Chaos damage and why it hurts the game in it's current form.

Chaos damage has become a huge issue since the introduction of open beta. Massive changes were made to both the sources of chaos damage and the ability to negate it. It is my opinion that in it's current for it alone is responsible for reducing defensive build diversity to two viable builds. Below I will list the reasons for this and some possible fixes for the current situation.

Chaos damage, how it is delivered.
Currently there are only a handful of monsters that deal chaos damage. You have chaos spitting snakes, poison arrow archers, Vaal constructs shoot chaos damage and the poison alchemists that shoot chaos bombs. These are all ranged, on top of those you have monsters that use viper strike such as spiders, and bears that have a chaos damage aura.

One major issue is that their is no way to avoid taking large amounts of chaos damage. Some attacks such as the viper strike monsters and the vaal constructs use direct attacks, these can be blocked, dodged or evaded. However some monsters use special AOE chaos damage such as the bears, alchemist bombs and poison arrow. This damage cannot be blocked, evaded or dodged. Combined with the monsters using these attacks being ranged means that it is impossible to use three defensive mechanics to avoid or reduce taking chaos damage.

Chaos resist and required stats on items.
About now a lot of people reading (Who have read this far) are probably thinking just stack chaos resist, this is not an issue... Well with no mechanic in game other than chaos resist that can reduce damage from these attacks it becomes an issue and makes chaos resist a required stat on almost every item.

Chaos resist is a rare stat to find on an item, it only comes in one form, there is no way to boost the amount via the passive tree excepting a very few nodes in small sections of the witch/shadow tree.

So now we have a source of damage that cannot be evaded, blocked or dodged. That we revive -60 resist in that last difficulty, meaning the majority of gear must have some chaos resist to reduce damage to a reasonable level. And to top it off there are is only one small section of the passive skill tree that has any hope of using passive nodes to mitigate this damage.

Something needs to be done.
With chaos damage as it stands there are only really two defensive builds that stand any hope of making it in end game without constant deaths when facing a chaos damage source.

First is to remove it entirely with Chaos Inoculation passive and invest a lot of your passive points in energy shield. This way at least removes the need to stack chaos damage on almost every item.

Second is to stack life nodes and some form of regen/life steal. With this method you will need large amounts of life in the final areas of the game to avoid damage spikes, some form of life recovery such as regen or life steal and to stack chaos resist.

That is it, with chaos damage as it stands you cannot build for a duel tank with medium amounts of life/energy shield. You cannot build evasion or make use of the phase acrobatics keystone and elemental resists unless you stack huge amounts of life also. You cannot build to block attacks/spells unless you also stack life.

There is no possible viable build unless you stack life. Forget energy shield entirely unless you plan to get CI. Don't even consider using either of the life leach/regen applies to energy shield unless you get chaos inoculation.

Chaos damage as it currently stands is hurting build diversity. At least 1/2 of all passive points granted in the course of leveling must be assigned to life/ or CI+Energy shield in order to just deal with this one unavoidable damage source.

Chaos damage needs to be reworked in order to breath new life into build diversity. Some ideas for this are to rework chaos damage as elemental poison damage, include chaos resist in "resist all elemental damage" nodes/stats. Make it possible to mitigate all sources of chaos damage with evasion/dodge/block, Introduce Chaos resist to more areas of the passive skill tree.