Help me out here...

I am laboring under the assumption that energy shield goes first, then life. At least this is how it has worked since I started playing a little while back.

However, today I put a Midnight Bargain on my necromancer build and now my life is going right out from under my energy shield. I've checked everything on my build and cannot for the life of me (lol), figure out what is going on. For clarity sake, Midnight Bargain is a wand that reserves 30% life and allows you 1 extra spectre, zombie and skelly. Does it also change the mechanics of your energy shield? This is really annoying and has totally fubared my build..

As I said, life is going before energy shield.. so what use is energy shield at this point? I assume I will die when life reaches 0 whether I have full energy shield or not, right? Is this working as intended?

Thanks for any helpful comments..
Cheers

Very odd...
I reloaded the game and it is now working as expected..
Sorry to bother ya'll.
Cheers

Yes you will die if life reaches zero, even if you have energy shield. Certain mechanics cause damage to bypass energy shield, the main one is chaos dammage.

Midnight Bargain shouldn't do this specifically, it's possible you were encountering another mechanic.

Ahh... very interesting. I went back to the original zone I was experiencing this in and sure enough, it is still doing it. It's The Toxic Conduits in Act 8. I had finished it then reloaded the game and the next zone was not doing the same thing. I've run this zone a few time before but I guess I didn't notice it.

So, I didn't realize chaos damage bypassed energy shield. My chaos resist is really bad at the moment. Working on it..

edit: yup, caustic ground - chaos damage!

Gee, learn something new in this game daily!

Thanks.. appreciate the info.

Cheers

Yep no worries. There's not a whole lot of chaos damage in the campaign before about late act 6, so you might not of noticed it yet. It does make things a bit tricky if you have a hybrid build without much life. There are a range of things you can get to help out. For example, ES mastery has an option that makes 30% of chaos not bypass ES. Coruscating elixir. Just doing what your doing with getting more chaos res. There's a range of other things. So long as your not playing HC it's probably manageable. Going full CI might also be an option if you get a lot of ES, but you wouldn't be able to reserve life.

Hmm.. I had noticed on other characters that there were significant stages of difficulty as they progressed.. thought it would be linear but obviously not. Well, good to know. As I said, I learn new stuff daily.. it's a very complex game with an enormous body of content. I do think it is gonna take years to figure it all out, let alone master any of it.

That said, I happen to have run into another issue. That wand reserves 30% life, so naturally one looks for life reservation efficiency.. and on the reservation mastery there is a 20% Life Reservation Efficiency of Skills option. Doesn't seem to be working tho. Not like the mana reservation efficiency does.

So with 1733 life, I get 520 reserved for 30%. One would expect that 20% would reduce the reservation of 30% to 24%.. ?? Not happening. Where did I go wrong?

Thanks

Its a bit quirky, but you can't modify the reservation on that item. In general, what your trying to do will work, on aura's that are reserving life, but this items has a set amount.

This is from the wiki for midnight bargain. https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Midnight_Bargain

"

This reservation is not affected by the modifiers to (Life) Reservation Efficiency.

Can see how that would be confusing.

It's a bit harder to get life reservation efficiency currently, they removed some of the sources. Those one's you've got should work on other things you have that reserve life. Like if you have an aura linked with arrogance, just wont work specifically on this wand mod that is locked at 30%.

I should have read the wiki page on the wand.. my bad!
And once again, thank you

No worries. It's hard to know when you don't know exactly what to look up. This might also be useful.

https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Reservation