Energy Shield vs Armour Builds

Some days ago i played the new djinn class and i had a lot of fun, but i wanted to play something else and picked the warrior as my new class.

My djinn class had more then 13k energy shield and i played CI. I was very tanky and could take many hits from bosses without getting one shot.

Now with my warrior im scared as hell in every map. My damage is fine at the moment, but i spend all my currency to solve the defense problems. I nearly get to 50% block chance (47%) have, +20k armour, a bit armour applies to elemental damage, resis capped and some chaos resistence. But here starts the problem.

With energy shield you can just max out the energy shield as high as possible and you are save. With CI you dont need chaos resis and you are bleed imun. Only few problems that are easy to fix and are very strong.

With my warrior, in the optimal case, you need max block chance, armour as much as possible, armour to elemental damage as much as possible, a high life pool (that is not skillable in the passive tree), resis capped and maybe imunity to bleed, ignite and poison over charms.
To get my character where he is now i had soooo many problems to fix and it was sooo extremly expensive and i still feared in maps, because one crit from a mob and i could die, some burst dmg or anything else can easily kill me.

Many others before me said this and will always say that this kind of stacking defense is much more worse, then just pick a high amount of energy shield.

Im in endgame since a few hours and i will see how the character will work the next days, but right now im out of currency.

I really would like to see a bigh nerf to energy shield or a big buff to classes that work on the left side of the tree. Maybe at least ignite immunity or less damage from crits. Or more sources for flat physical damage reduction. We need something to fix all these problems without to spend so much currency.

%100 agreed

Maybe what im thinking about is, we could add a Keystone deeply in the left side of the passive tree that sets our maximum life to 1 and we can only get life with energy shield on armour pieces, but we can never have energy shield. So we can pick gear with energy shield and boost energy shield in the tree and everything is added as life. Maybe with the negative effect that life regeneration, flasks or something like that is reduced.

But maybe its a bit to strong and a lot of people would use it.
That was just an idea i had about that.

Game feels much better and less unfair with 10k ES, they have to buff HP by a lot because Evade and the badly designed armor formula CANNOT compensate having a huge buffer like ES.

Basically having 10k ES is the equivalent of having 5k HP AND A REAL 50% damage reduction TO ALL HITS EVEN THE BIG ONES (something armor CANNOT do) and while Evade will net you similar "effective HP", you'll get 1 shoted eventually so overall it's way worst because all you do is dodge, dodge, oops I didn't dodge correctly but hit got evaded, loop that for a while until you endup not dodging correctly and not evade, boom dead. With 10k ES? I can breath, finally.

Disciple of Varashta is like ES++. You can take an Ar/Es shield and easily get 40% block chance for a 30 spirit investment. In addition you can take the ES reduces physical damage ascendancy node to easily solve a big ES weakness which is lots of little phys dmg hits.

With 10k ES, it's one of the tankiest builds I have played.

Armour at 45k+ (for both phys and ele hits) and 4k life also feels very good. But it is inferior to ES at taking a big hit. You also need to invest in life regen and maybe block. Overall much more investment than pure ES.

I have yet to make evade feel good. I'm working on a new evade character now with investment into deflection. Can't block with a bow, so that is off the table. But I will still have the same problem which is you can't get life as high as ES. And life builds also need to invest in Regen or some other recovery mechanic like leech.

"

Kozikuru#3127 a écrit :

Disciple of Varashta is like ES++. You can take an Ar/Es shield and easily get 40% block chance for a 30 spirit investment. In addition you can take the ES reduces physical damage ascendancy node to easily solve a big ES weakness which is lots of little phys dmg hits.

With 10k ES, it's one of the tankiest builds I have played.

Armour at 45k+ (for both phys and ele hits) and 4k life also feels very good. But it is inferior to ES at taking a big hit. You also need to invest in life regen and maybe block. Overall much more investment than pure ES.

I have yet to make evade feel good. I'm working on a new evade character now with investment into deflection. Can't block with a bow, so that is off the table. But I will still have the same problem which is you can't get life as high as ES. And life builds also need to invest in Regen or some other recovery mechanic like leech.

The issue with pure evasion is that u can't evade most boss attacks. Even auto attacks seem to have very high accuracy. So u have to manually dodge everything or u'll die in one hit. Maybe not with 0 boss passives, but once u get some in that tree it's inevitable. Deflection helps a bit, but ultimately the life pool is just too small.

Evasion for mapping feels fine for the most part at least for ranged characters.

Ill bring some nuance to this discussion as I think a lot of it really is

And I hate to say it as I once was this way.

