Armour, Evasion, Energy Shield, How to balance this game?

Everyone is a PoE Professor: episode 10, season 9

In this episode, we'll revisit the good old gig 'guy who doesn't have a clue gives advice by the ton as if he has it all figured out'.

lol the real defense mechanic in this game is : Leech , block and EHP

Armour, Evasion, Energy Shield and Life should _feel_ differently compared to each other.

What happens now is Evasion mostly relies on having dodge and evasion/dodge flasks rather than evasion alone. Life is a worse version of ES and armour gets replaced by our good friends damage reduction and damage conversion(lightning coil).

So here's how to make it feel and act differently.

1) Energy shield: leave it as is, even with vinktar's. It's the type of build you play if you like seeing your health bar go up and down to 10% several hundred times per fight. It's an enjoyable experience so don't change it.

2) Life: Very few people pick life because of one shot mechanics. Something which energy shield _should_ suffer from since you can easily get 7-8K ES. But life needs a sort of buffer between itself and these mechanics. So here's my suggestion, put a node on the right side of the tree that converts all incoming damage into damage over time(and puts ES to 1, sort of the opposite of CI). The higher your lifepool, the longer the duration of the damage over time becomes.

So rather than get a single hit of 2K damage from an enemy, with a lifepool of 5K life, you get 400 damage per second for 5 seconds. You get hit again for 2K damage from another enemy and this tick becomes 800 damage for 4 seconds + 400 damage for 1 second after. So all received damage stacks with each other, but life will genuinely feel different. It'll get rid of cheap one shots and give you time to consider your moves. Will you pop a flash to give you more regeneration or a resistance flash? Maybe an instant flask? Point is, it gives you more possibilities.

3) Armour needs to remove a flat number of damage. This gets balanced by having more regeneration if you stay on the left side of the tree for life. You'll get a larger pool of life, so the physical damage hits will hurt more, but the regeneration will edge it back to full much faster.

4) With the new life system, a combination between dodge and life won't be so bad any more either. Since every tick is something that can be evaded, extending the window of time you have to act upon it. It'll also be a clear difference between dodge and evasion. Dodge will get rid of the entire damage over time cluster while evasion gets rid of a single tick.


But I doubt this will get read by anyone with enough influence to suggest it :)

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HUGJOBK wrote:

As you can see Energy Shield is currently far more superior to Armour and Evasion in term of Defence.

Energy shield and armour are both plenty powerful in their own ways. Can't speak of evasion since I haven't made an endgame evasion character yet.

In Prophecy I played a chieftain with high armour and life regen. He was practically immune to normal enemies and could also walk through labyrinth traps with impunity. Facetanking Izaro was no problem even with mechanics, but Atziri's elemental attacks hurt a lot.

In Essence I play an occultist with CI and high ES. She can't withstand a pack of normal enemies for more than a few seconds, but fortunately that's usually enough to kill them. Traps are dangerous because she needs a period of no damage in order to recharge ES. She can barely facetank Izaro with no mechanics, but on the other hand she can survive Atziri's empowered flameblast.

"

HUGJOBK wrote:

And I just can't understand the idea behind "Mages are tanky as hell in this game". As it is supposed to be: Strength base class should be stupidly tanky, deal heavy and slow damage at close range. Dexterity base class should do insane dps at melee range or good dps at far distance, and is also provided a kind of Defence that all we know it is evasion. Intelligence base class should be able to deal large amount of damage with huge area of effect and at very far distance, but they should also be squishy and vulnerable to melee damage which will require them to always keep the distance to their enemies as far as possible.

Because that's how it is in every other game ever and god forbid anyone tries to do something different?

"

HUGJOBK wrote:

Third, remove Chaos Inoculation which is so stupid and insanely broken (seriously? You can just literally immune to Chaos damage, the strongest, hardest to mitigate type of damage).

Chaos damage isn't the strongest type of damage in the game because it's balanced around being hard to mitigate. Enemies have practically no heavy-hitting chaos attacks as opposed to physical or elemental attacks.

CI also has the drawback that life does not increase your effective HP but still factors into how often you get stunned or frozen. So if you go all in with ES and damage and don't take any life you'll get stunned and frozen all the time, which can be quite dangerous.

ES might have been considered a secondary defense type like armour and evasion on the initial conception of the game, but that is not the case anymore. It has evolved to work like HP. So to me there are 3 defense layers in this game. CI is an iconinc PoE keystone, and it should not be removed or changed in anyway IMO.

1) First Layer: Life and ES

2) Second Layer: Armour and Evasion

3) Third Layer: Endurance charges, block, dodge, Mind over matter, fortify etc.

