In Path of Exile you have two different resources that keep you from dying
One is Life (the red stuff) the other is energy shield (the white covering the red). When you go throughout the passive tree you will see that there are +life / +life percentage nodes and on the other hand there are +energy shield nodes.
One very important node is called Chaos Inoculation. This node makes it so your life is reduced to 1 and you become immune to chaos damage (chaos damage bypasses energy shield).Choosing energy shield for your build usually means that you are using this passive skill.
Thus, you want to choose one or the other in order to maximize your survivability by only using life gear and life passive nodes or high Energy shield gear and Energy shield passive nodes.
Just some stats for people trying out sword raider BF build, with only a Dreamfeather and a Scaeva i'm doing 1155 damage per uses of BF, attacking for 7.38 time a sec, 30% crt chance, 340% crt multiplier. This is with max frenzy on a 2x ascended raider.
Feels free to compare to other classes if you're not feeling raider is up to par, or if swords isnt your thing.
Cant go wrong with this, you can also respec to BF later, it uses pretty much identical tree nodes and similar skill gems > https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1738625/
I will hopefully decide which of WarChieftain totems or Gladiator Block Blade Flurry that I will play sometime around the league starting >_> . I may end up defaulting to the "safe" build of warchieftain totems to make poe currency, but it would be nice to play (and fail) with a build I've done some work on myself.

May
POE Incursion: A Primer on Vaalish History
Incursion league is very close to us now, so I'd like to share some Vaalish history, and I think you guys would be interested in it. It's no doubt that Vaalish History is important in Path of Exile 3.3 update, it's the core part of next league.

Mar
Making a build of my own for the new legacy league
Plan on going into hardcore legacy and trying to learn quickly- I expect a lot of rage on my behalf. Looking forward to making a build of my own for the new legacy league.

May
POE Leagues Transverse Comparison
Now is the show time of Flashback, but we should never forget these great leagues, which has brought us a lot of happiness in the past years. Then here comes a question like "Which is your favorite league" or "Do you love Harbinger/Abyss/Bestiary, why?"

Dec
I still have so much fun in PoE after so many years
The beginning is the best thing ever! My tips for you is bind your left click button to Move only.

Jan
I'm not fond of how you NEED the Anima Stone jewel
With Flame Golem enchant you get 88 damage(58 without) and can add 3 of these effects on top: 26.1 cast & attack speed, 87 crit and 11.6 phys dmg reduction or 304.5 flat life regen.

Dec
All that the jewel sockets and Clayshapers are a pretty big investment
getting jewels will be hard, and without them you cant really play arround Golems, unless you go normal summoner first then switch.