Why nerf energy shield? Buff other defences

They don't want to fix defences bro... They need to make Jonathan's vision visible! Fk everything becouse we need meaningful combat.

Yeah the faster start of energy shield recharge nerfs are quite brutal:

- Passive tree small nodes from 15% to 6%
- Notables from 25% to 12%
- Body armour cannot roll that suffix anymore
- Jewels cannot roll that mod anymore
- Soul-core that gave 30% changed and gives zero now

But I noticed that, with my 0.4 character i had 80% faster start and 40% energy shield recharge, felt completely fine with my defensive setup. 4sec/(1+0.8) = 2.2222

After patchnotes today I made league starter for myself and I can get now 76% faster start with the patchnote changes and using additional +4 passive skill points on the tree. 4sec/(1+0.76) = 2.2727

So pretty much same result.

ES are still the king of defense.

They just nerf tiny itty bit so that people are less mindless.

The root of problem with ES are still not solved.

Still got huge pool, and with CI, it still have 2 affix advantage, 1 suffix and 1 prefix, since they they need neither chaos res or life.

Other def still struggle to compete life with defense, which all occupy prefix slot.

The suffix hungry for resistance are expected, but really, 2 affix advantage is HUGE.

A thing about defenses is that the league has the new Guard. So all characters will have access to an additional method to avoid damage. So it sort of makes sense that numbers of the other defenses would be tweaked down.

This update has nothing new. ar/ev builds still need +life on gear, it's the life nodes on tree that's missing.

The faster start is a pretty massive nerf. Recovery rate too. This was my build for 0.4 (haven't played since December but it was pretty min-maxed)

https://poe.ninja/poe2/pob/1b50e

21k ES with 0.73s ES recharge delay and 11.5k ES recovery per second.

Vaal power zealot spectre and Navira's Fracturing hybrid build.

To get those recharge figures I had 413% fast start of ES recharge and 358% increased recovery rate (and Soul Bloom).

Those are going down to around 100% each at best with all the nerfs. Maybe even lower since they are mostly deleted from gear too.

New ES recharge delay will be about 3s/(2) = 1.5s
New ES recovery rate will be about 2600x2x1.2= 6240 per second


So roughly halved each of the figures and that's with near min-maxed gear. Still playable, however I do make more defensive builds than most. I'll be league starting this build as it can insta delete bosses and clear a screen of trash mobs as well.

It will feel quite different to play though. Have to wait twice as long for ES recovery to start while also recovering at half the previous speed.