Salvaging CI - Suggestions open to discussion

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Energy Shield
As long as you have greater than 0 Energy Shield, you have a 50% chance to avoid stun.

Energy Shield acts as an additional hit point pool on top of life. If you have any Energy Shield remaining when you take damage, the damage is subtracted from the Energy Shield first. Damage is only applied to life once all

Energy Shield is depleted. The exception to this is Chaos Damage, which ignores Energy Shield.

Energy Shield will recharge if you do not take any damage for a certain period of time. The default delay is 6 seconds. This time can be reduced with increased energy shield cool down recovery modifiers from passive skills.

The formula for the recharge delay is:
6 * (100 / (100 + increased recovery) )
so 100% increased recovery is halving the delay, not removing it entirely.

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bassdoken wrote:

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.

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epeli wrote:

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Cronos988 wrote:

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.

This... is not a good idea. It nerfs early game ES and buffs endgame, when it should do the opposite.

Let me pull some endgame numbers out of my ass (read: rounded #s from my witch)
1300 flat base ES and 500 int, thus +50% more ES instead of +100% increased.

Total ES without any +% ES passives: 2600 -> 1950 (1300*2 -> 1300*1*1.5)
With +100% increased ES from passives: 3900 -> 3900 (1300*3 -> 1300*2*1.5)
With +150% increased ES from passives: 4550 -> 4875 (1300*3.5 -> 1300*2.5*1.5)

As you can see, this would require considerable investment in +% increased ES passives before it even reaches

the old levels of total ES. (The same amount you used to get from int)


EDIT: Or did you mean adding another ES bonus instead of replacing the old additive one? That...

seems a bit too much. But it certainly would bring ES back to the old CI levels, and only for pure int specced

characters. Interesting.

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brutalman wrote:

First, full disclosure: I have never played a character with CI, though I was building a

Witch towards it before I changed my main to a Ranger. So I propose the following with absolutely no experience:

Since the recent nerf to CI removed one of its - arguably OP - benefits, would it be appropriate to reduce the

penalty to HP was to some thing much less severe than "all except 1 HP"? If CI changed to "Maximum Life -50%,

Immune to Chaos Damage" would it be overpowered?

No, just no. This would be even more severely overpowered. Free HP for auras with no risk of chaos damage + Pain

Attunement + 2 Redbeaks. CI must set HP to 1. You don't want to see 20k DPS witches running around with

absolute no weaknesses.

To be honest, the more and more I play with witches, the more I think the current CI is fine. It's a choice

now instead of an obvious must-have no-brainer keystone. If anything, the early +% ES nodes could use a small

buff.

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anubite wrote:

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HollowedOnes wrote:

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.

That's an interesting idea but I don't think they want to overcomplicate the CI keystone. I seriously doubt

changing the wording on CI is going to fix CI. All CI users need is a means to acquire more ES or mechanics that

can make refreshing/restoring ES easier.