New Unique Body Armor: Bulwark of Faith

TLDR: One-hit protection with big drawbacks

Base: Saint's Hauberk (315 AR, 78 ES)
Damage from hits does not damage life, if your energy shield isn't depleted.
Take 30-50% increased damage while your energy shield is depleted.
When your energy shield reaches 0, your maximum energy shield becomes 0 for 2-4 seconds.
+45-75 to maximum life

So one of the main reasons why ES is so desireable in the current meta is because you can stack a ton of it and basically have very good protection against one-hits. This is something non-ES characters can't really do at the moment, even if you massively invest into life and have good other defenses, your one-hit buffer is much lower.

That's where this body armor comes in. While you have at least 1 ES, you would be immune to one-shots with it, because the hit would only deplete your ES and not touch your life. The rest of the mods are basically there to make sure the item can't be abused and isn't overpowered. Mediocre to decent(ish) max life is added as an indicator that it's not meant for CI builds.

So, I grab 10k life and the smallest amount of ES possible (not 0), take ZO, take a little bit of damage from blood rage, then I'm almost immortal because I'll not be on full life so life regen will kick in on energy shield, and in case I take too much damage that bypass energy shield, I have a 10k life pool

Seems unbalanced :p

Okay, so it needs hard counters against ZO and GR, it seems, wanted to avoid that.

Cannot leech energy shield.
Cannot regenerate energy shield. (Could lead to confusion with energy shield recharge).

BTW: I would like to see how you get 10k life with this body armor

Also basically immortal under vaal discipline.

If I'm not mistaking, some jewels can roll "energy shield gained on hit" too, there should be other things like it also.

Hmmm, yeah, what about this then:
Energy shield cannot be replenished for 2 seconds after being depleted.

And then you can take a very high attack speed build with the jewel "ES gain for each ennemy on hit by your attacks" .

It won't work like this man, if you start trying to patch an item for every single other combination what would be game breaking, something is probably wrong with the design and it becomes too complicated.

No, the jewel wouldn't work, because ES gained on hit is also replenishment. The item would keep your ES at 0 for the indicated number of seconds.

I am grateful for your comments, but other than you, I firmly believe that testing an idea against the minds of other people and revising it accordingly is exactly the right way to go.

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zagibu wrote:

No, the jewel wouldn't work, because ES gained on hit is also replenishment. The item would keep your ES at 0 for the indicated number of seconds.

I don't think so.
If it was a replenishment, the wording would likely be as so.
But it isn't.

I think that I do understand where you want to do with this, but I really don't think by starting with a set of rules to try to exclude the known combinations that would break it is the way to go.

You could be more simple and have :
"When your energy shield reaches 0, your maximum energy shield becomes 0 for 2 sec" for example.

The premise is wrong. I would like them to address one shot damage for life characters instead of pigeon holing us into another "mandatory unique".

The burst one shot damage should be toned down and ES should keep serious drawbacks instead of being - go huge "blue" life pool and play PoE in easy mode...

But the plan for this item was exactly to address one-shot problem of life builds. You can't really use it with CI, and for non-CI full ES build it doesn't have enough ES to scale. So it's only really useable by life builds, and maybe not even as a main item, but a swap-in when you know you are going to face some serious damage output soon.

The pidgeon-holing is intended, because reliable protection from one-hits shouldn't come cheap. Maybe some additional positive stats such as +max life could be added, though, to make it a little bit more desireable.

Note that I agree with your general ES criticism, but this item isn't meant to fix that problem all alone.