Clearer Defensive Layers

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If anything, we need more redundant systems because there's currently not an alternative to spell suppression..

You wouldn't need a redundancy for spell suppression if spell suppression was never introduced into the game.

Is spell suppression supposed to be superior to resistances? Why do builds on the right side of the tree deserve this? Why is a 100% suppression build more sturdy against elemental damage than a jugg with high armor and 0% suppression?

Why look for redundancy B to band-aid fix issue A instead of not introducing issue A into the game in the first place? Keep it simple. Don't pride yourself on complexity for the sake of complexity, especially when your balance passes in patches become increasingly seldom and laughable.

This goes far beyond spell suppression. There are a million examples in the game for this problem, both offensive and defensive. They introduce a problem into the game to possibly introduce a band-aid solution at a later time, and if you can't accommodate that band-aid into your build, too bad you die.

Having defensive variety through mechanisms A, B, C, D, and E is fine. Requiring most or all of those mechanisms for someone who doesn't want to play an ARPG like frogger is NOT fine.

And the sheer amount of comments here that amount to "an ARPG should be about dodging things" blows my mind. Go play dark souls instead.

Having a bigger focus on armor by removing physical damage reduction redundancy wouldn't kill evasion builds. That's why defensive nodes of all types must be spread more throughout the tree. Somehow life nodes get this special treatment but nothing else is allowed.

Near league start I saw a youtube video talking about popular early league builds on poe ninja. One of the mentions was jugg strength stacker and then the person said "the downside is that you are squishy and will often get 1 shot." A player that's newish to POE, but not newish to ARPGs in endgame, will look at that comment and say "but that ascendancy is literally supposed to be the tank archetype?" to which the community replies "well yes, but no, they are terrible, go play this pathfinder instead."

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Jixa87 wrote:

For many years I have tried to understand and comprehend the myriad of defensive layers available in Path of Exile. Some more effective than others, not all available to every build. I enjoy a good build guide, but there effectiveness varies depending on the build creator. If you follow a streamers build guide, they can be outside the casual players price budget. The guides typically invest heavily on what skills you'll be using with little to no information regarding EHP. You'd love to be able to clear all content or even specific content on your character so understanding the limitations on the build you've chosen is important.
Example: Picking a glass cannon for heist, not ideal unless you're reflexes are like a cat! Compared to picking a glass cannon for a single boss fight.

My feedback is, there needs to be cleared "Acheive these combinations of defensive layers for good survivability"
Having a list of what these actually are, so you know how you are progressing towards them and when you haven't hit them the player can understand why they are using 6x portals to clear a t10 white map.

Example; Im playing a slayer, with leech investment, 90% phys damage reduction, max 80 elemental res.
That's not enough to survive t16 content.

Another example; Im playing a pathfinder, with max evasion, 100% spell suppression, 50% chance to block attack & spell damage, 50% phys to lightning, 82% max lightning res, purity of elements (ailment immunity)
That's not enough to survive t17 content.

Well, what is? Am I just playing the game wrong? is my character not good?
It makes you feel like you've wasted all your currency on a character and followed the wrong build guide to have a good experience.
The alternative, is you follow another build guide and your tank is insane, life regen, armour, max res, you can't die but it's a struggle to clear content, it's slow.

It can feel like your punished for going too far in either direction, you need to settle for something in the middle.
I don't get to engage much with the league content because my characters are all garbage, they either don't do damage enough to kill bosses or constantly die to be able to have a fun experience of the league.

tl;dr - depending on the build guide you follow, you might like the look of how it plays, but your capability of the build guide is unknown until you realise what you can and cant afford.
your ability to align with the build guide will impact your overall experience of the league.

I downloaded your pathfinder character

I don't see you converting physical damage to lightning

You only have
6,087 phys max hit

This is far too little and that's why you die often

Maybe use Iron Reflexes and try to figure out how to avoid being stunned

With Iron Reflexes you will have 37,599 armor

9,867 phys max hit

call to arms and enduring cry could also help

Hmmm, you're writing to me saying I don't understand

I wanted to give him some advice in a very basic way with a very small investment, and in order to properly develop his character, you would have to play the character and assess what he really needs.

As for my character, he's doing quite well, but I don't have time to play. If I had time, I'd play ruthless.

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mnieradko wrote:

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If anything, we need more redundant systems because there's currently not an alternative to spell suppression..

You wouldn't need a redundancy for spell suppression if spell suppression was never introduced into the game.

I also hate spell suppression because its so good and so needed for a lot of builds. If you can cap spell suppression you pretty much will always choose to do so.

Having 75% or more ele resistance has never felt more useless. I'd like it to mean something if you have to account for it in designing your character.


I think a lot of stuff in this game just does utterly ridiculous damage because its the only way GGG knows how to threaten the player. Arms racing us like that isn't a really good way to deliver challenge both because the challenge isn't skillful to beat and also everyone not as proficient at the game gets to eat dirt.

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mentos1308 wrote:

I downloaded your pathfinder character
I don't see you converting physical damage to lightning

I had lightning coil with topaz flask always on, didn't improve tank.
I went farrul's fur with bismuth flask, didn't improve tank,
And by didn't improve tank, meant i died 6 times before reaching the map boss on a t16.
Which is why the character has been left unplayed, sold the uniques and left the character with dendrobate on.

