At what point does ES start feeling as better than life+armor as people claim?

I keep hearing all this about how ES is excessively easy to stack, and how once you get to a certain amount of ES you can basically ignore armor and all other types of defenses because it's so much nothing can oneshot you, and how unbalanced it is compared to life with all possible defensive layers.

But at least until now that hasn't really been my experience. I have a character that reached t14 maps relatively stress free, with only around 2000 hp and maybe 8000 combined Evasion/Armor, which doesn't even get me to 50% phys reduction or chance to evade, I also didn't have capped resses for most of it. The few times I died between t1 and t14 maps were due to me being excessively careless to the point of just sitting in front of a rare doing nothing for 30+ seconds.

Meanwhile, a character I have with 9k ES and capped resses gets oneshot by some t3 map rares that barely scratch my armor/life character, and I keep dying on packs that come offscreen and "chip" down my ES in about 8 hits, something that doesn't even come close to getting me to low life in the other character.

What makes it even more confusing is, according to PoB2 I should have around 5000 EHP, 2000 phys max hit and 6k ele max hit on the armor build, and around double for phys alone and nearly 4x ele max hit for the ES build, but in game it feels the other way around.

Are the PoB2 calculations wrong? Is ES just overrated at an "early" level of the game? Am I not meant to tank hits as an ES build like I do in other builds?

Send us the POB, let me check. Maybe you forgot to enable some configs for your other characters that make its eHP lower than it actually is.

you'd need something besides just ES unless you have some crazy ES amount like 30-40k.... like you generally always pick armor or evasion and than ES on top of it You still need to mitigate the dmg in some way with stacking ES thru armor or evasion unless you have crazy ES regain and you have ways to make it start quick, monk meditate is good for that but can't really do that in the middle of packs boss fights it's a bit easier to use meditate.

This is not true for softcore. You can manage with only 5k ES if your build is destroying everything on the screen. If you aren't destroying everything on the screen then your build is broken anyway. Welcome to PoE 2.

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Ablan#1306 เขียน:

Send us the POB, let me check. Maybe you forgot to enable some configs for your other characters that make its eHP lower than it actually is.

Disclaimer: they're both probably very bad; more so than the quality of defenses I'm confused as to why the numbers seem to feel the opposite way around. I'm also aware that EV may be playing a part in survivability but it feels like way too much for the little evasion I have.
(numbers are probably different from my OP, I made a few changes but the difference is still there)

ES build: https://pobb.in/p1gjy47mlXWx
Life Armour/EV build: https://pobb.in/MCcXQkZ6lYOo

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baconbyte#0146 เขียน:

you'd need something besides just ES unless you have some crazy ES amount like 30-40k.... like you generally always pick armor or evasion and than ES on top of it You still need to mitigate the dmg in some way with stacking ES thru armor or evasion unless you have crazy ES regain and you have ways to make it start quick, monk meditate is good for that but can't really do that in the middle of packs boss fights it's a bit easier to use meditate.

This makes sense to me and is what I expect, and I honestly appreciate the refreshing sobriety of these replies regarding ES. Everywhere else I've read seems to talk about ES as a miracle cure to oneshots and the general thing I've noticed is that when a bunch of people say "ES is tankier" what they really mean is "I just die less with ES builds than with self made builds", which usually just translates to "if I died 500 times a day with my self made build I just die 400 times with ES", which again, isn't tanky lol.

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ImMobile2010#0431 เขียน:

This is not true for softcore. You can manage with only 5k ES if your build is destroying everything on the screen. If you aren't destroying everything on the screen then your build is broken anyway. Welcome to PoE 2.

Also a pretty refreshing perspective, and adds to what I said above; people seem to say "tanky" when in reality they just mean "well I can survive one hit if I don't clear the full pack in one cast", which really is just a less fragile glass cannon situation.

My chronomonk with a non divine gear (59% of evasion, about 2k ES and 1.8k HP) living pretty well

From the beginning to the end of the game

Ultimately it’s hard to say as we just have to take your word(I won’t) that you ran all the same modded maps or at least had similar conditions


As well as the builds in question

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ThDs#2405 เขียน:

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Ablan#1306 เขียน:

Send us the POB, let me check. Maybe you forgot to enable some configs for your other characters that make its eHP lower than it actually is.

Disclaimer: they're both probably very bad; more so than the quality of defenses I'm confused as to why the numbers seem to feel the opposite way around. I'm also aware that EV may be playing a part in survivability but it feels like way too much for the little evasion I have.
(numbers are probably different from my OP, I made a few changes but the difference is still there)

ES build: https://pobb.in/p1gjy47mlXWx
Life Armour/EV build: https://pobb.in/MCcXQkZ6lYOo

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baconbyte#0146 เขียน:

you'd need something besides just ES unless you have some crazy ES amount like 30-40k.... like you generally always pick armor or evasion and than ES on top of it You still need to mitigate the dmg in some way with stacking ES thru armor or evasion unless you have crazy ES regain and you have ways to make it start quick, monk meditate is good for that but can't really do that in the middle of packs boss fights it's a bit easier to use meditate.

This makes sense to me and is what I expect, and I honestly appreciate the refreshing sobriety of these replies regarding ES. Everywhere else I've read seems to talk about ES as a miracle cure to oneshots and the general thing I've noticed is that when a bunch of people say "ES is tankier" what they really mean is "I just die less with ES builds than with self made builds", which usually just translates to "if I died 500 times a day with my self made build I just die 400 times with ES", which again, isn't tanky lol.

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ImMobile2010#0431 เขียน:

This is not true for softcore. You can manage with only 5k ES if your build is destroying everything on the screen. If you aren't destroying everything on the screen then your build is broken anyway. Welcome to PoE 2.

Also a pretty refreshing perspective, and adds to what I said above; people seem to say "tanky" when in reality they just mean "well I can survive one hit if I don't clear the full pack in one cast", which really is just a less fragile glass cannon situation.

I checked your ES Build.

Unless there is sth wrong you are not res capped and instead of resistance runes you are using life regeneration runes? Why? (The game is balanced around to be res capped.)

Since you are not using CI chaos resistance is also very important, chaos damage deals double damage against ES. You should also look into life on gear, there are many low rolls or without any life. 1.300 life is not very much.

There are people here whining about ES for no good reason. Meanwhile Blasphemy+Temporal Chains is probably what keeps me alive way more often than ES. There is plenty of stuff in juiced maps that can melt ES in an instant if you don't keep it away from you or kill it first.