Low-life Pain Attunement build, are life nodes still worth getting?

I'm building a low-life pain attunement cold caster shadow.
I recently started to wonder if those points into those life nodes would be better spent elsewhere. Afterall you reserve 65% of your total life to benefit from pain attunement and other gear bonuses, in the end +2000 life is actually just +700.

Would passive points be better spent in ES and other defensive nodes such as Block chance etc?
what are your opinions on this matter?

These are the nodes I originally thought about going for:



Ditching life in favour of energy shield and more chaos resists:

Could also take some shield block nodes or something.

What are your opinions?

Hi warbaque, I've played around with low life builds before and tried to make them work. I personally think HP nodes are pretty important in the leveling stage of character creation to get your character there. If you want to respec them out later that's doable, but their importance early on should be stressed.

Ultimately, the 8% nodes give you very little once you're reaching flat aura reservation. Once you have your primary life pool headed towards energy shield, I think they become more or less worthless with some minor considerations for incoming chaos damage buffer.

Hope that helps!

(What I mean is, say you have 3000 HP. 8% of that is 240 HP, so losing 1 8% node brings you down to 2760 max HP before reservation. Imagining a perfect reserve of 65%, the difference between having 1 8% node to your total end value is a difference of 156. (1950[65%] reserved of 3000) 1794[65%] of 2760).

So the ultimate difference of the 1 node is 84 HP given our nice round numbers we choose for this example. It may be worth it to you, I typically favor them less.

yes, otherwise chaos damage will destroy you.

Yeah, you want some life for Pain Attunement, and you have to make chaos resist the #1 priority on your gear (above all other resists, all but the highest +life, and damage) until you get gear good enough to have other stats.

Thanks to chaos resist on gear, you no longer have to stack life/es as hard as it was in the past, which is nice. Overall you do want a ton of eshield though, since once you get past the "1-shottable by chaos damage at 35% max life" hurdle, you don't want to invest any more into life.

My rough estimate would be 75 chaos resist at 2000 life (700 after reservation) and upwards of 4k eshield (which would be taking lots of eshield passives and having a bunch of high eshield gear) to be able to start running maps. Zealot's Oath is also an interesting option, similar to Invalesco's BotW build in my sig.