My view of why CI is better than Life in some but not all stages

Normal mode: Most people don't do CI this early but it's doable if you have good es gear. The loss of life from going CI at this stage can be a lot but the frenzy charges from blood rage and open slots for granites makes up for it. I'd say Life>CI at this stage because Life builds can easily have a good life pool even without +life mods on most gear.

Cruel mode: This is when some builds planning to go CI do it because Chaos damage can be difficult if you are depending on es for a lot of your HP. Stun becomes dangerous for CI but can be negated with a costly unique or trip to unwavering stance. Large hits like Vaal slam and other close range large hits become a problem for melee builds. Totem builds pull ahead in terms of survivability. I'd say CI=Life although CI is more costly at this point.

Merciless mode: Chaos damage becomes more dangerous for builds without immunity or added resists from gear/tree. Not having adequate es on gear for CI builds becomes just as dangerous. Stuns becomes very dangerous for CI melee builds requiring immunity to survive. Melee builds are at high risk from close range large attacks. Totem builds still have it pretty easy.

Early Maps: Life builds have a disadvantage even with great rare gear. Life builds with Kaom's are very strong. Ranged and caster builds encounter some risky situations with flickering spider, leap slam blacksmith and beartrap tossing undying outcast bosses but still have far less risks than melees. These situations are still less risky for totem builds because the totems draw most of the agro.

Late maps: Life builds without Kaom's are at a large disadvantage. Life builds with Kaom's are even with CI's with equally valuable rare gear. Ranged and totem builds find more difficulty with deadly firestorms and lightning balls but are still much safer than melee builds.


So in my opinion CI only seems OP because the late game build enabler (or what I would call a build breaker) is very expensive. There is still a very large survivability disparity between melee and ranged. Especially totem builds. What pairs most conveniently with melee? Life. What pairs most conveniently with totems? CI.
For the people who keep referring to Kripps discharger when saying CI is op: It's discharge. Where's the danger when you can 1 shot the entire screen? Sure you can die to reflect but the same was said for EK but it was nerfed. Also it's Kripp's excuse for why he died so much in early Onslaught :-P
Kaom's IMO is a huge gamebreaker. Without it, higher hard to get life rolls could be added to gear.
I think Shavronne's is ok. It had much less es than CI. at least until the CI nerf.. The only problem with Shavronne's is that the best thing to use with it is dual spork.

My advice for solutions:
Cut Kaoms to 500 Life. That way rare hard to get life rolls as high as 200 (another 100 life mod or a increased local life mod would work too) can be added to gear. Kaoms will still have high life and work great for 2 hander builds. (BoR helm would need a buff too)
Make totems draw much less agro. Right now you can just spam them by mobs and mobs can't tell the difference between you and them.
Give Righteous Fire a benefit for melees. More melee damage as fire would be interesting.
Make Vaal pact cause 50% less regen and life from pots pots.
Give mele attacks a way to fend off or reduce close ranged monster attacks. Melees would still have a much higher risk with things like map Piety's lightning ball but it would be a good start.
Nerf discharge. What were you thinking??? No melee no mater how glass cannon can 1 shot merc piety. Maybe split the difference between what it was and what it is now.

Edit: Here is an example of a CI melee build that has the same survivability as a Life melee
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/42623/
If you are going to compare a melee life to a CI then compare it to a CI crit dagger shadow. If you read the forum, it's mostly people asking for advice because even though it's only semi melee (Lightning Strike) the survivability is just as bad as any other melee. Note that the 30k dps is only with superb gear. With average gear it's about 15k.. same dps as a bear trap but with 20+ points invested into damage.

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Necrogue wrote:

My advice for solutions:
Cut Kaoms to 500 Life. That way rare hard to get life rolls as high as 250 (another 150 life mod or a increased local life mod would work too) can be added to gear. Kaoms will still have twice the possible life roll and be great for 2 hander builds. (BoR helm would need a buff too)
Make totems draw much less agro. Right now you can just spam them by mobs and mobs can't tell the difference between you and them.
Give Righteous Fire a benefit for melees. More melee damage as fire would be interesting.
Make Vaal pact cause 50% less regen and life from pots pots.
Give mele attacks a way to fend off or reduce close ranged monster attacks. Melees would still have a much higher risk with things like map Piety's lightning ball but it would be a good start.
Nerf discharge. What were you thinking??? No melee no mater how glass cannon can 1 shot merc piety. Maybe split the difference between what it was and what it is now.

You left out the most effective solution:

Eliminate the Cruel and Merciless Chaos Resist penalties!

Chaos Resist is blatantly unbalanced and one of the biggest unspoken stinkers in the Open Beta test. The drop rate of items with Chaos Resist is not even close to adequate, and the trade value of these items is typically one GCP and up. Chaos Flasks are a poor bandaid and Kaom's is an unrealistic option for the vast majority of players. That leaves CI (or perhaps Shavronne's) as the only reasonable alternatives to stacking HP as high as you possibly can.

There is no point in attempting to "balance" CI with HP so long as monster Chaos damage is completely OP in Merciless. Chaos is not elemental damage and the -60% resist penalty is nothing but unmitigated cheese. Fix that and then we'll see how CI compares to a well-balanced HP build.

