Salvaging CI - Suggestions open to discussion

As it currently stands, CI << ES+Life <= Life. Giving up your life for energy shield results in having less total "health" than either pure life or ES+Life. The only reason to take CI at the moment is Blood Rage or Darkscorn Bow. Literally, that's it.

Those reasons aren't strong enough, because Darkscorn sucks (mostly) and Blood Rage now requires VP and GR to be good with CI. Forced to use three keystones does not a good compelling reason to use a keystone make.

For CI melee you need VP. As a FP caster, you only.need GR.

Which is still dumb. Further, about to be lvl 83 and still haven't touched that keystone. Will be getting ilvl72 crafting gear soon, so well see what happens.

"

anubite wrote:

As it currently stands, CI << ES+Life <= Life. Giving up your life for energy shield results in having less total "health" than either pure life or ES+Life.

Exactly. Not to mention 1 life > 1 ES.

"

anubite wrote:

The only reason to take CI at the moment is Blood Rage or Darkscorn Bow. Literally, that's it.

True, the problem is apparent. CI is intended to be mainly witch / shadow keystone. Yet the only way to use it is Blood Rage + Ghost Reaver shadow with retarded amounts of passive points in ES nodes. Darkscorn's pretty much useless.

So, from your replies, mainly anubite and epeli's, I gather that something does need to be done about CI...unless one believes that it should be kept as a very specific niche/marginal keystone?

"

Kostrowicki wrote:

So, from your replies, mainly anubite and epeli's, I gather that something does need to be done about CI...unless one believes that it should be kept as a very specific niche/marginal keystone?

The issue with that is down to ES itself. Without that multiplicative 50% boost, ES is fairly mediocre as of right now. I would be fine with leaving CI as a niche keystone, but the easiest approach to fixing ES involves buffing it.

"

epeli wrote:

"

anubite wrote:

As it currently stands, CI << ES+Life <= Life. Giving up your life for energy shield results in having less total "health" than either pure life or ES+Life.

Exactly. Not to mention 1 life > 1 ES.

Not sure about that. Although ES can not be replanished with Potions, it reduces the Chance of getting stunned, frozen etc. by 50%. If it would be possible to trade 1 ES for 1 Life it would be rather good, but you normally trade 1 ES against 1 Life and a lot of mitigation.

If you have the same Stats and switch all your Life for ES it would be a very good trade.
Turning from 4k HP and 14k Armor to 4k ES and 14k would be really nice, but it is not possible to maintain the same pool of Life and the Mitigation, which is propablematic.

"

Kostrowicki wrote:

So, from your replies, mainly anubite and epeli's, I gather that something does need to be done about CI...unless one believes that it should be kept as a very specific niche/marginal keystone?

As it stands currently, CI isn't sensible as a niche keystone for some super niche purpose.

Right now, its only purpose is intreaction with chaos damage being negated. For certain things (Darkscorn/Blood rage) this is great, but because CI no longer results in you actually attaining higher ES levels than you would life+ES, and because you can now get chaos resistance gear anyway... and because ES can't be recovered with flasks... it's a death sentence to pick it up.

When a keystone requires one or two other keystones to be viable, then the keystone itself is broken, simple as that.

I would change something ES or CI myself, but that doesn't mean Qarl necessarily agrees. Perhaps there is some build he knows of where CI is still very strong...? I don't doubt it, honestly.

The 'simple fix' to CI is just to raise the max ES cap drastically. Giving CI a 'more' modifier is just toxic.

But yeah these are the things I would do in 0.10.1 to fix CI:

1. Introduce 5 new unique ES pieces that would synergize well with CI (but come with interesting down-sides)
2. Give the two 8% ES clusters below witch one unique notable node each
3. Introduce 2 new ES clusters to both Shadow/Templar that give those classes some unique ES mechanics that could be exploited with CI
4. Introduce a new jewelry base item type that gives flat ES (neck or ring)

I think that's all that needs to be done to fix it. To make CI work we simply need to raise the max potential ES you can have and provide interesting effects for builds to use with CI.

But as I said, this is how I would do things and I'm sure everyone has their own opinon - Qarl isn't going to do anything if all we do is state opinions all day.

If you've made a CI character, level it as high as you can possibly manage, PM Qarl with the character's gear and whether the build is working or not... whether you can even continue to level it or not. That's going to be more helpful in the long run than making posts about CI.

reading the thread it seems like giving a reduced health conversion, something like 50% of health is converted to energy shield would solve the various problems with CI being discussed. players could take health nodes to decrease the chance and duration to be stunned at a smaller reward to ES or they could simply choose to max ES nodes. it wouldn't be a huge buff, but at least it would make the penalty of losing all health for CI lessened.

"

FatesDefiler wrote:

reading the thread it seems like giving a reduced health conversion, something like 50% of health is converted to energy shield

It would solve problems only in the sense that it would completely remove any identitiy or purpose to the keystone. CI is supposed to be, "Hey, you don't have to stack health now." Giving it a health conversion basically says, "Hey, you still should keep stacking health." I think it's a really dumb suggestion. Sure, it would make CI good, but we could just slap 50% more ES on it and get the same result.

Health conversion is strictly something they will never do w/ CI and it really serves no design goal at all to something like that. There are much better ways to improve CI without simply converting health. It's equivalent to making RT reduce crit chance by 50% or letting Blood Magic convert mana into life. Sure, we could let these things happened if BM or RT were underpowered, but it would destroy the purpose of the keystone. The keystone is supposed to change how you play and how you build your character. Life conversion doesn't do that at all.

What if rather than dropping health to 1 you take a hit to all elemental resist(-25%) and/or physical damage is increased by 25%.

That way instead of losing health your trading immunity from one annoying and powerful element for vulnerability in others.

I would also suggest that Blood Rage and other skills that inflict damage on the user be changed from Chaos damage to a "Self-inflicted" damage type that CI would not grant immunity from.