Chaos Inoculation vs. Blood Magic (long)

No mana issues? Lvl 16 FP with GMP, Faster Cast and Cold Pen costs 80 mana, and you can easily get up to 3+ casts per second. If you invest nothing into your mana that's not going to go well for you without flasks. With Clarity and say a regen of 50 mp/s, you'd need a 1500 mana pool to leech back the other 190 mp/s you're spending.

If you just take the few passives near the witch start though, gear can probably take care of the rest, since you don't actually need to sustain infinite FPs.

As for low evade, if you go down to get the crit multi stuff in the ranger area and get the 4 ES/EV nodes in the Nullification circle on the way, Grace by itself is going to get you 15% evade, which is significant IMO, even if it's probably unneeded for a CI witch.

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aimlessgun a écrit :

No mana issues? Lvl 16 FP with GMP, Faster Cast and Cold Pen costs 80 mana, and you can easily get up to 3+ casts per second. If you invest nothing into your mana that's not going to go well for you without flasks. With Clarity and say a regen of 50 mp/s, you'd need a 1500 mana pool to leech back the other 190 mp/s you're spending.

Man, only 80 mana? Fuck LMP, I'm getting GMP on my FP. Even at 6 cast/sec I could get off 2-3x times more than the 5 EKs I can cast at 1.5 cast/sec.

That's depressing.

Anyways, I think the OP is confusing BM builds with general life users. After playing both mostly life/BM builds even with the mana issues of using a CI EK shadow (mana hungry skill with a mana starved class), my CI build is much stronger in every way. I haven't bothered using pots (besides diamonds to 1-2 shot bosses) in about 5-10 lvls.

The only scary situation for me is being permafrozen with flicker strikers around. Either by itself is nothing. I only have 10k ES as well and I'm not pure DPS because I want to be able to support EK w/o mana leech (failing miserably but can get off enough shots to clear the map anyways) so I have a ton of mana nodes.

I think if I picked up mana leech like most builds I could get another 5k dps and even though I have no need for it another 5-10k ES (one or the other). Hell if I took off malis, got a belt that had ES, a high ES shield, better boots I probably could get both 5k DPS and 5-10k ES.

Also when you talk extreme cases from HC builds. I've heard of people getting 20-25k ES while the highest life total I've heard is 8k. Both are goddamn insane and hard to kill but it's going to be much harder to kill the ES person as a perfectly bad situation could leave the 8k life guy checking out default while the shit storm that would have to happen to wipe out 20,000 ES would have to be incredible.

I think it was victordoom that said it to me last night. Just remove ES. It will take forever to balance life and ES, you'll be better of just removing ES.

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flab a écrit :

Edit:
It irks me how so many people just choose to ignore the potentials with these things (and sometimes willingly), because it's hard to get great items (not really). Somehow it just gets disregarded. Two obvious examples being the ES gear, compounded by CI and then crit damage and diamond flasks.

The majority of people won't see these good items so they scream to not have a nerf as it's easier to buy slurm's old gear, or another high end witch who had a 300-500 5l ES chest, which would be a huge ES gain for many casual CI witches. But for a life user they'd need to get high life rolls on each piece. While getting melee gear is generally cheaper, we need more pieces to get the same benefit that an ES user does out of one piece. I mean I have 10k ES from 3 pieces (chest, helm and boots, although shield does have 50 ES but comon really) and my duelist is/was as tanky with the lowest life roll being 65, most are over 85.

Imagine if to get 10k ES (which I really do think is equal to about 4-5k life) you needed that top ES % roll on 9 pieces of gear.

And tbh after using CI and Slurm providing his numbers with and w/o CI, the only problem with CI is the chaos immunity. The problem isn't with CI, it's with ES's gear affixes. Flab, I like your point with it the best, bring up the base and lower the rolls. The base items are almost useless, in most cases even with a 100% ES roll they are still garbage.

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flab a écrit :

I still think Xendran's suggestion to make CI convert life to ES is a great idea. There are a bunch of things you can get more managable if you do this. It helps the status ailment situation (optionally, by choosing life nodes instead of ES), makes life in general for ES users easier and it'd make CI seem far more balanced imo. The only real remaining issue then being shield delay recovery for melee (and non-CI in general), if base life also affected that (a stretch, I know) you'd have virtually all bases covered as well as you could, short of dropping ES altogether.

CI really needs absolutely no other benefit besides chaos immunity. I don't see why or how people think it needs more. My witch ran maps into the 70s, as a fire storm tempest shield (lolwdf) with 6k ES and about 45% block rate, coupled with grace, inner force and granites I had 0 issues dieing. That toon had 5 deaths on his trip to the top, compared to most of my builds, which have deaths into the hundreds. (Albeit I normally play armor/evasion based life builds (EB) lately, which are arguably inherently much weaker then ES)

In the end, the route to "balancing" ES, can really only be accomplished by making armor and evasion work independently towards their intended mitigations. As it stands, CI IS overpowered, however, its because ES is designed as the "Stand alone" defense combination. Evasion/HP and HP/Armor are the other two defenses; Not balanced alone, but rather, balanced as a couple, for both of the above, to, while taking more time and effort, investment, to achieve good numbers, should in theory be better then ES.

The issues with the above is this, evasion without acrobatics is pretty bad, meaning that users who can't get to acrobatics, or can't use acrobatics, due to conflicting nodes, are shoe-horned into using armor. Armor is useless without endurance charges, and builds unable to build or sustain endurance charges reliably are exceedingly weak with armor, compound this with the fact that the two main sustaining abilities of endurance charges, end cry and warlords, are both kind of flawed. End cry grants charges based off of nearest enemies, however, at the same time, the most dangerous mobs (Brutus, vaal, omgiantspider) are one enemy, therefore take the longest to get the charges, when you need them the most; then you have warlords, which grants end charges to mitigate damage after you kill the sources of said damage.

CI and ES can't be reliably balanced without first bringing the others up to par.

The fact that armor/evasion are bad has nothing to do with the scaling of ES/CI. CI takes far less points to achieve the same or superior survivability to life/regen. It's obviously a problem that will become more apparent as the game matures and the really good ES gear becomes more widely available.

How about we see how it handles endgame. You know, the one the vast majority of us have yet to experience.

I'm all for changing it, but until we see how it all holds up in the true endgame. It being so near, I would rather just wait and see.