"Tankiness", what a word...I play a Frozen Orb Sorceress, using the Ice Barrier constantly as I worked it into my key press rotation as I cast Frozen Orbs. Taking the additional choices of making every 50 mana spent reduces the CD of Ice Barrier by 1 second helps when you cast Frozen Orbs that need 40 mana to fire. Wearing the Ring of Starless Skies and also having the Snowveiled aspect on my chest and occasionally using Flame Shield literally makes you immune to everything. In combat, nothing ever gets through to kill you if you watch what is coming or on the ground.Those skills, aspects and the ring all help, mess with any of them and it breaks the ability to survive confrontations. Many players choose to play the various classes, and each has their own set of rules and gear that can, with optimal affixes, grant most characters a decent chance to survive any encounter at maximum difficulty save for mechanics such as Lilith's ground effects. Personally I don't care whether I play T4 or T3, but T4 just takes longer to kill of the mobs, rares and bosses.I see plenty of problems happening with these changes, but I have to wait for them to be applied before I can judge if it is worse case senario or just going to be a longer grind to achieve meaningful results.That is the bottom line here. Are these changes and their impacts going to make our preferred character class and play style better or worse. Not everyone likes to constantly change their class or build due to nerfs and or skills/paragon board upsets. But we only get to vent our ideas after the fact and nothing we say changes much.Waiting for December 11... to see just what happens.
My preferred method of working out how tanky I am is to play the game and see how quickly I die. I don't need an arbitrary number for that.
Historically, how well defenses work under normal conditions requires little thought. Either you build up enough defenses to progress or you stay stuck. It's always the burst damage outliers that force players back to the drawing board entirely. Off screen 1 shots by ballistas forced me to rethink how I could double my hp and dodge just to stand a chance of walking forward without dying. Long range 1 shots by Aether Fiends forced me to slow down to ensure I killed each one at close range just to make it past each round. The sudden sharp damage spikes from chaos rifts relative to the rest of the NMD or helltides made me stay away from them unless I was already geared for the next difficulty up.
