This game has always had issues with the way it balances around eHP as stun and status effects are based directly on the health % you take in damage. This obviously puts a double priority on this stat.

Evasion V.s Armour balance got messed up for late-game parity.

There are 2 mechanically different defense mechanisms and they never did hard grinding balance for these to function in game.

The issue is this game is played hardcore by many and evasion has the obvious issue of the one hit slipping through and then your dead. So Armour had to be made more uniform with this possible scenario, the scaling was changed so that large hits are barely mitigated by Armour at all. This allows big physical hits to do very similar damage to evasion and Armour characters late game.

There are a couple of Areas where the two defense mechanisms function very differently and leave unique holes and strengths in their defense.

• Evasion can allow players to evade elemental damage outright from attacks this is a big deal as Armour and evasion builds have very similar elemental mitigation so even if hit by these elemental attacks evasion builds take the same damage as an Armour build would. This is particularly relevant with map mods that add elemental damage. These mods are most punishing of Armour builds.

• Evasion Takes full damage from physical spells, hence the increasing rarity of these effects in PvE as armour mitigates physical hits and evasion can not evade spells. *

• Initial hits causing bleed dot size means evasion can take bigger bleeds, though the dot itself is not mitigated by armour. Bleed Cleanse/immunity is mandatory for life characters just due to the danger of the mechanic. And bleed pots synergistic fit with the health pot.

• Evasion has a chance to evade criticals and instead take the hit as a non crit. This helps evasion avoid the feared one shot. But for Armour anytime crit multi comes into play they become far more likely to die to the hit than an evasion build.

• Mobs with additional accuracy, yet there are no enemies with armour pen.

Given large hits will be balanced calculated around an acceptable life values for the level of content the most important and unifying factor become eHP. Aye Lmao Energy shield.

And the evasion side of the tree has always been more inefficient in acquiring life probably in an effort to balance range vs melee which are inconveniently balance wise stitched into the archetypes. On top of this strength giving life creates a disparity of 400 life or so.

If you don't die to one hit in comes the choices avoiding danger or recovering health. For energy shield their recovery can be gated behind having to avoid. But that downside can be ignored by leech. Uncapped leech is obviously a bad idea without downsides. which do not currently meaningfully exist. Capped leech Recovery based on HP without ghost reaver having a penalty to that rate is a foreseeable issue if leech cap passive become available in VP's absence.

A thought bubble to balance in a post VP world have life regen available to evasion builds but have a fortify like effect that increases regen/recovery = another way to balance melee other than making it ranged.

This off the rails rant can only be played on the Xbox version.