The evasion and energy shield problem

im sure everyone who reads about poe has noticed the massive outcry to the gutting of shadow and the continuous ignoring of this particular problem, and here is my thoughts on the issue.

Since 2.0, evasion has been frowned upon as although dodging damage is all well and good, since the damage buffs, if it hits, and eventually it will hit, you take all of the damage with no mitigation. Energy shield also lost blood rage completely(for any and all hybrids), and as always CI is forced to travel all the way through witch(worht cause of nice ES nodes) to gete zealots oath.

comparing defences.
Armour vs evasion: armour reduces any and all physical damage, and is exponentially boosted by fortify, other % damage reduction is applied after armour. Evasion gives a chance to completely nullify an attack, however if said attack hits, there is no mitigation applied to the attack.

so with armour, you take all hits, but they all do less damage, with evasion you take less hits, but you take the full brunt of it.

To withstand a hit, point for point, an evasion build needs more life than an armour build. easily up to double the life of an armour build to withstand a hit, and 50% phys mitigation is not so hard to get on an armour build, and this is befor accounting for endurances charges avaliable on the left side of the tree.

Life vs ES:

Flat life comes predominantely from levels, with scaling coming for certain uniques and off the tree.

Energy shield comes predominantely from gear, and discipline, and scales off the tree aswell.

life can be restored by lifeleech, potions, lifegain on hit, and regen, and standard life values are around 5k or more for a high level build.

Energy shield

recharges reasonably fast when not hit by anything for a period of 3 seconds, without assistances, cannot be regened in any other way, when using zealots oath, and ghost reaver, you lose the respective effects on life.


Conclusions.

Based off how ghost reaver and zealots oath work, life and energy shield are not meant to be used together in equal ammounts, where the end game health pool is split among both, and using energy shield gear, means you lose affix's that could be devoted to armour or evasion, thus energy shield is supposed to be equivalent to these two, however energy shield typically cannot be regenerated in combat while still having the effect apply to life.

Current problems.

Evasion builds need a higher total hp pool than armour builds to survive hits that do penetrate their defences, they dont have this. Energy shield cannot be regenerated in combat in a meaningful way. flat HP and HP scaling nodes are all on one side of the tree.

possible solutions:

people hate the idea of giving life to the right hand side, it seems to many it is straight up offensive. my proposal. make energy shield and evasion 1 stat. if fits the bill.

evasion alone cannot survive, as it requires base life pool, however life is a very very flexible defensive stat, and is incredibly easy to recover, energy shield is not, it is difficult to recover without significant investment. energy shield cannot recover while you get hit, evasion assists in that, armour is weak to spells, evasion is weak to spells, so no problem there. the right side of the tree doesnt have the flat strength to make life truly as good, so we dont get life, but evasion builds need approaximately double the life pool of an armour build to survive the same hit. this deals with it beautifully. you take the hit, and cant regen your es, so you run away until it comes back, whiel armour builds can pop a potion and continue, this is the price that needs to be paid to use es.

armour ES, harder to scale, not really that many nodess that support it.

ES and blood rage:

blood rage says blood, blood is life, it should only effect life, having somehting completely unusable by hybrids isnt fair and they still need to compensate for it, hybrids wont be immune to chaos, so they still pay a price, CI tends to be casters and dont benefit from blood rage, giving CI melee a free buff really isnt that bad, they ned to invest in stun and freeze immune, more than a big enough tradeoff.

what are the thoughts here?

My thoughts are that you're absolutely wrong about life and ES not being meant to coexist. They work just fine together, they're just not meant to use ghost reaver or zealot's oath, as those are quite obviously meant to support ES heavy builds.

Life plus ES creates massive defense against burst via very high effective healthpools (especially versus elemental damage, for which you don't sacrifice mitigation), you just resign yourself to mostly recovering ES through recharge, which is not bad by any means if you spec a little for it. Sure, you can't just mash your face into enemies and expect to maintain your ES, but a little tactic goes a long way when you've got that huge buffer to guard you.


As for evasion? Eh... pure evasion is fine for archers, especially combined with acro/phase acro (and even better when you add vaal grace). It provides general protection against the masses, including some nice protection against spells. OHKO's can be a threat, but again tactic is a part of the game, and that's what protects you from the big OHKOs as an evasion archer (the fact that you can choose a position to attack from that keeps you out of the enemy's threat zone).

