The secret of being Tanky in POE for beginners

Dear friends,

I know most of you doesn't need such a Guide for defense mechanics in POE, since you are very experienced players and you know every shit and your balls are steel etc....

I will write a few paragraphs for the beginners who needs a help while building a good defense for end game.

During my close to two years of experience in POE following are the most important things I learnt:

1. Skill Tree is for picking up defensive stats (mostly life) and key stones. Damage can be found by some other means like uniques, weapons, belts, skill and support gems.

2. The belief that "There are three main defensive mechanisms which are Armor, evasion and energy shield" is a one big bullsh*t lie.

3. Ordering of the defense mechanisms from Good to bad is as: evasion > block = dodge > burritos > Armor

4. Capped Resists are a must and I am not even mentioning them.

5. Energy shield is additional life Not defense and it is always good to have

6. There are dual wield block, shield block, stave block in game and those nodes in the skill tree are there for a reason.
Not for decoration only.

7. Armor gives % reduction which decreases with increasing incoming damage whereas 50% block is always god damn 50% block. 50% Evasion is guranteed 50% pseudo rng evade incoming damage sh*t.

8. If you only thrust your armor "Kole" will shove his hook into your characters a$$.

9. No matter how much life you have on your items find at least +200% to maximum life from skill tree. If you have new/legacy kaom's heart get the f%ck out of my threat...

10. You always need multiple layers of defense (at least two) in order to survive. These can be selected among the mechanics mentioned above. Ex: with 75% block, 30% evasion, 40% dodge and 20% armor reduction the average damage you will receive is 2.1%. You can facetank a lot of bosses with this amount of DR. Above numbers are very easy to achieve with yellow only items and auras.

WARNING:This sh*t is for physical damage only. You need spell dodge, spell block and elemental resistances for the spells.

11. Find a corrupted Stone of Lazhwar with 4% spell block, wear it,forget about finding another good amulet and shut the f%ck up.

12. If you want to be tanky do it properly. Any mechanic with a name armor on it may not be the best defense in the game. Dont thrust your 21k armor and cry when you are one shotted by some random stupid boss.

13. Dont forget arctic armor, mind over matter and some other special uniques

14. That is all. Thanks for reading

I did not see Endurance Charges mentioned anywhere. Armor is good if used properly, with endurance charges, life leech, and a decent brain inside a player. People complain the game requires no strategy and then cry when they cant get surrounded 50:1 and tank everything...or when they cant facetank an attack that is obviously a skill-dodge.

This is a backhanded qq about not understanding how to use various methods of defense in a game that has more valid options than people give it credit for.

There are some bosses where evasion/block/dodge doesnt help at all, but armour does. Its not possible to say that armour is better over evasion or other way araound. It always depends on the mob you are facing.

I'd say Lightning coil is very underrated. This chest alone provides up to 38% physical dam mitigation without draining your mana on hit like MoM does. I built ZiggyDs EK scion/shadow and totally dumped MoM keystone once I got Lightning coil + Purity of lightning + over resists. I honestly cant see using another chest unless build needs something else.

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Aim_Deep wrote:

I'd say Lightning coil is very underrated. This chest alone provides up to 38% physical dam mitigation without draining your mana on hit like MoM does. I built ZiggyDs EK scion/shadow and totally dumped MoM keystone once I got Lightning coil + Purity of lightning + over resists. I honestly cant see using another chest unless build needs something else.

Lol I wouldn't really call Lightning Coil underrated tbh - several of the most popular builds all use Lightning Coil and it's been an easy sell in Ambush for the entirety of the league.

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OleOlof wrote:

There are some bosses where evasion/block/dodge doesnt help at all, but armour does. Its not possible to say that armour is better over evasion or other way araound. It always depends on the mob you are facing.

like what?
evasion maybe, but dodge and block are separate from evasion just as armour is - like if a rogue or boss as RT or lioneye's (aka they cannot be evaded) they can still be blocked and dodged, in fact.

I couldn't find any secrets in the OP. It also doesn't state why anyone would build tanky in any league. Beginners usually don't build survivability at all or, depending on their experience, still mostly ignore it.
Also, a total beginner has no idea what you're talking about in a lot of these points. Not everyone knows what corrputing a stone for spell block actually means.

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ilenoc wrote:

7. Armor gives % reduction which decreases with increasing incoming damage whereas 50% block is always god damn 50% block. 50% Evasion is guranteed 50% pseudo rng evade incoming damage sh*t.

Jonah Unchained disagrees. Evasion does not give you a fixed ratio to evade, but is dependent on the accuracy of the attacker. The higher the chance to hit of the attacker the less effective your evasion will be (and vs Jonah it's gonna be zero).*

Imho you can't just throw out that evasion per se is better than armour. It depends on your build. I've played enough different builds (even playing an evasion based variant on a char before a respecc and an armour based after to have a good comparison) to say that evasion is superior to armour on ranged chars that don't get hit often. On melee chars that get hit constantly on the other hand, the death rate is MUCH lower with armour.

EDIT:
* BTW if YOU have resolute technique you'll have zero evasion on reflected damage.

Really don't even see why people use armor these days when you can use endurance charges + immortal call. Very easy to run around with near-permanent immortal call by grabbing 1 or 2 extra endurance charges and using IC+ID.
Easy way to see this is to observe armor users doing the three bosses for Atziri run - nearly all are using immortal call because their armor gives poor mitigation against those high physical attacks.