Salvaging CI - Suggestions open to discussion

After leveling a CI build to 70 in the closed beta and another to 77 in open beta, I think I have a pretty decent understanding of the benefits and downsides of both versions of CI.

The state of CI in the closed beta was completely overpowered paired with easily attainable items. My CI necromancer had nearly 5k es with complete garbage for gear (although good resists), and with my granite flasks I could mitigate physical damage as well as most hp/armour builds.

My CI wand shadow has 4k es with relatively above average gear. I don't feel like the reduction to es was too harsh. However, with the nerf to granite flasks I do not have the luxury of picking whichever suffix I want; I need the of Iron Skin suffix. Not really an issue at all. With purity, my resistances are almost capped in merciless, so I can take elemental damage relatively easily. The only problem I'm noticing more is around the same issue I've noticed in the closed beta.

ES is garbage for sustaining damage, unless paired with life leech, ghost reaver, and vaal pact. That's kind of a bad combo to require for being able to take more than just a few hits from those hard hitting physical damage mobs.

I also tried using the new Zealot's Oath passive, but I'll leave my thoughts about that out of this thread.

I do think there needs to be some kind of buff for CI. Perhaps putting some nodes after CI that make ES more viable for sustaining damage, either by granting some kind of huge recharge increase or another keystone that grants physical damage mitigation while also benefiting pure ES. Additionally, elemental ailments and stuns are too easily applied to CI users. Like another poster has said, CI should use your ES for stun/elemental aliment calculations instead of your hp.

There are certain things that should not be done with CI. First and foremost, it should not grant any kind of multiplicative bonus to your es. I made a low level dueling build with it that had 1100 es with fairly mediocre gear. Not really a good solution because it doesn't solve the bigger issues. CI should not convert hp to es, as the point of CI is to not get any hp increases, nor should it set your hp to any but 1 because if it were any higher you could easily exploit it with blood magic percentage based auras. Additionally, flasks should never recover ES.

I kind of feel like CI is where it should be as a passive, but all of the other issues with ES based builds need to be addressed. As previously stated, the big things are es recharge delays and physical damage mitigation, which since both are pretty lack luster, pure ES builds are horrible at sustaining any kind of damage.

I totaly agree with previous poster... i would be glad if CI would have something like unweavering stance to be stun immun, this would be enough for me, to make ci viable again or calculation of stuns from es instead of hp... just my 2 cents :-)

have a nice day

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bassdoken wrote:

... CI is where it should be as a passive .... pure ES builds are horrible at sustaining any kind of damage.

- How do I put these together dear sir?

Though I agree on most points made.

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Lichalfred wrote:

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bassdoken wrote:

... CI is where it should be as a passive .... pure ES builds are horrible at sustaining any kind of damage.

- How do I put these together dear sir?

Though I agree on most points made.

CI only grants chaos immunity, and that is the only point of the passive. Why should it do anything else? I should amend my previous statement to say "sustaining huge physical damage or repetitive elemental damage".

Like I stated previously, the issue with pure ES builds is that it can't sustain damage because you have close to no physical damage mitigation (sans granite flasks), and unless you pick up Ghost Reaver, you have no way to recovery ES during battle. That is fine for builds that will use both, but there needs to be an alternative for people who won't be using Ghost Reaver (Zealot's Oath is total garbage in its current state), such as summoners. If a CI summoner takes a hit, unless they can gtfo quickly, they're pretty much dead. Either ZO needs a rework (which I have thought over a few ways to redo the passive), or secondary damage dealing CI builds need a way to recover/recharge ES a lot faster.

For instance, there could be a keystone that grants 20% less es, but es recharge delay is fixed to 1 second. Zealot's Oath could be reworked to be something like "Energy Shield recovery applies instantly. 70% less energy shield recovery speed." That one could be reduced a little further, then have a cluster behind it to give it a boost (much like the Acrobatics cluster). There are a ton of ways to go about this, but CI users need to be able to take more than 2-3 big hits before dying.

Does anyone else see it as a problem that CI is still basically mandatory for any ES build?

If you invest heavily in HP, your ES is going to be really lackluster. If you invest heavily in ES, your HP is going to be lackluster and you can safely go with CI.

Unfortunately, there aren't enough nodes to make a build that utilizes both ES and HP. Does it bother anyone else that "split" armor is not worth it unless you're going for EB?

Am I the only one who feels like CI isn't a significant tradeoff, yet at the same time is not worth it because Energy Shield based builds just aren't up to par? Does it bother anyone else that "split" armor is not worth it unless you're going for EB? Does it bother anyone else that the only way to get a "safe" amount of HP is to get every ES node on the map (templar and shadow side) and use an ES shield?

Unfortunately, ES seems to suffer from the same problem every other defense in the game. It isn't sufficient to survive big physical hits.

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FamousTrip wrote:

Does anyone else see it as a problem that CI is still basically mandatory for any ES build?

