The State of Life & Mana

I have played POE since the 2013 beta but wouldn't say I am particularly hardcore. I have about 2k hours on POE1 in that time and have probably close to 250 in POE2.

The current state of life and mana really limits build and skill diversity.

For context, I have two end game characters that are playing relatively off-meta skills. My Infernalist (lvl 88) is playing frostbolt and my Deadeye (lvl 93) is playing Poisonburst+Vine arrow.

I'm going to focus on Deadeye as I think it's a great representation of the problem for both of these resources.

Because life is so scarce on tree, I am running an evasion + energy shield loadout for my Deadeye, which feels really suboptimal. I have about 4.5k eHP split evenly between ES and Life. My evasion rating is 90% but I can't spec into acrobatics because I can't fully invest in evasion gear.

To compound issues for this build, I need to sacrifice eHP and/or damage to try and optimize for mana regen and intelligence. This makes little to no sense for what should be a life/evasion build.

My level 32 Poisonburst Arrow can almost sustain with close to 250% mana regen and 50% (inspiration+passive tree investment) reduction in skill costs. It feels crazy to me that to be able to use a bow skill without mana problems I need to have a mana pool of 1k+ with so much regen.

Life is also hurt by the fact that there are very few sources of % increase with the exception of very rare rolls on gear. There's also few sources on uniques because they've all been handicapped as tier 1 version of equipment for some reason.

Anyways, I'm loving the game overall but there's some really fundamental balancing issues for life and mana that need to happen or we're going to continue to see everyone focus on Grim Feast and intelligence/mana stacking builds.