Armour fix (SHOULD WE GET A "+% Increase to Max Life" on gear?)

Armour is not useless, but at the same time, it is useless because there are no passives nodes in the skill tree to increase max life... We can increase our energy shield's percentage increase (+%) with both passive nodes and gear as well as our energy shield's base value (+#) on gear... but max life has no bonuses within passives and no (+%) increase on gear either... this makes the base value of player health, which armor improves the efficacy of, very limited. I have seen builds with 7000-9000 energy shield on top of chaos inoculation (immune to chaos damage), while builds that are armour focus tend to cap between 1500-2500 max life. The only bonuses to health are coming from a character's strength attribute and "+# max life" on gear. This means we can decrease the amount of physical damage received, but there is very little improvement towards our total hit points, which mitigates elemental and chaos damage when using armour/max life builds.

I believe trying to fix armour will NOT correct the issue here. Armour is working as intended; yet, max life is not flexible enough to use a build without energy shield - which is unfeasible on some characters.

Possible Fixes:
1) Add "+% increase to maximum life" to amulets and rings
2) Add "+% maximum life" to passive nodes that already have health regeneration on them or other under performing nodes.

you already have +% to max life on amulets?

Hopefully we'll see that Armour acts more like Resistances, doing a flat percentage damage decrease, without any diminishing returns or scaling down at larger damage values.

Otherwise, I feel like a solution is to drastically increase Life, potentially tying into something like "2% Increase in Life for every 100 Armour", and go from 2,000-4,000 Life to 15,000-20,000 Life. Though, I have no idea what these larger values will actually be, since I have no way of telling how much damage an attack is doing to me or whatever when getting on-shot.

Another option in my mind is to make something like Scavenged Plating base-kit, and tied to Rage. As you gain Rage, you become more resilient, and by consuming your Rage to empower attacks, you put yourself more at risk and lose some of your resilience.


On a related note, it kinda blows my mind that the existing Scavenged Plating, and many other Buffs, only last 4 seconds. I think increasing this to 10s, or having some way of extending it, say keeping the Buff while your still have Rage, but doubling your Rage depletion. Feels pretty useless when Buffs fall off so fast. It's the same with de-buffs. I can barely fit in a move to take advantage of someone with Fully Broken Armour when the debuff only persists for four seconds. Just feels janky.