However, it's not really fine for pure melees, for certain... all the tactic in the world won't keep you from having to get up close with some OHKO threats that'll knock you out if you don't roll an evade/dodge proc, as melees don't have the ability to freely choose a defensive position to attack from, and evasion melees don't have access to long immortal calls to make themselves immune. Iron reflexes can help them turn their evasion into something more reliable, and of course fortify helps, but it's still lacking if that's all there is. Dunno how to solve evasion melees' issues exactly... maybe you could argue pure evasion just isn't meant to be used with melee, but that kinda runs contrary to the whole concept of build diversity.

"

maoster wrote:

Energy shield

"...cannot be regened in any other way..."

Now thats just wrong. Dont forget about Vaal Discepline - FC - Inc.Duration! ;)

Grands you nearly 6 seconds of immortality...

I love life/ES combos. Now its easier more than ever to utilize this as a shadow (or witch), both CLEARLY lacking defensive options. You end up stacking a ton of both for added layers of squishy HP blubber.

If i build right i can get around 8k total with sub-par gear by mid-season and eventually 1 shotted by something stupid as usual. :3

Life/ES melee is of course lame. ES/Eva/Life would be a must and its just not good atm. I was disappointed to see 2.1 didn't bring anything new to ES/EVA.

its rough to use and uses a minimum of 2 slots,i feel combinine es and evasion would fix quite a few problems, and could be a way to deal with the garbage life on the right hand side of the tree, and the differences between armour and other defences

I've had survivability issues with armour and evasion, they have different problems. I think the benefit of the classes closer to es nodes is that hybrid builds are more realistically viable and imo hybrid is the strongest defensively, going hybrid evasion or hybrid armour is equally viable imo.

All suggestions, including yours, will always end-up suggesting higher pools.

The right side of the tree is intended to be focused on damage dealing.

The question is: if you CAN get similiar life pools (compared to left side of tree) AND all that juicy crit/dmg, WHY shouold anyone ever play with the left side of the tree ? Right, there is none and because of that, they wont touch that in a range, where it would have a big influence.

life and es are fundamentally different, i would rather 5k life and 20k armour over 3k life 4k es and nothing else, high pool doesnt mean anything, i would much rather 20k amrour and 6 endurance charges. the problem with trying to get that sort of ES and hp is you need very exact mods, and u definately cannot go armour, getting both high ES and high ev or armour is impossible if you are also trying to get life, that is the problem right now, you go life or you go ES, you dont go both, then you get your choice of armour or evasion, if you want life es, you have to drop armour or drop ev. my proposal leaves ES as an emergency pool for taking that big hits, as it stands, if i want to play crit, i play scion, scion has better everything, crit next to scion is better than shadow crit, scion has easy jewel slots easy life easy es, easy ev, if i need amrour i head left, making such a trek from shadow isnt really feasible, as it stands shadow is a shit version of scion, and scion if it really wants, can go over to shadow and cherry pick the nodes it wants.

i want to play shadows i really do, i have 5 reasonably high lvled shadows, but i cant justify it, i am better off with scion in every single case, and it isnt by a small margin.

EVA melee (even with high block) is kinda lottery, when you play in high maps with insane map mod stacking and go against heavy hitters (bears, vaal fallen, rakango..). If you don't kill them fast, they'll surely one-shot you.

Not even an insane HP pool will save you in some cases: extra crit, extra crit multi, extra damage on map... all this stacking with increased damage & crit on a rare mob == skip or rip.

Armor, otoh, delivers damage gradually and thus spike damage can be more easily mitigated by player action.

Back in 1.3 I played a CI Dual Claw shadow that used Iron Reflexes (so armor + es with a butt ton of leech - 29% or so instant leech at the time). Basically, he was armored enough with high enough hp pool (~11K armour, 6.3K ish ES) to withstand oneshots, and had rough 14.4K ES/s recovery when attacking. The definition of a leech tank.

2.0 rekt that build when it murdered leech in cold blood, both in value and taking blood rage away from CI builds.

While I've come to realize that the degree of leech my character had was most likely super OP (this was the age of the low life ST chars), this kind of character doesn't really exist anymore.

Personally, I would like bloodrage back, and better leech effectiveness (likely through Ghost Reaver itself or some added node near CI). Also, implicit stacking on claws would be nice to have back (since other implicits, ie daggers, still stack).

I've played nothing but life builds since 2.0. Three of my builds have some amount of ES (600+), but only one of those ever uses it (as a buffer that recharges after not taking damage). The others use bloodrage so the ES isn't really there.

I said this before and I'll say it again: there is very little incentive to play CI for most builds. Life is just better in most cases. The only real exception is the ZO regen mega tanks (that coincidentally do very little damage to speak of).

-Savage