Red life versus Blue life

What i think is wrong is not that ES (blue life) has higher numbers than life (red 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. They removed all life nodes in tree and at the same time not only kept all the ES nodes in the tree but buffed them by 3x, while giving insane amount of ES recovery options with no downsides, making very little sense to scale anything other than ES and sometimes ES alongside Mana (MOM/archmage was also "buffed").

Right now i will not even bring to the table that CI makes you immune to a fifth of the damage currently present in the game while also making you immune to poison and bleed. Has access to an aura that doubles your ES pool while mapping for minimal spirit cost. And has a bunch of conversions (life to ES and mana to ES) with odd behaviors that might be bugged or not.



In conclusion, 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 quickly, 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.

ES is miles ahead of Armor and HP gained in the warrior area, its very frustrating to play War only to not be tanky and have the added benefit of having a outrageous wind up time. By the time im done winding up my friends have almost killed the target and they are free to shoot and move its really Bad Design.