I'd like to bring up an issue that Arcane devotion currently has.

Magic shield in Craft to Exile takes some (not all ) of the damage the player takes and substracts it from his/her magic shield, if any is present.
Arcane Devotion reduces your life to 1hp, and boosts your magic shield in exchange, making it very similar to CI (Chaos Inoculation from Path of Exile (PoE) from which Arcane Devotion is clearly inspired by).

Unlike CI however, in Craft to Exile the player can still die to health loss, even if magic shield is still present. The reason this is the case, is because damage is still being substracted on a % bases from your 1hp, turning your actual hp into a fraction of 1.
The main issue here is that the player is unable to see his real health bar and therefore can not make educated decisions on whether or not he or her should use food in an attempt to replenish his or her health bar percentage.

I've died several times to this, last but not least to the "life-Mending" enchant, while testing out how it interacts with magic shield.
It, too, will drain a percentage of your 1hp and magic shield, making it possible to die to the enchant while still retaining some magic shield.

Coming back to PoE, CI has one additional aspect that's crucially missing from Arcane Devotion: It grants the player 100% resistance (immunity) to Chaos damage (which is a damage type meant to normally pierce energy shield). This is very similar to what's happening in CtE, since this immunity isn't given.

My suggestion would be, if this is possible, to implement code that checks for any leftover magic shield when the player takes fatal damage and Arcane Devotion has been allocated (on the Tree or from Shavronne's Wrapping). If there is any, the player will simply not be able to die to this damage instance.

Alternatively, providing death protection to fall/fire/wither/poison/Life-Mending damage (and any i might've forgotten) would already be enough. Of course this would mean that Arcane Devotion would essentially let you swim in Lava without every dying, but it'd make you a sitting duck so to say, as you'd die to any enemy damage instance (since you're at 1HP without magic shield) and are slowed quite considerably from the lava.

Hoping something can be done to help out AD a little bit =)

made a change for this

Hey thanks! I actually know why this happens and I don't have a way to "fix" it properly, but you've given me an ide to at least help players with this. Instead of their life going from 1 --> 0 after a few ticks of damage I can set it so AD doesn't actually set life to 1. That way players will at least see their health going down. Thoughts?

hmm i dont think that this really fixes the issue. Is there a way to show the health percentage in a different way? Like a second health bar or something similar. Just not setting health (and health regen presumably) to 1, will still make it extreamly difficult to judge how much health one has, because it still gets hidden by the magic shield. I think that this is the core issue.

Not having HP set to 1 would also take away a lot of the flavour that AD/CI has. Otherwise its just 50% MS for 30% Armor/Dodge, which is imidiatly a lot less exciting i think, even if having extra HP would be stronger objectively speaking.

Maybe having Magic shield regen apply to health aswell at the same rate could help (to always fill up your health regardless of hunger), or changing the hunger required to regenerate health. I think there are some opportunities to get around this issue without impacting combat gameplay or taking away from CI's identity.

"5 (995) / 5 (995) on the health bar (5 HP + 995 magic shield)"

This would be a really good change, even without the AD problem. Before I picked it up, me and a friend would constantly wonder how much HP do we actually have, how much is MS and this would remove the extra step of always having to open up the menu to figure this out. Especially with the party MS buff.
And it'd also help with the issues I have. If MS regen now also applies to HP, then its perfect =)

"Alternatively I could just make it so AD doesn't give you - HP regen multi? Should functionally be the same."

not quite because it allows harmony to be used together with AD, meaning you could potentially have quite fast MS regeneration which, I think, is supposed to be the downside of picking it up in the first place.

But yeah, those 3 changes would definitely help out AD in a way that doesn't make it "stronger" but just makes it less buggy and more intuitive for beginners.

Well, no it wouldn't fix it. After reading your reply I get what it is that's concerning - basically its the magic shield bar completely covers the health bar and you don't know how much health you have right?

It is removing some of the 'flavour' but also this isn't PoE so there will be some things that need to be changed. I would do something like -99% health multi, so you'd have really low numbers of health. I could then add a health amount on the health bar too. Or I could do magic shield in brackets. So instead of:

1000 / 1000 on the health bar (1 hp + 999 magic shield)

you'd have something like:

5 (995) / 5 (995) on the health bar (5 hp + 995 magic shield)

The reason I don't want to keep it at 1 hp and have 1 (999) is because when you take damage straight to your health, the gui indicator won't actually display fractions, the value gets rounded. At least with 5 hp you'd see that you're now at 3, 2, etc. Instead of 1 --> 0.

Magic Shield regen to apply to health with AD is a pretty good idea too. Alternatively I could just make it so AD doesn't give you - hp regen multi? Should functionally be the same. Even if you only had 1 hp regen it'd fill you