[Feedback] Giga-Nerf Energy Shield in Patch 0.4.0

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AverBeg7#1689 schrieb:

If you're talking about the top-end you shouldn't be pointing to stuff like PoENinja EHP.

ES is more invested than life. It takes up many affixes and passives to achieve those numbers. The numbers being higher than life once invested in is only natural. Stuff like PoENinja only tells you what EHP Path of Building expects, it does not account for stuff like % on kill or delayed damage etc. so it doesn't actually tell you which is effectively stronger only which has the highest # recovery and max hit in a predictable scenario. The people competing for numbers on PoENinja are doing just that, competing for numbers. It does not accurately represent the practical power of the setup in content.

Life is in a much better spot this league than it was the previous one, thanks to the delayed damage timeless jewel passive and some very strong recovery options, as well as % on gear.

If they keep adding more options for life scale, it will be in an even better spot. The focus should be less on nerfing ES and more on giving life the scaling it is missing from the passive tree.

Of course its more invested into than life. It has 30x the nodes to boost it. Life is in a better spot because armor got some love finally but still needs much more IMO especially since they nerfed giants blood hp and block stacks. But highest ES is 4x the highest life stacker and that sounds correct?

Armor + Life + Block

vs

Evasion + Deflection + ES

vs

ES + Mana + CI/MOM


Where would you rank them from most tanky to least?


EDIT: I agree if they actually add HP nodes and not coming with some downside on them like a bunch of the warrior part of the tree it would improve greatly. But like others have said, leaving ES alone and bringing Life to it will make everyone too tanky and they will have to increase mob damage which is dumb. Small 10-15% nerf on ES and 5-10% buffs on life would close the gap enough to be pretty fair IMO but obviously further testing would be needed.

If every single node, item, bonus for ES would be cut by 50% it would be still by far tankier than armor, and still 100 times stronger than evasion.

0.3 gutted the already horrible evasion to the point that you dont even want to play evasion during late campaign...

Fun fact, even with 400k (yea, 400.000 evasion) you are still hit by every 20th hit, aka hitting the 95% evasion cap, which means all your investment in gear + passive tree is nullified. Imagine if ES would have a 5% chance that any kind of damage bypasses ES ...


Deflection is a meme, since thanks to the formula, it doesnt matter if you have 3, 300, 30000 or 30 trillion evasion, you will never have 100% deflect chance (unlike poe1 suppress)

Currently the sole purpose of evasion is to feed ghost shroud for the bloated ES

Armor got the well deserved love, now it is in fairly good spot (not perfect, but still doesnt look bad)

And then, there is ES, where a single small node gives the same amount of increased ES than the ENTIRE PASSIVE TREE HAS as increased life.

Look at ninja:
103k characters in trade.
42 of those have more than 10k life, 13k being highest.
Out of those 42, only a single one player does not use Veil of the night helmet, which while gives a massive %hp boost, also has the fun little drawback of having 0 elemental res.

Lets look at ES.
560 characters have more than 14k ES, highest in ninja being 31k and we know that it is not even remotely close to the max (say hello to captainlance's 42k ES lich)
Not only you have more than 13 times of player with higher hitpool, but none of those are sitting at 0 res, in fact 1/4th of them are actually CI, so they are immune to chaos + bleed, while also mostly res capped.



So yea, ES wouldnt even notice a 50% nerf all across the board...

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Soulsniper1313#7576 schrieb:

Of course its more invested into than life. It has 30x the nodes to boost it. Life is in a better spot because armor got some love finally but still needs much more IMO especially since they nerfed giants blood hp and block stacks. But highest ES is 4x the highest life stacker and that sounds correct?

Armor + Life + Block

vs

Evasion + Deflection + ES

vs

ES + Mana + CI/MOM


Where would you rank them from most tanky to least?

ES/EV>
Life/EV/AR>
Life/AR/Block>
Life/AR>
ES/AR>
Life/EV>
Mana/ Deflection Reliance

Deflection is a miss for me. 40% less damage a % of the time is nice for very low EHP builds in softcore to sometimes work, but it doesn't actually work all the time as a buffer for an EV build to not get one-shot.

Mana seems OP, until you get stunned to death because most of your EHP is in a place where you can't get stun threshold. Or you get mana donut'd, or you get slapped hard with a degen on top and can't cast your stuff anymore.

Yeah they should add more life scaling, and the stuff that makes hit damage to life over time instead should have maybe another option outside of the timeless jewel.

Other thing is recovery on life is way stronger. Constant regen instead of sometimes recharge, on kill % leech, etc.

The reason EV/ES is the best is because Ghost Shroud is instant recovery in large amounts and you can get recharge in windows you are evading. So it subverts the weaknesses of ES in general. If they nerf the instant recovery options and be careful when they add any others to cement those differences then that would probably be a good change for the "balance between life/es".

I have to say as someone that likes ES and leech, that I kind of dislike the idea of making ES too finicky. I feel like if life is in a good spot, then you can play a life build and aim to switch to ES later. It doesn't have to be the case that they are equals at the very top, especially since ES is much more investment.

Not a fair comparison since all the top es builds are using broken damage mechanics and then just grabbing all the es nodes and sockets on the tree.

