Energy Blade

I like being a bit pedantic, the gem already has changed from what was announced here:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3187742

It "only" lessens maximum energy shield by 50% but the damage values changed accordingly, so same damage but less of a self destruct.

from 10.000 ES to 5.000 ES and still only ~20 - ~2000 damage with 1.7 APS and 7% crit. Sadly ES is in the top half and sword passives in the lower half. :/

Decided to give Energy Blade a test and see 'how bad' it really felt as an attack tool. My season start is a raider using flicker. Just hit level 78 with with approximately 2,200 ES. My feeling is that the skill provides too little raw damage for the opportunity cost. The literal cost is 50% less ES. However, you must spend precious passive points to take ES and another survival tool (Evasion+Spell Suppression, Block, ETC). Furthermore, you must give up any positive passives you may have had on a traditional weapon. The total cost (opportunity plus actual) is simply too great the damage provided (as an attack skill).

Very frustating...
I saw the New gems intro...
Wow, energy blade Very cool + 100% és as flat dmg Nice Nice... 3h at pob...
Leveled my inquisitor,
swaped to energy Blade... 2000es 800 lightn dmg... Wait what...? 60% dmg Nerf, i didnt saw any warning😶😐😆😠
Still love the game, thanks. 😀👍

I didn't know about this thread so I'll copy what I posted there, here.

Energy Blades should increase maximum energy shield leech rate by 100%, minimum

Maximum total recovery for Life is 20%. Maximum total recovery for energy shield is 10%. Blood rage degen is 4% of Life and 4% of Energy shield per second. If Life and Energy Shield is the same, Blood Rage results in (10-4-4=) 2% maximum Energy shield recovery per second. If Energy shield is half of life, Max ES recovery is less than Blood Rage degen (10-(4*2)-4=-2).

This has been a considerable problem for me trying to level as flicker strike energy blades elementalist (besides flicker strike being bad to play with less links to begin with). Investing in ES, supposedly damage and mitigation for Energy Blades, is only damage since I can't leech it beyond blood rage's degen, which is necessary for flicker strike to work while leveling. Unless I go raider for Way of the Poacher. This means I have no Energy shield at all.

Now I can fix this by investing 4 points into ethereal feast and a point in leech mastery to add 100% increased max rate, as well as investing in some recover ES on kill, but that's more investment out of damage or mitigation that could simply be on Energy Blades to take ES max recovery to parity with life max recovery.

E: I gave up on that build.

Inquisitor Battlemage here

Was very excited for this skill due to Battlemage's interaction the downside is that being a Lightning Sword it blocks out many of the strength skills and even a lot of the dex skills as they are bleed based, chaos based, or locked behind Axe/MAce/Staff making this very difficult to use.

Proposed Solution:
Make a threshold jewel to change the weapon type of the Energy Blade to open up more builds (IE making it an axe unlocks all of the slam skills which a lot of the passives nearby are for)

I've spend a few days on PoB trying to get this skill to work. That being said I have not played it. But trying multiple builds with items I can't even afford (str stacking, attribute stacking, int stacking, raw es stacking) and even using multiple perfect cluster jewels and split personality. Tried mana stacking with clarity watchers eye, will shaper clusters, hierophant. Even with 100ex+ budget, I've come to the conclusion that energy blade is just way under tuned. Even if the damage was great, defenses would still be an issue as the amount of focus you need on es to get good damage means you have little room to invest in life or defenses.

The only use I see for this skill atm is that you don't need a weapon, so while leveling you can just use discipline to get a decent elemental weapon for free.

I tried to build a base for energy blade to work but the numbers just don't add up and the opportunity cost is far too high.

Went guardian for the 160% of reserved life as armor. Reserved 50% of life for Petrified Blood (tempest shield and clarity on arrogance with some efficiency). Then stacked on Ivory Tower and Aegis Aurora to get back a large chunk of ES and ES return on block, scaling to my already life to armor scaling.

My gear is certainly not done yet and I have a miss-matched offensive investment but I do have all the ES/Armor nodes, most of the ES/life nodes, and the biggest life or es nodes.

I am sitting around 3600 life with 1800 reserved, 11k armor and 3200 ES. I am still having spike damage vulnerability issues and cutting my ES in half will only make that worse.

