Devs, Buff ARMOR Before ur going to vacation

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tzaeru#0912 schrieb:

IMO armour is currently closer to ideal balance than ES is. The problem really isn't armour itself, it's moreso tad bit too low life for many builds; and that ascendancies which do not give significant enough defenses are not very playable as life+ev or life+armor.

Current EHP king especially vs mixed type damage (like phys attack with convert 30% of damage to fire etc) is Titan. Bear shaman can also get pretty high. But all other non-ES setups are well below ES setups in terms of EHP vs biggest hits.

Shaman is prolly the only ascendancy that really allows going both ES and Armor without that being a hindrance rather than an asset. Maybe Warbringer could do it too.

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UnholyKirin#7925 schrieb:

how come the game is OUT for a YEAR! and u didnt buff armor yet ?

It has had significant buff since launch. Granted, the most significant one happened in 0.1.1, a bit over a month into the EA.

I can tell you as a bear shaman, In order to see DPS, it requires pathing to the left, In order to get good ES, recharge, less delay all that, it requires pathing to the right, mainly top and top right, yes theres elemental damage nodes, no armour nodes, only ES

So as a bear shaman you need to either sacrifice damage and armour for ES
Or sacrifice ES for 90% Armour and favorable DPS

And then finding the max hp is my problem going the 2nd route

If you want to balance between the both, its not viable unless you somehow manage to stay at 100% hp at all times and have regen apply to ES, 5% of phys damage taken being converted to ES really doesn't do its job and is not worth it, I see 5-10 ES, sometimes 45 and its immediately gone, and sacrificing all regen for ES? ya no thanks, its the worst notable passive ive ever tried

Now you also have to consider mana, costs arent cheap, which is why I converted costs to life, yet now how I am suppost to heal... Life flasks have been my go to, and still not enough, its still in a really bad state, in order to make melee work at this point in time you need ES or you will be dying

They could get around this easily by allowing melee classes to scale guard, say put some guard passives in the bottom left/left side of tree, out of access from spellcasters, in range of huntress, passives that add a way to get guard, possibly scale the amount received, and rework olroths flask its legit broken
can get up to 1800 guard with olroths flask no problem scaling life flask recovery amount, thats just unfair, no other way to reliably get guard besides charms and 1 passive that converts 8% of life recovered from a flask in 1 second as guard, I recover 1800 in 1 second, think 20% is instant, I get 118 guard... not even comparable, its a joke

17k armor will reduce 10k phys dmg by 14.5% -> 8.55k dmg
5k phys dmg -> 25.4% phys dr -> 3.75k
At 3k hp both of these are oneshots.
Similar investment in ES can let you tank >10k hits raw.

Armor can potentially match ES at unattainably high amounts, but the armor formula being so parabolic and balanced this way, alongside the fact that armor applied to elemental resistances is applied before %resists, will always result in low or moderate amounts of it being completely worthless. You will always want to go all in on armor, or not at all, making hybrid armor/es or armor/ev horrible choices unless you want to go from 90% dr to 15% and getting oneshot at seemingly random, leading to the high effective damage variance perceived by the player.

Compounded with the lack of life scaling, but the wide prevalence of es scaling, and existence of armor break and armor-ignoring attacks, and you get ascendancies that start next to armor nodes, pathing to the complete opposite edge of the tree to pick up CI and energy shield nodes.

Add on the fact that most rare modifiers affect melee much more adversely, and you get a ton of people complaining that melee and armor sucks.

The formula needs to become more linear, with nerfs to armor stacking achieved in a different way, or hybrid armor will always be shit even if they buff armor again.

To clarify, I still think full armor is bad rn even due to lack of hp scaling alone. Guard is an effective layer, but does not apply to many bosses' attacks.

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Jobama#9902 schrieb:

I can tell you as a bear shaman, In order to see DPS, it requires pathing to the left, In order to get good ES, recharge, less delay all that, it requires pathing to the right, mainly top and top right, yes theres elemental damage nodes, no armour nodes, only ES

If you take Zealot's Oath, the recharge start delay isn't a problem and you can get like 10k ES while having decent-enough armour rating to matter for something while sticking only to the left side of the tree, never crossing the vertical division of the tree to the right side.

