BM vs CI rant
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Armor is basically not worth investment. 95% things that oneshot most life-builds are pure elemental based, and in this game, most builds outleech/regen non-oneshot damage. GGG staff would have to rework basically everything to make armor/evasion/dodge useful again, but i bet they won't. So considering life builds, to speed up ES builds in terms of EHP we need strong buff to amount of life that we receive from passive tree and items/progression.
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^tagging onto that:
Yes, a life build's gear can "Progress" by getting a decent bit more armor on it, but the amount of life between a high tier drop and a low map drop is fairly small, while the ES difference between a low tier and a high tier is very high. As such, ES feels more and more tanky against the Elemental threats, while Life based chraracters feel "capped" at how tanky they are against elemental damage. So progression feels drastically more stunted. There's much less feeling of advancement than their is with ES. |
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" Issue is, almost all your physical mitigation comes from Endurance Charges and Flasks. Next issue is, while a 800 ES chest is twice as good as a 400 ES chest, a 2.000 Armor Chest is not twice as good as a 1.000 Armor chest. Armor just doesn't scale really well, getting about 10.000 is enough to survive most physical damage with a bunch of charges. At this point all you want is more life to survive elemental damage or maybe a bit of evasion, which at least helps against elemental attacks. |
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" From what I have experienced in this game, there's a huge difference in survivability between "I have 10k armour and 10k evasion all the time, no questions asked" and "I only want life and resists" (which usually tranlates into something like 3k armour, 1000 evasion, read as: nothing). And that's where those armour/evasion prefixes come in very handy: They help to reach those tresholds without wasting your passives. Because you guys are definetly right about this: there's no reason whatsoever to spend passives into armour/evasion. Every defensive skillpoint wants to be life or block/dodge chance. The only passives worth spending into AR/EV are the ones that have life attached to them. And you're also right about this: unlike ES, armour and evasion have diminishing returns. But to get to those tresholds and the dimishing returns, you need quite a bit of investment, either in gear or in passives. Again, I prefer gear to be the solution. Good luck getting permanent 10k armour and evasion with a 500 armour chestpiece and a 2h weapon. Considering Flasks: You maybe don't want a granite/basalt when you could instead use a DpS flask. Or a resist flask to provide protection against this elemental oneshot damage you're all so afraid of (still waiting for those non-volatile, non telegraphed elemental oneshots that blast through my 6k life). And you maybe want your armour to be there no matter what. I certainly appreciate it during all sorts of DCs/lags/screen freezes that always happen in the most dangerous scenarios. Tldr: If you want to do so, ignore all armour/evasion stats and complain about "no gear progression". I certainly won't. P.S., as always: All I write is under the assumption that "yes, life is worse than ES. There's some small adjustments needed. No, life is not that terrible as people in feedback want to make it." 3.5 build: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2299519 Last edited by Peterlerock#5171 on May 7, 2017, 4:43:12 PM
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I think the main problem here is how GGG collects data:
most people here (like 90%) will agree that it is underpowered, however, at the GGG meeting, someone will say "but 20% of our players play it. it's not underpowered". Thing is, statistics show what you want it to show. Some number of players who play it don't know any better. Some are new players. Some are managining to utilize it well, but their build can be so much better with aura setup. Some use it just for leveling or short-term. Very rare builds don't have choice but to use it, like explosive arrow, which has mana cost around 150-200 in a six link. So GGG, whatever the number is, you're wrong. Blood magic is crap, and you need to change it. This comes from a player who loves concept of Blood magic so much, that he's thinking of sacrificing viability in order to play it. I love not paying for my skills, and would be totally fine to sacrifice something in order to get it, however, sacrifice is too great currently, especially considering that sustaining mana in normal builds is not a big problem. The mechanic posseses so much flavour - like, you're sacrificing your own blood in order to fight. You could make a movie about it. Any yet GGG deliberately wastes this mechanic. THis reminds me of their fear of an auction house - they're afraid that Blood magic has the potential to get out of hand, because the mechanic is abuse-prone, and they decided to do nothing. GGG, if you don't take some risks, nothing is gonna come out of it. Give Blood magic some flavour, not necessarily power, like the suggestion with bleeding from one guy in this thread. Or, passive behind BM, "whenever you kill enemy you gain % of its life for 4 seconds." That enforces Blood magic's flavour. |
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"With my build i have currently 10k life, 1200 armor and 0 evasion. Basically, i have not a single problem with high physical attack damage, only things that usually kill me are volatiles(elemental), strong DoTs(physical/elemental/chaos, but armor or dodge won't help herE), one-shot attacks that no matter how much armor u will have will kill u anyway(vaal oversoul smash, shaper smash, malachai smash etc). Armor is illusoric, it was stated by some guys on reddit, that accoring to GGG staff armor mitigate physical damage up to 10% of armor stat value, so basically 10k armor will stop maximum of 1k physical hit. Considering this, if you have to invest in passive tree and gear 1k more life or 10k armor, you will be better at 1k life, even with no armor at all. Last edited by Painkiler1#4125 on May 7, 2017, 5:35:10 PM
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" I second that, completely. And yes, there are big elemental damage spikes, but not random one shots ( volatile apart here, even though I have yet to be one shot by a volatile, but when the stars align ... it seems possible ), " That is a very wront assumption there. PS : what do you consider "high" physical damage ? SSF is not and will never be a standard for balance, it is not for people entitled to getting more without trading.
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" On the note of flasks, I really think that granite and jade flasks shouldn't exist, in the same way that there's no "+base ES shield" flasks. Primary defenses Base amount should be constrained to gear, and flasks should act as multipliers to that (Like flask effects increasing your armor/evasion by a %, or flasks granting you a % Physical resistance). |
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" Agree Nerfing jade and granite to 1500 base value would be a good start, they could consume slightly less charge to compensate for example. SSF is not and will never be a standard for balance, it is not for people entitled to getting more without trading. Last edited by Fruz#6137 on May 8, 2017, 12:43:04 AM
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" You're a Berserker, so your life is more like 9k. I played VP berserker life sponge in the past. It felt stupidly broken against some content, but still died way too often. This type of builds only survives when I am in full control all the time, press the right flasks, click in the right direction, observe and judge everything correctly, and my game doesn't decide to turn into a lagging clusterfuck whenever I'm facing real danger. With builds that have layered defenses, even though I have less life, I have much more failsafes. " ...it's not like I just wrote this: " ...You won't ever find me investing skillpoints in the passive tree into armour nodes. But I still want Armour, so where do I find it? ... with better gear. More expensive gear. I still take all the life I can find on my gear (except that I won't trade a nice rare chest for a belly). 3.5 build: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2299519 Last edited by Peterlerock#5171 on May 8, 2017, 2:00:33 AM
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