Virtuous Barrier's Strength motes should not be max life.

On it's face this is a seriously bad choice for this mote type. Assuming you were to focus completely on it, it could give you 28% increased, which is not at all a bad increase in the scope of POE2's pitiful max life scaling options. But, it's tied to a disposable mote.

Tying any amount of a player's life total to a fragile consumable that can be lost just for rounding the corner into a pack of Quill Crabs, and takes 56 seconds to return to full strength, seems insane to me. If that 28% is worth thousands of HP on a life stacker, you stand to instantly lose thousands of max HP, only to essentially never get it back. Nevermind you would also take all the damage! So your Max HP would plummet, and then you would take all of that damage directly to your shrunken life pool... What?

If a single mote is worth 100 maximum life, and something taps me for 1 damage, I take 101 damage, in effect. I lose the mote, and take 1 damage. That's absurd.

Plus, unless you go pure evasion, defending these motes in any meaningful way is basically impossible. You lose them on hit, so if you block: you lose them. If you rely on armor: you lose them. If you rely on energy shield: you lose them. The only way to protect this resource is to never be hit.

Considering that life stacking should thematically be the domain of warriors and armor tanks, that feels madly upside down. It just doesn't make any thematic sense.

Losing a damage steroid instantly to a shotgun blast would be one thing, but losing a massive chunk of your maximum life, before you even take the damage itself, just sounds psychotic.

i made a similar post yesterday literally only good for pure evasion dex skills and still 40+sec to stack it. strength stacking would help you take big hits but the stack time sounds so bad. it should stack of hit or crit and maybe have a passive duration stack on the side thats timebased.

Sorry if I missed your post, my guy. The forums move fast and I didn't see it, but yes: stacking too slow is one issue, but the main issue (as I see it) is the way in which the motes are disposed of. 'When hit' is bad. How you accumulate them is much less important than how you lose them. If you get one every two seconds, but the game allows you to be hit dozens of times per second, there's a clear mismatch there.

It's basically a resource you can't manage: it's RNG. And in terms of something as important as the max HP that determines if you live or die, that's a pretty precious resource.

Not worth investing skill. If it is to remove passive points of double Inherent bonuses then it's completely the same.