Otherwise, yeah, true enough you end up having to go quite far in the tree if you want to get that 11-16k ES. Of course you can get good EHP without that so you don't have to if you don't want to.

Liches tend to have more focused passive tree, but for Spark/Arc Stormweavers for example, it doesn't really even look completely different.

Like here's a 16k ES Rend Shaman: https://poe.ninja/poe2/builds/vaalhc/character/1nikita741-4546/MykytaShaman
Here's an Arc/Spark Sorc: https://poe.ninja/poe2/profile/draxgodx-4253/character/polukaloiservers

Keeping in mind that you path pretty fast on the outer ring, the sorc actually has more travel nodes as in attribute nodes.

It's quite similar really for staff and bow and spear ES+EV.

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Jobama#9902 schrieb:

So as a bear shaman you need to either sacrifice damage and armour for ES
Or sacrifice ES for 90% Armour and favorable DPS

All builds with high survivability and good tolerance for mistakes need to sacrifice DPS for defenses, including pure ES builds.

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Jobama#9902 schrieb:

Now you also have to consider mana, costs arent cheap, which is why I converted costs to life, yet now how I am suppost to heal... Life flasks have been my go to, and still not enough, its still in a really bad state, in order to make melee work at this point in time you need ES or you will be dying

There's many non-ES Shamans and Warriors plus the occasional Witchhunter and MoM Bloodmage on HC doing juiced max tier maps as it is. Granted, it's harder to play those, and you need to be more careful with the build and might need tad bit more expensive gear. But it's not impossible by any means, and those being HC chars, they obviously don't die much even to juiced T15/16 maps.

what about tons of 100k+ armor hc titans roaming around with shieldwall, being almost immortal and facetanking bosses? Since campaign.
Surely, there are moments in game when you lack armor and its very tough. On other side, any other defences have their bad windows in progression. Still there are not that much of defences which allow you almost afk on a map, but stacked armor allows.

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vzmNitie#2139 schrieb:

what about tons of 100k+ armor hc titans roaming around with shieldwall, being almost immortal and facetanking bosses? Since campaign.
Surely, there are moments in game when you lack armor and its very tough. On other side, any other defences have their bad windows in progression. Still there are not that much of defences which allow you almost afk on a map, but stacked armor allows.

A singular specific copied build that's irrelevant since every other class can't replicate that,and doesn't change armor being worthless on everyone else.

Let's not Cherry pick overpowered builds as the standard now.

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SpasticDovah#6460 schrieb:

17k armor will reduce 10k phys dmg by 14.5% -> 8.55k dmg
5k phys dmg -> 25.4% phys dr -> 3.75k
At 3k hp both of these are oneshots.
Similar investment in ES can let you tank >10k hits raw.

Armor can potentially match ES at unattainably high amounts, but the armor formula being so parabolic and balanced this way, alongside the fact that armor applied to elemental resistances is applied before %resists, will always result in low or moderate amounts of it being completely worthless. You will always want to go all in on armor, or not at all, making hybrid armor/es or armor/ev horrible choices unless you want to go from 90% dr to 15% and getting oneshot at seemingly random, leading to the high effective damage variance perceived by the player.

Compounded with the lack of life scaling, but the wide prevalence of es scaling, and existence of armor break and armor-ignoring attacks, and you get ascendancies that start next to armor nodes, pathing to the complete opposite edge of the tree to pick up CI and energy shield nodes.

Add on the fact that most rare modifiers affect melee much more adversely, and you get a ton of people complaining that melee and armor sucks.

The formula needs to become more linear, with nerfs to armor stacking achieved in a different way, or hybrid armor will always be shit even if they buff armor again.

To clarify, I still think full armor is bad rn even due to lack of hp scaling alone. Guard is an effective layer, but does not apply to many bosses' attacks.

