Energy Shield passives

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FoxNyaKawaii wrote:

Jokes aside, I've read forum for a while with lots of CB people stating CI is now useless, while some of more experienced CB players still deem CI being useful, and found arguments of the former ones to be more convincing.

I don't think anyone feels the CI node is useless, but most of the complaints are from players who can no longer make viable energy shield builds post-change, and are feeling backed into a corner to take Chaos Innoculation (because they cant get a large health pool AND a large energy shield pool) and the lack of bonus energy shield is making such a build nearly impossible to pull off.

Essentially, energy shield is not a viable build alone. Witch has no mitigation options besides energy shield nearby, when in reality Armor and Evasion are vastly superior since they are flat percentage mitigation of damage and they COME with extra health and/or have an additional absorption component.


The problem is that Dexterity gives you Evasion (And allows you to Equip Evasion), Strength Gives you Health (But allows you to equip armor) , and Int gives you Energy Shield and Allows you to Equip energy shield. But that's essentially just a different color of health that works differently, Intelligence characters have no other choices for damage mitigation (aka int characters usually take 100% of all physical damage) where as Str characters can take 50-60% of physical damage, and evasion characters dodge 40-50%. WHILE they also dont have to put huge amounts of passives into it to make it useful, leaving them nodes for damage and/or health.

Int needs another form of mitigation, otherwise as damage values get higher and higher in cruel and merciless, INT characters are going to get absolutely wrecked in comparison to Str or Evasion characters.

But to make energy shield viable you need to put talent point after talent point into it, where as Armor and Evasion from gear alone are quite huge bonuses.



I would say the most logical steps right now for chaos Inoculation, is to leave it be and concentrate on energy shield instead, to add a few more large reductions in energy shield cooldown, possibly a few scattered 30% nodes (i would like to see players capable of reaching 200% ES reduction instead of 110% if they really spec for it). Then as for the mitigation issues, you could create a keystone that gave you 1 point of armor and 1 point of evasion for every point of energy shield you were missing. Making witches still susceptible to not dodging big hard hits, but more durable against sustained smaller hits.

The keystone would only be vastly beneficial for players who invested heavily into energy shield passives and would compliment CI builds very nicely while completely removing the need for CI to give massive energy shield pools. It also wouldn't need a big negative aspect, because to stack enough ES to get more than 200-300 bonus out of it is very costly. You could simply invest more in Armor and/or Evasion nodes as a duelist/marauder/shadow/ranger and get the same benefit.

At say level 50, when a witch has a good 1000 Energy shield, at half ES they would have 500 armor and 500 evasion even lower it would be 750/750, compensating for the cruel and/or merciless difficulties and giving them something more like 2000 effective ES-HP if they are taking damage in small bursts, and more like 1200 if they take large bursts.


Stacking ES nodes should be tanky, players already have to invest heavily into mana talents as they become better witches so try to find a balance between Mana, ES and damage or utility nodes.

Come on guys. I did not create this thread to complain about CI, can we seriously leave CI out of this?

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Lionguild wrote:

Come on guys. I did not create this thread to complain about CI, can we seriously leave CI out of this?

But they are very closely related since if you put your defense in ES you are going have problems with chaos dmg without CI. Might be possible to some hybrid builds though but it's still a very interesting discussion about the purpose of CI but more importantly the diference between health and ES. It can just be blue health. There needs to be something that makes them different, I like the idea of more/stronger nodes that give reduction on the recharge. So health can stand in the fight more while es needs to pop in and out a bit regen.

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Lionguild wrote:

Come on guys. I did not create this thread to complain about CI, can we seriously leave CI out of this?

This is a totally reasonable suggestion, the thread title doesn't mention CI and there are already a bajillion CI threads you could post in with your CI-related suggestions. If you have something to say, quote here, copy and paste to that thread, then post it there.

That said, I propose this:
* Change Arcane Focus (notable in Witch starting area) to 30%
* Change the two 8% nodes adjacent to Arcane Focus to 10%
* Change third 8% node in witch starting area to 10% cooldown recovery
* Change all 8% nodes in center to 10%, but only have four nodes per logical cluster (not five)

with these effects:
* Witch becomes noticeably stronger ES user, templar and shadow not impacted as much unless they really infiltrate the witch's starting area
* Those going for ES nodes in center won't get any more ES out of it, but will save 1-2 skill points

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Lionguild wrote:

Come on guys. I did not create this thread to complain about CI, can we seriously leave CI out of this?

