I feel like stacking HP is the best way to go...

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Xendran wrote:

1. No. Life is not overpowered, everything else is underpowered. You need to consider how absurdly hard things hit in this game

2. No. Every build i make uses no armor, evasion or energy shield, but survives purely on regen. I have been doing this for nearly a year now. ES, Eva and Arm are flat out not necessary.

Pretty much.

It's true, all the defensive options in this game are lackluster, which leaves hp as king. ES can act as hp replacement in a CI build with the special nodes like Ghost Reaver, but other than CI builds ES is basically extra base life with a different recovery pace that doesn't benefit from % health nodes. Armor, Evasion and Block just suffer from a bad formula, especially Armor which has a horrific formula which makes it useless when you need it most(against bosses and even certain elites).

HP is fine, it's the stats that kill diversity.


Basically every reasonable path in the tree has access to +200% total hp, the problem is that most builds become too weak if they do so.

The kind of builds that seem conventional or intuitive, (such as dual wield sword duelist, or fire mage, or claw shadow), would need to grab +damage or +crit nodes to be able to do enough damage to be able to kill things.

Instead, the "best" builds rely on using gimmicks to deal a lot of damage with very few offense-only nodes. One such "trick" is shock stacking with a heavily supported lightning arrow or shock totem. Generally, these strategies rely on finding skills that scale extremely well, or do very high base damage without needing passive node support (like bear traps), and then stack defenses.

Almost all of them, however, rely on the most powerful part or the skill tree: the templar-marauder area. Essentially, strength is this game is the omni-stat. You don't need to stack dex if you pick up Resolute technique, and you don't need int if you pick up blood magic (or just link it to your favorite attack gem together with life leech). You don't need to do anything but stack strength.

Conveniently, all those hp nodes that people complain about having to get are right in the strength area. And what makes the hp nodes so great? Having a high base hp of course, which you get by stacking strength. And what about all the damage you lose by stacking hp? Oh wait, strength is the only stat that gives +damage (and a lot of it). You can even use it for non-melee by either grabbing a keystone or with an appropriate support gem.

Honestly, I feel like, with the exception of a couple builds (like totem/minion witch or EK shadow who will ultimately one-shot himself to reflect mobs), non-strength stats are only useful to meet the requirements for support gems and bows.

Suggestion: scatter hp nodes all over the tree, keep the number same or maybe a few more. Then, change strength to +2% melee damage, +5 armor, and make Resolute Technique +x accuracy rating, -y% crit multiplier.

It's true, all the defensive options in this game are lackluster, which leaves hp as king. ES can act as hp replacement in a CI build with the special nodes like Ghost Reaver, but other than CI builds ES is basically extra base life with a different recovery pace that doesn't benefit from % health nodes. Armor, Evasion and Block just suffer from a bad formula, especially Armor which has a horrific formula which makes it useless when you need it most(against bosses and even certain elites).

In my nub perspective, I don't understand why Armour doesn't do a straight physical damage resist % / level modifier instead of whatever the formula is doing now. I mean we have straight ele and chaos resist percentages, so why not phys damage resist % (with the level mod to keep the armour treadmill ticking).

As for HP, I'm fine with it being able to make everyone so tanky. ES could do with a buff to make it on par with HP so people not on the strength side of the tree have an alternative.

The only thing that needs to change is that tanky builds should not be necessary, and it should be possible to be too tanky. Having 1500 HP or whatever is great, but if you never dip below 1000 HP then some of those nodes aren't helping your character at all. The reason (it seems, to me) why this doesn't happen at the moment, is that there is horrendous spike damage late game which renders evasion/armour/resist useless. So if damage was turned down overall, so that the defenses mattered, then the HP glut wouldn't be a problem anymore. But as a result you would probably make all the other resists scale for level as well somehow so you need to balance all your resists to prevent leaving yourself open to any one specific damage type attack.