This is a very good summary. It's also important to understand that the philosophy behind armour / evasion and energy shield are very different. (tldr at the bottom)

Both armour and evasion are meant for sustain. In other words the game expects an armoured heavy hitter like the typical warrior build to get surrounded by trash mobs and survive. DEX based chars, like the ranger, is supposed to kite and / or keep a distance. However evasion works as a second line of defense, the first being the movement speed.

Fighting dozens of enemies at the same time means you will get hit no matter what. This ain't Dark Souls where you can do no dmg runs. Both armour and evasion are there to cancel out the noise, which are mostly white and blue mobs. Armour works very well against sub 1k dmg. While attrition is a problem, it can be solved with hp regen and / or leech. Ranger on the other hand is supposed to stay out of trouble, and drink potion when accidentally hit. Evasion is not there to keep you alive, but to make the economy of regen versus attrition more favorable for the player.

None of these mechanics are meant for face tanking rares or uniques, but rather to make fighting huge armies of trash more economical. Without changing the Vision™, the following solutions could be made:

1. Give warrior type builds (STR + armour) more effective life either by increasing their max life or by having a flat #% reduction to all dmg. They need enough buffer to not get wiped by stronger enemies.
2. All big attacks (above ~1k after mitigations) should be slow and well telegraphed, so a ranger type character has enough time to get to safety.

Now for addressing energy shield. The problem with ES is that it is not a form of sustain. A caster is simply not supposed to continuously take damage. However when they do get hit, ES is there to make sure they survive. And that's it. You bump ES to crazy levels and you survive. It's the dumbest pos of a mechanic you can find in the game. It makes the game lame and boring. Instead of turning armour and evasion into the boring mess that is ES, I suggest we address the flaws in the current design.

tldr: We don't need godmode on any of the characters. Instead of turning all defenses into huge eHP mechanics, we should address the real, underlying problem of shitty enemy designs. Attacks that pose a serious threat should be executed in a way the player has not only enough time to react, but has the option of not dying by making a series of good decisions within the allocated time window.

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Megami83Tensei#9384 schrieb:

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vzmNitie#2139 schrieb:

what about tons of 100k+ armor hc titans roaming around with shieldwall, being almost immortal and facetanking bosses? Since campaign.
Surely, there are moments in game when you lack armor and its very tough. On other side, any other defences have their bad windows in progression. Still there are not that much of defences which allow you almost afk on a map, but stacked armor allows.

A singular specific copied build that's irrelevant since every other class can't replicate that,and doesn't change armor being worthless on everyone else.

Let's not Cherry pick overpowered builds as the standard now.

Shamans, Smiths, Warbringers, and Witchhunter can all run armor+life and scale to a point where they can survive a hit from essentially boss mechanic, perhaps bar some particularly nasty juiced map mod combinations.

And they can all get their practical in-game EHP to roughly equivalent levels with the average ES setup.

Armor can be pretty OK with life + energy shield combos too. Usually you'd want some specific synergies to help a bit with it and more or less need to be in the left mid of the tree. But it's totally doable.

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Jobama#9902 schrieb:

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tzaeru#0912 schrieb:

IMO armour is currently closer to ideal balance than ES is. The problem really isn't armour itself, it's moreso tad bit too low life for many builds; and that ascendancies which do not give significant enough defenses are not very playable as life+ev or life+armor.

Current EHP king especially vs mixed type damage (like phys attack with convert 30% of damage to fire etc) is Titan. Bear shaman can also get pretty high. But all other non-ES setups are well below ES setups in terms of EHP vs biggest hits.

Shaman is prolly the only ascendancy that really allows going both ES and Armor without that being a hindrance rather than an asset. Maybe Warbringer could do it too.

"

UnholyKirin#7925 schrieb:

how come the game is OUT for a YEAR! and u didnt buff armor yet ?

It has had significant buff since launch. Granted, the most significant one happened in 0.1.1, a bit over a month into the EA.

