Defensive Mechanisms - Warrior vs Rest

Warrior has, like the other classes, two defensive options.

- North on the passive tree, we have ES and on top of that MoM. This is huge, giving the player access to 2 defensive options that can tank every damage (hits, aoe, damage over time). Thanks to CI, chaos damage isn't a big problem. And there are enough nodes increasing ES and mana reg. So the north side works pretty good and that's why it's the current meta.

- South-East, we mainly have EV, but rangers go for EV/ES, have good access to "Eternal Youth" and since they attack, can also rely on life leech. And since they dodge sometimes, ES has more opportunities to start recharging. So this works pretty well too. Combine that with ranged high-dps fast clear-speed gameplay from Ranger and it's quite a safe playstyle.

- And South-West, we have Armor and Block. Block sounds good in theory, but can ONLY be used with having a shield, which excludes all 2-hand weapons. This is problematic, since Witch/Sorc/Ranger can go for 2 handed weapons and still use all their defensive options, while warrior is kinda forced to use 1-handed weapons, if he wants to use block. And armor? It only prevents physical damage. And it's less effective against big hits.

So what are the options now? I wouldn't nerf ES/MoM, because it works right now. I would buff Evasion a little bit and give armor and block a huge buff or change the entire defensive options from warrior.

Here are a few suggestions:

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1. Bring life-nodes exclusive for the south-west part of the passive tree. Make it easily accessable for warrior, but harder for other classes. This way, Warrior player can outshine other classes when it comes to life. This also makes sense, since warrior also has some life reg nodes, that would go well with it and the titan ascendency gives +15% more life. I know that you removed life nodes because all classes went for it. But if it's limited to the warriors tree, it should work just fine.

2. Give melee weapons also a block option. That means, that all melee weapons have a %-block stat, which differs depending on the weapon (2-handed mace should have more then 2-handed quarterstuff). And ofc this stat should be lowern then having a shield. And instead of "Raise Shield" make it "Raise Weapon". Skills based on having a shield equipped would ofc not work with a 2-handed melee weapon. This way, warrior could make use of the block stat, no matter if the go 1-hand or 2-hand.

3. Armor should give, similiar to elemental resistance, a fixed damage reduction. So if you have 75% armor, you only receive 25% physical damage from every source.

With these changes, warrior would feel much better in terms of defense.

Warrior needs changes, but ES does not "work", it's busted. High tier players are running around with 20k ES after Grim Feast. It's nuts.

Also I'd rather they add life to armour/melee nodes, rather than just add life nodes, adding more node tax.

ES should be scaled way, way down and be the defense that works best at absorbing a lot of small hits due to the quick recharge. It should not also be able able to eat huge hits better than other defenses.

Personally, I'd like them to play into the active defense nature of the game, but still allow us to fulfill the power fantasy of the big strong warrior who trades blows with the bad guy. Currently there isn't a good option for turning the dodge roll into a defensive cooldown in the way Blink allows (some) casters to have an active defense that still plays into their class fantasy.

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ClockworkShrew#7536 wrote:

Warrior needs changes, but ES does not "work", it's busted. High tier players are running around with 20k ES after Grim Feast. It's nuts.

1. High tier players (which is the minority)
2. Grim Feast is a problem, not ES

So if they fix (nerf) Grim Feast, ES would be in a good position.

What I want to achieve is, that ES doesnt get weaker, Armor/Evasion should get stronger, so that they are endgame viable too.

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ClockworkShrew#7536 wrote:

Also I'd rather they add life to armour/melee nodes, rather than just add life nodes, adding more node tax.

That's not a bad idea. Would truly limit life nodes to melee classes.

I think the pure armor clusters should have like 2-4% life on notables.

Right now armor has two problems:

1) It works only against one type of damage which by the end game is not as common as the other damage types. Evasion works against strikes and projectiles which are extremely common, and ES works on literally everything.

2) Is inversely useful to the threat of the incoming attack. Because of how armor is calculated, it's useful against small mobs, but boss slams and even mob slams like the belly flopping giants are barely affected by armor unless you have converted it to another damage type (such as with infernalist or cloak of flames) to improve the armor:damage ratio.

Adding small amounts of increased life to pure armor nodes solves this issue for pure armor users. Life is life. It works against all types of incoming damage but unless you're str stacking still won't get close to the large raw size of ES and life healing is done with different methods where it still feels different. And, more life means you can baaaarely scrape by the getting deleted by errant slams issue. You still won't be able to ignore the big boy slams, but the medium size one's will chunk you without instantly deleting your health bar.

Armor/ES nodes are perfectly fine right now. ES acts as ablative life for armor builds and a little amount of armor helps ES with their horde of small slaps issue.

Armor/Evasion is also fine. Armor helps protect from small hits and evasion helps with big hits. They're complementary.

And by putting it on only the pure armor notables, you prevent the issue of ES or Evasion builds from grabbing a few increased life clusters because they have to go deep into the red side of the tree but it's still accessible for Mercenary and Templar type builds which are close enough and can focus in on armor. Also, maybe it's just me, but if it's just on notables it makes it so non-armor builds that somehow find themselves over there still have to grab 2-3 dead nodes which if someone wants to spend 3-4 passives on 2-4% increased life I feel like they have better things they could do with it.

I like the idea that increased life gets put on armor. Would place melee in a very different and in a much better position then it is right now.

I remember saying someone say they wanted to make it harder to get %Life increases which is why they removed those nodes from the passive tree. So would raw life increases be the answer?

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drkekyll#1294 wrote:

I remember saying someone say they wanted to make it harder to get %Life increases which is why they removed those nodes from the passive tree. So would raw life increases be the answer?

Maybe making life rolls larger in magnitude everywhere maybe be a good idea??

All life-related rolls on any "gear" ; Life-related skills & supports ; STR -> life buffs ; etc. all sound reasonable enough to me.

Just make sure that when the patch is applied that we don't need to "divine" our existing gear to see the buffs :)

I know that I went WAAY out of my way to get all the life I could on gear and even took life-related nodes on the tree to hopefully synergize.

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drkekyll#1294 wrote:

I remember saying someone say they wanted to make it harder to get %Life increases which is why they removed those nodes from the passive tree. So would raw life increases be the answer?

And that was a good idea. Because every class went for life, restricting build variety. Especially the big life wheel between marauder, templar and scion where literally a must-have for many builds. The problem is, that melee users need a way to increase their hitpoint pool. But that is currently limited to Witch/Sorc, while Warrior has the least effective defensive possiblities, especially when using two-handed.

That's why I think giving the armor nodes small life buffs (like +2-3% more life per armor node) would make the armor-nodes worthwhile