We need reliable melee character, new life based system !

Hi everyone,

I'm writing this because i really enjoy this game. GGG has bring the game to this amazing state where noone else has been able to put it before in the hack & slash history.

I've really appreciated the Atlas of World extension, it just came to sublimate the end game content !

I play in standard, and i like to see how the new added mechanics can perfectly fit in the core game actually.

But if i write this, it's also to highlight about something i don't understand.

I've recently started to play a lot with a witch, a Contagion/Essence drain CI witch, now sitting on 15KES.

I was able to get even further in this game, in places where i would never been able to come with one of my close combat marauders, duelist, templar and their 5.5k life... and what about my rangers ? Well, same thing, 5k/5.5k life also, i just don't want to play them anymore too. And I would not even consider to make a life based shadow, it would be a complete madness...

So why would i try hard to get 5.5k life when i take almost all the life from tree and gear, when i can simply easily reach 15K ES and feel for the first time able to survive in this game ?

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Also, i've noticed 2 interesting things :

First, we are in a situation where whitches (or any other ES/CI based build, CI blade vortex ranger for example) are able to hit from a good distance, and can also reach an epic amount of 15K ES (witch can be considered as her life pool), and on the other side, we have all the close combat characters, which are directly taking part of the fight, taking huge risks with only 5k/6k/7k life pool to survive for the best of them. Which means actually caster are able to tank for warrior that just can't.

Secondly, i've acquired recently a 6L perfect Brass Dome, a new unique with at max roll reach 4050 armor. So, i just wanted to see if it could be reliable. And i've made a character based on this. I've designed something with 6K life, and 90% estimated physical damage reduction with no flasks or determination aura activated. And i just got obliterated 2 times in a T13 "High Garden" map.

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Anyway, all i wanted to show here is Life is just too bad when we have ES, armour as always just been useless.

But what about evasion ? Well since the life is just not enough to take the hit we are not supposed to evade, it's just the same thing. And i used to play this node before, named "Ondar's Guile"... Now we have arrow dancing, which is just... bad.

So what about block chance ? Even if it's really good, this is the same here, the life pool is always just not enough to make us able to take blows that was not blocked in hard situation.

Dodge from accrobatics ? Well, i don't want to play it anymore, since i don't like life base and i prefer to play ES now, but this reduces ES (And even armour lol) by 50%. I can understand it reduces block chance, but ES and armour ?! So, i just walk away. Also, if we can take block with ES, why try to even play dodge ?!


Well, thanks for anyone that takes the time to read me until the end. Peace !

I agree with everything you're saying, life/evasion/armour is in a deplorable state at best.

It's strange to think that in the current state of the game, a Witch/Shadow (frail, high damage characters by nature) out tank a Marauder/Duelist. In addition to being more tanky, these spell casters usually have ranged abilities, giving them another layer of safety our tanks can't enjoy. To me, this system is completely backwards. Why would i ever play melee when i could just play ranged AoE spells and kill bosses at a distance? Let's not even begin about the name-locking melee skills...


I'm not saying that spell casters need a nerf, I'm saying the survivability of melee characters needs to be buffed, badly.


I feel like Armour and Evasion are in a somewhat useless state as well. Acrobatics and arrow dancing are basically rendered useless. Tanks have no way of increasing their elemental resistances to tank enemy spells besides Purity auras and one or two max res nodes in the tree.

I think Block/Spell block is an example of mitigation done better than the above choices, but this limits melee characters to only 1 handed weapons with shields (and sometimes dual wield or staves).

In short, i think the defense system needs to be reworked. Tanks need to be able to get higher elemental resistances, better physical damage mitigation, tools that do both, and higher life pools.

The main problem is, there is only a SINGLE item mod, that provides decent life.
For example, a chest can have a maximum of 119 life (126 with Essence), and even cheap chests can have this stats (because rolling high tier for single stat is quite easy and often happens). Expensive life chests have more resistances, more armour/evasion/ES and some other stats, but it is only a minor advantage.
Oh, ok, you can also roll strength and get another tiny +39 life from that...
Your character has decent base life pool on his own. But as you gear progresses, you quickly hit a "cap" of your life pool, which you just CANT exceed (because you cant get more life from gear).

ES is very different. Your character has very low base ES pool (if we take Discipline as it), but most items can have up to 4 mods to increase one's ES, two of which (%increase and flat ES) strongly multiply each other. As your gear progresses, so does your ES pool. At certain point, it exceed life, and goes futher, and with really great gear, exceeds Life 2-3 times.

If there were more mods, that provide bonuses to life (let's say, %increased maximum life and +maximum life and +life regen per second), players would have better endgame scaling for life, and life character wouldnt fall behind so much. OF course, those mods should be prefixes, so players choose - they want going "full life" or life+armour/eva/es (as now).

Also, Witch area is packed with ES nodes (and good ones) far too tightly! I feel like every ES character must go into Witch's starting area, just to grab enough ES. It's bad, and hurts build diversity. I remember old times, when ES nodes were spread more equally, and you could make a viable ES build with various combination of Shadow's, Witch's, Templar's and Scion's starting areas.

Energy Shield: The core problem here is that it's been designed primarily as an alternative, rather than a supplement, to Life. Every other defense in the game is designed as a supplement, so ES has naturally become better than the other defenses. With Chaos Inoculation this makes sense, but it's spread to pretty much everything ES... and really, we're not going to see defense balance unless CI is more of a "cute" option. My suggestions:
* Change Zealot's Oath to "Life Regeneration applies to Energy Shield as well as Life."
* Change Ghost Reaver to "Mana Leech applies to Energy Shield as well as Mana." (This breaks Vaal Pact for CI characters; Life base or GTFO.)

