Chaos Inoculation Vs. Everything Else

Health sucks. The only benefit to having health is access to leech and regen. The problem is you can't get enough of it without stacking strength, which takes up suffixes on your gear. You can't ignore any resistances, which takes up suffixes and prefixes on your gear. You MUST get life on every piece, which takes up another prefix on all your gear.

You can get more than enough Energy Shield to run CI on pretty much anything. You don't need perfect ES pieces to do it outside of a chest.

When you can ignore chaos res, and attributes on gear, you effectively have +2 suffixes on every rare piece of armour on your character.

With some energy shield builds (10k+) it is possible to completely ignore ele res altogether after getting ~30%.

This disparity goes past EHP pools and build power. It leaks into the rarity problem, which feeds into an economy and build diversity problem. ES builds don't just have 3x the EHP of health builds, with CI they also have ~10 more affixes than any other build that can be used for rarity, and the ~5 suffixes they could get it in, are in a slot where there is nothing better for them.

There simply must be more ways to get resists and EHP for health builds, to bridge this massive gap. My suggestion is nodes in the tree that don't give health, but become "active" (good) once you have ~2k life. How about 0.X to one elemental resistance per X life, one fire, one cold, one lightning in different area codes on the tree?

(somehow posted instead of editing)

I agree with your post and see the ties into magic find et all.

Health and armor are at a pretty bad place right now. Energy shield is good but only because health and armor are under performing. Someone thought of elemental armor, a percentage of armor that gave resistances. That's an interesting thought.

On the whole i figure this is because of where the end game is right now. I figure its poe1 maps slapped onto poe2 and the game does a 180 once you start doing higher maps.

Its a shallow problem but its a symptom of the stop gap. I'm leaning more into either not playing or playing new toons until the end of the campaign and if i get them done then stop playing until endgame is changed, crafting or drops are improved, or they add new classes to play them instead.