If you invest heavily in HP, your ES is going to be really lackluster. If you invest heavily in ES, your HP is going to be lackluster and you can safely go with CI.

Unfortunately, there aren't enough nodes to make a build that utilizes both ES and HP. Does it bother anyone else that "split" armor is not worth it unless you're going for EB?

Am I the only one who feels like CI isn't a significant tradeoff, yet at the same time is not worth it because Energy Shield based builds just aren't up to par? Does it bother anyone else that "split" armor is not worth it unless you're going for EB? Does it bother anyone else that the only way to get a "safe" amount of HP is to get every ES node on the map (templar and shadow side) and use an ES shield?

Unfortunately, ES seems to suffer from the same problem every other defense in the game. It isn't sufficient to survive big physical hits.

How do you arrive at the conclusion that split gear is only worth it for EB? ES benefits directly from having a secondary defense and regenerates faster than your HP. Plus hybrid defense nodes are currently very good for both ES hybrids.

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Cronos988 wrote:

How do you arrive at the conclusion that split gear is only worth it for EB? ES benefits directly from having a secondary defense and regenerates faster than your HP. Plus hybrid defense nodes are currently very good for both ES hybrids.

Because of the way ES works.

Looking at chest armor on the wiki the best split evasion / es armor has 1/3 the evasion and a little less than half the ES. Assuming this is outdated and it's closer to 50% evasion and 50% es.

You can take advantage of the fairly efficient ES + Evasion nodes. Which is fine, I suppose, but if you do so the pure ES nodes become much less efficient. For ES to scale into values that actually matter, you need really high ES values.

But if you go investing in the 8% es nodes, your return is abysmal. With the pure ES armor you're getting an additional 8% more ES per node. But with the split armor you're essentially getting half of that. The halved base evasion isn't going to make up for the fact that you are getting less than 1/2 the ES from the other 'pure' ES nodes.

So those nodes all become a waste. Meaning you will end up with about 82% more ES from passives and maybe another 40-60% from int. And it only works on half as much ES. So the sacrifice of half your evasion for a meager amount of ES isn't going to be worth it because of the way Evasion works. You're going to be better off just using Grace and pure ES armor.

Maybe it's worth it, but it definitely doesn't seem like it to me. The meager amount of evasion your get, or armor you get, doesn't offset losing 50% of the efficiency of your int, and all the pure ES nodes you are supposed to take. That's partially because of the way evasion and armor scales.

To put it another way - you sacrifice more than 50% of your ES by locking yourself out of the pure ES nodes. But the real problem is that your give up 50% of your ES, but the evasion or armor you gain doesn't make the remaining ES 100% more effective. Not even close. You may have more access to HP (if you don't go CI). But particularly for shadows it seems foolish to not use pure ES gear as they don't have the strength or hp node availability to really take advantage of HP + ES.

If one we to use the same "buff ES CI build" one with hybrid gear and one with pure ES gear, the pure ES char would live longer always because the tiny amounts of armor / evasion don't double the effectiveness of the ES to make up for the loss of half of the ES. Particularly when they won't be enough to even cut physical damage by half, let alone the fact that much of the damage you take is elemental.

I tried CI today. And that was painful...

Well in fact, after 3hrs of painful death, I just refunded this passive skill. I did build my witch hoping to be able to use shield as my main HP. Silly me and dumb me. My character is totally useless in Merciless difficulty.

I might consider redo a witch (or something else) that will use the damn LIFE to tank things, since it seem it's the only way to avoid been dead with 2 hits. Or I'll just stop playing the game since I've already spent quite few hours in this witch that is a waste of time.

I'm not here to complain about the game. I'm just saying that there is no point giving us the possibility to chose between life or shield if shield is just useless.

A suggestion I just posted in another Thread:

Have Intelligence give +0,1% more Energy shield per point (about 30% more ES at 300 Int). That would bring the ES gain from Int in line with the HP gain from Str (which, because it affects base health, is multiplicative). Judging from the ES values posted in this thread, this could be about 800-1000 points of additional ES for CI users.

It makes no sense that a primary defense option that is already at a disadvantage because it gets no base value per level also has a weaker stat contribution than the alternative.

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Cronos988 wrote:

A suggestion I just posted in another Thread:

Have Intelligence give +0,1% more Energy shield per point (about 30% more ES at 300 Int). That would bring the ES gain from Int in line with the HP gain from Str (which, because it affects base health, is multiplicative). Judging from the ES values posted in this thread, this could be about 800-1000 points of additional ES for CI users.

It makes no sense that a primary defense option that is already at a disadvantage because it gets no base value per level also has a weaker stat contribution than the alternative.

I can get far better returns then my hp/es shadow gets 300 Int venturing into inefficient for ES dex part of the tree, could get more. 30% more with life oh nice I would clearly get it. In fact even maradeur with 100-150 int just would get ES armor gear.