Some of the misconceptions and exaggerations about defenses and builds

There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about ES, life, etc.

First off I'd absolutely agree that ES is overtuned compared to life, and that most melee skills (including pretty much whole of Mace) feel underwhelming and janky. Those things need fixing.

But it's very common to read complete exaggerations here. Here's some of the misleading statements I keep reading:

ES needs only a couple of passive nodes of investment -> No, ES builds commonly have from 30 up to 45 passive nodes for ES. Case example, a 12k ES build from HC: https://poe.ninja/poe2/builds/vaalhc/character/draxgodx-4253/polukaloiservers

The fact is that both ES and life+armour builds need a minimum of around 30 nodes on defense if they want to reach certain thresholds of survivability.

You will be oneshot without ES -> Technically it's possible that you do have a max juiced map with a combination of mods that lead to a situation where the max damage roll of a specific boss mechanic is such that you get wiped.

But if we look at the max damage you can ever take from end game content aside of those particular mod combinations, it's certainly possible to have the defenses to survive basically any mechanic. One of the highest damaging attacks you'll ever be met with could be, for example, the Arbiter slam. The max roll is 5800 physical and 3000 fire.

Here's some of the examples of surviving that:

With 0 stacks of scavenging plates and no shield, this Smith: https://poe.ninja/poe2/builds/vaalhc/character/fastlanu-4807/Hood_Legend
Without MoM, this Blood Mage: https://poe.ninja/poe2/builds/vaalhc/character/ArChanum-2445/Nualia_Tobyn
This Shaman without uniques: https://poe.ninja/poe2/builds/vaal/character/phkhai251096-7759
This Shaman using Cloak of Flame instead of AR armor: https://poe.ninja/poe2/builds/vaalhc/character/Extragonoff-1762
This level 86 Smith: https://poe.ninja/poe2/builds/vaalhc/character/SkunekPL-4261/SkunekHC

I left Titans out cuz it's so easy to reach on Titan. Warbringers also reach those numbers with Jade. Witchhunters reach them with Sorcery Ward. Oracle with Harmony Within.

Armour doesn't do anything vs bit hits -> It indeed is less effective vs big hits, but it's absolutely not nothing. It can be the thing that lets you survive the biggest singular physical hits.

For example, 20k armour is reachable by many builds without even including e.g. scavenged plating. With 20k armor, the Arbiter slam's 5800 physical is mitigated by 20000/(20000 + 10 * 5800) ~= 26%, turning 5800 damage to 4292 which is a lot more survivable.

There's of course other mitigation you can add to that. E.g. shield's 8%. Now you're taking 3830 damage. Some builds will include conversion to elemental or chaos. Even 5% drops another couple of hundreds of damage off.

It is true though that for the majority of armor-based builds, the gear is more expensive in total and the margin for error is smaller than it is with ES builds of similar expense. But that's more about ES vs armor, rather than about armor itself being useless - it isn't.

ES is easy -> Honestly, with the right build and gear, all setups can be easy in PoE, requiring no more player skill than the ability to press a couple of buttons in a loop. The vast majority of players never reach those builds though.

Generally speaking ES takes a while to start to properly scale. With the nerfs and reworks to the spirit skills that supported ES, the campaign is probably a bit harder on HC with pure ES than life or life+ES. Until you can minimize the charge delay and maximize charge speed or get significant direct ES recovery, you'll be faced with situations where you keep taking chip damage that stops you from recharging.

Once the stats related to ES are maximized, it becomes very good and does give a higher functional survivability than armor does. Is that enough to make it easy - eh, depends. There's essentially immortal builds with and without ES, with the ES builds being more common, but again, most players will die every so often whether or not they have ES.

I don't think your example works in your favor.

With 20k armor and 3.5k health and a host of other damage mitigations you are not going to survive that slam if you take the fire damage into account. So you need to invest into armor, health, ele res, chaos res, armor applies to ele and chaos, spirit into scavenging plates, additional forms of damage reduction from shield, etc. to have your bases covered.

With 9k ES and 0% fire res you will survive the slam. And that is very easily achievable.

But additionally your damage will also be lower as melee, you won't be able to damage as you kite prolonging the fight, you will be way more susceptible to eating the damage of ground degens, eating the CC, etc.

Not even health regen is a saving grace. It is yet another thing you somehow need to heavily invest in or it does nothing for you. A 50-100 health per sec regen is not much if you have just lost 3k life.
But you kinda need to invest in that too because otherwise bleed will wreck you. If you just mitigated say that 3k slam but it had bleed on it, you are now faced with 450dmg physical dot for 5 seconds (total of 2250).
Yet another thing some ES builds don't have to worry about at the measily price of 1 notable (and neither about chaos dmg or poison, so no worries about chaos res either making gearing significantly easier yet again).

See how this is a problem? It's not even comparable how easy it is with ranged + ES vs melee + Armour.

Just play the numbers for a bit. Say what would it take for that slam to go below 3k from the armor alone? Answer: 54135 armor. That's assanine. So we arrive at another problem that ES doesn't have to face but armor does: Diminishing returns.

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Slart1bartfast#0332 schrieb:

I don't think your example works in your favor.

With 20k armor and 3.5k health and a host of other damage mitigations you are not going to survive that slam if you take the fire damage into account. So you need to invest into armor, health, ele res, chaos res, armor applies to ele and chaos, spirit into scavenging plates, additional forms of damage reduction from shield, etc. to have your bases covered.

All of those builds linked would survive it. I specifically calculated it both myself and checked those builds in PoB with the appropriate calculation settings.

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Slart1bartfast#0332 schrieb:

With 9k ES and 0% fire res you will survive the slam. And that is very easily achievable.

Yup.