"Me see big number me think one is better"



Having both builds here at similar investment. Both being no item is over 5d, this is all super budget.



EnergyShield Screen (its a hybrid but that helps my argument as this has more protection)



Pure Armour Screen



Investment on the tree/Gear

EnergyShield build


Armour Build



Conditions:
Both characters avoid added chaos map mod.
Only the warrior avoids "steal charges" map mod

Every other map mod is on the table, and fair game.


Thoughts:


My stance on armour. Nothing needs to happen to it.

My stance on ES. The mechanics that are involved at the top of the tree need dialing back.
-Easy access to stunthresh/ailment thresh (literally connected to ES nodes this is bull shit you should have to path for these not have them next door)
Why do you get ALL ailment threshold based on ES at the top of the tree, and down in the bottom left, we get ONLY ELEMENTAL thresh for a single node???

-MoM offering 100% damage to mana before life

-CI giving you two immune's

-%Scaling being to high

-Downsides on nodes need revisiting


TLDR: Armour can be great with some conditions. ES is just great in general

i dont think anything is inherently wrong with ES vs Armor

the armor players just expect to face tank everything while the ES players know to always keep moving/kill anything that can see you from afar

perhaps easier access to "movement penalty when using skills" (or whatever its called) should be added to these types of nodes to make moving/using melee skills easier for those that try to face tank

to be clear, they seem balanced, its just a skill issue coupled with penalties that should have further penalty reduction (skill/movement/cast/attack whatever) for melee players.

"

bennisen#4006 a écrit :

I really would like to see a bigh nerf to energy shield or a big buff to classes that work on the left side of the tree. Maybe at least ignite immunity or less damage from crits. Or more sources for flat physical damage reduction. We need something to fix all these problems without to spend so much currency.

There's no need for complex fixes. Just give us some life nodes.

"

tdonov5#2743 a écrit :

the armor players just expect to face tank everything while the ES players

...can actually do it

"

Mashgesture#2912 a écrit :

Ill bring some nuance to this discussion as I think a lot of it really is

And I hate to say it as I once was this way.

"Me see big number me think one is better"



Having both builds here at similar investment. Both being no item is over 5d, this is all super budget.



EnergyShield Screen (its a hybrid but that helps my argument as this has more protection)

Spoiler

Pure Armour Screen

Spoiler

Investment on the tree/Gear

EnergyShield build

Spoiler

•7 clusters of energyshield/armour
•5 sapphire jewels all with energy shield prefixes
•Majority of the tree defensive

Armour Build

Spoiler

•5 clusters of Armour
•3 ruby jewels (one timelost) all with armour prefixes
•Majority of the tree offensive

Conditions:
Both characters avoid added chaos map mod.
Only the warrior avoids "steal charges" map mod

Every other map mod is on the table, and fair game.


Thoughts:

Spoiler

After playing both, it is not even remotely close who between these two characters is more tankier.

Its the warrior.


Just Geonor for example, same map mods

Requiem on high hits me for 700 damage as warrior. Which I just regen back to full almost instantly.

Requiem on high hits me for 4k+ energy shield as stormweaver.***

***Thats WITH it being hybrid with armour as well.
And I have to hit convalescence or the trailing DOT would KILL this character.


ES scaling however is still over the top. This is only an example with an ascendancy that has access to life/armour you would have a hard time doing this on mercenary for example

•The problem with ES is you also have access to CI (bleed AND chaos immune)
•MoM (100% of damage to your mana before life)
•Insane ES recharge time with very little investment
•Too high value for the chaos x2 weakness to matter. As well as not much chaos damage in the game to begin with.
•Build is usually at range, so you dont get hit really anyways
•Broken things such as ghost dance
•All spell casters can obtain similar defense, sometimes even better

My stance on armour. Nothing needs to happen to it.

My stance on ES. The mechanics that are involved at the top of the tree need dialing back.
-Easy access to stunthresh/ailment thresh (literally connected to ES nodes this is bull shit you should have to path for these not have them next door)
Why do you get ALL ailment threshold based on ES at the top of the tree, and down in the bottom left, we get ONLY ELEMENTAL thresh for a single node???

-MoM offering 100% damage to mana before life

-CI giving you two immune's

-%Scaling being to high

-Downsides on nodes need revisiting


TLDR: Armour can be great with some conditions. ES is just great in general

> 200k armour

dude, with that amount of investment you could get a lot more ES.

I easily got over 10k ES in SSF. I could hardly reach 25k armour after scavenged plating, ever.