Balance (Energy shield Too strong!)

It's not that ES is too strong, it's that life is in a really terrible state atm.

Lack of nodes that increase life by a % amount is the main issue. ES has nodes that give % increases, and lots of them.

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NoyAvargel#6918 wrote:

solution : Nerf ES across the board nerf the points on tree and base ES on items to bring ES more in line.

Alternate solution: Buff life and armor to bring them in line with Energy Shield.

+1

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NoyAvargel#6918 wrote:

hello GGG and i hope you read this .

problem 1 : energy shield is way too strong and over performing that it is silly to even consider playing life.. ES is superior to life in every possible way.. . the ES on items is stronger than poe 1 alot thanks to runes
while the passive tree points are nearly 3 times stronger than they are in poe 1 and there are also way more ES points on tree.

CI on top immune to chaos damage which is huge and everywhere in poe 2 .. life builds are stuck around 3-4k life meanwhile ES are now over 15k ES already.
with just 2 ES items and minimal investment on tree you can get higher ES than life while also being immune to chaos. the gap is so large that even if you nerf all ES % on tree by as much as 50% ES still gonna be stronger than life .



solution : Nerf ES across the board nerf the points on tree and base ES on items to bring ES more in line.



problem 2: life currently is simply inferior when both ES/Mana / ES+Mana seem the way to go.. life always seems the worst way to go.


solution : in addition to the above nerf to ES consider making the life modes on items an hybrid life mode which grants % of life in addition to the flat life .. to make up for the lose of life % on the passive tree

for example.. high tier life roll will look like 90+ flat life + 7-10% increase life .




also unrelated you should look into ascendancy classes as rebalane because some of them are underwhelming and underperforming by large margin


ty

Unrelated... but...

Thats a fuck of a lot of supporter badges.

Hello,

The road to hell.
I will never understand players who demand to nerf something. Now players who don't use ES request its nerf. Tomorrow players who don't use evasion will request its nerf. the day after tomorrow players who do not use armor will request its nerf. and so on until we nerf to unplayability.
I'm assuming you're playing as a warrior, so ask for armor repair, or better use/utilization of life, not breaking something that works.

Not an ES stacker yet, but I can facetank a lot of stuff with EV as well, lol, at least until a hit gets through.... In POE1, I ran a character who had like 20k ES, because you could do that with the heirophant, but my chieftan was like 100x more tank with half his life reserved at 2k life using defiance of destiny and petrified blood and good old cloak of flame with max fire res. Since the Heiro had no defense layers besides ES, he could get close to 1-shot doing deeper delve, all he did was kill stuff really fast or die. With 20k ES. What I'm getting at, is let them balance out armour and some other stuff and build out more end game before immediately freaking out over ES. Otherwise, I could see, as was stated, the ES people get nerfed and start griping about block and EV and so on.

Normally you would expect warriors to be tanks. But in this game sorcerers are tanks.

Problem is that life and armour are really really terrible at the moment!
Nerfing ES without buffing the others would be a nasty move. People flock to ES because getting randomly wiped is awful.

This is my reply to other post, but same thing

Why people think ES is OP? The OPness doesn't come from ES.
ES alone is really bad.

Here some reasoning:
1. When you have high amount of ES you can take ONE big hit, but if there comes two ES doesn't do anything and you're dead.

2. Why everyone who plays on high level on ES? It scales well, but still that's same problem as in 1 part. The reason ES is popular on high level players is that they blast through maps, basically kills mobs before they even come to close to player, this is the problem.

3. But if damage is removed from caster / ES builds they don't have anything against enemies anymore. ES in this case would just be delaying mechanic, not defense mechanic.

4. Recharge time and Recharge speed, makes it so that ES build isn't good at all when mobbed, so even smaller hits can quickly kill ES character.

5. It's pretty much mandatory right now to use (strength) block shield as any caster (on bosses you can use focus or two handed staff) if you don't play as blaster character who kills everything before they get near you, this is actually one thing I hate in PoE2 that they removed int shields.

"

It needs to be "soft capped" by life in some way, so that it fills its role of protecting life, instead of replacing. Evasion and Armour are already "soft capped" by life (or ES), so ES needs to be like that too

In this case you would mandate everyone play as hybrid character what would kill build diversity even more.

There is a lot mechanics what already makes CI / ES builds weaker, freeze, stun and etc. This puts a lot of passive point pressure on ES / CI builds.

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Pure Armor builds should be able to tank impressive amounts of spike damage. ES should be able to absorb more total damage over time due to recharge but have less ability to tank big hits.

This is totally opposite how it has always been in PoE, and I think current way is better. What point there is for caster to take multiple small hits, they aren't front liners, and aren't designed as one.

I don't have played at all yet any Armor / Evasion build so I cannot say anything specific about them. But I have played 2 casters now.

Don't worry, i'm more and more convinced every day that GGG themselves hasn't played an Armor melee build either in their own game.


How? How is it that they can even push this class / defensive metric out in this state is puzzling to me.

How? How is it that not only is ES a far superior defensive ability in practically every way but the classes with easy access to it are also the classes that are spoon fed the highest damage skills in the game.

Best CC, best Clear, best defensive abilities, Range, 0 down sides.

I saw the Ziggy D interview with Johnathon Rogers where he specifically said that Melee was in a great spot that they had really focused on it and that it might even be "Too Strong" and yet here we are.

Melee has every down side with every mechanic in this game, defense being at the top of the list and yet here we sit.

I won't drag this thread into a Melee vs Caster discussion, however returning to the Armour / life / ES discussion, every single point brought up by the OP is spot on.

I don't know that I want to see ES nerfed, maybe balanced a bit, but right now, to say that I am dis enfranchised, disheartened, and completely disappointed in GGG as from a design standpoint at the state of Life and Armour in this game would be an understatement.

I hope it gets better, I really do.