and physical damage. from the crabs. And stacked lightning/physical from the archers. There are times when a pack of crabs (10) will pop up, and if there was a multiple projectile mod, thats a lot of fucking rocks they're shooting out their ass. At least I hope they're rocks :P. Anyways, these can stun me pretty quick, and as I watch my witch attempt to run away in fear of crabs (no, she's not a whore, I SWEAR!!!), and consistently get stun locked, the fear of death slowly creeps in. I've watched that 11k drop QUICK.

I can not use health potions, yes I can pop a granite, but that only lasts so long and helps so much.

Physical damage can be BRUTAL.

Second type of shameful death scenario. Lightning. Even with a semi-good resist, I had a lightning ring I would use if the map called for it, once that lightning stacks, that ES drains fast. Without anyway to replenish it.

With the mara, both of those I laughed at. Would run in and kill them all quick, since stun lock was really not an issue, as well as physical damage from those types of monsters. So what's easy for a mara, can be hard for a CI witch.

Do I think CI is OP. Maybe. That's because of two reasons.
1) We're missing an act (I'm thinking fire though).

2) There's currently only 1 unique ( I think) that has chaos resistance. Chris has said before that more will be added into the game.

Because of those 2 reasons, I hold off on my final saying about CI.

The one thing that I do want to make clear to people who complain about some players having insane amounts of ES. They're either doing two things, and neither of which should be punished.

1) Have GODLY TOP END FTW gear. Usually, these people, like myself, are high levels. We are not 60,70,75. We have played A LOT of hours and deserve to have top end gear if we put the effort into doing so. My gear is by no means average.

2) The player chose many +ES% nodes on their skill tree. This is what I did before I got my gear, but in order for me to do this, guess what. I had to sacrifice my DPS for it.

So, in terms of "that's too high of ES". The only ways are godly gear or a defensive build thru the tree. Is there an inherent problem with those?

I know I've kind of rambled, so I'll end it too the point. Honestly, as strong as ES is, it does have it's drawbacks. Mainly not being able to regen in battle, and taking the full brunt force of physical damage. It does also not become, what I define as "kick ass" until the player get's godly gear. And in this scenario, should the player not be kick ass?

I'm looking forward to testing how well ES hold up in PvP. I think this might help put more perspective on the topic.

For all those who mainly play AR and EV classes. I would really like to hear your opinions on this topic. What you like about/don't like about ES. And same for AR/EV.

Let's keep this thread civil folks.

Cheers

P.S. Just got back from a wedding, so there may be some typos and bad grammer.

I have ran two CI characters (freezing pulse/ethereal knives crit shadow and leap slam witch) and I have exactly similar experiences with CI. Shock, freeze, stun, physical damage and swarms of ranged monsters demolish me. Everything else is trivial.

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/52936

I think CI is the main problem. It shouldn't give 50% more ES. Just get rid of that, make it only give chaos immunity and 1 life. Then, rework energy shield on the passive tree. And put in some keystones and nodes to support the use of hybrid ES items. Even my leap slam melee witch couldn't utilize hybrid es/armor gear because it's too hard to find sufficient ES pool on it to run on. And if I weren't running CI, my life pool would be pitiful against chaos damage.

Oh, and avoid status/stun should be a stat near the Shadow, to compensate for CI nerf. Would be great honestly. Unsure why only the Ranger has access to it.

Rework ES on passive tree, add some more ES keystones, fix hybrid gear, remove 50% more ES on CI. I think that's the solution. Though I dunno how the devs feel on this and whether anything should change at all.

In your case Slayer, though, you have to admit you're an extreme case. I'm kind of surprise you got that gear so quickly, and the extreme case is something we need to plan for because once OB comes, eventually a majority of players will be geared like you.

But, for builds that aren't so min-maxy, using ES is a major pain. You can't viably do half/half ES/armor, ES/eva or ES/life. Though I did hear of someone with 1.7k ES and 3k life, that may be another extreme case of luck, or something, I don't know. But from a standard of "level this build up using commonly available gear" - ES/life, es/eva, and es/armor hybrids do not work. I've tried them.

- Iron reflexes needs to go. Turning evasion into armour should not be the fix for evasion.

- Hybrid armour needs a buff. There needs to be a joint +mod for an armour's base defence.

