Nerf Energy Shield & Buff Armour

*meanwhile on the top right side of the tree*


"Oh hey guys did you hear a bunch of people on the feedback threads said they should buff armour, now I dont know about you guys but what if... what if there was hybrid type body armours in this game and we take advantage of this silly suggestion?


"Surely this buff to armour is also meant for us right? No way can they overlook something so simple"

The first and most obvious change they should do is remove grim feast.

Gives you free es regen and up to 100% extra energy shield for 30 spirit.

ES is in an exceptional place right now, to the point that it is worth taking even on my ranger using Ghostwrithe. Life needs to be almost doubled for it to even be worth looking at currently.

I am currently leveling a Blood Mage and have figured out a way to make this work somehow... The biggest issue is that even if you STACK life you will end up with maybe.. and I say MAYBE 3k HP at best, 4K if you get a baddass ES chest and take that ascendency node. This is not enough, this leaves me constantly open to being frozen, stunned ect. I have almost no way to negate a lot of these ailments. Freeze in particular is the BIGGEST concern.

Even my titan with 650 Strength and the 15% max hp ascendancy and 150+ life pieces and 240 chest has only 4.8k HP at level 83, 650+ strength is worth 1300 HP alone.

If you are ES for 4 passive points I can.. Add 100% of my 5-7k ES as freeze threshold, and increase it by 30% with the small nodes. For extra passives I can convert a % of my massive ES into stun threshold.

Even increasing freeze threshold on life is difficult because well, it is already low so you get little benefit from the increases that you put in.

IF (?) it's a given that ES pools will always be much larger than most player's life pools then those players that rely on Armor for damage mitigation likely need all of the following:

1. Currently Armor is really only effective against small physical hits. Armor's protection needs to be expanded so it offers protection against ALL types of hits.

2. Currently Armor suffers when it takes a large hit -- I.E. it doesn't protect as well. If this mechanic is kept in some fashion then armor still needs to have a reasonable floor on the damage mitigation it gives.

3. Armor pieces [likely] also need to grant increased stun, ailment, and ragdoll threshold buffs / protection.

"

Direfell#7544 wrote:

"

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.

I question that, since most damage comes from elemental and chaos and on-death effects, And even trash mobs can have big hits and agains those, armor is less effective.

"

Mashgesture#2912 wrote:

*meanwhile on the top right side of the tree*


"Oh hey guys did you hear a bunch of people on the feedback threads said they should buff armour, now I dont know about you guys but what if... what if there was hybrid type body armours in this game and we take advantage of this silly suggestion?


"Surely this buff to armour is also meant for us right? No way can they overlook something so simple"

The hybrid nodes don't really do much, mainly because there isn't much point in doing armour anything, hybrid or not, because it only helps with the minor hits.

Armor was never that great in POE1 but you had a few good armor nodes / ascendancies plus you a ton of other defensive stats (like endurance charges, life, fast life regen, basically stuff that barely exists in POE2).

In POE2 armor is junk, ES is OP

"

IF (?) it's a given that ES pools will always be much larger than most player's life pools then those players that rely on Armor for damage mitigation likely need all of the following:

1. Currently Armor is really only effective against small physical hits. Armor's protection needs to be expanded so it offers protection against ALL types of hits.

2. Currently Armor suffers when it takes a large hit -- I.E. it doesn't protect as well. If this mechanic is kept in some fashion then armor still needs to have a reasonable floor on the damage mitigation it gives.

3. Armor pieces [likely] also need to grant increased stun, ailment, and ragdoll threshold buffs / protection.

To be honest they should just do away with armor in general and put Physical Damage Reduction on the heavy armor pieces and have additional % increases rolled as a suffix the same as you would inc armor. This would put it in line with resistances and make it MUCH easier to balance.

This still does not solve the problem of life being too low. Currently ES and life can get the same elemental resistances and to be honest they are what kill you a good portion of the time on any life/armor build due to low the HP pool.

The balance topics brought up in PoE 2 reminds me of feedback for PoE 1 almost a decade ago we had the exact same problems:

- Energy shield ( blue life pool) ridiculously overpowered
- CI chaos immunity too imbalanced with heavy chaos damage
- Armour sucks in fact the armour formular was changed in PoE 1 to not demand too much armour
- Melee sucks
- Spells overpowered
- Archmage overpowered
- Life as a resource pool bad with very limited scaling optioms
- Attack speed penalties on melee gems
- Item Rarity and Item Quantity were broken and quant had to be removed from the game but before quant was heavily nerfed
- There were also rollback crafting in PoE 1 as well as currency duping on live servers there was a famous story about a certain dagger

At this point i dont believe those points are slip ups in balance. The mentioned topics seem to follow a repeating pattern except for the duping thing. I remember in a poe2 interview where Rory the guy in charge of balance mentioned that ES/CI wont be the one stop shop solution for everything well.. i guess this promise did not made it into PoE 2 yet.

When the tankiest warrior builds have to go ES, and use cloaks as their main armor like Ghostwrithe or Cloak of Flames, you know GGG messed up hugely.

ES isn't "broken". Some mechanics a slightly over tuned, but I wouldn't blatantly "nerf it".

What GGG desperately needs to do is to make armor matter.
The armor system in POE1 is BAD, and it got WORSE in POE2. And this came from a company that proudly presented fans with the fact that "they had fixed melee".

By that I presume "made it completely unplayable". I'm not talking about screen clearing monks here. I'm talking actual warrior.

Evasion gives flat evasion chance. No idea why armor can't do the same.
I get that some bosses will be easier for warrior because their main attacks are physical.
Well, that is only fair when you play the slowest class in the game, isn't it? And if GGG NEEDS a counter, give those bosses ability to armor break a bit.

And then you make + max resists hard to get on the warrior side of the passive tree.
Warriors are supposed to be the tankiest class against physical hits, and wear the most protective armor. They also have the slowest skills in the game, which should only be preceded with extreme tankiness for any sort of fairness or balance.

As it stands armor is dead.

"

Nyon#6673 wrote:

The first and most obvious change they should do is remove grim feast.

Gives you free es regen and up to 100% extra energy shield for 30 spirit.

That sounds like a good first step.