Armor Mechanics Too Steep

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but not everyone wants to run grace+determination+IR. its a serious tradeoff between dps and armour. the amount of points that u need to fly all the way to IR is bad enough already.

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Atomgun wrote:

:)

Yeah, POE is not built for mitigation builds that use flasks for health. In other words, go leech or go home.

what are trap builds
what are totem builds

and don't tell me those are weak, they are more than capable of doing endgame content

YOu are right, there are a lot of builds that are viable. I was intending to only be refering to the melee characters.

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gh0un wrote:

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Yesu wrote:

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a life flask that lasts long and grants 90-100% increased armor.

It's not really effective to use life/mana flask for this. As soon as you reach 100% life/mana the bonus to evasion/armor ends.

It is effective to use your main life flask for it. I have done so many times in the past.
The time when you need additional armor is exactly the moment when you take damage.
Having 20k-30k base armor prevents any 1 shots, but as soon as you start taking damage you will use that main life flask, so you will always have that additional bonus.
If you hit 100% life, you are safe from death anyways, so you dont need any additional armor.

Having it on a manaflask as a comparison, is not effective.
While you might already be taking damage, you might not be able to use the manaflask to gain that additional armor because you might still be at max mana or close to it, thus preventing you from gaining the increased armor effect.

Its effective only on that main life flask that you use after taking slight damage.

I will have to give the flasks a shot. How do you deal with shield bashing? I have issues with those guys with the shields hitting me all at once and moving out of the way only allows me to get away from a few and when trying to attack those I get bashed elsewhere. I feel like i have to spam groundslam the whole game...

In order to prevent being stunned you have to have enough life and enough damage mitigation.
Stun duration depends on how much life they take from you with that particular hit.
If you watch the video i posted on last page, you can see my flameblaster on a vulnerability map (vulnerability increases physical damage taken and in the last patch it was also increasing stun duration and the video is from last patch) and even though i get shocked on top of that (increasing damage taken even further), they still dont manage to stun me at all or just for very brief moments.
I can still run around freely without being stunned too much.
Later on when i had even more armor and life, i was basically immune to stuns.

So you have several choices.
1. get more life
2. get even more armor/damage mitigation
3. get unwavering stance in the passive tree
4. get an item with unwavering stance on it, like kaom´s roots
5. get a cloth belt, which increases your block and stun recovery (which effectively increases your lifepool for purposes of stun calculation)
6. get a flask with block and stun recovery effect on it

I had 90%+ increased armor on my life flask, 90%+ increased evasion on my jade flask, and increased block and stun recovery on my granite flask.
Whenever i was about to take damage i would use my granite flask, increasing my armor and also making me less prone to stuns.
As soon as i take damage, i use the lifeflask, thus further increasing my armor.
If i knew i would take even more damage, i added the jade flask on top of that.

Theoretically, you dont need the jade flask at all. 50-60k granite armor is more than enough.
You can replace that jade flask with another instant life flask instead.
I was just greedy for huge armor numbers, which is why i used it anyways.


The only thing that is wrong with armor is that it is not intuitive how to get good amounts of armor in this game.
If you want to utilize armor as a defensive mechanic, the main bulk of that armor is not going to come from your gear at all.
Most of it is going to come from auras, IR, and flask effects.
Armor from gear is just there to further supplement that armor, but it will never be the main bulk of your defense.

uh, block and stun recovery doesn't work as extra life for the chance to stun calculation, what it does is decrease the duration of the stun which is entirely different

How much HP do you have atm (and what diffulcty/act are you on) as that is a large factor regarding stuns

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Real_Wolf wrote:

uh, block and stun recovery doesn't work as extra life for the chance to stun calculation, what it does is decrease the duration of the stun which is entirely different

It does nothing for stun chance but it does plenty for stun duration yeah.

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gh0un wrote:

In order to prevent being stunned you have to have enough life and enough damage mitigation.
Stun duration depends on how much life they take from you with that particular hit.
If you watch the video i posted on last page, you can see my flameblaster on a vulnerability map (vulnerability increases physical damage taken and in the last patch it was also increasing stun duration and the video is from last patch) and even though i get shocked on top of that (increasing damage taken even further), they still dont manage to stun me at all or just for very brief moments.
I can still run around freely without being stunned too much.
Later on when i had even more armor and life, i was basically immune to stuns.

So you have several choices.
1. get more life
2. get even more armor/damage mitigation
3. get unwavering stance in the passive tree
4. get an item with unwavering stance on it, like kaom´s roots
5. get a cloth belt, which increases your block and stun recovery (which effectively increases your lifepool for purposes of stun calculation)
6. get a flask with block and stun recovery effect on it

Sorry, I don't get stunned because i do have unwavering stance. The issue is more the knockback and then trying to get in close to hit and then knockback or when they do it all so quickly that my life just goes from full to zero at breakneck speed. I only have 1.8k life. I am in merciless and I have 8k armor that goes up to 12k with determination. I am lvl 63. I grabbed all the armor bonus nodes in the str and the +30 Inc Armor nodes near the duelist. I dropped one of the +30 clusters for life because it didn't seem to help as much as the life. I have the nodes that have mace/stun or mace/armor. I grabbed two extra endurance charges plus got the Oak quests all three times. My two hand mace allows me to stun more often than my using my mace and shield. I switch between them. I can survive a little better with the shield but hit all day and never kill anything.

As expected, your issue is primarily that you don't have enough life. 1.8k is very low, i'd say 2.5k is minimum for merciless. Try getting higher +life rolls on gear, haku can enchant +50-60ish, and you should be able to get plenty of gear with this. I play my characters often with pretty much no armour or evasion, and with about 2-3k life and good resists I can take on most content. Focus on that life and the life nodes on the tree FAR more than you are at the moment

You just have too little life.
For a melee character i recommend atleast 3-4k life for merciless.
With only 1.8k life, its not even about armor anymore, you will die to all kinds of elemental sources of damage without even realizing what happened.
Having more than double the amount of life makes you a lot tankier.
Armor alone doesnt help if your lifepool is too small.

You have several choices how to make a tanky character.
Either you go full life like my flicker duelist who has 7k life.
He just takes the big hits and then leeches it back up with lifeleech.
Or you go the armor/evasion life mixture route. There i recommend around 4.5k-5k life.