Nerf Energy Shield & Buff Armour

I would like to recommend nerfing ES across the board, such as ES nodes on the passive tree and base ES on items while at the same time buffing armour gain from equipment and armour nodes. They could even add life to armour nodes.

Energy shield seems to be a far superior defensive choice as compared to armour in almost every situation. Nerfing energy shield while buffing armour would help level the playing field.

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CharlesJT#7681 wrote:

I would like to recommend nerfing ES across the board, such as ES nodes on the passive tree and base ES on items while at the same time buffing armour gain from equipment and armour nodes.

Energy shield seems to be a far superior defensive choice as compared to armour in almost every situation. Nerfing energy shield while buffing armour would help level the playing field.

Asking to nerf a defence you clearly aren’t using is redundant, there is nothing wrong with ES except an unethical use of own minions to buff grim feast (this needs to be taken out so only your kills can spawn the buff).

Armour IS the problem in that it does nothing for any player, and only Evasion and ES do. Potentially this could be solved with X element taken as Phys damage mods.
A strength based character (warrior) is hard to play due to this armour issue and it does need attention but blaming something else is not the answer.

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Timbo Zero#8289 wrote:

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CharlesJT#7681 wrote:

I would like to recommend nerfing ES across the board, such as ES nodes on the passive tree and base ES on items while at the same time buffing armour gain from equipment and armour nodes.

Energy shield seems to be a far superior defensive choice as compared to armour in almost every situation. Nerfing energy shield while buffing armour would help level the playing field.

Asking to nerf a defence you clearly aren’t using is redundant, there is nothing wrong with ES except an unethical use of own minions to buff grim feast (this needs to be taken out so only your kills can spawn the buff).

Armour IS the problem in that it does nothing for any player, and only Evasion and ES do. Potentially this could be solved with X element taken as Phys damage mods.
A strength based character (warrior) is hard to play due to this armour issue and it does need attention but blaming something else is not the answer.

How is physical damage reduction the problem?

This is like saying make my kidney stop working efficiently because my liver is not as efficient ?

How about just buff Armor to be on par with Energy Shield ?

Honestly Energy Shield seems fine. Its the fact that there's some clearly superior support options for it (Grim Feast, Blood Mage and Ghostshroud Life to Energy Shield conversion, etc) that allow for insane numbers.

Grim Feast doesn't help for bosses though, as my poor monk is finding out. But it does allow him to reliably survive Breech, so its a tricky thing to nerf. My best guess is a slow trickle down to normal energy shield so if you're not in the middle of clearing stuff you can't go into the next fight a minute later with double energy shield.

I like how no one’s is … really thinking it through when they say “just buff armour”

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Timbo Zero#8289 wrote:

Asking to nerf a defence you clearly aren’t using is redundant, there is nothing wrong with ES except an unethical use of own minions to buff grim feast (this needs to be taken out so only your kills can spawn the buff).

Armour IS the problem in that it does nothing for any player, and only Evasion and ES do. Potentially this could be solved with X element taken as Phys damage mods.
A strength based character (warrior) is hard to play due to this armour issue and it does need attention but blaming something else is not the answer.

Eh, my armour makes me feel pretty immortal against swarms of normal enemies during breach/ritual. But against bosses/rares... ya you right.

Energy Shield is broken op too the point warrior dont use armor and dont use skill point in armor but in Energy Shield and use Ghostwrithe

or cloak of flame , idk what more to say , you play a game where 95% of the player base use Energy Shield and cloak armor , i think is very clear something is not balance , the one knowing the formula know how is bad

Nobody's using armor because armor doesn't do anything against a lot of attacks.

So before we can really say 'energy shield OP' we first need to get armor in a place where it actually does its job so we can compare them properly.

Biggest problem it feels like to me for armor is two-fold: 1) Lack of decent tools for sustain, synergy, or options beyond stacking it; 2) You only have life, yet there's next to nothing baked into passive tree, meaning you have to add it entirely through gear, giving you more limitations than ES focused builds (especially when they have CI and can ignore both a prefix AND a suffix and still sustain better).

They could start by adding some flat and modest % life to red and adjacent passive tree, and buff armor's phys reduction by about 10-15%, or give us some more interesting persistent buffs. Red side in general--from passives to support gems--feels like it is lacking in enough tools. I'm making it through, but barely. I've seen easily fewer than 30 chaos resist mods on well over a thousand drops by now. I constantly struggle to find another upgrade and am struggling hard not to die to a dozen mobs in tier 11. Exp gain is starting to hit a wall because of how dangerous each higher map gets, it's kind of insane, especially considering how all the Expert gear and mod tiers I need only drop in maps where a single white mob (especially with bonus damage mods on mob, map, or both) straight up wipe 1500 health without even trying or one shot on an attack I otherwise don't notice much.

I genuinely want to know what GGG thinks is appropriate armor and life at each map tier, because it sure feels like they're expecting me to be rocking ilvl cap armor and life on every piece of gear to reasonably survive bullshit moments or allow for a mistake.