- Hybrid keystones need to be implemented. As it stands, you are forced to specialise in pure armour types in order to get the most out of keystones.

- As a pure evasion melee Shadow, evasion is a pain in the ass. If you get hit, you have to pop an instant flask or else you're dead next hit. You can't utilise the flask bonuses, because your life is almost always topped up, making it wear off. Meanwhile, CI classes are happy to fill those flask slots up with Diamond Flasks.

- Marauder keystones are overpowered, plain and simple. It lets them have all of the benefit and none of the opportunity cost.

The chest was complete luck. Thru and thru.

Between the boots and helm were probably 1000 alts and maybe 25-30 scouring, and 25-30 regals. With of course 3 exalts each and 2 divines on the helm.

I know this is an extreme case in terms of a time window, but I also play far more than your average player.

You may be right with the 50% ES needing to be eliminated. I've never considered that possibility. But of course, the issue that comes into play is I needed that extra bit when I took it, but now I don't since I have great gear. I really don't know how it would play in towards the lower levels.

I also agree that hybrid gear is lacking. Hexaste made a great thread in regards to that topic.

Personally, I think only around 6k is required to mitigate the faults of CI, with maybe 8-9k being the extra one obtains at higher levels. I think if it stays the way it is, I have 6-7 more offensive nodes I can take which puts me at lvl88-89 than after than I could invest in 5 nodes of 6%ES increase.

Of course this won't happen now, but purely in terms of longterm nonwipe gameplay. I could see 15k being reached with all main offense nodes taken in the tree.

The one thing I do want in this game is for players who reach uber high levels and gear to actually FEEL different than someone who has not. Right now, I have the gear, but the lvl? In my mind, no. And I already have this feeling.

I also think that IR is an "issue" as well, simply because of how much insanely easier it is to roll EV mods compared to AR mods

"

Altnaharra wrote:

Before this goes any further can I just get this out there;

DefenSe

Thank you, we are trying to keep this civil.. so enough with the barbarism.

Coming from a goatman. Go back to your hills cliffhugger >:[

I hope you didn't find that offencive.



I mainly play with an armor defense and occasionally dip in to ES builds. Evasion builds are what I find unplayable. Note: I don't consider iron reflexes an evasion build. When a hit does get by and I see an enormous chunk of my hp go missing, that's a terrible feeling. It doesn't matter when it happens, how or where. It doesn't matter if I have a belt full of instant health flasks. Seeing that hp just vanish will never allow me to be comfortable with an evasion/acrobatics build. And don't even get me started on the waterfall cave. What a nightmare.

The other thing is I feel like evasion/acrobatics builds are exceptionally vulnerable to spell damage. I know that probably doesn't make sense but I'll explain.

It's true that armor doesn't effect spell damage, but it does heavily mitigate physical damage. When evasion gets hit, it doesn't have that reduction. So even if I have a just stupidly high amount of life nodes with evasion, enemy casters and chaos damage are still slowly softening me up and for that inevitable melee critical that gets past my evasion and dodge. If casters weren't softening me up my likely hood of surviving that crit might be pretty high and I could heal myself up... but chances are somewhere in the area I'm in there's either casters, chaos damage or both.

It could be that I just play evasion poorly, I'm not ruling that out, but that's my feel on it.

ES feels really powerful to me every time I play it. Just being able to break away from combat and get full "health" again within seconds feels reliable. Puncture's pretty scary if I don't notice it right away. I used to have problems with status ailments but I've refined my builds enough that they're not too worrysome now.

Then there's armor, especially iron reflexes. It just feels really reliable. Off the top of my head the thing that always consistently does the most damage to me is the spiders who use viper strike, often times that's my own fault for not killing them fast enough or running ahead too early.

OP, I really wonder how often you are getting hit between zombies, temporal chain, freezing pulse, ice spear and a totem that also casing ice spear.



A ranged spell caster with CI is as tanky as AR Melee, I think thats why some people consider CI op. Not to mention it completely ignores chaos damage



Check out some build of the week.

Week 2, 3, 4, 12. Melee build. All taking considerable damage during fight. Especially the melee witch in week 2, almost died to regular mob without any rare present.(I remember seeing a shadow build similar to week 12, but with CI, the guy just keep blood rage up all the time, and spam flicker strike)

On the other hand, Week 5, 8 and 10, the ranged build barely got touched.





