Salvaging CI - Suggestions open to discussion

"

Give up everything in pursuit of greatness — including life.

A random comment: I've always perceived CI as "tank for gank (damage)" tradeoff, or something along those lines.

These are my ideas/propositions.


1. Make CI boost ES based on life. Only the base life would be taken into account, ignoring all +%/+flat nodes, affixes, bonuses and other things. For a level 90 Witch, 1->1 conversion ends up at about 550 extra ES. With the two clusters directly under the Witch starting area it ends up at slightly under 1k ES, more with other nodes. Or it could be taken as base to which no bonuses are applied.

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2. Completely forget the ES bonus on CI and give it a +% bonus to either all damage or just elemental damage. Exact number is debatable, but something along the lines of "Max life becomes 1; Immune to Chaos Damage; +20% elemental damage".

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3. Following the above idea, give it a small chance to do chaos damage... something like "10% chance to convert all (or just elemental) damage to Chaos damage; cannot leech life from doing Chaos damage." If that's too much, convert the damage after damage reductions from resists and armor.

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4. Add a couple of nodes/keystones after it, pretty much as what was done with Acrobatics/Phase Acrobatics. A quick sketch can be found here. I apologize for the roughness and pain caused by the sketch :)

Anyway, in this idea, CI gives 50% immunity to chaos damage (please, keep reading).
CM stands for "Chaos Mastery". It gives the remaining 50% immunity (so far, two skill points spent for the gain of current one).
Alternatively, it could give a chance for damage to bypass damage resistances, but not much. And both incoming and dealt.

The numbered nodes should be either-or, so that you can't take both of them. It's been already done with one item: Midnight Bargain can't be equipped if the character has CI.

One path could give you bonuses to ES and resistances (just like the 8% and 6/15% nodes, respectively) with a penalty to damage.
The other path could give you bonuses to damage and a penalty to resists or/and ES (or be inspired by the idea #3)

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Personally, I'm most inclined to either #1 or #4. First goes returns to the roots, in a way. Fourth allows for more specialization.

Now, please tell me where my logic is faulty. I'd love to read the replies. :)


EDIT/PS: Not really related to the above, but I think that, if one of the above ideas are implemented, the skill description should be changed to:

"

Give up everything in pursuit of power — including life itself.

Its impossible to build enough ES using hybrid gear. What's the point in having those hybrid nodes if a CI shadow or templar still has to end up wearing pure ES gear?

If you want to keep ES and CI purely gear dependant, then hybrid gear needs to be buffed.

Also I really think bleeding immunity also needs to be added to CI, currently bleeding alone destroys CI builds far too quickly.

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bhavv wrote:

Its impossible to build enough ES using hybrid gear. What's the point in having those hybrid nodes if a CI shadow or templar still has to end up wearing pure ES gear?

If you want to keep ES and CI purely gear dependant, then hybrid gear needs to be buffed.

Also I really think bleeding immunity also needs to be added to CI, currently bleeding alone destroys CI builds far too quickly.

Because you don't go full retard using ES/EV gear in every slot you can put it and still expecting to hit 6k+ ES. The gear is there to serve as a fallback. Sure, you can wear pure ES in every slot and have no defense or you can compromise for when you do get hit. I wear ES/EV Helm and Gloves. With Grace and Inner Force cluster, I still manage to hit ~25% dodge chance and it's pretty fucking useful in maps.

The only thing that needs to be changed about Puncture is the damage scaling on moving. By itself, it would take 60+ seconds to kill you. However, when you start moving, the damage scales up to stupid levels. That's the only real problem.


Also, what that other guy said. When you spec CI, you're trading HP for ES, it's stupid to have stun/freeze calculation based off a hidden pool of health you don't get to interact with unless it fucks you over. It should be based off ES for CI users. That's the only change CI needs. Everything else is just fine.

*Enough ES to survive end game content.

Still no dev response on this. Disappointing.

I disagree that a solution needs to force CI and ES users to spend ANOTHER passive point simply to get on par with what HP users enjoy by default. This could be avoided by simply changing the status ailment calculation like so:

Status ailments are calculated based on the combination of the player's max HP and max ES.

There, all three groups are covered--HP stackers, ES stackers, and hybrids.

Functionally, these builds should all have the same chance to resist status ailments:

4k HP, 0 ES
1 HP, 4k ES
2k HP, 2k ES

CI wasn't still in a good shape...

BUT THIS !

It just killed CI. Forever.

"

PinkPingPenguin wrote:

CI wasn't still in a good shape...

BUT THIS !

It just killed CI. Forever.

*sigh* this hurts for CI builds

"

PinkPingPenguin wrote:

CI wasn't still in a good shape...

BUT THIS !

It just killed CI. Forever.

has GGG ever changed a unique before? this item is really the craze right now

It doesn't hurt CI builds. It doesn't replace CI builds. The point of that item is to mitigate chaos damage for builds that stack ES instead of life and don't take CI.

AKA, Pain Attunement builds.

Maybe I'm overlooking something here, but why can't you wear this in conjunction with a CI build? Seems like it could be a pretty good ES piece for a CI caster.