State of Armor/life builds

What I'm talking about here is a generic STR/armor character, like a GS/Cleave Marauder with maybe some Endurance Charges or shield passives, some rare armor items slapped on with maybe 1-2 uniques. Something a new player would start as a tanky character without much knowledge of the game.

Back when I started to play, the main damage threats were spike physical damage and shock stacks, and armor/life builds would naturally do well against both of those. These builds would usually have additional max resists, which fit very well into the theme: get hit all the time, but take less damage on average, and steadily regenerate. Now, avoidance (eva/block/dodge) and ES builds were somewhat struggling with these types of damage, but more and more stuff was added to help them: AA, MoM, Lightning Coil, CWDT-Immortal Call, Vaal Grace/Discipline, Rumi's, and so on.

In the meantime, armor/life builds got hit in many ways:

- The contribution of STR to total life has become less and less

- the max resists on the armor/life side have been removed

- shocks, which are reduced by having a lot of life, have been nerfed

- life regeneration is a lot less meaningful with the super-powered hp flasks

- the main threat in the game has shifted towards high bursts of elemental damage

Now, this seems to have become the main weakness of armor/life characters and I think we have arrived at the point where they are the ones who need help. I don't think generic buffs are needed, but some kind of tool, a cooldown or trade-off would be great. My suggestions are:


- some sort of temporary conversion of armor or endurance charges (or both) into maximum resists (something better than Vaal IC - or am I underestimating this?)

- some sort of conversion of incoming elemental damage into physical ("reverse Lightning Coil")

- an increase to the STR->life conversion rate to restore the health advantage of STR/armor focused characters

Nothing new about this. Dagger/es builds are the best melee tanks and damage dealers at the same time on purpose.

While shadow (right side) has got ci, eb and all the high attack speed increased base crit weapons (claws, wands, daggers), the left side with templar, marauder and duelist is just inferior in all categories.

Game is designed around the shadow/witch/ranger class on purpose, and those three classes cover all the game needs anyway, which is witch = spellcaster, shadow = melee tank and ranger = physical/elemental projectile. The devs obviously don't like or want to bring balance to the other classes, I wonder if they even recognized yet that there is a balance problem. If they did the following should not have happened: While dagger builds were op before the forsaken master patch and every other melee weapon build was lacking behind them, they got further buffed to be even stronger than before now and outclass any of the life melee classes that clearly that it became stupid to play one of these.

Templar, marauder and duelist? As you have mentioned, in fact they were further weakened in order to make players choices easy. I guess those of us who once picked one of them can be considered stupid, as we believed that GGG has got a bit of sense and understanding for balance.

For the next balance patch I suppose that blood magic should be moved to the right side (next to ci and eb), so that shadows and witches wont have to go the far distance to the left side in order to support their one million damage aoe builds on low life with 9 auras. We do not want to limit their fun.

I don't want to go into a discussion about offensive stat and weapon balance, this is a thread on defensive balance. I also don't think mocking the developers is very helpful. Note that neither the top Rampage/Beyond builds were these crit/dagger/ES builds you mention. Anyway, I am ready to accept that "red" builds are a lower damage but safer choice, less vulnerable to crowd control and less reliant on constant life steal. The problem is that they don't seem to have any tools left vs the new generation of elemental damage (Apex bosses, exiles, Beyond bosses etc.). And therefore they are not really safe at all.

the way I see it is that the right side of the tree, green life builds, have THE best attack mitigation in the game via hybrid ar+ev+ondars+block or coil+ev+arco+ondars+block etc making them the best melee choice imo where you are getting toe to toe with a lot of attack monsters and being bombarded by ranged attacks at the same time. The weakness of green side builds was elemental damage as you had no real access to +max resists.

The red side had comparatively weak defense against attacks via armour+block but could rival the coil+acro type setup using aegis+armour+es+block. Where they were stronger was for sure the spell mitigation via max res and armour (phys spells). Now that elemental side has been taken away the whole aegis thing is still incredibly strong but your bog standard armour block setup doesnt really challenge the green side for attack mitigation nor does it have such a big advantage against elemental spells.

I think the devs are right though, the max res situation was making balancing elemental damage monsters very hard. I think it couldnt hurt to go back to the marauders diamond skin having +1max res, or even +2 and having that the only source of +max outside of the themed fire, lightning, cold thats spread out, to bring back something there that gives that side an edge of its own. Maybe even stick that on a node thats the other side of resolute technique to strengthen non crit builds and give equal access to templars and marauders? That way the advantage of surgeons res flasks is also somewhat dented but far from broken? I have no doubt that there was too much max res on that side before but perhaps its now gone too far and left avoidance comparatively too strong with very little drawbacks.