This is why no mid-league nerfs is stupid.

If builds were balanced, they wouldn't be able to stack es that high without sacrificing damage.

To be honest one of the best things they could actually do is CAP ES at like 8-10k and be done with it, this way they have a SOLID boundary to work with. If your ES reaches 8k you cannot get anymore, put points elsewhere.

This would solve the problem and does not actually ruin build diversity because it allows the player to reach a set goal. All other defensive layers have a cap or hit significant diminishing returns that they are not worth investing in after a certain point. The only one that does not is energy shield.

Either that or treat ES as life is treated. Make ES a version of life. Remove increased ES nodes from the tree entirely, leave some of the faster recharge and recharge start nodes and only have ES on gear which would severly limit the ways it can be scaled, similar to how life works. This actually opens up a ton more interesting stuff they could put in the caster tree that is not just scaling ES.

We could potentially see more specific spell based things such as more projectile or channelling based passives or more Area Effect based things for casters, more interesting stuff for minions rather than just flat damage/hp. I honestly think the caster tree lacks flavour compared to say the Ranger/Monk or Warrior tree, at least in the diversity it offers and that is because 1/3 of it is filled with ES nodes of multiple varieties.

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imphilxd#4709 schrieb:

This is why no mid-league nerfs is stupid.

I agree, GGG should standardize a mid-Season balance patch so everyone can expect one. Right now, we have to wait until next Season to see things adjusted in the right direction.

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CharlesJT#7681 schrieb:

With the changes in Patch 0.3.0, Evasion and Armour are in a pretty good spot as defensive mechanics, but Energy Shield continues to be an outlier, being vastly superior. For comparison, endgame Life builds have around 2-3K life whereas ES builds have around 10-15K ES. I urge GGG to NOT buff Evasion and Armour further as that would trivialize challenging content within the game.

Instead for Patch 0.4.0, GGG should Giga-Nerf ES with a three-pronged approach as follows:

* All Energy Shield modifiers on items reduced by 25%
* All Energy Shield nodes on passive tree reduced by 25%
* Increase default Recharge Time to 6 seconds (up from 4 seconds)

lol... why just not improve armor and evassion, to be tanky like ES???.

what is this idea to turn a good thing, in bad one, armor and evasion... why to play evassion char at all???.

Despite PoENinja listing ES as the most tanky builds I bet the guy who has 5k life and a good setup actually survives more in maps.

Again, when you are competing for numbers, it is not about the actual performance in-game in most late-game scenarios. It's just about what makes the number go up in Path of Building.

They really should just buff life, I don't understand why people pick life and say "I'm not tanky enough, they should nerf ES" or look at content creators and PoENinja and say "wow thats so broken, they need to nerf it". These guys are outliers who push unreasonably far because that's how they have fun. The fact you can do it on ES better is just because there is more scaling for ES, and it is a more heavily-invested stat that takes up more affixes.

ES/EV is so good simply because of Ghost Dancer and evasion giving you windows to recharge, you can rock 3k ES and completely smash the end-game. I am literally doing it. Nobody needs 10k+ or whatever. People just get it because they wanna see the number go up.

Taking away the option for the number to go up does nothing for you and your life build. You should not even be struggling on life this league after investment, it is actually really good.

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AverBeg7#1689 schrieb:

I don't understand why people pick life and say "I'm not tanky enough, they should nerf ES"

What's so hard to understand? ES is too powerful if scaled correctly and the universal goal is to make game balanced. Not only between classes but also between you and the enemies and bosses. Nerfing ES is the most logical conclusion, unless you only care about getting more powerful... but your power growth is meaningless if enemies are pushovers.

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AverBeg7#1689 schrieb:

If you're talking about the top-end you shouldn't be pointing to stuff like PoENinja EHP.

ES is more invested than life. It takes up many affixes and passives to achieve those numbers. The numbers being higher than life once invested in is only natural. Stuff like PoENinja only tells you what EHP Path of Building expects, it does not account for stuff like % on kill or delayed damage etc. so it doesn't actually tell you which is effectively stronger only which has the highest # recovery and max hit in a predictable scenario. The people competing for numbers on PoENinja are doing just that, competing for numbers. It does not accurately represent the practical power or ease of the setup in content.

Life is in a much better spot this league than it was the previous one, thanks to the delayed damage timeless jewel passive and some very strong recovery options, as well as % on gear.

If they keep adding more options for life scale, it will be in an even better spot. The focus should be less on nerfing ES and more on giving life the scaling it is missing from the passive tree. In 0.3, they have already gone in the right direction, so I trust them to make some powerful options for both.

There is no downside to any of this.

Players do insane damage. There's no reason not to invest a large portion of your passives in to buffing ES. Melting the screen in 0.3 seconds or 0.25 seconds has very little significance, but becoming nearly unkillable is.

And then there's affixes. So what? What are they sacrificing? Life prefixes that are useless since they reduce it to 1 anyways with CI? Thorns? Not stats, not resistances, skill levels, movement speed, etc. Almost nothing. When you can get everything you want and also everything you need, it's just having your cake and eating it too.