Now the first defense layer is the harder to stack and build, followed by the second, followed by the third. The problem is that second layer defenses are hard to stack, need high gear and passive investment and they give mediocre returns, while third layer defenses are very easy to stack, and for the most part give better returns. Also keep in mind that theoritically, being able to stack much higher amounts of Armour or Evasion, is the theoritical advantage of Life builds over ES. So fixing second layer defenses, and make stacking them worthwhile can fix the whole ES/HP issue without actually nerfing ES.

Now the problems and what can be done is really simple IMO. It is just that GGG always fear they will make something broken, and do not buff it, while accidentally make other shit 1000 times more broken.

ARMOUR

Problems:

1) It is shit against heavy physical hits/one shots.

2) Does absolutely nothing against elemental damage, which is scaled to absurd amounts in top tier maps

Solutions:

1) Buff the shitty armour formula. Instead of needing 10 times the amount of armour to mitigate half incoming physical damage, do it to need 5 times instead, meaning that you are doubling it's effectiveness. No, with the current meta it is not broken at all. I mean back when the hardest physical hits you could receive were level 71 Brutus Colonade, or the fire/cold phase a level 77 Piety(which were half physical), the armour formula might have been OK. In the current game, not so much.

2) Make flat armour values to increase maximum resistances. Every 5K armour 1% to max elemental resistances is quite nice. An extreme armour heavy build with top gear will have around 40K armour before flasks, meaning +8% to max elemental resistances. This, along with the buffed armour formula will be quite enough to effectively mitigate(especially with flasks), the absurd amounts of damage that end game bosses and even trash mobs can do with suicidial map mods.

That's it. Now you do not need to only keep stacking ES/HP and relying on outleeching everything to survive. Tanking CAN be an option



Evasion


Problems:

1) Does not do anything about spells

2) When you are hit, you are hit hard


Solutions:

1) Make evasion to give spell dodge as well. EG. the tootlip % of chance to evade could give 1/3 that amount as spell dodge. Meaning a top tier evasion user with top gear could have around 80% chance to evade, and this would also give him around 26% chance to dodge spells as well. Other way it could work is every 10K evasion would give 5% chance to dodge spells. Anyway, something in that sense

2) With the above changes, and taking into acount that you will have Acro/Phase acro, possibly uniques to increase your dodge chance, and maybe even block, it is possible to not get hit at around 90% of the time if not more. Also eva characters are usually agile, with high attack/movement speed so you can manually dodge telegraphed one shots. With these in mind, if you are hit, you are hit hard is working as intented IMO. It would be fair(while now it is not).

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Poutsos wrote:

1) First Layer: Life and ES

2) Second Layer: Armour and Evasion

3) Third Layer: Endurance charges, block, dodge, Mind over matter, fortify etc.

I would order those a bit differently.

First layer: Evasion, block, dodge. They have a chance of avoiding the hit entirely, in which case nothing else happens.

Second layer: Armour, endurance chargess, fortify, resistances. They will reduce the damage that passes through.

Third layer: Life, ES, mind over matter. They absorb the damage that got through the first two layers but have finite pools.

You do not have to be a game devloper, professor, or even have more than 200 hundred hours to know the game is unbalanced and has problems. Anyone who would argue otheriwse is clueless or trolling. Even the devlopers have accepted it is not where they would like it to be.


Removing CI may not be the answer but ES is far ahead of the games other defences in terms of offering survivability. Perfect balance is impossible, but it sure as shit could be a lot better than it is at present.

agree with you OP but i wont say anything more cause bullies all over the forums nowdays

ES was designed to be a massive life pool buffer that cannot be replenished without withdrawing from combat.

Guess what happens when you can suddenly replenish such a buffer in an instant while remaining in combat.

Good stuff.

Peace,

-Boem-

the only reason ES comes out on top is all 3 scale for phys but only ES scales for ele/chaos (and amusingly they are immune to chaos with CI)

You can make a character borderline immune to phys, but said character will die as soon as you run mods that amp ele damage because you end up with a titanic multiplier compared to your regular damage intake.

with 90% phys you take 2.5x damage from 100% extra damage of an element, CI characters take 25% extra damage (assuming your running 0% phys I tend to always run enduring cry so maybe 30% extra is closer)

Evade characters have their own problem, generally involving dumpster HP pools. I'd say you need 6.5-7k hp to reliably HC safely these days and I'm not even sure its possible to get an evader to 6.5k hp, maybe if you kaom's and use pathfinder pots to actually do the evasion.

the various posters talking about leech being required are also correct, currently It seems to me that every build requires either high regen, or high leech I've really not seen many characters succeeding using potions for regen (both because they suck and there is an opportunity cost associated with using HP flasks instead of more OP buff flasks)

in the grand discussion of armour/evasion/ES I don't think ES needs nerfing as its the one that is most capable of doing content currently, I think some flat health buffs are needed and possibly some bleed over from evade/armour to reduce elemental damage slightly.