CI vs Life - Advantages and Disadvantages?

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renroval wrote:

I see a lot of CI is broken posts though which I don't honestly get.

The one thing I don't get about the complaints is: You get 9k ES vs 5k Life...why the complaints??? It's a pretty huge advantage, and not broken that it is underpowered...(maybe broken that it is overpowered)

You're not getting it.



You can have 12,000 ES and die a hell of a lot easier than someone with 3k health.

The mechanics of stuns and elemental status effects are related to your health, not your Energy Shield. So a guy with 500 health and 82,500 Energy Shield will get 3x Shocked for every Spark cast, perma-frozen for every little ice mage auto attack, and most importantly, stunlocked for every single archer that gets an arrow to connect with your character model.

And the ways to COUNTERACT that is to use extremely understatted uniques just to be immune to the effects. Eye of Chayula, Wanderlust, Tricorne, and frankly, I'd even say Dream Fragments is understatted. But they are required if you're going to survive. Chayula at the VERY least.

renroval please dont comment when u have no clue what ure talking about,

U could have 100000000000k ES the way the game works = u get frozen once ure dead with CI
people have died on hardcore getting hit by a frozen mage and out of "dispells frozen" pots
ONE MAGE can u understand that? one guy hitting u and freezing u in place, ure left with nothing to do but watch ure char die slowly the more ES u have.

Only way CI works is when u take about 3 unique items that make u imune to status ailments(and the necesity for unique's make's it broken imo for all new players)

Because, like someone else said, it's much simpler to get HP to a very nice level than it is to get CI to an okay level.

This is why a lot of people have a hard time making the switch to CI, even if they had been focusing on ES gear all along. 9k ES, for most people, would require a fairly significant investment in passives plus having fairly high-tier gear. Whereas for HP, you only need to get a +70 life on your gear and grab life nodes along whatever build you're going for (usually starting from Marauder or Templar).

Also, CI used to be stupidly overpowered back in CB and people that complain about it being 'useless' now might be experiencing a bit of nostalgia more than anything else.

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renroval please dont comment when u have no clue what ure talking about

Don't be a dick. Kid's asking a legitimate question, he never claimed anything.

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Don't be a dick. Kid's asking a legitimate question, he never claimed anything.

Thanks.

Yeah, I get it now. Hmm, if you are ranged though, you shouldn't be getting hit at all or getting damaged. Then again if you are ranged you wouldn't need all that 9k ES.

I just checked the forums and the indexer for ES gear and those 700+ ES chest pieces cost a ton O_o. In fact, I think you are better of getting Kaom's with whatever money you'd need to purchase those ES gear and still get ahead.

Side question: Does armor make a huge difference in higher levels? Or would going EB (ES to mana) be suicidal since you have no armor or ES?

You can be ranged and still get hit all the time (see any tanky Ranger build).
If you're gonna be playing in groups or with a lot of summons and other trash between you and mobs, though, yes, you might not get hit all that much. Which is why taking CI and just a couple of ES nodes tends to be a better deal in those scenarios, even if you don't have the amazing gear to back it up.

If you want CI and get hit a lot, you'll need some of that expensive gear you saw.

Kaom's is not the be-all and end-all, though. It works on certain conditions, for certain builds, but still puts a strain on your setup as a whole. You have to make up for the sockets somewhere and that might offset the 1k HP.

Armor is subjected to diminishing returns. The more damage an attack does to you, the less reduction armor provides. In layman's terms: armor helps against a bunch of shitty mobs hitting with wet noodles, but it doesn't really do much against bosses.

No ES + no armor being a good or bad idea would, again, depend on what you're playing. If you're going to be getting hit all the time, then yes, you will die a lot. And even then, you might be playing some build that stacks life and takes EB, so it might work out okay, anyway.

Yeah, was thinking of going dual spark totems and guides were saying I should rarely get hit. There were two variants, EB and CI. EB would fix my mana issues completely while stacking life % nodes. CI build would have some mana problems but in general shouldn't be an issue with enough mana/mana regen nodes. Thing that got me thinking about CI vs Life was that there were people who had 9k Shield and most I've seen people have was 5k-5.5k life. Got me thinking that maybe CI was the best choice due to surviving most one shots due to having a bigger buffer.

As for armor...if something is hitting me like a wet noodle, couldn't I just pot up or run away? Would I be able to do that with CI or would I be forever stunned?

Immunity to Chaos damage isn't a big deal and should be reworked. When you have a healthy amount of life regen and even a tiny amount of Chaos resist, your large life pool is really in no danger. I have 5000 Life, -25% Chaos Resist, 150 Life Regen (Which isn't even all that high), and I can sit with multiple Alchemists attacking me and not panic.