Armour: I think this defensive mechanic is well-designed.

Evasion: I don't think this mechanic is particularly well-designed. Unlike other defenses, Evasion doesn't change what types of telegraphs one has to avoid to prevent their death; if something has only a 40% chance to kill you, you still need to avoid it 100% of the time. This means that, unlike the other defenses, Evasion tends not to impact positioning, with players continuing to position as if they had no defenses whatsoever. This isn't quite true with numerous small hits, but that's exactly the type of thing you just heal through anyway (flask, leech or regen). Basically, evasion serves as a recovery supplement, not a proper death avoider, and therefore is best in combination with Armour or ES than by itself. I think evasion, especially pure evasion, should be buffed but I have no concrete suggestion how.

Honestly the exact same CI was considered terrible after Awakening released. Because it lost basically all the cool things it got, exspecially not being able to just have Blood Rage on was a huge hit for CI and also partially lowlife.

Of course Act IV also rarely had any sources of chaos damage making CI a less obvious choice, if you died it usually was to elemental damage. So going CI was just not needed.

But the only thing that changed besides having some more Chaos Damage threats now is that with Essence making CI gear is a bit easier. The issue with CI is always that you sometimes get additional defenses you are not supposed to have (and of course instant leech).

If you compare an Evasion Acrobatics Char with high Dodge and about 5k HP, he basically has more effective HP in most combat situations than a CI char, however that is entirely meaningless if both chars have instant leech and are basically back to full life in a splitseconds whenever they take damage. At this point all that matters is surviving everything. And even here CI would not be as good if you couldn't just have Fortify, Basalt Flasks, Elemental Flasks etc.

i think there are 2 core problems

first one is instant leech, GGG try to make the game hard but when chars can fully heal in a split second the only way to make the game "hard" is to resort to the 1 shot mechanics and the only way to deal with 1 shot mechanics is either having monstrous hitpoints or tons of % reductions. unreliable, situational or flat reduction defences become less and less effective.


second problem is the melee vs ranged dilema, given the freedom we get and the lack of specific classes what ever melee does ranged can do it better and safer, on an ideal world ranged would either be much softer or do less damage but in poe they cant just buff a class.


a posible solution would be to simply get rid of instant leech aswell as nerf the damage of both monsters and players specialy from ranged skills.
another thing worth mentioning is that the game needs less hard counters to main defences, for instance there is little point in going heavy with armor if elemental / chaos will just ignore it. i think defences should take a warcraft aproach:

armor reduction:
40% more effective vs physical
no bonus against chaos
40% less effective against elemental

this removes the need of stacking life/ES as the one and only reliable defence


that being said i doubt GGG will ever take that route from fear of creating rage of biblical proportions.

Something needs to be done but i'd say it requires a more significant change than just messing with life.

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lagwin1980 wrote:

Something needs to be done but i'd say it requires a more significant change than just messing with life.

They wont buff life, expect a heavy ES nerf next patch.

What they should really buff is FREAKING melee with stuff like elemental damage reduction on melee weapon nods so ranger and caster can't abuse them. Seriously i'm making an uber juggernaut tank with Brass Dome, Legacy Aegis, Blasphemy Enfeeble, 10 power charges , Arctic Armor, 32k armor, 1.4k regen and even if i'm extremely tanky (with that much investment it has to be) I still take monster dmg values sometimes from unfair mechanisms like bearers, Volatile, heavy elemental degen, ect...

I still manage to deal with it but this character is entirely designed around tankiness with damages coming from Varunastra/ Legacy Void Hearth (something impossible in league). A normal melee char would have no chances doing some of the content I do. It's incredibly silly.

I think GGG assumes because things like 10+ end charges, AA, enfeeble-blasphemy, fortify and even chaos golem are in the game melee should stack them to survive. On the other side of that coin if they don't assume this life becomes faceroll easymode for those who do stack all that shit.

I'd love to hear someone at GGG kind of explain their thinking in terms of how much they expect life based melee characters to stack those kinds of defenses.

I would imagine on paper life probably has at least as much if not more ehp compared to ci.

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GeorgAnatoly wrote:

I think GGG assumes because things like 10+ end charges, AA, enfeeble-blasphemy, fortify and even chaos golem are in the game melee should stack them to survive. On the other side of that coin if they don't assume this life becomes faceroll easymode for those who do stack all that shit.

This is a really, really old problem. As in, fleshed out 7 years ago.

The only variable Laz is ignoring in his pessimistic analysis is human reaction time. Let's say you have a telegraphed attack which deals a decent chunk of damage, but requires you to react somewhat quickly to avoid it. If your personal reaction time is long, you will be hit, you need the defenses. If your reaction time is short and you choose to avoid, you won't be hit, you don't need the defenses (but you just lost some DPS time with the manual dodge).

In order for defensive investment you have relevance without being a flat-out requirement, monster design MUST factor in telegraphing on a comprehensive level, AND offensive investment must reward manually dodging hits enough to compensate for lost DPS time which could have been achieved just tanking the hit.

Then on top of that, defensive and offensive investment need particulate mutual exclusivity and balance. If using a defense has no cost or a trivial cost, there's no meaningful choice there.

Even then, for each individual, reaction time is somewhat constant -your reaction time is your reaction time - therefore within a purely individual context, everything Laz says still applies even with well-designed telegraphing.