Vitality

GGG please... Any word on this terrible terrible aura? Make it a 20% aura, or buff it...

as an aura, vitality is in a really bad place, but it has potential to be so good at the same time due to interactions with health degens

note, for the math i'm taking the averages of nodes not notables based on frequency and value

vitality, at level 1, is roughly 1.5ish life regen nodes on the tree, compared to another 40% aura, purity of elements, level 1 gives 12% which is TWICE as much as the one all res node on the tree (which is being removed with 2.0.0), or compared to the 12%/18% SINGLE resistance nodes from marauder/scion

vitality at level 20, is about 3 life regen nodes on the tree, while purity of elements is 27% all res, over 4 times as much as the all res node, vitality does not only start weaker but it's also been outscaled

vitality is also build enabling for some builds however, most notably righteous fire, should you want to take nodes other than life regen and path all the way to duelist as an RF caster, also low life RF, personally i think this should be remain the case at least for life based RF

my suggestion is to make vitality, instead of being % regen, increase life recovery rate by a %, total amount healed is the same, duration (for leech and pots) is decreased and rate of heal is increased, why?

auras such as determination, hatred, and clarity become better the more you invest in them (more armor makes determination give more armor, more pdps gives hatred more edps, more flat mana means a higher level clarity and more mana regen), but no matter how much % life or % life regen you invest in the % regen vitality grants is still the same, this allows you to invest in life regen on the tree, and have it slightly boosted by vitality (also works with RF)

with the moving of vaal pact, builds on the left side of the tree can have a strength based aura that allows you to increase life leech rate (without having to pick up life leech rate nodes if you want to play a caster) while still keeping life regen (red gem, strength alignment)

in party play, vitality becomes more relevant to other players instead of just being a nice QoL thing, it will provide a small boost to flask recovery rate, life leech, and already existing % life regen, if a player does not have any recovery, they will not benefit from it, just as an arc caster does not benefit from hatred, a 0 armor build doesn't benefit from determination, or a build with no fire damage doesn't benefit from anger
some auras do apply effects to everyone regardless of whether or not they have scaling (generally defensive auras), but without much scaling the energy shield from discipline wont amount to too much

it's not a value that can be commonly found on the tree, like every other aura

i know that sorta recently sturdy growth was removed (there were 2 spots where it could actually take effect iirc), i'm not completely clear on whether it was because it was seeing no use, was due to the dark thoughts removal of medium radius gems that required 70 stat allocation, or a likely case that it was overpowered as it just made any investments into regen/leech even stronger
basically 15% more life regen rate when you already have 12% life regen would net you an additional 1.8% life regen, so this definitely needs to be taken into consideration, as well as life leech rates and health pots, the difficulty is that each of these rates is different and some of them are more balanced than others (different life pots have different recovery rates, and life leech rates with different weapons have differing amounts of availability)

some other things to be taken into consideration if vitality did become increased life recovery rate is it does matter how ZO and GR are coded (vitality should affect the rate of those as well), whether or not this should become a 60%(live)/50%(beta) reservation, as well as scaling (especially with aura effect nodes) and use level, and power early game (life leech and damage are low, % regen is uncommon for some classes, pots will be pots), however having had discussion on this topic, i feel vitality would be better off being purely restricted to health as a strength alignment gem as any builds that go heavily into energy shield tend to also have greater access to vaal pact for leech and low life righteous fire should require more investment into % regen with use of ZO to achieve the same effect, although depending on numbers, the proposed vitality should not be too impactful even if it were to affect ES through GR or ZO, just concerns were brought up regarding combinations of keystone or gem BM, MoM, EB, and GR that would effectively allow you to increase your ES recovery rate as mana, which is one of the major points that need consideration

the end result being something like this, with investment in aura effect and life regen, this should still make RF possible if necessary, it will help with any build that relies on leech that cannot reach vaal pact and provides another alternative to picking up max life leech rate nodes, work with flasks (apart from seething and the first part of bubbling, giving reason to use other flasks), and is an aoe aura for your party

I vendor any vitality I find because the scroll fragment is more valuable than the gem.

My feedback is very general as I tend to theorycraft a dozen builds for every build I play. In short, it is that while Vitality may be handy for your golem and perhaps even useful for summoners who need to keep their spectres alive or have zombies with absurd amounts of HP, for the casters purposes it feels like a very lackluster aura.

I've theorycrafted a handful of Righteous Rire builds and played a Righteous Fire Iron Will Incinerate build in The Awakening beta and another in Tempest. If I end up using this aura I consider it a leveling solution, a bad solution, or a lack of options solution because the build needed passives for other things but had some mana it could reserve left over. While I realize that increasing the %regen may be too powerful for summoners (I honestly don't know) increasing the skills power with a reduced effect for minions or adding a flat amount of regen might make the aura more appealing for non-summoners.



While I would just love a straight up buff, I think adding a flat amount of regen would be very interesting for Eldritch Battery, and balancing your HP around when this skill would be efficient to use for Righteous Fire seems very interesting as well.

If I theorycrafted another build with insane mana costs, I'd love to make it hybrid between EB and mana using both Clarity and Vitality to handle the mana cost. Perhaps with Acrobatics for defence since it probably couldn't use MoM if ES regen was just a buffer for mana regen.

With an ever increasing number of sources of percentage-wise life regeneration (Growth and Decay skill node, uniques, talismans, boot enchants) Vitality looks ever more underpowered.

Now there's even a golem that with fixed size healing at level 20 heals 105 life/s; A level 20 Vitality aura heals 1.65% life/s, which means that the golem, whose only cost is the opportunity cost of not using another golem, provides more healing than the Vitality aura for everybody with less than 6364hp!

Perhaps the saving grace is that it benefits the entire party or summons?

Hardly. Even dedicated party-support aurabot builds using the new Guardian subclass and stacking 10-11 auras like the PartyJesus build don't use Vitality these days. After all, what would be the point? Want to support the party with a small amount of life regeneration? Wear the Shaper's Seed amulet.

As for summoners, even an aura build to support summons such as this one, that ends up benefiting from 12 auras (some actively sustained, some not), does not use Vitality.

At some point one has to ask, "just what's the point of the Vitality aura?"

The only builds I know of that use it now are variants of the Dy'Ness tanking build that try to maximize ES regeneration at all costs, and even there it is of pretty marginal value - there are so many better and cheaper ways of acquiring regeneration, that Vitality is only picked as a last resort when all others have already been taken into use.

Vitality: The 35% mana reservation aura that provides a benefit worth less than two skill points.

The only real use for vitality is when there is literally nothing else to use

there are builds with enough life regen to run righteous fire without rise of the phoenix.


if it is going to be a 35% aura it need to be comparable to discipline. and right now it is simply not even close.

I'm wondering why Vitality doesn't show up in the Wiki under Mana Reservation.

http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Mana_reservation

You clearly have no intent on balancing this aura, so please just remove it.

Compared Vitality to Discipline? Complete failure.

+5 life for each level could be a nice upgrade for vitality.

Or some resists vs damage over time.