This is a totally reasonable suggestion, the thread title doesn't mention CI and there are already a bajillion CI threads you could post in with your CI-related suggestions. If you have something to say, quote here, copy and paste to that thread, then post it there.

That said, I propose this:
* Change Arcane Focus (notable in Witch starting area) to 30%
* Change the two 8% nodes adjacent to Arcane Focus to 10%
* Change third 8% node in witch starting area to 10% cooldown recovery
* Change all 8% nodes in center to 10%, but only have four nodes per logical cluster (not five)

with these effects:
* Witch becomes noticeably stronger ES user, templar and shadow not impacted as much unless they really infiltrate the witch's starting area
* Those going for ES nodes in center won't get any more ES out of it, but will save 1-2 skill points

Very Agreeable suggestions.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Lionguild wrote:

Come on guys. I did not create this thread to complain about CI, can we seriously leave CI out of this?

This is a totally reasonable suggestion, the thread title doesn't mention CI and there are already a bajillion CI threads you could post in with your CI-related suggestions. If you have something to say, quote here, copy and paste to that thread, then post it there.

That said, I propose this:
* Change Arcane Focus (notable in Witch starting area) to 30%
* Change the two 8% nodes adjacent to Arcane Focus to 10%
* Change third 8% node in witch starting area to 10% cooldown recovery
* Change all 8% nodes in center to 10%, but only have four nodes per logical cluster (not five)

with these effects:
* Witch becomes noticeably stronger ES user, templar and shadow not impacted as much unless they really infiltrate the witch's starting area
* Those going for ES nodes in center won't get any more ES out of it, but will save 1-2 skill points

Completely agree

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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Lionguild wrote:

Come on guys. I did not create this thread to complain about CI, can we seriously leave CI out of this?

This is a totally reasonable suggestion, the thread title doesn't mention CI and there are already a bajillion CI threads you could post in with your CI-related suggestions. If you have something to say, quote here, copy and paste to that thread, then post it there.

That said, I propose this:
* Change Arcane Focus (notable in Witch starting area) to 30%
* Change the two 8% nodes adjacent to Arcane Focus to 10%
* Change third 8% node in witch starting area to 10% cooldown recovery
* Change all 8% nodes in center to 10%, but only have four nodes per logical cluster (not five)

with these effects:
* Witch becomes noticeably stronger ES user, templar and shadow not impacted as much unless they really infiltrate the witch's starting area
* Those going for ES nodes in center won't get any more ES out of it, but will save 1-2 skill points

But then its just bue health, there has to bee a difference in use of ES and health. And a lot shield still does migate anything, its just buffer tanking. A buffer tanking usually is bad.

The ES nodes do seem a bit weak. ES is an alternative to life, so 8% per node makes sense, but there aren't so many ES nodes compared to life nodes.

Maybe pure ES is the wrong way to go for tanking, and you should instead be backing it up with a bit of Armour or Evasion? If you go for ES, you usually end up doing at least one Nullification or Body and Soul ring anyway just to pick up enough of a bonus to ES.

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At say level 50, when a witch has a good 1000 Energy shield

Pretty funny, considering I had around 900 ES at lvl 32 with CI in CB with meh gear. At lvl 50 I had about 2k ES with CI and discipline.

But otherwise I agree that ES require more passive points to invest to stay decent in higher difficulties.


Actually I wasn't going to discuss CI, but CI was so linked with idea of ES user that it is necessary to compare how it was with CI before with current state of the art of witchcraft.



Good!
On the opposite, I suggest turning all %recharge on the way to Arcane focus to be replaced with 10% energy shield and all those 8% close by also pumped to 10%. The reason is I don't necessarily want to reduce recharge time, and it would be good to move them into separate cluster so I could opt not to take them on the way to Arcane Focus.


Would be cool if energy shield could reflect projectiles ^_^ which goes well with the idea of ranged caster. But very hard to balance it out.


Sure, actually I think chainmail pyrowitch or dex-int armor frostwitch could be nice, trying to do the latter one right now, but still only lvl 33, taking it pretty slow. Maybe will write feedback 2 weeks later ~_~.

Why not just have a new node or group of nodes that give %ES and %Armour (similar to Body and Soul), with a new Keystone at the end of this progression that gives you Armour equal to some % of your total ES. This would give more value to %ES passives currently and would help with the mitigation issue people are discussing in this thread.