I would like to see CI reworked so that you're not immune to Chaos, but Chaos hurts your shield instead of bypassing it, in addition, a percentage of your maximum Energy Shield is what is used to determine if you're stunned, frozen, shocked, etc. GGG would have to figure out what percentage is balanced, but say 40% of your maximum ES is the value used to determine ailments...if you have 8000 ES, the formula would consider your "max life" as 3600. I'm not a balance expert, and I'm sure numbers would have to be toyed with, but CI should head in that direction.

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dndallasta wrote:

In layman's terms: armor helps against a bunch of shitty mobs hitting with wet noodles, but it doesn't really do much against bosses.

This always bothers me. It's misleading, because this is not the case.

Let's think of this in the example of extremes, because that's my style.

A shitty mob is doing 1-3 damage to you. You have 25% armor. You're ignoring .25 to .75 damage. Very minuscule. Now a boss hits you for 200 damage. You're ignoring 50 damage. Very massive.




Now we inflate this a hundred times over, and the TRUTH of it is that armor does MORE for you against the heavy boss hits. THE KEY THING WITH THIS is that very often, even after your armor, it will still 1 shot you - not to mention being crit can tip the odds in the boss's favor, and your Evasion Rating helps makes connected hits not be criticals, but people often forget that. So then they go and say armor doesn't do anything for bosses :/

Armor can very often be the difference between being 1 shot and being 2 shot in a boss battle. And frankly, that's two times the difference. Even if the first shot gets you to 12 health and zero ES, at least you're alive to pop some flasks and put out more damage.




On a related note, my advice to literally everyone ever is... BUY A PORTAL GEM. They're 2 GCP's, but they're worth every Alt Shard.

It comes down to the playstyle you prefer: by taking CI you trade defense for more offense. Instead of taking HP nodes you can instead invest those points in crit or elemental damage nodes for example. You kill faster, but you are getting killed more often without a HP safety net.
Biggest disadvantage for CI is vulnerability to stun. You must buy
otherwise you won't be able to farm Docks in merciless. The dog packs with their machine gun breath will keep you in a stunlock (happened to me a lot; i play a CI frost witch) => no XP gain, which beats the purpose of farming there. (Lotsa problems in the Fetid Pools with the undead rhoas too).

Here is quick summary of the pros and cons from the "Cold Crit Witch Guide (The basics and everything you need to know to get started)":

"To CI:
Pros:
-Do not need maximum health/life regen on items.
-Can focus on Energy Shield as a main def
-immune to chaos damage
-potential to have extra passive points left over to spend in other areas (don't need health nodes)
-Do not need health flasks (extra flask slots)
Cons:
-Relies completely on ES
-Gear dependent
-High energy shield needed
-Cannot use health flasks
-No way to regen energy shields in battle (unless using ghost weaver/zealots oath)

To Not CI:
Pros:
-Two forms of def (health and energy shield)
-Not as gear dependent
-Can use health flasks
-Energy sheild is not needed as heavily
-Can regen health without need of other skills
Cons:
-Need to get health on gear (items become harder to get “ideal” stats on)
-Need to get both health and energy shield items (more stats needed on items)
-Need to get Chaos resistance, otherwise chaos damage is extremely deadly.
-Need health and energy shield nodes (potentially use more passives)
-Need health flasks (less flask slots)"

One additional minor advantage of CI: when doing maps "takes x Chaos Damage per second" turns from a nuisance to a sought after map suffix.

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ShadyC wrote:

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dndallasta wrote:

In layman's terms: armor helps against a bunch of shitty mobs hitting with wet noodles, but it doesn't really do much against bosses.

This always bothers me. It's misleading, because this is not the case.

Let's think of this in the example of extremes, because that's my style.

A shitty mob is doing 1-3 damage to you. You have 25% armor. You're ignoring .25 to .75 damage. Very minuscule. Now a boss hits you for 200 damage. You're ignoring 50 damage. Very massive.




Now we inflate this a hundred times over, and the TRUTH of it is that armor does MORE for you against the heavy boss hits. THE KEY THING WITH THIS is that very often, even after your armor, it will still 1 shot you - not to mention being crit can tip the odds in the boss's favor, and your Evasion Rating helps makes connected hits not be criticals, but people often forget that. So then they go and say armor doesn't do anything for bosses :/

Armor can very often be the difference between being 1 shot and being 2 shot in a boss battle. And frankly, that's two times the difference. Even if the first shot gets you to 12 health and zero ES, at least you're alive to pop some flasks and put out more damage.




On a related note, my advice to literally everyone ever is... BUY A PORTAL GEM. They're 2 GCP's, but they're worth every Alt Shard.

It's not misleading at all. Armor has a diminishing effect. The harder the hit, the less effective your Armor is. So his statement is correct. If Armor was effective against bosses, pure Evasion builds would be not viable at all, when in fact they're extremely powerful but just incredibly difficult to gear for, even more difficult than gearing for a CI build.

With a typical Life build, you need 1 stat on the gear, Life. You want more, but Life is the only mandatory modifier. With CI builds, you need +ES and +ES percent modifiers. With Evasion builds, you need Life, +Evasion and +Evasion percentages.