Any good reason to go for life instead of ES ?

Life is grossly underpowered outside of freeze and stun mitigation which is a non existent ossie for those perma flask skyforth boys.

GGG could start by making life nodes good again and not forcing everyone to go to scion life cluster to get decent end game EHP.

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Nephalim wrote:

Life is grossly underpowered outside of freeze and stun mitigation which is a non existent ossie for those perma flask skyforth boys.

GGG could start by making life nodes good again and not forcing everyone to go to scion life cluster to get decent end game EHP.

This is definitely true. I shouldn't have to go to the scion wheel on almost every left side and right side character, no matter what type of build. Hell, even builds at the top of the tree come down for the life at the scion.

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DarkWap wrote:

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SasoriOtoko wrote:

Depends on the ES build. I have a Lv 90 Occultist with 15,500 ES with around 2,300 ES regen a second. She can facetank a lot of things...but stuns and freeze wreck her bad. The build I followed (based on Dy'ness's tank) had a premise that the high ES and regen could survive just about anything...however in practice it's not quite the case. Some bosses stun lock and destroy her instantly (Maegara) and big hitting bosses like T14 Vaal and T13 Voll can do upwards of 10,000 damage a hit and have one shotted her with crits and bonuses from map mods.

And then there's my Pathfinder with 6200 life with 75/70 block from Rumis, 30% extra physical damage reduction from a Basalt flask, 13% reduction from Arctic Armour, Enfeeble curse and Fortify from her WB/Vagan Dagger combo...even hits from a powered up T13 Voll at most do half of her life. She can facetank bosses that destroy my high CI Occultist all day long.

And with a flask that gives almost 4,000 life per second which *never* runs out (the rest rarely do either)...I'll stick with life anyday...and stuns are extremely rare and she's immune to freeze (as well as ignite and shock) with her flasks constantly up. A CI based version of my build could be good if it had stun immunity and a way to refill ES quickly...but so far, I'll stick with life.

Volatiles and Bearer bombs can be dangerous...but most only do a small chunk of life.

and why an es based char can't use block, basalt, arctic, enfeeble and fortify?

tree positioning, for one: most block is in the lower-right unless you use staffs while most ES is in the top half. CI characters only have so much mana to reserve, and must carefully choose which auras or blasphemies they use (while low-life ES characters must rely on Shavronne's Overpriced Robe to not be instantly killed by any chaos damage whatsoever), etc etc.

you can certainly, say, run a blasphemy'd enfeeble and arctic armor, leaving you with 40% of your mana remaining (investing into mana reservation reduction is a choice between very expensive gea or further stretching your passive tree). you could even have a chaos golem summoned on top!

fortify requires a melee hit to grant, so while a spell dagger build using whirling blades can use it, some others might not--or don't want to be within melee range of mobs for any length of time to get it.

another source of phys reduction would be endurance charges... which are also in the bottom-left side of the tree for the most part, and requires a lot more passive tree stretching or heavy gearing to really capitalize on.


and last and most importantly, why bother? the upper regions of the tree (near all the ES nodes) is full to bursting with spell damage, elemental, damage, and similar effects to be able to delete your enemies from several screens away, largely nulling the need to have much in the way of defenses beyond the exorbitant effective hp that CI or hybrid life/ES grants. as has been noted upthread, a dead enemy deals 0 damage for you to need to mitigate.

ehp lol

It's worth noting that there are lots of popular non es uniques, like- rats nest, maligaros gloves, facebrakers, lightning coil, most quivers, cospri's will, atziri's step, acuity, hyrri's ire. lossing armor or evasion gear piece is less devastating than losing es one.

Life has the ability to more easily stack other defensive mechanics where as es builds cant.


The problem however is that those defensive options dont really do much for ... elemental damage

a life build could get to 15k effective hp vs big hits by stacking endurance charges and armor.

but vs elemental they are really still working with 75% all res. at which point all that mattes is how big your hp pool is.

es can have much larger pools .. therefore in the end they are much safer


also there exists quite a few shortcut items that make just going es an easy choice.

It is very simple:

As long as big single burst hits dominate the endgame --> ES which stack highest ES values possible without further mitigation will be always the superior choice (= current state of the game)

When multiple consecutive moderate hits are the most frequent encounters paired with DoT effects --> Life builds with layers of mitigation will be the superior choice


It is really as simple as that. Big hits can't be mitigated effectivly besides flat damage reduction modifiers (Enfeeble, damage conversion, Endurance Charges). An ES build can get enfeeble easily and also has access to Endurance charges with some investment. Damage converion is harder to get for ES builds bit with Essence league there will be an option to get it on a rare chest.


