Change to zealot's oath that may promote hybrid builds

"

Xendran написал:

It's fairly similar, however mine pushed farther in both the positive and negative directions.


Zealot's Oath
65% of life regeneration also applies to Energy Shield
Energy Shield can only be recovered via Regeneration

That would mean a pretty high chunk of regen, but being unable to leech ES or use ES recovery. This would have good synergy with Blood Rage and be good at protecting against chaos damage from groups that have other damage sources coming at you as well.

Another idea i had would be this:

Zealot's Oath -> three nodes of 4% Life + 6% ES > Lifeblood

Lifeblood
When hit, 30% of damage is taken from Life before Energy Shield

Not so sure about that one though. Haven't really theorycrafted with the idea.

before i read your post, i was thinking of a 33% life regen converted to es regen, but a half an half sounds better. like 20% life regen is converted to es regen, 25% hp regen is added as es regen. cannot leech es also doubled es recovery delay and halved rate of this recovery (so by default it takes 12 seconds for the delay based recovery to start and it takes 6 to heal to full this way).

edit: however that penalty doesn't sound like much and is clunky in wording. a small group behind ZO for increased % hp and es hybrid is somewhat desired at any rate however. definitely doesn't need anything else as far as this part goes.

Remember that regen is significantly impacted by the fact that hybrid builds have way less max HP than HP builds do, and all regen in the tree is based on your max HP.

If you really want to promote hybrid builds, you could do something like this:

Life regeneration also applies to Energy Shield.
Regeneration amount is based on the lower of Maximum Life & Maximum Energy Shield.

@Pneuma

"

The strength of life+es is that you get the biggest possible buffer. More than CI, more than pure life.

Out of combat, you'll regen up all your life and then regen up all your ES and get back to the "biggest buffer possible" state.

I have a question for you mate, could you provide data to back up this statement because it troubles me sort of speak.

For several reasons.

- assuming a partial investment in ES/hp you are actually reducing there effectiveness.
(both in raw numbers and in effectiveness of leach/regen)

- CI has a more multiplier added to there base pool, so higher investment results in higher end-numbers

- lack of defense mechanics like armor/evasion/chaos resistance cuts your "ehp" value's by a HUGE margin. (not even considering elemental damages, which are the biggest sources of damage in the end-game)

I am curious to how you come to the conclusion these builds posses the largest buffer in the game.

I have a hybrid build and with "regular" gear investment it reaches 2k life and 4.3k ES if you want i can link the build + items, it is by no means special and it is not decked out in BiS gear, but i would assume we don't base our findings on that state?

Several issue's pop-up when making a build like this.

1) passive tree investment

Very high ehp investment requirement resulting in semi-par damage investment

2) items

The need for life roll/es roll/chaos roll items is very harsh on item choices and just overall on finding these kind of items.

3) resource investment

lack of mana pool is troublesome at best, so is the 50% effectiveness of any regeneration mechanic you opt to go for (like i mentioned earlier, in the current state you reduce there effectiveness by 50% in a hybrid build)

Would love to hear your reasoning behind the quote,

Peace,

-Boem-

well i didn't want to go as far as to (pseudo?) double regen via "hp regen is also es regen". making it the lesser of the two in addition might get weird for those who don't grab those nice armor/es nodes right nearby for some bizarre reason.

as for a penalty, which do you want to hit: people who blood magic or people with high int?

if anything, there should be a completely separate keystone that is what we're trying to do for hp -> es but instead mana regen -> es. will obviously require dividing mana regen by 100 while still as a percent. ie 300% total mana regen boost is now 3% es regen. however that itself also runs into the problem of "what penalty should be invented?"

"

Boem написал:

Would love to hear your reasoning behind the quote,

First off, "theoretically" ES+Life should be the biggest buffer. That's its defining advantage, and how it should be designed toward. Adding nodes with "%life,%es" would make that stand out much more. It's not entirely the case right now, but only because GGG has never made a strong attempt to make it an interesting defense in its own right.

... But I do want to talk about the way it currently exists (not purely "how it should be"), and my argumentation doesn't focus on the super high end of the game. I personally always try to think of where the average player is, which is somewhere in merciless A3X/Low Maps with less than perfect gear.

Before I begin, with 2k Life and 4.3k ES, your buffer is 6.3k. That is an exceedingly high amount of life for most players without Kaom's, without a very high character level (and 300%+ life investment on the tree), and without maximizing +strength on all of their gear. That is also a fairly high amount of ES for players without T1/2 +es/%es rares.

"CI" (a.k.a. CI + 24% increased + 12% more from Infused Shield) has slightly more total ES than a mixed ES+life build. The 24% increased can be modeled by 4 points in ES elsewhere, so you lose one point to efficiency loss by not taking those 8% es nodes. For 3 points (CI, IS, and one to efficiency), you sacrifice all life and gain 12%more ES.

