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.