Evasion vs Armor vs Energy Shield vs Sorc Ward Power Fantasy

This was the first league I have finally tried all 3 defensive layers so I wanted to provide some feedback on some areas I think are lacking.


Evasion is in a really good spot. You eventually tend to get that fast, highly mobile god like dodging feeling. You do have to solve some problems with damage over time as evasion only applies to hits but that can feel rewarding to solve with enough options.

Armor is in a much better spot than it was on a pure functional level, however severely lacks on the power fantasy aspect. The idea is that you are supposed to "feel" like an unkillable badass warrior, blocking damage, healing through it in a berserking rage, or shrugging off big hits to your beefy armor. You are even debuffed to help facilitate this fantasy by reducing your movement speed.

You do not feel this way at all play armor, or at least I didn't. You frequently get body blocked by mobs, and you get knocked out of sprint just as easily as other layers if not worse. Finally armor does not protect against damage over time, which can be an interesting problem to solve, and its generally easier than evasion.

For energy shield, it does not feel like there is a clear identity that it has, and is reflected in your gameplay. From a functional level ES is the best, and its not even close. It has a few draw backs to solve, but also has a few things solved for it. For example, you need to solve the recharge time, recharge rate, and in combat recharge. Those issues become trivial to solve however, so you end up becoming an unkillable god, much easier than other layers. Additionally, from my experience, ES is the only layer that protects against most damage over time by default. However i could be mistaken as blood mage makes it hard to notice that damage. I think ES is lacking in draw backs to play around for how strong it is. IE the current draw backs are too easily solved, and ES is very strong once those issues are solved.

Sorcery Ward finally feels functional as a defensive layer, however similarly lacks interaction/identity like energy shield. You have no way to work around its draw backs like recharge time. At the same token this makes you significantly modify your playstyle, especially if you are melee. It feels more like energy shield gameplay, than energy shield does.

That being said, it could use some more interaction or drawbacks to make it unique/address in your build. Sorcery ward also does not block ANY damage over time, this can be a huge problem, however it forces you to adapt your build so its not the end of the world and it is generally solvable.

Also there is no HP UI update for having sorcery ward, you have to watch a buff on the top left, so that really needs to be addressed as it feels terrible.

ES is the only variant for pinnacles t2+
Armor and Evasion won't save you from oneshots on these levels.

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tacticalturnip#6180 wrote:

Armor is in a much better spot than it was on a pure functional level, however severely lacks on the power fantasy aspect. The idea is that you are supposed to "feel" like an unkillable badass warrior, blocking damage, healing through it in a berserking rage, or shrugging off big hits to your beefy armor. You are even debuffed to help facilitate this fantasy by reducing your movement speed.

Watching my heavily armoured, raining down meteors and ground-pounding earthquakes demon bear get tripped over by a small crab really shook me out of the power fantasy for sure.