I can tell you as a bear shaman, In order to see DPS, it requires pathing to the left, In order to get good ES, recharge, less delay all that, it requires pathing to the right, mainly top and top right, yes theres elemental damage nodes, no armour nodes, only ES

So as a bear shaman you need to either sacrifice damage and armour for ES
Or sacrifice ES for 90% Armour and favorable DPS

And then finding the max hp is my problem going the 2nd route

If you want to balance between the both, its not viable unless you somehow manage to stay at 100% hp at all times and have regen apply to ES, 5% of phys damage taken being converted to ES really doesn't do its job and is not worth it, I see 5-10 ES, sometimes 45 and its immediately gone, and sacrificing all regen for ES? ya no thanks, its the worst notable passive ive ever tried

Now you also have to consider mana, costs arent cheap, which is why I converted costs to life, yet now how I am suppost to heal... Life flasks have been my go to, and still not enough, its still in a really bad state, in order to make melee work at this point in time you need ES or you will be dying

They could get around this easily by allowing melee classes to scale guard, say put some guard passives in the bottom left/left side of tree, out of access from spellcasters, in range of huntress, passives that add a way to get guard, possibly scale the amount received, and rework olroths flask its legit broken
can get up to 1800 guard with olroths flask no problem scaling life flask recovery amount, thats just unfair, no other way to reliably get guard besides charms and 1 passive that converts 8% of life recovered from a flask in 1 second as guard, I recover 1800 in 1 second, think 20% is instant, I get 118 guard... not even comparable, its a joke

Idk im playing bear shaman and im doing just fine. Here is my build


https://poe.ninja/poe2/profile/Hyperspacing-5593/character/fivemeodmt


I also take the motto of 30% of your skill tree should be defensive nodes or skills.

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SpasticDovah#6460 schrieb:

17k armor will reduce 10k phys dmg by 14.5% -> 8.55k dmg
5k phys dmg -> 25.4% phys dr -> 3.75k
At 3k hp both of these are oneshots.
Similar investment in ES can let you tank >10k hits raw.

Armor can potentially match ES at unattainably high amounts, but the armor formula being so parabolic and balanced this way, alongside the fact that armor applied to elemental resistances is applied before %resists, will always result in low or moderate amounts of it being completely worthless. You will always want to go all in on armor, or not at all, making hybrid armor/es or armor/ev horrible choices unless you want to go from 90% dr to 15% and getting oneshot at seemingly random, leading to the high effective damage variance perceived by the player.

3k hp is indeed too low vs biggest hits with no ES, MoM, Sorcery Ward, or such to help out.

The actual calculations though - you kinda need to look at the ascendancies and the damage conversions, other phys damage reductions (mainly shield), and consider including buffs that are very likely to be on.

Once you run all of those calculations, it becomes fairly clear that reaching 7k of physical max hit EHP by level 90 is not an impossible task, and is something that is routinely achieved on HC by many different ascendancies.

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tzaeru#0912 schrieb:

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SpasticDovah#6460 schrieb:

17k armor will reduce 10k phys dmg by 14.5% -> 8.55k dmg
5k phys dmg -> 25.4% phys dr -> 3.75k
At 3k hp both of these are oneshots.
Similar investment in ES can let you tank >10k hits raw.

Armor can potentially match ES at unattainably high amounts, but the armor formula being so parabolic and balanced this way, alongside the fact that armor applied to elemental resistances is applied before %resists, will always result in low or moderate amounts of it being completely worthless. You will always want to go all in on armor, or not at all, making hybrid armor/es or armor/ev horrible choices unless you want to go from 90% dr to 15% and getting oneshot at seemingly random, leading to the high effective damage variance perceived by the player.

3k hp is indeed too low vs biggest hits with no ES, MoM, Sorcery Ward, or such to help out.

The actual calculations though - you kinda need to look at the ascendancies and the damage conversions, other phys damage reductions (mainly shield), and consider including buffs that are very likely to be on.

Once you run all of those calculations, it becomes fairly clear that reaching 7k of physical max hit EHP by level 90 is not an impossible task, and is something that is routinely achieved on HC by many different ascendancies.

Shields don't increase eHP. Anything with a probabilistic damage reduction needs to be viewed as a worst case scenario, in which shields are +0 eHP. Unless you raise the shield, but that's not eHP. By the same logic dodging is infinite eHP and so is movement speed.