On a separate note, EV is kind broken at the moment, either you dodge and take no damage, or get hit and lose most of your life.

I promise I talk about Energy Shield a bit in here. Somewhere.



Energy shield never interested me until Ghost Reaver, but the lack of some form of instant heal is scary when you're melee (hello D3 btw -- cooldown on potions in an ARPG is so stupid but that's what you get for cheating and removing chance to miss). I tested a ghost reaving sword shadow once, and it did just fine. Problem is, you need pure energy shield to make it work.

Which brings me neatly to the issue of hybrid armour. That otherwise cool-looking EV/ES armour just doesn't cut it. It's a half-measure of two things that need full, leaving you with inferior evasion and inferior energy shield.

Naturally the other hybrid gear types don't suffer quite the same way. Armour/Evasion gear has IR written all over it, Armour/Energy Shield benefits from the fact that armour calculates before energy shield removal.



PS I reckon Chaos Innoculation and Avatar of Fire might be bunk-buddies someday soon, whether it's in exile or in a 'correction' state...

I tend to categorize defense strategies slightly differently than other people do. The developers have labeled three major defense types. Those are ES, AR, and Evasion. For me personally I categorize a defense based on how reliable and effective it is.

The most reliable forms of defense are Armor, Energy Sheild, Life regen/Vampirism, and resistance. I consider these to be the top four forms of defense you can have because they are extremely predictable.

Armor and energy shield have been discussed frequently and are well understood. Life regen/vampirism however is my favorite type of defense. This includes life regeneration over time, life gain on hit, life leech over time based on physical attacks, and life gain per kill.

This sort of build is extremely difficult to make and requires a lot of wandering on the tree, and a lot of different nodes. You need to hit fast and accurately so you want a lot of attack speed nodes from the shadow and duelist parts of the tree, but you also need those red nodes from the marauder and perhaps claws which are INT based weapons to boot. Yet when you put it all together you get something similar to energy shield but which depends on active attack to really work. This is the current build I'm working on:



Resistance is also something I prize highly. It cuts down damage from elemental based attacks, including those pesky spells that might bypass my armor. It may not reduce them much, but every little bit helps. You can consider resistance to be the elemental equivalent of armor and pretty much everyone needs it.

Once you get past these major types of defense we then have the minor types of defense . . . block and evasion. Both of these are random and give us a chance to completely avoid damage.

All about block & Evasion


Dodging, Kiting, Etc . . .



Great topic! I probably wrote too much so I put a lot of it into spoiler sections you can read or skip at will. :)

I agree with SLAYER on most points. I myself always used shield with 450+ ES and high crit chance for spells so it didn't drop my dps so much, but the block can be really vital when there is tons of stuff flying at you.

I changed from a ice-crit-witch into ele wand witch and with the same ES pool as before (8-10k), it is MUCH harder to stay alive, even when I do 3x the damage as before. the main thing so "OP" about witches is freezing pulse with high crit chance. When you freeze the mobs coming at you, they dont do anything at all. You don't have to have insane dps to control big massess of mobs, but with ranged/wand skills this isn't so easy, even if you have some cold damage in your attacks.

As for other defensive means, I only know about my life/armor templar witch was much harder to keep alive than my caster witch. Granted I don't have as good items for him, but I used all the defensive manouvers I could.

Conclusion: CI is great if you use it with something to slow/freeze the mobs, only very few situations can be deadly.

btw. SLAYER, thats my old wand! :)

Too bad it's all being moved to legacy :(

I started a thread in the suggestions section about a week long witches only race w/ CI @ 0-25%. Anubite, ever since you said that its got me thinking that you may be correct.

Maybe it is just w/ a freezing element that it becomes OP. Oh, and I didn't use temp chains, I used Elemental Weakness. The temp chains I was leveling for PvP.

As Hexaste has mentioned in his hybrid armour thread. I do think it would be better if there was one hybrid mod for items, instead of the them being separated. Anyone who's crafted knows it's a pain/impossible.

I would also like to try a Ghost Reaver build at some point as well. Seems like it could be quite...interesting.