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I think Shavronne is on par with Kaom's Heart with how bad it is breaking the game. Simply because you do not have to go CI, and use those life you have to add in more even more auras, effectively making you go into a low-life build. There are some unique item are kinda meh, but if you go low-life, you will see the true nature of those unique items that tend to be overlooked. When you add in Alpha's Howl, GR + VP, those Rainbowstrides, and...Auxium. You have walking sausagefest waiting to push the game to its limit.

I see Shavronne's as a Low Life build enabler. The tradeoff is that if you take away the Chaos redirect element then it's just a mediocre es chest. Same as Alpha's Howl without the freeze immunity. Rainbowstrides on the other hand are a best in slot for any es build with all good stats and no downside making all rare es boots junk. Same with Auxium for any ci attack build. Low life RF Shavronne build is basically a glass cannon. It's the survivability and power of dual spork that makes it seem op.

Koam's would be junk without the 1000 life. Even with high armor 3000-5000 max health is not very good so Koam's is basically a build enabler for Life. It's pretty lame that the most basic form of survival depends on some rare expensive Legendary item. That wall is whats killing life builds.

"

Chaos Resist is blatantly unbalanced and one of the biggest unspoken stinkers in the Open Beta test.

Good CI gear costs just as much as good life gear with Chaos resist.

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Necrogue wrote:

"

Chaos Resist is blatantly unbalanced and one of the biggest unspoken stinkers in the Open Beta test.

Good es gear costs just as much as good life gear with Chaos resist.

Point is not how much it costs, but how rare it is to find Chaos Resist gear that has great stats in the other mods as well. High-end ES gear is way more plentiful than comparable Chaos Resist gear.

Shavronnes as low-life Build enabler would be ok, the problem is that it comes with righteous fire Jay Wilson'ing your Spelldmg, and with Pain attunement combined thats trippeling your dmg with spells.

Shavs isn't broken, it's righteous fire.... I dunno why this skill even exists in the game - It's impossible to use it for it's ae-dmg component and impossible to regenerate against it without having a small life pool and a ton of ES, forcing Shavs to be used. Or staying out of maps and farming Lunatis/Docks/City of Sarn.

Jay Wilson'ing X-D I like that. Pain Augment + RF is about 110% more spell damage. That's about double. Right now the trade off of being vulnerable to Chaos damage or using a hard to get unique with half the es of one of the same value seems reasonable. It's a risk for power tradeoff. This tradeoff is negated by dual totem though.

Today I convinced my GF to play PoE with me. I leveled up a RF dual sporker for her because she's not a gamer and dual spork is safe and not complicated to play. Just right click and make 2 things. I usually check the map for Chaos mobs before I have her join because I do not have a Shavs but this map was a goatmen map so she could join right away. It was a Ghetto map so so I informed her to stay behind me but stay close.

If you didn't know, the ghetto boss is The Reaver. It's a lvl68 map version of Perpetus the boss from the city of Sarn that uses EK and tosses beartraps directly onto you. The one Ghetto map I did with other people was a public map that I joined. I warned everyone to watch out for the boss but when we got to it the party was all wiped out except for me.

So anyway back to my GF and I. The Reaver comes out of nowhere like the sneaky bugger always seems to do and hits me with a trap and then another before first released. It's usually a good idea to equip Lightning Warp for this boss but I didn't. Luckily I got away. My normal strategy for this boss is to run away and then sneak back up on it. I told my GF to run away but she didn't listen. She stayed and killed it with no effort. What. So. Ever. It didn't attack her at all. I just kept killing the totems that were spawning next to it.

My GF has a few hours of experience playing PoE tops. If that's not the perfect example of the easy button then what is? Either that or my GF is secretly a hardcore gamer X-D

Again my suggestion to fix this imbalance is to have totems draw less agro. Nerfing ES or CI again is just going to make Kaom's more of an end game requirement and Life based builds will still be just as squishy without it :-/

I forgot to mention that the dual spork char was level 64.

Seeing as this thread is not getting trolled like other feedback ones do, I take it that most people agree ;-)

good change, imo it needs to be 0% till deysnc is atleast fixed a lil bit.
using skills like cylone and multi strike end game is lol.

i just want to second the following:

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Kaom's IMO is a huge gamebreaker. Without it, higher hard to get life rolls could be added to gear.

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Ranged and totem builds [...] are still much safer than melee builds.

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Give mele attacks a way to fend off or reduce close ranged monster attacks. Melees would still have a much higher risk

and imho i feel that i should add:

i've been playing since day 1 open beta (always on hardore, though not as a uber ha4rdc0re n0life, stoped playing for a while cause of desync, now im back with open beta cuz of spec.throw filling the aoe role for melee's)
and i saw there with Kaom's and now with S.Throw how ppr are eager to have life&melee as viable as the ones OP said.

melee is more vulnerable than any sort of ranged, thats a fact (you have to be more exposed). That's why melee usually are more tough than ranged in games. In other words, melee have survivability bonuses in compensation for being more exposed. I don't think that the previous happens as a fact in POE, maybe because how freely & customisable every aspect of the char can be. Maybe trying to imbue the toughness concept for melee on the passive forest would work better.

>Nodes that says 'melee' usually only give atk boosts, like ranged nodes, thus disregarding the melee disavantage

as a sidenote, me and my friend (im a melee, hes a ranger) been noticing how most of the new nemesis modes punishes more the melees (with only the proximity shield punishing ranged more as far as i can remember)



tldr: ive failed to see adequate compensation for melee's natural higher risk for being more exposed