Energy Shield and Life

Low life shouldn't even have been a thing. It took the same overpowered ES mechanic but added extra auras on top of it... completely broken.

if we merge the extension to the core game, will all the old chests become legacy? are these 2 seperate games or will the Amour nerfs be the new overall rules...


and remember:

some of you guys also know the titan quest desaster in the good old times. this trap has to do wif wrong ballancing

These nerfs seem bit too much, but still, do people really need to be this raging in this thread? It's beta tweaks which will likely not be final.

Very nice, I like the balancing changes, would like to see more defensive based buffs for both life and Energy shield, would also like to see more ways to mitigate Energy shield's innate drawbacks, such as Stun and Freeze.

Other things:

- Now that Discipline is basically Vitality for Energy Shield, why not give Vitality a flat life bonus as well?

- I really like the mentality of letting us go CI or Energy shield in general EARLIER in the game, I'm all for playing the way you want as soon as possible.

Seriously, you forgot to do the math.

Life pool from life based characters ALWAYS has to be alot lower than energy shield pools from es based characters, because you forgot about the big defense, life based characters have to offer.

I mean seriously, it's so easy to make a character with at least ~7k life and to have at least ~50% physical damage reduction without any endurance charges up. How can this be balanced?

To be more detailed:
Energy shield players doesn't have this big layer of defense or better said, they have no defense at all, because energy shield as a type of defense turns into effective life without having tons of phys reduction and tons of dodge and evasion. If you want to play a 100% es based char without having the possibility to leech with Vaal Pact anymore, then es regen has to be buffed ALOT! Since the normal leech via Ghost Reaver is a joke with only having 2% leech from Warlord's Mark (as spell casters).

So you have to buff Ghost Reaver with mods like increased es leech per second and % increased of maximum Energy Shield per second to maximum Energy Shield Leech rate

Or you create some new es leech nodes on the tree, especially in the Intelligence/Es based areas on the tree.

And to be honest, I never saw a character with 25k es; I don't know from where you got those numbers!!??
Maybe with the old Vaal Discipline it was possible to reach 25k es together with god-tier gear in standard.

At the moment I play an es regen based character and I have decent es gear so far as you can see here:

With ~250% increased es from tree PLUS the more multiplier behind the CI keystone, 465 Intelligence and a lvl 20 Discipline results for me in 13,4k es as effective life. Which is in my opinion totally comparable with a 7-8k life char, because those also have the big phys reduction from all the armour as well, or additional evasion and dodge as layers of defense. We energy shield players only have the es pool and that's it.

And on top of that we have the big downside that we have to wear stuff like Valyrium or Eye of Chayula to not get stunned and we also have to care about to get frozen. As a suggestion, you could make CI keystone to have something like "stuns/freezes are based on maximum energy shield"; and not still on life. From this point of view, life builds are way more unbalanced than es builds. Or change the placement of Unwavering Stance and put it more in the middle so that EVERY char has access to it without crippling the build.

So, SERIOUSLY, how could this be balanced at all? With those reduces in energy shield I'd have maybe almost 9k es with my (decent!) gear then, but with the lack of any physical damage reduction and while having to waer a crappy ring to avoid stuns most of the times.

How can this be playable at all against hard hitting bosses and how can this be balanced?

As other users already mentioned it, you should just have buffed life which - and that more unfair - you already did buff with hey hybrid "armour/evasion + life" master craft mods.

I don't get your whole point GGG, please enlighten me.

Nice now average players will have 6k es with no leech, no armor no evasion no instant flasks.
You can also try to remove sockets from es gear that will make it competitive:
If it has es on it, it can not roll sockets.
Oh and make es gear -80 ms cause those es characters get to places too fast as well.

Well back to berserker or duelist then.

loving it, u guys all need to fkn relax. this is just part of the bigger picture.
the game was a joke, and they are finally fixing it.
currently u achieve ~9k life and ~22k es with the same amount of nodes invested, what did you guys expect. it still will be 9k vs 14k or something like that.
energy shield was always meant to be the high end solution.

for me its better than christmas, rip es/vaalpact/doubledipping. its almost like the game wont be trivialised anymore.

ggg u did well so far, hardcore will be great again. gimme that 3.0 supporter pack!

This is an utterly stupid nerf and doesnt solve the fact that life builds are horrible to play end game and taking Vaal Pact on them makes them even worse.

ES builds are almost worthless without instant leech since they cannot use Flasks and Vaal Discipline is situational.

Now everyone just plays Life builds since they are about 10x easier to gear and getting 6k-8k HP wasnt very hard on a Life build.

My SSF Life based Berserker (who abused Vaal Pact big time) with MoM rarely died to incoming damage - I died to lame degens.

Theres so many fucking degens in this game its unreal, taking Vaal Pact to prolong a life characters...life..basically just kills all fun since the build is absolutely frustrating to play.

SSF Zerker can do all Guardians deathless but insta dies to a 'Poisoning Tempest' with vulnerability - takes a 7k dot a second, yeah nice one

So now we get horrible QoL Vaal Pact Life builds or horrible survivability ES builds.

No wonder you are buffing minions since nobody is going to want to play an attack/caster build ever again

I'm a bit confused here. I always thought that the reason for these high ES pools was the fact that ES characters have basically no armor or evasion and so they need more ES to not get one-shot?

Yes, these changes haven't even been tested yet, but this is a bit too much- reducing ES by like 30% or so and destroying the ability to restore ES mid-combat without running away from the boss/mob pack? Picking one of these 2 things would be fine IMO. And I'd prefer getting rid of ES leech, because I don't like the idea of legacy gear at all.

PS. Really GGG? I started my first ever CI char yesterday and today I read this? :S

Wew friends