My humble opinion about Defenses

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. missclick posts. I accidentaly created a new post instead of editing OP and it was posted twice for some reason. Sorry

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Sakanabi#6664 wrote:

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Redthorne82#3177 wrote:

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Sakanabi#6664 wrote:

OK. I didn't do the math but I play PoE 2 for a while and we all now tha ES is far stronger than Armour and ES. These changes could bring all three Defenses into line imo.

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Sakanabi#6664 wrote:

ARMOUR
- Increase effectiveness by 50%
- Cap Phys Res at 75%
- Add passive nodes for increasing max Phys Res

What is effectiveness? 12k armor is now equavalent to having 18k? It just blocks 50% more damage? Capping phys res? Is that the sheet number? Or actual physical damage reduced by attacks? If the first, what does that accomplish? If the second, that does nothing (as you're only blocking 75% of the small hits anyway). Passive nodes for, once again, increasing the paper number or actual phys res?

If I'm not mistaken there is some formula like "you need Hit*12 armour to reduce this hit to 50%" or something. Increasing effectivenes by 50% will reduce armour needed to Hit*6. But when I'm thinking about it it is actually 100% increased effectiveness. I just used incorrect number.

Passive nodes should increase flat max Phys Res like there are nodes which increase max elemental Res.

Okay, absolutely agree with the armor thing (maybe the math is different, but the idea is right).

The problem with the passive nodes idea is that you're almost never going to get 75% reduction on big hits...pretty sure this would make armor significantly worse against small hits too.

Since the % reduction on armor in the character sheet is "estimated off a normal hit from a white mob", it's not really a number that can be used to balance things. They'd almost have to work an entire armor calculator into the game to make it functional that way.

A large part of Armor is their weird obsession with little hits & big hits. It causes your eHP to fluctuate drastically when instead the base DR values could simply be lower. Having multiple methods of reducing Armor DR is redundant. Resistances have this issue in PoE1.

Evasion suffers the same issue it always has. You need something else in order to survive taking a streak of hits which in PoE2 is ES or Armor. In PoE1 Evasion was just awful to level with back in the day but once you got 75/75 dodge / block is was insane. Which is why both got murdered.

ES was originally quite busted late game in PoE1 early years for the exact same reasons it is now. Armor doesn't work and Evasion is not reliable on it's own. ES gives the same or more eHP and it's entirely reliable providing steady eHP unlike both the other options.

Tweaking numbers isn't going to help much IMO. They're simply flawed in design. In PoE1 we had things like Double Shout Enduring Cry, Immortal Call, Endurance Changes, Conversion, Flat DR on most Ascendancy options, Dodge and more. These gave the illusion the systems worked.

In fact they never did.

If they want to make any sense of it Armor and Evasion should be less but reliable numbers. ES should have no overflow and no recovery outside time. Then nerf the hell out of late game enemy density, enemy damage and player damage. We don't need another stat smasher ARPG.

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Finalstan#5006 wrote:

Delayed recharge start is not enough of a drawback not to go full ES every time you can.

Change the Recharge delay to flat RECOVERY delay. Make it so that Energy Shield cannot increase by any means until the delay is met.

Grim Feast remnants can temporarily add to the players maximum ES stat without recovering any intact shield if the delay is still in effect.

This is a concept problem. It can't be solved by setting it up. This requires a different approach.

Both Armor and Evasion rely on randomness. But Evasion doesn't promise to "save you from damage." It says, "you may be not get hit." For a single hit, there is no difference between a 50%, 55%, and 80% chance to evade.
The problem with Armor is that you don't know how hard you will be hit, because it stops working when you are hit really hard.

But the Energy shield works differently - it is controlled, you can see how much it is, you can even influence it right in battle, and 3,000 ES is 3,000 ES, no matter what.

Armor and Evasion should give the same absolute, controllable value. The simplest option is Health: If the item has Armor or Evasion, then it gives you a certain amount of HP. And you don't even need to enter anything else.

Armor needs complete rework. If anything, its effectiveness should be inverted. Right now it works best against small hits, but is pointless against huge hits. The opposite should be true to mitigate the difference between a hard hit and a weak hit. Armor should have other perks too, mobs shouldn't be able to push player around based on armor. Maybe even innate stun threshold should be directly derived from armor so armor gear would offer great stun threshold without investing into stun threshold affix too much. Right now armor is all the downsides and no upsides. It decreases your movement speed, it doesn't work when it matters, mobs can break armor, it's basically useless.

ES is fine. I think ES as a whole is balanced well outside of Grim Feast, which is just overtuned. The problem is armor. The solution is not to nerf ES but to buff armor.

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Radonegsky#6656 wrote:

For a single hit, there is no difference between a 50%, 55%, and 80% chance to evade.

Except for, of course, the probability of actually taking the hit IE: the entire point of Evasion

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Radonegsky#6656 wrote:

3,000 ES is 3,000 ES, no matter what.

Unless the damage is Chaos, in which case 3000 ES is effectively 1500 ES.

Make ES take 50% more from physical sources and mute any increases to an intact Energy Shield (the maximum value can still increase) while the delay is in effect. Additionally, have any source of DoT nullify the ES max increasing from any instance.

Alot of actually good points. Thanks.

What about another solution to armour - an inherent mechanic that takes % of damage NOT prevented by armour (based on estimated phys res) and removes that amout from HP/ES over 4 seconds instead?

It strikes me that it isn't so much that Armor only effects physical damage (and poorly, at that), it's that mace/warrior specifically and Life generally are also in a terrible spot. I'd posted https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3699608 a while back and bump it here and there for visibility. I think Armor/Life's biggest problem is the lack of tools, especially in light of the fact our attacks are slower inherently (which in truth I love big, slow, heavy hits) meaning we're getting hit far more often than anyone else.

What we need the most are tools, then buffs to Armor/Life generally, especially given there's effectively nothing in Passive tree to increase your life while ES is just piles of powerful nodes. The same amount of investment in Armor (and likely EV, too, but I have little experience Green side) as ES, ES wins out by a fucking landslide. Strength needs to give more life, we need life nodes both hybrid and dedicated, we need more DR access, we need ways for Armor to reduce ALL non-dot damage (especially hits), we need more sustain (another problem with ES's over performance as there's piss for Life regen and literally NOTHING that gives flat leech of either kind outside of gear and a couple gems), and we need our slow speed to be a core mechanic that can further improve our survivability just by virtue of being slow.