Energy Shield passives

I played a CI/GR crit dagger Shadow and Frost witch in CB, and I'm recreating the characters now in OB. My personal take is that CI is fine as is, but ES as a whole needs boosting. There seem like two feasible options: boost the base ES on items, increase the ES passives. I think that a bit of both would be the correct path. Increase the ES on gear by about 10%, and make the 8% ES passives into 10%. Also, bump Arcane Focus to 25%. Also, perhaps Discipline could be slightly increased, though not back to where it was at the end of CB.

More generally, though, all these problems are part of the same general PoE issue: defense is supreme. No build can really focus on +dmg, everyone has to spec into lots of defense. Except for CI builds, everyone else has to pretty much pick up every HP cluster they come across. You have to be tanky or you're dead. Glass cannons aren't just difficult, they're not at all viable. That ES is relatively worse than evasion, much less armor, just means that it's hit harder by this overall emphasis on defense. I know that GGG has said that they want to address this, but that they've been overwhelmed with getting server and stability issues resolved.

Previous paragraph notwithstanding, ES is the weakest of the three defenses and I think that the slight increases I suggested would go a long way towards bringing it in line with evasion. That said, I hope that both ES and evasion can end up roughly on par with armor.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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grimwald wrote:

Keep all the nodes what they are now, but either put a 15-25% Energy shield increase on Chaos Inoculation.

FFS, no. CI should not be "hey, we took away all your red life, but here's a bunch of blue life instead!"

If CI gets a buff, may it please, please, please be anything but more ES.

I fully agree with you, and will fight this cause should it be necessary.

In the patch GGG said that CI is about chaos immunity and not ES bonus. I understand that, but the way I see CI was used just as a way to sacrifice your life for ES (chaos immunity was just something needed for someone with 1 life)

I think that the witch tree deserves a way to exchange life for ES. If 50% more ES is too much, it could be changed for less than 50%... or for increased instead of more... or both! Maybe your life could be converted to ES (life per level and gained by strength, life nodes could be too much)

If ES bonus + chaos immunity is too strong, then remove the chaos immunity! CI could make the chaos damage hit the ES.

Change the mechanic and the name of the keystone... or perhaps make a new one... but give us a way to trade life for ES. Without that, we loose a lot of interesting builds!



I love the game, keep up the good work!

And yet there so little effectiveways to utilize this immunity. And seeingsomeone like Invalesko running 75%+ all resist, it would be matter of time seeing everyone with such geer. It makes just a joke of CI defence wise. What current chaos resist magic/rares and chaos damage penalties do: is not only undermine any CI viability long term, but also kinda make low life builds less viable short term (ok "Springleaf" helps a bit because chaos damage is mostly dot effect)

And I can't see beneficial skills/ uniques potentialy making you resive 60% chaos damage per second of health probably except "Darkscorn". "Which seems to give 25% physical damage reduction.

I'd change Discipline to give 'more' ES, like Determination gives more Armour. This would actually be a nerf to EB users and other casual users of ES, but it would give a real leg-up to characters that actually invest in Energy Shield in their gear and passives.

ES items can probably afford to be buffed a bit now that CI no longer gives 'more' ES. The added ES bonuses are fine, maybe even too strong, but the base ES on items is terrible - even Vaal Regalia only gives 175 base, and low- and mid-level ES items are completely useless even on low-level characters.