Feedback for the general balancing from a HC perspective

I made a similar thread in January and most of the points there continue to be valid, albeit the details have changed: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3684432

As a general note, by "balance", I mean two interconnected things; one is diversity in builds. Another is whether the game generally feels right in terms of difficulty. Poor balance would mean there's only a couple of builds being played, and that with those builds, the game is trivially easy while with other builds, it it feels punishingly hard.

I'll also point out that I consider myself more of a casual than a serious PoE player, even though I play only HC. So my feedback is not from an expert perspective.

In any case. There are still a lot of balancing issues that make the game less interesting to play:

ES was soft-nerfed via Grim Feast and other nerfs, but in return, it got new equally strong buffs such as Convalescence and build-specific buffs such as Lich's ES stuff.

At the moment, of the top HC 50 characters, 94% are ES based and out of those that aren't, one is equally between life and ES. So only 4% of characters are life based. And one of those is a Blood Mage.

The basic issue is just the amount of scaling you get for ES both from gear and the passive node tree. It's too much. Meanwhile, most builds can't get enough life to survive with any reliability on HC.

ES needs to scale less. You should not be able to get +10k ES, unless there's some significant sacrifices for that.

Life should scale more. The two life builds on the top ladder are Titan and Blood Mage, both of which get significant amounts of extra life from their ascendancy.

Even then, their health is at 3k for Blood Mage and 4.8k for Titan. Other builds are worse and can't have enough health and other damage mitigation to realistically survive a single small mistake, and being able to survive one mistake is what HC chars need to be able to do.

Life builds across the board should all have about 1k more life.

Damage mitigation potential for physical damage is too low. It makes balancing physical vs elemental attacks in boss fights and in mobs just plain weird. Perhaps most life builds should be able to secure additional +2% or +4% physical mitigation from e.g. some passive node. Physical damage mitigation in shields should scale from +5% to +10%, rather than +4% to +8%.

Armor maybe needs to be slightly stronger, but I haven't redone the math for it since the last changes to it, so idk really.

Multiplayer in HC is currently too risky. The amount of visual clutter on the screen is tad bit too much - maybe should have an option to drastically reduce the amount of it. And you can block your teammates with various skills by accident.

Melee barely exists in HC. It's not even just survivability - even tho melee has too low survivability, usually due to melee builds being more life focused - but rather the general speed at which you can safely clear. IMO the problem isn't necessarily melee's damage potential, insomuch as it is the equally high or higher damage potential of non-melee options. Range already has a benefit from being ranged, so I don't really understand why it has also been made higher DPS in most situations, with only exception perhaps being certain boss fights. But in HC, you take fewer risks, so even in those boss fights the DPS advantage melee might have had is diminished or nullified by ranged characters having better opportunities to safely damage the enemy.

In concrete terms, I think something like this would be nice:

ES scaling from the passive tree reduced, so that if you got say, +120% ES from passive tree with a ES build, it would be +80% instead. Basically, the current ES focused builds should across the board have 1-2k less ES.

Life needs a boost. +2 per character level, and add 3 notable passives that give +4% max life and some other minor boon. Place them so that one is in middle of the bottom left quarter (middle of the "red" area of the skill tree), one is in the middle left (at the border of the "red" and "blue" areas) and in middle bottom (at the border of the "red" and "green" areas). This way, characters starting in red can easily take two of them, while characters starting in the top left or bottom right quarters can easily take one of them.

If max physical damage mitigation for most builds in the red area (ignoring some very build-specific ways of maximizing this) investing heavily into it was +30%, this should be +50%. This can be achieved with a combination of increasing phys damage mitigation from shield, by tuning the armor equation, and whatever other small means are figured out.

As an end result of those two, builds investing into life and phys damage mitigation would have about +1k effective health vs hits that are half physical, half elemental/chaos.

ES needs to remain a few Ks higher than life, since ES doesn't catch all damage without specific investment, and because ES has a recharge period. Life regen can get pretty alright as it is, which is good, because it balances against ES having a much faster recharge but having a wait period before it starts.

Melee should just generally have a bit more cleave. Pure single target skills should not really exist at mid to late game in a game so heavily focused around mobs. Basically all skills should target at least 2 enemies or have some small secondary AoE via whatever means.

The overperforming damage skills are pretty much always toned down between balance patches in PoE1 and PoE2, so I assume that I don't need to add much about that. But generally speaking the top performing couple of ranged attacks, compared to the top performing melee setups, should have their damage slashed down by like 10% or even 15%, especially in early to late end game. Even in SC melee is barely played, and in HC it's made even worse by the fact that you need to be extra careful in melee range. And the basic issue is just clear speed. Ranged is so much faster at that.