Steelskin

I'd say Guard skills are in "debatable" state at the moment. I like the concept of short duration non-automated self-buff, it (theoretically) provides a playstyle that is directly opposite to the one forced by Winter Orb. So kinda undebatably good thing, but

I'm trying to understand the skill constants and I still don't get it.
Realisticly achievable 3000 damage absorbed at 70% rate means : you can take 4285 damage during active buff. Excuse me, wtf? Everything in this game hits twice harder. The skill goes off instantly, eighter you've managed to predict a burst damage from a multiple monsters or trying to tank a bit of boss' damage. If it's not supposed to 'save your ass' in extreme situation why then the duration is so low? It's equally bad at taking a huge predictable hit and as "I need some protection for some time" situation handler. The skill needs Flame Dash -like charges.

Personally I still don't have required "skill" in order to utilize any Guard's buff, Maybe I should used to not focus on anything and track everything on the screen?
Or maybe I need a better hardware setup, like:
Things like that seem mandatory if you actually want to "outplay" a offscreen volley from Karuis archers.

Shortly: everything "guard" is shit but immortal call is a bit better.

I dunno what the point of the ridiculously short duration is. The skill will already wear off once it's absorbed a rather pathetic amount of HP and even then 30% of the damage still gets through to you, and the skill's cooldown doesn't begin until the skill is gone, so why hamper it with a short duration on top of that? Basically makes the skill hit-or-miss as to whether it'll absorb any damage in the first place due to the short duration meaning you don't even know if it'll still be there once you start taking hits.

Prefer immortal call on my builds. It works well at lvl 1 unlike steelskin and i don't have to get 155 strength.

This buff could use a buff. One or two of a 1) an extra second of duration 2) extra hitpoints blocked 3) maybe some protection from ailments on high quality.

I dont mind the duration. shorter duration and shorter cooldown means it has much higher uptime than molten shell, at the very least its worth keeping them different in that way. if you're going to buff it, keep it different. make the cooldown even shorter, or give it better scaling with gem lvl. right now steelskin is the only guard skill that really benefits from boosting gem level.

the short duration makes me think of steelskin as a reactive i-frame kind of skill rather than ms/vms which you pop preemptively. you could reward players for using steelskin "correctly". like if the buff absorbs 100% of its damage before the duration ends you get some small temporary mitigation, or even faster cooldown.

This skill is much weaker than his brother Molten Shell.
It is designed for builds without armor. So for evade/block builds?
The duration is only 1.5 seconds, which is not long enough to absorb damage, given that during this time they may not deal damage at all due to evade / block.
And the amount of absorbed damage is less than that of Molten Shell. There you can reach 10000 barrier with a lot of armour, for at least 3 seconds, which gives a really sure way to survive.
In addition to immunity to bleeding, which comes in handy in the first acts, the skill needs improvements:
Increase duration to 3 seconds.
If you are evade during skill, the duration is refreshed.
At the end of the duration, restore life equal to 50-100% of the remaining barrier.

Playing through dodge is much less safe. More builds will choose armour because it's stable. Players don't care when he evade 95 out of 100 hits, they do when those 5 out of 100 hits send them into a hideout or standard.

Steelskin is incredibly weak and it is also yet another 150 strength requirement guard skill just like Molten Shell, what about dex based builds? Feels really bad to be pigeonholed into Molten Shell for everything.

Through the campaign I usually run Steelskin until I hit the point of act 4 where I can equip molten shell on damage taken. After that I wear it as a secondary to damage taken, but it has no real utility other than keeping me from dying from a stray boss hit that I was terrible at dodging.

Allow this to be cast on damage taken and give it a bit of juice to compete with molten shell, and it'll become a fairly useful utility for multiple character types. If it could retain it's non-shared cooldown it would be even better, as multiple guard skills could be used with cast on damage taken.

It wouldn't keep you from dying from the majority of problems, but it would help against a lot of those stray chained, arrows, etc that seem to appear out of nowhere and can't be dodged.

I think this skill gem would benefit from having hybrid skill requirements of 98 str + 68 dex instead of requiring 155 str, as that 155 str requirement just seems too high for that gem.

Usually if I'm ever running a str character, I'd always go molten shell since it has good scaling based on armor. The only time I'd ever have use for steelskin is when I'm not doing a str build, however the high 155 is usually a large barrier and I usually have to just swap it for something else.