Why life scaling is messed up and is part of the problem with ES scaling too.

Currently ES builds are leaps and bounds better than armour and evasion builds, but this isn't only due to ES numbers being too high. One of the things that makes ES different from armour/evasion is that it doesn't care about your maximum life. ES is simply added on top of life, meanwhile armour/evasion multiply the effectiveness of your hit pool.

The issue that arises here is gearing. When players choose between life or defense mods on their armor pieces they will always choose ES first, but for armour/evasion you always need a flat life mod, since if you have no hit pool to multiply then any armour/evasion you have will be useless. In this way having player life scaling being tied to the gloves, boots, helm, and chest slots on gear is problematic since it always leaves ES builds having effectively 4 more gear modifiers than armour/evasion builds.

My proposal to fix this imbalance is simple. Just remove the pure flat life prefixes from the crafted item gloves, boots, helm and body armor mod pool while simultaneously increasing players' base life to compensate. This would fix the modifier imbalance and only leave the question of how should player base life, and later ES, be adjusted.

From the 4 armor pieces players can get a total of +686 life from flat life mods and +196 from hybrid life/defence mods with perfect maximum rolls. Currently people don't generally target the later due to opportunity cost. I'd recommend changing player life scaling to grant an extra ~500 life at maximum level (+5 per level) combined with the removal of the pure flat life mods on the 4 armor pieces. Since most people before were getting up to ~700 life from the 4 pieces they could reach the same total with the 500 extra life from levels and the 196 from hybrid mods. This of course would change itemization since if you at most miss out on 196 life then you have a lot less at stake if you want to build prefixes besides life.

The above change would give non ES builds a lot more leeway when it comes to gearing. Leveling and gear progression having more consistency and freedom is also a bonus. This would also be a buff to unique items since they don't have a mod pool to lose potential life from and more unique item buffs are always welcome.

ES builds would also benefit from an extra ~500 flat life, which can actually be a good thing as we enter another topic. ES blatantly needs to be nerfed and GGG has even mentioned they will nerf it in 0.5(?).

ES all around the board is too high, but chaos inoculation is one of the more overpowered things about ES. Chaos inoculation has a lot of upsides with a measly downside of having only 1hp. Players have only ~1200 base life at level 100. Increasing base life to ~1700 would make the downside of chaos inoculation comparatively worse. This means that when ES is inevitably nerfed, if player life is simultaneously increased by ~500 then chaos inoculation will feel the nerf more, as it should.

Thanks for reading.

interesting Take!

idd interesting take.

i say, let the devs cook a lil' bit longer.

pure es should have the highest max hit pool because it has no dr vs phys, the values are a "little of" right now however :D

Solid analysis, but missing one factor: Wanting life rolls on gear isn't just a binary state where ES builds don't want it while Armour and Evasion builds do. Leaving it on gear maintains the flexibility of getting that affix slot free for pure ES builds that go CI, while allowing for there to be hybrid builds that scale their defenses with "percent of life as energy shield" and other life-based scalars.

It's definitely an interesting idea to nuke the pure life rolls from the primary defensive gear slots (I'm assuming jewelry and belts would still get them) while leaving the hybrid life rolls as an option, but it kind of feels like then there would be little to no opportunity cost or decision-making involved in just taking flat defense, percent defense, hybrid life as the prefixes of every gear piece. To me, the only reason there's not really meaningful feeling choices right now is because life is bottlenecked while defenses are not. Doubling down on the lack of choice by purging that affix entirely seems like a step in the wrong direction.

Maybe a silly analogy, but games often run on a combination of CPU and GPU processing power. If you're hitting a CPU bottleneck, making the same CPU cheaper so you can afford to buy a better GPU won't make the game run better. Likewise, making the same life total take less investment so you can stack more already abundant defenses won't make survivability feel better.

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There are several factors that are simultaneously true that I often point out when arguing against life on the skill tree (not the case you were making here but reliant on the same premise):
-Base unmodified life totals are absolutely too low.
-Armour and Evasion can scale their theoretical eHP on small hits to the moon but have no effective way of scaling their "Max Hit" (the largest hit they can take without dying).
-Energy Shield is entirely too effective at simultaneously scaling eHP and "Max Hit".