For the price of 1600 ES and my main hand weapon stats I recieve a 44-875 1.7 speed 7.7 crit chance energy blade at lvl20 q20. This comes out to be a 782 lightning damage dps sword with 7.7 crit.

Now consider a Rebuke of the Vaal. There will be some multi element efficiency loss over the energy blade but not too bad and there are ways to convert to fewer elements. A max roll Rebuke is 1041 dps with 5% crit and an average roll is 851 dps. The crit chance gives a little more damage to Energy Blade but at the cost of 460 flat accuracy. Accuracy is something my current build is lacking greatly and any ES+Life+Armor build is going to have a challenge with getting to the hit cap.

Energy Blade is also a melee weapon after so there is no way to avoid getting hit so a low armor, low life build will not cut it and CI builds need not apply at all. I belive I have close to the best current combination of synergiesed effects if not all the rares to back Energy Blade up and it doesn`t hold a candle to a common unique with zero synergy.

Energy Blade needs several of the following, possibly all but split through multiple threshhold jewels.

1) Always Hits or a non dex/item based to hit scaling mechanic.
2) Give it Battlemage as a base effect then its more than just a low performing magic weapon.
3) Steal more from inquisitor and give EB crits ignore lightning resists.
4) Energy blade also counts as a weapon of what ever type is actually in the main hand for skills and modifiers.
5) Energy Blade augments a bladed weapon rather than replace it, adding damage and maybe some of the above effects.
6) Add flat ES recovered on hit and or a chance to generate an ablative damage absorption buff relative to the damage done on hit similar to a modest ward but only one charge removed per hit.
7) create a logarithmic scaling function so that smaller ES investments yield competative energy blades without minmaxed ones breaking damage scaling.
8) Change from "less energy shield" to reserves X energy shield and the damage is based on the ES reserved.

There are plently of other ways you can go with it but right now Energy Blade fits right in with the league krangle mechanic, give up twice the value of something rare in return for something half the magnitude and easily gotten elsewhere.

I have tried to make Energy Blade work both on paper as well as in practice, but it is not like any other skill. It's basically a active skill hiding as a support skill. It costs a lot of investment into defense, which then gets reduced by quite a lot. And when you eventually get there, you have just maybe 2 or 3 skills in a massive pool of melee/physical skills that can actually take advantage of the effectiveness bonus that the added lightning damage gives. I admire that after all these years GGG comes up with new skills we haven't thought about, I'm just not sure why it was not buffed or changed in 3.17 as it stands out as a great skill, just not the greatest execution in my opinion. I've tried Energy Blade (Vaal) Reave for example, has one of the highest effectiveness, works well at mid range as it can stack a lot to be safe as a melee character in nowadays meta.

My suggestions:

A. Make Energy Blade transform into the exact type of weapon the character has equipped. Meaning, there'll be a Energy Axe, Energy Mace, Energy Dagger et cetera. The narrowing of Energy Blade to the sword archetype that currently feels weak is hurting the usability of the skill in my opinion.

B. Allow Energy Blade, upon creation, to add all suffixes of the current equipped weapon. It will open up new alleys to use different uniques and combinations. Like using the special interaction on a axe to get a sword. But to be quite honest, I don't think it will be entirely enough. From my research there isn't enough modifiers to swords on the Skill Tree that would make it more appealing. We also would probably need more/better modifiers, or a general overhaul of one-handed/two-handed swords.

C. Overhaul Energy Blade and make it only available for wand/sceptre users (since it's pretty much for intelligence users as intelligence means energy shield means targeted archetype) and allow Spell Damage to add to its Attack Speed and/or Cast Speed.

D. Maybe add some special interaction to the weapon, like after shocking an enemy a chain lightning will start from the enemy target, hitting up to 4 additional enemies. Imagine using Arc with Energy Blade, creating Arcs for your Arcs. Yo dawg.

C. Unique modifier that allows all types of melee weapon modifiers to apply to Energy Blade?

Found an interesting STR/INT stacking build, finally switched to it at level 69, still can't use blood rage because the doubled degen outpaces ES + life leech. Maybe with some investment in life/es regen it will feel better but for now it's really annoying. Just bringing ES leech up to life leech max on the skill would be nice.