Convalescence Issue and Eldritch Empowerment Interaction

The way these two skills interact is puzzling to me.

The convalescence skill requires mana to be cast, but if you have taken the Eldritch Empowerment node from the Lich ascendency then you are dead in the water if your energy shield drops to 0 and you need to cast Convalescence to start casting again because it requires mana AND energy shield to cast, if ES = 0 then you cannot cast any spells.

Perhaps this is the intended trade off, however you are also unable to attack or do anything to mitigate being swarmed by enemies or get out of the situation quickly.

Hopefully there is some way around this, you shouldn't have your defence and offence entirely stripped from you.

I fully agree with this post. I am incredibly frustrated at this interaction.

Why the primary way of recovering energy shield costs energy shield to cast is beyond me.

Getting Convalescence in the skill tree helped greatly.

+1

I was really hoping that Convalescence is my "Oh, sh*t!" button when I run out of ES and can't cast anymore. But no, because of Eldritch Empowerment, I can't use Convalescence when I need it most.

Huge bummer, but this seems to be a trend within the Lich. everything is anti-synergistic:

Necromantic Conduit? Sound great, until you realize it doesn't work on Dots, which is the only actually viable Chaos build for casters.

Eternal Life? Could be really neat if it had synergy with anything that sacrifices life, but it doesn't. So its only purpose is reduced to mitigating "bypasses ES" effects.

But we could go CI, right? That seems great, since we rely on only ES anyway. Well... no... because since 0.2 things don't scale of your pre-CI Max Life anymore. So Atziri, Gaze, Soulless Form and anything else scaling off Life would become useless.

Lich has great potential, but for now it seems like it lacks an identity.