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

I think ES leech and regen should be treated with proper debuffing multipliers.

These mechanics are native for life replenishment, and they become ridiculously powerful when applied to ES values at full strength, considering ES has its own recharge.

This league I've played ES, Armor+Life, and Evasion+Life builds here's what I've noticed

Evasion/Dodge
Evasion/dodge based characters in the current meta pretty much die instantly the second something gets through their defense. They simply don't have enough life particularly if they decide to roll crit which just so happens to be on that side of the tree.

Armor/Life
Still can get a fair amount of life to the point where they can tank some fairly heavy hits.

ES
Not much to say here, ES is doing great this league

Improving Armor and Evasion Builds
Taking into consideration that I don't want to nerf ES builds. I've thought of a couple improvements that would go quite a way in shoring up the other two defenses.

1) Move Vaal Pact closer to the left side of the tree, ideally I'd place it just below the Sentinel notable. This would give greater access to Armor based builds who can make great make use of it and evsion/dodge can still access it.

2) Slightly buff life nodes on the evasion side of the tree by increasing each node by 1% and adding flat life to the notables. Less one-shots when you get hit, but hits will still hurt due to having less mitigation.

3) Add movement speed to more of the notables on the right side of the tree. Manually dodging hits is by far one of the best mechanics for Evasion/Dodge characters and better mobility is key for this.

4) Apply evasion to spells. Seriously I don't know why this isn't a thing at this point.

You know

ever since I cud afford ES builds I never went back to life builds exceot to try a few troll builds with LC and shit.
I agree that ES>life

But so what?
they both have their downsides and upsides

ES builds (low life or CI) require alot of insane gear to be beast or you are gonna have to waste alot of travel nodes in the tree.

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DDseedFoot wrote:

ES builds (low life or CI) require alot of insane gear to be beast or you are gonna have to waste alot of travel nodes in the tree.

Buff life and make armour and evasion on par with the ridiculous high amount of ES you can get and also put armour & evasion for es users on zero.

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jeke777 wrote:

Buff life and make armour and evasion on par with the ridiculous high amount of ES you can get and also put armour & evasion for es users on zero.

That kinda brings up a good point. Putting points in dodge wrecks your ES, Armour, and Block. It's a clear tradeoff, you get a second layer of evasion at the cost of everything else.

CI has no tradeoff because the loss of life doesn't matter when you can stack 10-15k ES.

I liked alot of ideas in here (AkuTenshiiZero)

1: Armor should reduce BIGGER hits not smaller hits
Unlike now how you dont reduce shit but small hits

2: Evasion should reduce (well evad not reduce ;p) smaller hits

3: Energy Shield should not reduce anything but may then be Underpowered

I can see why evasion should evad bigger hits since they are slower BUT this seems bad because then armor would reduce smaller hits and armor is the tanky class or ment to be

An assassin/rogue/thief does not stack armor because he would then be to heavy and be a tank not an assassin

A warrior/paladin/fighter doesnt stack evasion because he is ment to tank ad be in the frontlines he is heavy with his armor so he dont get hurt

A mage does neither of these things and stays back with powerful damage and AoE so he doesnt get hit (same as archer really but an archer sometimes does get evasion)

I also liked the %max res the higher your reduced damage was idea since in high tier maps 75% is useless

Perhaps thinking of the problem of balance in defenses in the reverse direction would be helpful. In other words, what should be able to kill a character? E.g. poor situational awareness (a telegraphed big hit should have one-shot potential; standing in the fire...), or a poor build (from lack of adequate defense in gear and / or tree). To me, character death should only really be possible from poor player choices or poor player skill. Work backwards from that.

So, the analysis should start with "how do we make player choices and skill matter" when it comes to balancing all the different defense options. This is what makes a good game with engaging game mechanics. This is what makes the potential of this game intriguing - the relatively complex passive tree, the gearing choices, the skill gem options, etc. At least to me. Cheap and unavoidable one-shot mechanics are lazy and dumb, and I hope they rethink that soon. But character survival, by that same thought, should not be a given.

The game is balanced around the mob's ability to randomly instant kill you regardless of mitigation or EHP. That is the core reason why the disparity exists and why life is in a sorry state and this is exactly how GGG wants it. Until they change their mentality, player defenses will go down every major patch while monster damage and map affix scaling gets worse and worse until only the super elites of super elites will ever get past level 95.

Stop blaming players for feeling forced to go CI with 12,000 buffer just to feel remotely non-squish, examine the game's crippling flaws at it's core.

Give players more goals other than grind maps til level 100. Extend the level cap, give us more end game content, something.

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HUGJOBK wrote:

First, Armour reduces all damage taken from hits (see the definition of hit here: http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Hit).

Mitigates squat all incoming magic/elemental damage, rendering pure armor into pure suicide without insane regen/leech.

Evasion completely eliminates whatever damage it can dodge, but one hit = 100% incoming damage taken. Again, instant suicide the one time RNG does not favor you.

Block is pretty much the same as evade. They synergize well, but that one bad roll of RNG and you're paste.

High ES and CI mitigates any and ALL damage, period. And it can be scaled to absolutely insane degrees. Coupled with a single notable and some life regen nodes and it's the end all be all of defenses.

Yeah... some balancing needs to be done for Armor (should mitigate incoming magic/elemental) and Evasion/Block to make them as solid for survival as ES.