How can I improve the survivability of my cyclone berserker?

Hi there,
trying to improve the survivability of my berserker.
I am quite ok with the damage and so at the moment - however sometimes I get smacked - one shot.

In the build I also tried to focus on defense - I have divine flesh, born of chaos and so on - but still sometimes it is just not enough.

Does anybody have an idea how i can improve my defense without sacrificing too much dps?

Here is the pob pastebin link in case you want to help me: https://pastebin.com/5EkXERSc

Any help is appreciated :-)

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Heimada wrote:

Does anybody have an idea how i can improve my defense without sacrificing too much dps?

Basically impossible. You mitigate elemental damage decently well (effectively 80.5/80/80 ele) but you don't mitigate phys. You have fortify, 6k armour, and 4 endurance charges. 5K life isn't going to get you far with those defensive layers.

After properly tuning your calcs

you're looking at either losing a third of your dps from speccing out of damage nodes and swapping out some gear or sucking up and realizing you're playing an ascendancy designed to do a lot of damage and not survive everything.

Your phys EHP gets close to your elemental EHP when you turn on Lion's Roar, but that's 10k armour you won't reliably have for bossing. Mapping, sure! Bossing, absolutely not.

Thx man for the detailed answer - well I have to live with this then I guess :-/

Sucks that some builds like Aurastackers have it all - great sustainability and dps.

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Heimada wrote:

Thx man for the detailed answer - well I have to live with this then I guess :-/

Sucks that some builds like Aurastackers have it all - great sustainability and dps.

If you are willing to invest hundreds of exalts/several mirrors to get into the same price region as Aurastackers i am sure there is a lot to improve for your build.

As for improvements without paying a fortune there are quite a few things to do. I don't have POB available at the moment so i can only provide rough suggestions for now.
First thing on your gear is that helmet, you are starved on resists to the point where you considered it necessary to take the diamond skin cluster. IF you got a helmet with resistances in stead of useless minion stats you could free up a whole bunch of points on the passive tree. It might even be worth losing the damage from the helmet if you can't get one with phys damage life and resists.

Possible investments on the tree are the two fortify clusters as well as imbalanced guard. You are very close to all of them in your pathing without taking them. The rampart cluster is an easy pick as it provides good damage and defense, unspec some other damage nodes and take that. Might lose out on a little damage but shouldn't be much. Both butchery cluster and path of the warrior aren't very good clusters, taking rampart instead would be way better.

If you get more resists on your gear to free up the diamond skin cluster and maybe a few other points here and there you should also be able to spec into steadfast for even more fortify effect. That should boost all your EHP values quite a bit at a moderate damage cost. If you take imbalanced guard on top, which is only one point you can double your armor from 6k to 12k which makes for another 3 or 4 points of physical mitigation even against heavy slams at the cost of one point. Seeing as both your boots and gloves are evasion bases you could also consider iron reflexes, should add another few percent phys mitigation.

You could also consider a helmet with increased fortify effect.

You won't get to the defensive prowess of an Aurastacker, especially not on a Zerker, but there is quite a bit of room for improvement since your build is pretty much focused on damage alone.