Hybrid life/ES vs pure ES

Playing Occultist, and wondering what gives the better defenses and survivability overall.


- Hybrid Life with as much ES as I can get

vs

- Pure ES

vs

- Going CI


Assume budget isn't the main concern, just which is best overall for endgame bosses / simulacrum etc

Leaving Inquisitors aside, going pure life or pure ES is usually the better call because it's difficult to properly sustain two different healthpools.

As for LL vs CI it's honestly hard to say. CI has the obvious advantage of being chaos immune but not being able to reserve your life pool means less auras and with that, less defense/damage. I'd say go for LL and use the auras available to find a setup that is suitable for your defensive and offensive needs, you are more flexible that way compared to CI. If you use Presence of Chayula as your amulet you shouldn't have a hard time getting near capped chaos res at which point chaos damage won't be much of a bother anyway.

lowlife with maxed chaos res feels *so good*.

If you can sacrifice the amulet slot, I'd say LL > CI.


As hybrid, I'd recommend Eldrich Battery + Mind Over Matter - cast your spells using ES, reserve all mana, ES still contributes to your EHP. Corrupted Soul or classical "deplete ES then your lifepool" are inefficient in my oppinion. You'll feel a bottleneck either in ES or Life recovery.