BALANCE between Armour/Evasion/ES
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es sux.
What rules are armor stacks and es+evasion ghostdance. Literally immortal builds. |
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" You need a fairly decent investment just to reach 3k as a life build. The same investment in a ES build and you would be 10-15k es. You dont see the problem? And yes bigger number is better. How is having 4 times higher effective health not better? And this is ontop of ES having access to CI which gives immunity to chaos and bleed. So you have 4-5 times as high effective health pool and you get immunity to bleed and chaos damage for free. Its not even comparable. | |
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Still possible to balance Life against ES this way :)
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Make Strength count as 3 Life points at least. 1,8 to 2,5k life is not acceptable as defensive element.
You made a game full of ES players. Congratulations!!! |
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It's not a life vs ES issue.
It's ES vs Armour vs Evasion issue. First, I think it's just too easy to reach a demi-god amount of ES. Second, I think if builds that rely on Armour and/or Evasion could find a couple extra ways to get some more PDR outside of the AR shield affix or corruption outcome on body armour, or a small increase to HP, they'd be fine. Perhaps the base-value adjustments and mechanics like runic-ward they're doing in 0.5 will help even things out. Third, I think there's too many competing affixes - especially suffixes - for AR/EV builds compared to ES builds, especially CI builds. Not having to worry about stats, or chaos resistance as a suffix while still being able to meet all your recovery/ailment functional requirements quite easily through the tree on top of easily accessible direct increases to the ES amount, makes the whole defensive "package" for ES-centric players feel way more synergistic, and pleasantly cohesive. Compared to the str/dex side, allocating tree points feels much more like balancing opportunity cost, which isn't necessarily "anti-synergistic", or bad, it just feels like things are less complementary and more inter-competitive with each other. Reaching a meaningful amount of any one stat feels like it requires large amounts of investment from more than one angle, which constrains affixes, tree pathing choices, and even skill choices and playstyles. It ends up feeling like way more investment for a less "visibly" effective outcome. I say "visibly" because playstyle also is a huge factor in perception. Most people play glass-cannon style builds and poe-ninja is basically a slice of the most dedicated players. Dedicated players tend to be more "skilled", which translates into them being less likely to be punished as often for their playstyle/relatively low defensive investment, and this is further complemented by the natures of ES and EV/ES, and to some degree, evasion. There are many cases where someone's glass-cannon build would die to a "bull-shit one-shot they couldn't do anything about" playing a life/armour build where on an EV or ES/EV build they'd manually evade with increased mobility options, roll a natural evade, or benefit from the demi-god level of ES to soak the mistake. This would likely lead to a technical over-representation of those defensive layers on ninja even if things were "balanced" just because of sample bias. Right now I think this natural bias is exacerbated by actual imbalances regarding defensive accessibilities between ES/EV/AR. So TLDR: - Too "easy" to get too much ES, - Too "hard" to get an acceptable amount/balance of/between AR & EV & Crit reduction & life & Regen & Leech & Strength & Dex & Accuracy & Resistances & Deflection & AR applied to ele & a Weapon &..... etc. Who am I to say anything, I don't respect my time either. Last edited by karsey#2995 on May 13, 2026, 5:25:36 PM
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" Everything would be solved if most armor/evasion nodes would also give a small amount of +life (like +3%). This way, you get a decent amount of defense but also life on top, which protects you more against things like elemental damage or crits since life is a defense like ES that works against everything. Since you get armour/evasion, you shouldn't get as much life as you get ES from ES nodes, but still: it would bring armour/evasion on par with ES. The problem is: You can't fix armour/evasion by itself. Evasion will always be problematic since it's chance based. And if a big hit goes through, you are dead. Having more life would help to survive those hits. Armour on the other side mostly works against physical damage and gets weaker against big hits. Ofc you can invest into the new stuff so that armour also protects against elements, but still: It's a huge investment of points and you still will have problems with things like chaos damage. Again, life would help here. |
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