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Jixa87 wrote:

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mentos1308 wrote:

I downloaded your pathfinder character
I don't see you converting physical damage to lightning

I had lightning coil with topaz flask always on, didn't improve tank.
I went farrul's fur with bismuth flask, didn't improve tank,
And by didn't improve tank, meant i died 6 times before reaching the map boss on a t16.
Which is why the character has been left unplayed, sold the uniques and left the character with dendrobate on.

I see
In my opinion, it would be better for this character to have some rare armor with a lot of evasion and armor than a lightning coil.

Additionally, a lot of life and 8% additional Physical Damage Reduction

And finally, convert with Iron Reflexes + avoid being stunned

Dreamcore on youtube.

Hi

Using PathofBuilding app is the first step to understand what's going wrong with our build. I don't follow any guide but I can easily clear t16 maps with 8 modifiers.

Basically, your character needs first the basics: life, elemental resistances and defensive layers armour - evasion - energy shield - blocks.

Capping 75% to all elemental resistances is highly recommended and I would say a must. Even 1% is a lot in one of the element. To do the maths, 75% resist means that you take 25% of the incoming damage.
74% means that you take 26%. 1-25/26 ~= 3.85.
If we look at a character with 75% resist, compared to one having 74% means that the life pool diminishs 3.85% faster. At 65% resist, 10% below 75%: 28.6% faster, more than a 1/4th.
It also means that having positive chaos resistance is also highly recommended since you don't know when a mob will hit you with chaos damage and everything without flasks added of course. Mainly because if you get hit when your flask is on cooldown or not activated when you just enter a map, you're dead.
I recommend 50% chaos resist to do t16 maps. You never know when a mob hit with chaos damage even if it's a few ones.

Personally I think armour is a must-have defensive layer. But when I say armour I mean the %DamageReduction associated with, not just the number displayed in the game.
What's displayed in the game is a mob at lvl 83 by default hitting around 1300 physical or elemental dmg with no modifiers I guess.
The flat armour doesn't give much %DamageReduction.
Example: With 2605 flat armours, mobs hit with a total of 1294 physical damage, the damage is reduced by 33%. But, if the hit damage is 5000, it is 10% reduced. If it's a big boss who deals 10000, 5%. In delirium the character takes even more damage.
Which means, increasing armour is relevant if you really increase %DamageReduction to withstand huge hits.
I fix the boss damage in PoB at 10000 so I know that how many percentage of damage is really mitigated.
The different ways to increase %damagereduction that I use are: damage shifting, %AdditionnalDamageReduction.

I think evasion is useful against boss with a high percentage of it (not flat number once again) but not against mobs if damage is not reduced. It makes sense because mobs hit you in large number, more than 10 can hit you in 1 sec.
As opposed to the boss, he might hit you in 3 or 4 secs because he deals stronger hits but fewer.

To play comfortably at t16 maps 8 mods, I have upped my maxPhys and maxElem damage taken up to 4-5 times my life+energy pool. Which means if I have 6312 healthpool, I can withstand a 24926 physical damage hit and die.

Upping spell suppress chance to 100% will add around 20-25% more sustained elemental damage as well as physical damage to your character at 75% resist.

Skill defenses like molten shell lvl 7 or immortal call lvl 3 + cast when damage taken at lvl 1 is also really useful.

Finally, elemental ailments can deal so much damage. And it's a pain to deal with. So getting immune to these are also essential to the survavibility of your character. I used Purity of Elements at first then switched to Stormshroud.



Those were ways to reduce or avoid damage taken defense. You might also consider to resplenish your life or energy shield after being hit which also helps a lot improving your survavibility.

I hope that it helps. Bye!

I always play my own builds and have never had this issue. My old characters, dark pact necromancer, chain dd necromancer, lightning trap elementalist, toxic rain pathfinder, ED trickster, explosive concoction ascendant were all able to facetank pretty much everything including ubers, except the mechanics that are obviously not meant to be tanked

Playing another pathfinder now and the build is far from being finished, yet I'm never dying in maps unless I do something very stupid or sit inside dd

It's not enough to have capped suppression, capped resists and some evasion/armour. It's impossible to make the defensive layers clearer as you described because they're all interconnected. Petrified Blood is a defensive layer but it's basically useless on its own and has to be combined with other things. Same for evasion, same for armour, same for blind, freeze, etc. You have to fit as many defensive layers as you can into a build

I also mention that armour is good up to a certain point, it reduces small hits but much less against stronger hits. That's why evasion and block exist. It allows you to take more hits, increase the number of hits you can take before dying.
Effective Hit Pool is the meaning of that: 50K of in coming damage, I can't take that hit, I can only take 0.98 of the hit with my resistances.
That's when evasion and block arrive. It gives me the possibility to evade the attack or block it. Which adds further damage "taken".
With 52% chance to evade, I evade only attacks not spells. Added to spell chance to hit, the boss hit me 74% of the time (48/2 % attack hit + 50% spell hit). Finally I can take 1.06/0.74 * 50k = 71596 dmg instead.
I could only take 1.06 hit * 50k = 53000dmg
But with my evasion I can evade 71596dmg before dying (I evaded 18596 attack dmg).

They have both pros and cons.
Evasion is good because you can "take" more dmg than you're normally can (you evade damage). But it's sensible to boss's accuracy.

I'm not familiar with block chance as much but it prevents all damage taken with a cost of a recovery time.