There probably should be significantly more ES left after a single hit when comparing builds of similar investment. Otherwise, ES is just weaker due to the recharge mechanics.

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Slart1bartfast#0332 schrieb:

But additionally your damage will also be lower as melee, you won't be able to damage as you kite prolonging the fight, you will be way more susceptible to eating the damage of ground degens, eating the CC, etc.

Sure; I didn't try to argue that melee wasn't in many cases underperforming compared to ranged options.

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Slart1bartfast#0332 schrieb:

Not even health regen is a saving grace. It is yet another thing you somehow need to heavily invest in or it does nothing for you. A 50-100 health per sec regen is not much if you have just lost 3k life.

Yes; and ES builds invest in less recharge delay and higher rate of recharge.

Granted, getting very high health regen is hard. It's theoretically possible to push to like 25% a second on combined regen and leech, but it's an extreme investment and does have a negative effect on your DPS. 5% is fairly easy to achieve. 10% with some effort without massive compromises.

And you of course have life flasks.

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Slart1bartfast#0332 schrieb:

But you kinda need to invest in that too because otherwise bleed will wreck you. If you just mitigated say that 3k slam but it had bleed on it, you are now faced with 450dmg physical dot for 5 seconds (total of 2250).

Other than perhaps some very particular map mod combinations, I don't think there's anything in the game that would hit even close to that much physical while also having bleed.

Off the bat I don't recall any of the big-hitting bosses having bleed. I think Zelina has bleed, but she isn't available in maps, I don't think? Her bleed attack scaled to level 82 would be pretty stronk tho!

I don't really recall bleeding having been much of an issue in end game when I've played my life characters, but yeah, I did skip on some maps when they had mods like increased dmg and bleed chance.

It's also pretty popular to run staunching charm.

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Slart1bartfast#0332 schrieb:

Yet another thing some ES builds don't have to worry about at the measily price of 1 notable (and neither about chaos dmg or poison, so no worries about chaos res either making gearing significantly easier yet again).

I'd not say that the price is just 1 passive. If you go CI, you have to invest very highly into ES, if the idea is that you have good survivability on HC.

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Slart1bartfast#0332 schrieb:

Just play the numbers for a bit. Say what would it take for that slam to go below 3k from the armor alone? Answer: 54135 armor. That's assanine. So we arrive at another problem that ES doesn't have to face but armor does: Diminishing returns.

Most life builds can have at least some form of phys mitigation or other defense (other than ES or MoM) in addition to armor, so shouldn't really calculate it on armor alone.

Additionally, I don't see why it was important to get the slam damage below 3k on armor alone. I do think that the point of attacks like that is that you have to invest into surviving them at all, and that surviving them half your health intact would require extreme and very expensive investment.

Cuz, the game doesn't hit you for more than that. And if those attacks don't almost kill you, then nothing will, and you can facetank.

Seeing how you can have ES pools that are 2 to 5x more then typical life pool, there's no reason why armor shouldn't be calculated like resistance or any normal formula. The armor formula from GGG has been bad since day 1, they don't want melee to tank but ES comes in such abundance that ES does exactly that and make ES users tanky, this is annoying to no end.

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Warrax#2850 schrieb:

Seeing how you can have ES pools that are 2 to 5x more then typical life pool, there's no reason why armor shouldn't be calculated like resistance or any normal formula. The armor formula from GGG has been bad since day 1, they don't want melee to tank but ES comes in such abundance that ES does exactly that and make ES users tanky, this is annoying to no end.

In my opinion, the way armour works is the better system, and e.g. the "linearly to cap"-way how resistances work is the inferior system.

It's also fairly common, lots of games use these kind of asymptomatic polynomials for scaling. I suppose WoW would be the most obvious example.

Based on my experience playing HC - which I say simply because building and gearing is a bit different on HC than SC, and I've no experience to speak about how it is on SC - by late game you need around 3 times the ES to be on par in comfort with the life builds.

Right now something like 4 times is the more typical difference.

I think the gist is that life/armour/block/regen/resistances/flat reductions/x taken as y etc. etc. - basically builds that do not use ES as a primary layer - comparatively need more invested into them to obtain a commensurate feeling of "tankiness" and it forces either a slower progression, or a more risky one, for non ES players.

ES weakness has always been attrition-based battles and/or sustained damage-taken scenarios. However, since it is a flat amount of hit points it has the inherent capability to compensate for these vulnerabilities and weaknesses by giving more time for a player to react to the damage it is vulnerable to. Many vulnerabilities are also easily mitigated through simple and accessible means such as charms and/or skill points.

Almost every build, ES or not, can kill mobs fairly easy by the time they are kitted out at endgame. However:

A skilled player with nothing but 10k ES, and some charms and skill points can eat mistakes in dangerous boss fights and live to tell the tale.

That same player, life-based, with the same level of investment, will likely just die.

There is just way too much investment required for non-ES based characters required to hit a similar eHP. The trade off here is supposed to be the fact that ES deals with sustained/attrition scenarios much easier, but those scenarios just don't really cause issues for players who are already skilled.

That means that skilled players will naturally gravitate towards ES-based builds, because the inherent advantages of ES are more valuable to them than the inherent advantages of being life-based - it better complements their capabilities and playstyle.

Bringing "life" up to the same level means that you need all sorts of non-hit-point related defensive investment to meet a similar "big-hit" eHP, and a lot of it is gated behind RNG in the form of gear with specific prefixes and affixes as well as augments or specific corruptions/uniques/jewels/annoints/abyss mods etc.

It is just comparatively a lot, so it "feels" worse when you're trying to achieve it in game, and if you're in hc, you're more likely to realize an "unlucky" big hit before you can get all those pieces in place.

That's just the price of having it all.

What does the monk say again - "Skill beats size, every time".

He makes a good point.