At level 70 with 150 strength (which is pretty reasonable for most characters), you have 677 base life. For 3 points, you can get 24% increased life pretty easily (witch has 36% for 4 points in her starting right tree), which is 839 life that you're giving up.

Obviously, this number can be much higher due to higher character level and more +life and +strength on random gear pieces. At high levels, you do hit a point where CI becomes the obviously better choice because you can get 3 ES-increasing affixes versus 2 ES-increasing +life, and the former has 40% more base ES, which on a perfect chest is ~280 ES v. 100 life.

For 12% more ES to be worth more than 839 life, you would have to have 6991 eshield before taking Infused Shield/CI. That number should seem quite high to you. If you have less than 6991 eshield before IS/CI, then to get the biggest buffer, you should instead take nearby life nodes.

---

Now, you're right that it ignores mitigation (namely chaos), which is why you'd want CI. A lot of this is the weird decision to make chaos follow the cruel/merciless resistance pattern when it was fixed at 0% before (another place where GGG centralized mechanics instead of letting them be unique and interesting).

Regarding your concerns:
1) passive tree investment
- Not an issue. Every long-lived build is majorly invested into defensive nodes. If anything, most people find themselves running across the tree to grab the last few %life/%es nodes they can find. Being able to get the nearby %life and the nearby %es is its own small efficiency gain here.

2) items
- Those items currently exist, and there isn't really a market for them because there's not enough benefit to running life+es. I don't consider needing "life/%es/chaos res" any harder than finding strong ES items that need to have "+es/%es/+int".

3) resource investment
- CI has the exact same mana problems. 50% regeneration is a bit incorrect. Like I described, you heal up your life at regen% based on your life, then heal up your es at regen% based on your ES. You don't regen both at the same time, nor do you regen the full buffer size (as in, you don't regen% based on life+ES), but the latter may be an interesting way to increase ZO's power later if needed.

Thx for the write up man, and i was talking in that post about the current version of ZO, referring to

"

3) resource investment
- CI has the exact same mana problems. 50% regeneration is a bit incorrect. Like I described, you heal up your life at regen% based on your life, then heal up your es at regen% based on your ES. You don't regen both at the same time, nor do you regen the full buffer size (as in, you don't regen% based on life+ES), but the latter may be an interesting way to increase ZO's power later if needed.

It seems you are responding based on your earlier changed suggestion for Zo?

I was actually saying at the current state, if you split all your value's for that higher buffer pool, you are actively decreasing your EHP value because all your regen value's are halved. assuming same pool of life + es.

But that was a cool read,

peace,

-Boem-

(i still personally believe, one get's far greater benefits atm when focusing on a single buffer which is why we see so little hybrid active builds, i can only think of summoners utilizing this style?)

Edit : i still favor a 100% efficiency of regen nodes over the 50% effectiveness you guys are proposing. Other wise it will remain a loss of passive point investment imo.

No min-maxer in his right mind will opt for that keystone imo. (similar to how nobody is utilizing it atm)

dont use ZO just get a shav ring and fine. so u reg both (+no mana reg 0> use bm gem)
hybrid reg doesnt make sense, since either u play es or hp based (even if its no lowlife build, one of them will be always way lower than the other) and there is ci.
on the other hand just use hp falsks if u want to recover ur hp while using ZO....

OP's suggestion (or rather pneuma's version of it) sounds good to me. I think similar ideas came up last time this was discussed.

"

Xendran написал:

Zealot's Oath
65% of life regeneration also applies to Energy Shield
Energy Shield can only be recovered via Regeneration

That would mean a pretty high chunk of regen, but being unable to leech ES or use ES recovery. This would have good synergy with Blood Rage and be good at protecting against chaos damage from groups that have other damage sources coming at you as well.

I think this might be too strong on life-based builds that only have a token amount of ES (mainly for the stun protection). The idea of having ZO mutually exclusive with Ghost Reaver is interesting though.

"

Another idea i had would be this:

Zealot's Oath -> three nodes of 4% Life + 6% ES > Lifeblood

Lifeblood
When hit, 30% of damage is taken from Life before Energy Shield

Not so sure about that one though. Haven't really theorycrafted with the idea.

This keystone makes a lot of sense for anyone with a dual recovery strategy, such as leech (or life gain on hit) for one resource and regen for the other. You wouldn't even need to hide it behind Zealot's Oath, because truly ES-focused builds wouldn't want either keystone. I think the north of the passive tree in general could do with some life/ES hybrid nodes sprinkled around.

There is a reason why i don't like the lifeblood option do.

Atm, the game offers limited "full life" benefits. However a hybrid build, if not low-life, will probably aim to maximize these full life benefits and i can only hope GGG will implement some more and interesting ones in the future. (one of the reasons why everybody goes low-life btw, full life benefits are scarce and abysmal)

Peace,

-Boem-

(would love some full-life caster mods for example)