Balance (Energy shield Too strong!)

OP, about "ES is better than life in every possible way":

ES cannot be directly compared to life in the vacuum, it should be compared to armor and evasion. I am not qualified to do that in poe2, as I've only played ES (sorc lvl 75 now). Yet what I've experienced is that ES is not universal solution.

Without some armor you have 0 phys mitigation (so ES depletes much quicker than a warrior's health), without some evasion you have no time to recharge it when under fire (and when ES runs out, no one would say their defenses are the best in the game).

ES only works when you can jump out of combat any time. Trying to do ultimatum as ES was the most miserable experience in this game so far. Eternal youth keystone won't change it either because as you said ES measures in 10k+, life flask recovers 1.5k per use and cannot be stacked.

So, without additional ES recovery it only works better on bossing, preventing oneshots. While when surrounded by trash mobs maintaining chip damage at you both from melee and range, I would want to have any other defense but ES.

That being said, ES tree nodes indeed have large magnitude, I fully expect them to be nerfed, its what GGG does, so my sorc went away from using ES already:)

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Echothesis#7320 wrote:

OP, about "ES is better than life in every possible way":

ES cannot be directly compared to life in the vacuum, it should be compared to armor and evasion. I am not qualified to do that in poe2, as I've only played ES (sorc lvl 75 now). Yet what I've experienced is that ES is not universal solution.

Without some armor you have 0 phys mitigation (so ES depletes much quicker than a warrior's health), without some evasion you have no time to recharge it when under fire (and when ES runs out, no one would say their defenses are the best in the game).

ES only works when you can jump out of combat any time. Trying to do ultimatum as ES was the most miserable experience in this game so far. Eternal youth keystone won't change it either because as you said ES measures in 10k+, life flask recovers 1.5k per use and cannot be stacked.

So, without additional ES recovery it only works better on bossing, preventing oneshots. While when surrounded by trash mobs maintaining chip damage at you both from melee and range, I would want to have any other defense but ES.

That being said, ES tree nodes indeed have large magnitude, I fully expect them to be nerfed, its what GGG does, so my sorc went away from using ES already:)

while alooot of what you say is true.. theres the issue in poe 2 that life build doesnt really get more armour/evasion than ES..

if you look at the passive tree not only the pure ES nodes are broken and have insanely high value, but also the hybrid armour + ES or evasion + ES and there are nodes that allow you to use evasion items and still gain high amount of Es. ..

currenly due to how over powered the points on tree builds that go ES + evasion /armour + ES can still get higher armour/evasion than a pure life builds (more true for evasion than armour) this result in a builds that going evasion + ES to have easily 5-7k ES along with high evasion that most life builds dont get.. while also having ghost shroud to recover ES based on evasion (something life doesnt have) while also being immune to chaos dmg and bleed and removing the requirement of chaos resist.

as for armor the tree allow you to scale energy shield recharge rate based on % of armor and there are alot of armour + ES .. so its still easier as ES even if you want armour/evasion...


also keep notice that for the normal life build armour and evasion are harder to get cause they limit gear choice if you need some uniques most of them wont have high armour/evasion values

all in all the end result is that ES is completely overpowering life especially in poe 1 when we dont even have ways to recover life .. . the regen is very low .. . and leech only works for physical attacks (if you can even call it works)

being squishy should come with the tradeoff of doing alot of damage, and being tanky should come with the tradeoff of lower damage.

In a game where they are balancing everyone to be the same role of 'generalist' you can't just nerf ES without making the squishy toons really good at killing stuff. Which is a direction they dont want to go, they dont want the game to be fast.

The game doesn't want to support the philosophy of glass cannon and tanks. They only want to support a slow playstyle.

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Darthuns#4073 wrote:

being squishy should come with the tradeoff of doing alot of damage, and being tanky should come with the tradeoff of lower damage.

In a game where they are balancing everyone to be the same role of 'generalist' you can't just nerf ES without making the squishy toons really good at killing stuff. Which is a direction they dont want to go, they dont want the game to be fast.

The game doesn't want to support the philosophy of glass cannon and tanks. They only want to support a slow playstyle.

meanwhile ES classes are also the ones who have big dmg (archmage lighting caster) is 1 of the strongest stuff in the game also just need to stand and spam spark with no effort 1 of the best clear dmg and defense..

(yes i know bow/xbow have better damage)

First, right now ES is completely broken when compared to life, but what i think is wrong is not that ES has higher numbers than life, the problem, from a design standpoint is that conceptually ES should be a bigger pool that has little sustain, while life should be a smaller pool that has easy access to sustain.

Which is not happening right now, somehow poe2 went straight to the poe1 phase where "blue life" is just "red life" but better.

In my opinion what needs to change is that all sources of ES recovery (this includes recharge, regen and leech), should come alongside nasty downsides ( i am talking about kaom heart no spirit stuff for example), you should need to sacrifice important stuff to get your ES back, for example ES recharge nodes/items should reduce your total ES pool.

This change would make life and ES have each their own unique playstyle and make balancing between each other a lot easier.

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just_dont#6539 wrote:

ES gets to be stronger just because it doesn't protect against everything.

Also life isn't even remotely weak.

An easy way to check if es is unbalanced is to check what all the top builds are using.
Oh their all using some combination of ci/mom with es. And no1 is using life?

Ofc life is weak, the game gives u 0 tools to stack life or life regen.

Any1 trying to defend es is just massively coping while trying to defend some op build their playing

My endgame experience:

LVL 90 Titan: Pushed everything I could into Life+STR+Armour on gear, as there are no flat life nodes on the passive tree or increase on jewels. Getting random one-shotted, even with resistances above 80%.

LVL 90+ Monk: Cruising through Tier 16 maps with 75% Armour (..and protecting me from harm), 10K+ ES and 82% Dodge chance. ES nodes everywhere on the passive tree and ES increase on jewels. Not to mention the additional movement speed from the passive tree and astronomical damage output.

The imbalance is ridiculous.

NO, don't ask for nerfs!
ES is viable, YES, but it's because other things are TERRIBLE.
They need to balance life and armour, not nerf ES. WE NEED good defensive layers in the game, coz the death penalty is a lot WORSE than poe 1, so i'ts fair to defensive layers be stronger too. ES is in a good place to counter the dificult of the game, and we don't a nerf to just keep dying again. We need more viable things, thats all.

ES isnt even that strong. everything else is just weak. armor for example is utterly useless.

you can still lose all your ES (over 4k of it in my case) in like 1.5 seconds and it takes ages to start recharging even when built to do so.

ES also isnt the strongest, using mana regen as EHP is.

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JODYHiGHR0LLER#6171 wrote:

ES isnt even that strong. everything else is just weak. armor for example is utterly useless.

you can still lose all your ES (over 4k of it in my case) in like 1.5 seconds and it takes ages to start recharging even when built to do so.

ES also isnt the strongest, using mana regen as EHP is.

Right?
I'm using almost 4k of ES too and its a horrible experience when I have to leave battles to wait for ES recharge. It's not that broken, even more in a game where death is TOO punitive. We need better things than poe 1 to surpass that. ES and MOM is a good thing now coz every other thing is bad, not because they are broken. People are still getting one shot and losing HOURS of farming even with ES, and thats for people asking nerfs is just ok? Thats makes no sense.
We need More ES. More Life. More armour. More evasion. More ways to negate Ailments/debbuffs. there's no point in having a lot of ES but can't handle with a stun/freeze. Can't negate to being shocked and get one shoot. Can't recharge as fast as life, don't have flask to use, don't have supress damage, etc etc etc... They equalized ES to match the game hardness and forgot to buff other things.