I think duelist isnt in a bad place because then can still go hard right of the tree from their start, my life dagger builds are ranger starts but they go within 1 node of the duelist start for all that juicy regen that allows you to run bloodrage. A duelist who moves to the left however is in the same boat as marauder, not as good at mitigating attacks yet with no benefits against elemental, leaving physical spells the only real thing they are better at dealing with unless you bring aegis into the picture.

It must be said, I havent played a marauder armour build since the latest changes, maybe Im wrong? But I just dont see anything in the theory that makes me believe anything other than an aegis hybrid build is going to compete with my green side attack builds.

For GGG, new has to mean better. That's the problem. They recently worked on the witch/shadow area of the tree, so it was made better. It's been a long time since they worked on the marauder area, so it's worse by comparison.

New monsters? Harder.

New skills? Overpowered.

New Bosses? Given them propitiatory items that outshine anything you can get anywhere else.

They can't just make it fit into the game seamlessly.

You're talking about an "old" build... years old. So it's naturally going to be weak compared to the builds that rely on new stuff.

marauder was revamped a lot more recently than ranger

Armor could be a respectable defense, but sadly there are multiple problems with it:

1. 'Crushing Blow' built into it thanks to a shoddy formula at its base. Armor should be providing good defense against physical damage since that's what it's touted as being used for, but this fails miserably. Physical damage hits that crit, or ones that just have high base damage 'crush' through armor and make it as if you're wearing tissue paper, which means you need to stack very high amounts of it and even resort to the IR/Grace + Flasks (Jade and Granite) just to even attempt to shield yourself adequately. This gives armor another inherent weakness on top of already having the obvious one of doing jack-diddly against any form of elemental damage. Changing the formula around would be a step in the right direction to helping armor's problems, but this isn't the only one.

2. Elemental damage becoming/has been the most prevalent damage in the game for monsters. As stated before, armor does nothing against this type of damage and it's no secret that some of the most dangerous mobs in the game (bosses specifically) are ones that use almost nothing but elemental damage. Be it the Torture Chamber boss, Crematorium, Flameblast Exile, Dominus, Shrine Piety, etc, etc...armor can't do anything meaningful against these bosses. Block, Spell Block, higher max elemental resists, etc, etc...these things provide so much more defense and make armor look like a joke. Not to mention they provide much more multi-situational defenses thanks to how the game has been developed and the route it's been taking as time goes on.

3. Map mods like '-Max Resists' and 'Monsters do XX% extra damage as <element>' take giant dumps all over armor and just make it feel even worse for obvious reasons. Now, one would think that mods like 'Player is cursed with Vulnerability' and 'Physical Damage%' increase would be a joy for an armor wearer to see...nope. Thanks once again to the poor 'crushing blow' mechanic, those mods just serve to show how bad armor is compared to other defenses and that if you're not stacking armor really high, you're gonna have a really bad time. You COULD get away with that before because the heavy armor side of the tree (left side) used to also pack the +max resist nodes, and while I know those were a headache for balance, they did offer something to help with getting some extra defense against elemental damage.

Mind you, this is mostly defensive stuff...not even gonna mention the offensive stuff that the right side of the tree offers compared to the left side, as I'm sure that has been touched on already. But as it stands right now, armor needs some tweaking.

Yes balancing with the increasing returns resist system is really hard. But max resist is the only mechanic that fits into the red defense theme: be beefy, tank everything, reduce incoming damage, then slowly heal it back up. Max resist would be fine, if they somehow made sure that surgeon spamming crit builds and avoidance builds don't have access to it. Some cooldown spell like "gain 1% max ele resists per 10% phys resist you have when cast". I'm not the one being paid for this, I'm sure they can come up with better ideas. Except they came up with Vaal IC which noone uses...

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- some sort of temporary conversion of armor or endurance charges (or both) into maximum resists

good idea. each charge should give 1 max res. more would play maru and dualist life builds


however main imbalance is armor needs a buff and phys needs to hit harder. its not right these no armor es builds can take any hit in the game while everyone has to stack resists. its not right a single chest lc is better than 20k armor.


did you know hardest phys hit in game is about 9000 from atziri vaals?
while spells hit for as high as 60k from uber atziri.

everyone has to stack over resits to deal with that 60k
while people can run around with no armor at all and deal with phys
and when you do put armor on it doesnt really do much so no 3000 life allowed

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Zed_ wrote:

Max resist would be fine, if they somehow made sure that surgeon spamming crit builds and avoidance builds don't have access to it.

How about putting max res in the notables for maces and axes...