CI needs an overhaul (But it does not need energy shield percent)

I have no problem with the open beta Chaos Innoculation nerf, which completely removed its energy shield bonus. That was well justified, however, there is still a glaring issue with people who want to make viable builds using CI.

I have no issues with how ES regenerates. The 'fairness' that I think stands out the most is, while you can't just hit multiple flasks and regenerate lots of energy shield the way you can with life, you can simply kite monsters. If you kite well, and are good at evading projectiles, you can regenerate ES quickly in combat and then proceed to take some damage while doing some burst and better leeching. So, with their respective regeneration methods I think Life and ES are fairly equal. Zealot's Oath is nearly useless for CI users, which is fine because not all builds that use ES are strictly ES. You can also still spec Ghost Reaver and gem for life leech if you're a CI spellcaster.

The issue I have is, while it's just as possible and practically equally as difficult to spec and gear to 12k life or 12k energy shield, CI builds using only energy shield still have an immense disadvantage due to the fact that being stunned, shocked, ignited, or chilled is based off the amount of damage done to you in relation to your LIFE.

CI users having 1 life are pretty much guaranteed to be stunned, chilled, ignited, or shocked all the time, regardless of their resistances, where someone with 12k life and no ES will hardly ever get status effects unless they take a massive crit.

I firmly believe that anybody who decides to take CI should have the following status effects calculated using their ENERGY SHIELD instead of Life:

-Stun
-Chill
-Shock
-Ignite

I also feel that to balance this, it should retain the effect of setting your life to 1, but remove the immunity to chaos damage, make it something along the lines of 100% chaos resistance, and instead revert chaos damage to removing energy shield instead of going through energy shield and removing life.

Overall, the tooltip on Chaos Innoculation would say something along the lines of the following (and behave this way as well):

"Maximum Life becomes 1, +100% Chaos Resistance, Chaos Damage affects Energy Shield instead of Life, all status effects against you are calculated with Energy Shield instead of Life"

I literally cannot resist stuns, chills, shocks, or ignites on my CI witch at all, and I don't think its fair to have to gear for immunity to some or all of those when life users can just resist them naturally. Gearing for them is an immense gimp to your build in most cases because most of the unique items that grant the immunity are vastly useless besides that. If I get hit even once by a multiple projectile Voidbearer, it's over. Forget trying to escape; no amount of flasking or movement speed or stun recovery will help.

I feel these changes would make CI much more viable and way more up to par with life users, because I hardly see anybody taking CI any more. I think a lot of people would see the value in these changes, even though many people would perceive the chaos damage aspects of my suggestions as another nerf.

Agreed about status effects needing to be based off ES instead of health. However, being immune to chaos damage is fine, and moving it to just affecting ES with 50% resist is not a good idea. Chaos immunity is already just barely making the keystone worth taking with all the drawbacks, but even then a case can be made that gearing for CI is just gimping yourself. Fix the status effects and CI will be in a really good place.

Perhaps CI could add your base health to ES when it converts your health to 1, for a few hundred extra ES but that might be too much. Either way, do not remove chaos immunity.

Though I dont use CI, I do see this as a problem and I agree. If you get stunned all the time, its not exactly fair that you get trashed by status effects because you have no life(lol). I think the chaos immunity is a good place though. Just tack on that status effects are gauged based on your ES not life.

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MoonSoshi9 wrote:

Perhaps CI could add your base health to ES when it converts your health to 1, for a few hundred extra ES but that might be too much. Either way, do not remove chaos immunity.

Also, you may not know, but that is what the CI nerf was. CI used to give 50% of your health back as ES and the devs felt it was too much, so they removed that effect. Alot of players kinda agree.

I'm not familiar with post-Normal mechanics yet, but isn't the resistance penalties on higher difficulties also applied to chaos? I mean, if it's -60% resistance on merciless, the resistance you propose CI to give won't even boost you to positive chaos resistance. Doesn't really sound like a good deal unless I'm missing something(and I probably am).

i like that idea, except for the chaos resist stuff. let it be at 100% chaos resists.

First of, a correction: For stun/.. calculations, the game uses your HP without CI, which is not 1, but should be a few 100 (you can eben increase it to get not that often stunned, .. but it is rather useless).

Giving us some form to counter those status effects is really needed, because actually playing a CI char is hard.

I would not use all of the ES to do the calculations, but f.e. use half the ES for those calculations. With that, we would still suffer more often from status effect, but not as bad as actually. On the other side, they then even could even remove the build in stun protection from ES (atleast for CI chars) to balance it.

everything you explained is exactly what i go through playing my CI caster. I get stunned constantly and against stuff that attacks fast i pretty much have no chance of survival. I would love to see effects based off of es as well as hp.

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mathw wrote:

I'm not familiar with post-Normal mechanics yet, but isn't the resistance penalties on higher difficulties also applied to chaos? I mean, if it's -60% resistance on merciless, the resistance you propose CI to give won't even boost you to positive chaos resistance. Doesn't really sound like a good deal unless I'm missing something(and I probably am).

I was actually thinking of this after I left to go watch the Walking Dead at a friend's house.

I now actually propose +100% chaos resistance, scaled in difficulties. This would make you immune to chaos damage in normal difficulty, 80% resistance in Cruel, and 40% resistant in Merciless.

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MoonSoshi9 wrote:

Agreed about status effects needing to be based off ES instead of health. However, being immune to chaos damage is fine, and moving it to just affecting ES with 50% resist is not a good idea. Chaos immunity is already just barely making the keystone worth taking with all the drawbacks, but even then a case can be made that gearing for CI is just gimping yourself. Fix the status effects and CI will be in a really good place.

Perhaps CI could add your base health to ES when it converts your health to 1, for a few hundred extra ES but that might be too much. Either way, do not remove chaos immunity.

With my suggestions, I think retaining complete immunity to chaos damage would make it overpowered. This is based on the fact that every CI character ignores life nodes and gear properties that add life, and hybrid life/ES builds still need to gear for chaos resistance.

The more I think about this the more I think that a better solution would be to just calculate the chance to take status effects using the combined value of your character's life and energy shield for all character builds -- not just CI.

CI users already have a 50% chance to avoid stuns due to base ES mechanics.

As for status effects, thats the downside of being able to reach 20k+ ehp totals and being immune to the most difficult to mitigate damage source that also happens to otherwise bypass ES.

My experience so far is that CI is (finally) well balanced and doesnt currently need further change.