Why bother with pure ES?

status elements are calculated form your effective hp so no it is not 1.

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Dravkwn wrote:

Personally, I'd like to see ES on gear upped significantly somewhere between 50% to 100% and lower the recharge speed. I see ES as something that is about short spurts of battle then recharging. While health is about healing, armor absorbing and evasion as avoidance.

That would break ES/EV builds that can gain any real amount of dodge.

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maryn wrote:

i dislike the fact that when u go CI everything freezes u no matter how much dmg it does because u have 1 hp

Correct me if I am wrong, but those calculations should be based on what your HP would've been without CI. If you are running CI, though, you aren't going to be running HP+ items or nodes, so that value will be very low.

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Nuro wrote:

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maryn wrote:

i dislike the fact that when u go CI everything freezes u no matter how much dmg it does because u have 1 hp

Correct me if I am wrong, but those calculations should be based on what your HP would've been without CI. If you are running CI, though, you aren't going to be running HP+ items or nodes, so that value will be very low.

Take HP nodes. Profit.

If you get +50% HP it *should* drop stuns to a reasonable level.

I mean, yes HP nodes become less powerful (because it's no longer your primary defense), but you can think of them as stun resistance. Which IIRC is a pretty big deal.

So to have an effective CI build without the Anti-Stun ammy and the Anti-Freeze ring, you need to take otherwise useless HP nodes, wasting passives that could be used for armor/resists/damage, to prevent stun/freeze? Something the an HP build absolutely does not have to do?



Just checking

or over 8k-12k ES

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Okanitu wrote:

So to have an effective CI build without the Anti-Stun ammy and the Anti-Freeze ring, you need to take otherwise useless HP nodes, wasting passives that could be used for armor/resists/damage, to prevent stun/freeze? Something the an HP build absolutely does not have to do?



Just checking

HP nodes take HP to prevent stun/freeze too

Incidentally that HP happens to make them live longer in a second way. I'm saying that HP nodes aren't entirely useless, since if you keep getting stuns you have an option to not be stunned as often.

There are a lot of threads on this issue, but I think I will post this info here.

I've now played a 'pure ES' Shadow up to level 63, mostly from farming EXP in groups. My current build is:



In this build I've taken all of the Shadow's Evasion + ES nodes, Unnatural Calm, and all the ES nodes around Arcane Focus. I've also specialized in Dual Wielding with the Shadow melee nodes and Gemini, and on elemental and mainly lightning damage with the Shadow's elemental and lightning passives. I also took all three of the Walker passives near the witch area because I was already taking Lightning Walker, and needed more resistances, and access to the other two walkers were only 4 skill points for +18% damage and +15% resistance to fire + cold. This will also be very interesting if I ever manage to find an Elemental Hit gem.

Also since I'm playing a shadow with Evasion + ES passives, I naturally thought I should focus on Evasion + ES gear:



All those items have Evasion + Energy shield boosters, but only two of them have the full desired set of attributes - +INT, +Maximum ES, +% Evasion + ES, so I still need to look for better ones before I can take CI.

At the moment I have around just 700-800 health depending on gear (and 3 health passives for the time being), and 1400+ ES. Even with this much, I found Act 3 Cruel, and all of Merciless impossible to solo with my melee elemental specced + ES build, and I also have two very good weapons as well:



In merciless, in order to stay alive and stop losing more XP than I can gain, I have been reduced to grouping, and standing far at the back and casting Spork Totems and spamming Arc with a mana leech gem attached to it for near infinite casting. My melee DPS is over 2500 with Dual Strike, and over 1000 DPS with cleave and flicker strike, and I also use Whirling Blades as an escape move as soon as my ES runs out. But still, melee is completely impossible as I die too fast, my role in groups as I already said is simply stand at the back and spam totems + arc, and if any enemies get too close to me or any other casters in the group thats the only time that I can use my melee to kill them to prevent any of the squishies getting killed. And My spork totem is only 98 DPS, and my Arc 300, but both those are much safer and reliable in groups than attempting to melee.

And I can just forget all about soloing, my totem dies too fast as do I if I try to melee, and my lightning spell DPS isnt high enough to handle mobs alone.

ES is much better suited for hit and run tactics, something you're forced to do as ranged spellcaster. It also gives you no movement speed penalty like armor does and it isn't rolling dices like Evasion.

If you make a pure Es build with the skill point that make LOH apply to Es then you can have insane survival and if you have pure es armour you can have way more Es than life if you had all the max life rolls on your gear so there is some benefit but I do think that life is better still because you have health pots which in a life or death situation can save you a lot easier than anything else, also the no blood magic with Es is A HUGE drawback