Something I've often pitched as a middle-ground solution to life on tree is to both increase base life and adjust life scaling from attributes. Give Strength double the current scaling, give Dexterity the current life scaling that Strength has, and leave intelligence as a mana stat. This is quite elegant since Armour builds need strength anyway, Evasion builds need Dexterity anyway, and equipment requirements will make sort of a natural gradient with the endgame life and mana totals of builds in a completely logical way.

Notably, evasion has deflection which does increase the max hit by 40% on deflected hits, so even though in this scenario they have less life than an armour build, they probably can scale their survivability better. Armour formula would need to also be adjusted at the middle to high hit range to balance it better.

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Leaving it on gear maintains the flexibility of getting that affix slot free for pure ES builds that go CI

I'm pretty sure most people go flat+percent ES as their third ES prefix rather than life. Non chaos inoculation builds also would still have to option to pick up life on jewelry. Saving chaos resistance suffixes is also already a big factor by itself for chaos inoculation.

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while leaving the hybrid life rolls as an option, but it kind of feels like then there would be little to no opportunity cost or decision-making involved in just taking flat defense, percent defense, hybrid life as the prefixes of every gear piece. To me, the only reason there's not really meaningful feeling choices right now is because life is bottlenecked while defenses are not. Doubling down on the lack of choice by purging that affix entirely seems like a step in the wrong direction.

The idea is that the life/hybrid prefixes are a lot less valuable so choosing other prefixes instead is a lot more viable than giving up a 150+ life prefix. I do think armor pieces have very boring prefix pools already though and it wouldn't make them more interesting. It would definitely be nice if GGG wants to add more utility prefixes in the future. It would be cool if there were enough prefixes in the default pool to optionally have 3 non defense mods.

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Something I've often pitched as a middle-ground solution to life on tree is to both increase base life and adjust life scaling from attributes. Give Strength double the current scaling, give Dexterity the current life scaling that Strength has, and leave intelligence as a mana stat.

I do like this idea as well.

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Armour formula would need to also be adjusted at the middle to high hit range to balance it better.

I think armour scaling on total hit damage was a mistake from the start. It should calculate on an enemy's base damage stat, which all enemies have and is innately higher for stronger enemies. That way it's still more effective against fodder enemies, but not so immortalizing against small hits and becomes relevant against boss attacks.

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I'm pretty sure most people go flat+percent ES as their third ES prefix rather than life. Non chaos inoculation builds also would still have to option to pick up life on jewelry. Saving chaos resistance suffixes is also already a big factor by itself for chaos inoculation.

That's what I meant. CI has no reason to grab the life affixes so they get a "free" affix in exchange for the downside of not having life. Early ES builds also wouldn't really need life too much.

Traditionally in PoE 1 for ES builds however, CI is not the ultimate goal of an ES build but just a good stepping stone. The stronger ES builds are very high budget and scale their ES and sometimes other stats off of life while reserving life for other things to be considered "Low Life" all the time. I'm not sure if PoE 2 currently has the tools for those types of builds due to Spirit (edit: Infernalist is a thing), but if not it's just a matter of time.

At any rate, you CAN roll hybrid life and pure life on the same piece of gear, they just merge the life total when you aren't holding the advanced tooltip button. You probably should just take both life affixes too since other ways to scale max hit are almost nonexistent while defense scaling is abundant on the tree; if there were an additional scaling method for life such as the attribute thing I mentioned earlier, maybe there'd be more of a choice in affixes (and generally better feeling defenses) depending on what your specific build needed rather than taking what you can't reasonably get anywhere else.

Wish it were that simple. Everyone knows ES wins because raw pool is better than eHP.

But add to this that ES can go sub 2s on recharge time for massive recovery and Damage to Mana is an option for multiple split sources of raw HP which all restore very fast.

Practical design says that ES is not needed in PoE2. Mana Shield alone would be more evenly matched with other defense options. ES is a more interesting mechanic but it was only made because in PoE1 we reserved mana. The devs aren't taking this into consideration. Just copying.

Not saying remove ES. Just giving a classic comparison on just how much stronger it is. Most caster's I've made almost never use healing or mana pots while any non-caster is constantly using them.