Big hard slow hits can be taken easily with an ES build if you build around it: You can take a 10k hit to your ES pool and wait for 1sec for you ES recharge to kick in (no need for flasks - so many people say using life flask is an advantage for life buids --> with an ES build you can get an "auto flask" every second if you invest properly in it)



Life has no advantage over ES in an endgame scenario in the current state of the game. In earlier versions of PoE Life vs ES was actually balanced. ES always got the higher pool with the recovery option if you don't get hit, but it was weal to status aliments and stun to compensate for that upsides which was great game design.
Over time ES builds got:
- options to be immune to stun/avoid stun
- options to be immune to status ailments/avoid status ailments
- a significant buff to ES recovery mechanics
- Energy from within unique jewel
- jewels in general
- Ascendancys which grant flat ES, increased recharge rate and faster start of ES recovery
- utility flasks got a huge buff
- introduction of unique utility flasks

Es builds got so many direct and indirect buffs over time without ajusting the initial power level. Nowadays you can eliminate all downsides auf an ES build if you build around it without facing any significant drawbacks having not as much DPS than a life build (no, in fact it is the oposite: through the very efficiant pathing on the passive tree of ES nodes, ES builds usually have even more DPS than life builds currently)


The only "downside" beeing left to ES builds is: You have to get the gear before you can do it - you can't do it from the getgo on the start of a new challange league - thats it.



There was only one time in PoE when life builds where superior to ES builds - and that were the times where the MoM/Arctic Armour combinations was efficiant and great. Then the nerfed CoD, reworked Arcitc Armour and Eldrith Battery and buffed physical damage of monsters significantly.
GGG ripped the MoM-Meta appart and left life builds behind with nothing - now we have fortify which serves basically the function of MoM (only that ES builds can get fortify too on top of it, while MoM was exclusive to life)



TLDR: Any good reasons to go Life > ES for my endgame build?
- you really want to go life (personal reasons)
- you are starting in a fresh league
- you wanna utilize MoM in your build
- you wanna use some fancy uniques (example: Zerphi's Last Breath)

Not really. Just go ES (if you can) and enjoy not being one-shot. :P

I think its a question you have to ask on a build by build basis tbh.

Lots of ppl in here saying es if flat out better, I dont think its as simple as that. Bow builds are some of the strongest all around setups for endgame, how many es based bow builds do you see compared to life? Theyre doing fine with 5-6k hp, coil, toh, basalt, evasion and dodge, and by fine I mean crushing the same content es builds are deathless. Theres situations Id put my ci melee in without thinking twice where Id hesitate on a life melee, but theres situations that go the other way too.

On standard atm I have

7 pure life builds

5 pure es builds

2 hybrid life + es


life suits those 7 life builds. If there was no reason to go life no one would be using coils or nests etc as ppl have pointed out, they get used a lot.

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AndIMustMask wrote:

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DarkWap wrote:

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SasoriOtoko wrote:

Depends on the ES build. I have a Lv 90 Occultist with 15,500 ES with around 2,300 ES regen a second. She can facetank a lot of things...but stuns and freeze wreck her bad. The build I followed (based on Dy'ness's tank) had a premise that the high ES and regen could survive just about anything...however in practice it's not quite the case. Some bosses stun lock and destroy her instantly (Maegara) and big hitting bosses like T14 Vaal and T13 Voll can do upwards of 10,000 damage a hit and have one shotted her with crits and bonuses from map mods.

And then there's my Pathfinder with 6200 life with 75/70 block from Rumis, 30% extra physical damage reduction from a Basalt flask, 13% reduction from Arctic Armour, Enfeeble curse and Fortify from her WB/Vagan Dagger combo...even hits from a powered up T13 Voll at most do half of her life. She can facetank bosses that destroy my high CI Occultist all day long.

And with a flask that gives almost 4,000 life per second which *never* runs out (the rest rarely do either)...I'll stick with life anyday...and stuns are extremely rare and she's immune to freeze (as well as ignite and shock) with her flasks constantly up. A CI based version of my build could be good if it had stun immunity and a way to refill ES quickly...but so far, I'll stick with life.

Volatiles and Bearer bombs can be dangerous...but most only do a small chunk of life.

and why an es based char can't use block, basalt, arctic, enfeeble and fortify?

tree positioning, for one: most block is in the lower-right unless you use staffs while most ES is in the top half. CI characters only have so much mana to reserve, and must carefully choose which auras or blasphemies they use (while low-life ES characters must rely on Shavronne's Overpriced Robe to not be instantly killed by any chaos damage whatsoever), etc etc.

you can certainly, say, run a blasphemy'd enfeeble and arctic armor, leaving you with 40% of your mana remaining (investing into mana reservation reduction is a choice between very expensive gea or further stretching your passive tree). you could even have a chaos golem summoned on top!

fortify requires a melee hit to grant, so while a spell dagger build using whirling blades can use it, some others might not--or don't want to be within melee range of mobs for any length of time to get it.

another source of phys reduction would be endurance charges... which are also in the bottom-left side of the tree for the most part, and requires a lot more passive tree stretching or heavy gearing to really capitalize on.


and last and most importantly, why bother? the upper regions of the tree (near all the ES nodes) is full to bursting with spell damage, elemental, damage, and similar effects to be able to delete your enemies from several screens away, largely nulling the need to have much in the way of defenses beyond the exorbitant effective hp that CI or hybrid life/ES grants. as has been noted upthread, a dead enemy deals 0 damage for you to need to mitigate.

maybe I should write /sarcasm in the end