I would love there to be a decent way to get a little Armor in this game...

Armor is pretty weird in this game and I hate it. The fact that the best way of getting a lot of Armor is simply by stacking Evasion (lol) pretty much sums up how ridiculous the situation is.

Here's my current build:
http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMAAuMEBwSzB6UQWBEPFE0Wbxo4GmwfAiSqLJwtfTI0NsU26TpYOthJsk3YT31RYFXGZp52EX6vfuKAVoFvghCDOIPbjHaNGZBVna6ePKIApwinhKyYtYW4k8AawbTYJNlf2t3djN6w34rfsOAS42rk7OcL6-7sOO9Q73zzvvrS

I want to make a hybrid life/es build with a little armor as back-up, but I cant get that up. I am absolutely getting destroyed by physical attacks and I would love to have a little bit of armor here and there.

But
- gear has too little armor available
- all the armor nodes are % nodes which only become good once you have a ton of armor already from gear
- Determination is a very expensive aura and also is percentage based.
- Molten shell cast animation is just stupid and impossible to keep up all the time.

Only option seem to be granites which are flasks ...

so what do we do?

The problem is that Iron Reflexes is too powerful. It's essentially the only way to up armor, basically doubling the sources of it. Armor is balanced around the presumption of having it, otherwise it would be overwhelmingly powerful instead of simply too powerful.

Armor should be given a strength bonus which would be negated if you took Iron Reflexes.

yea but I am nowhere near Iron Reflexes... I just want to have 1k-2k armor on my build so that I stop dying like a bitch whenever I run into a pack of monsters, which is currently hard to avoid as I run Lightning Tendrils...

There's simply no good solution if you are on that side of the tree, or if you dont run full armor gear.

so nobody has any solution?

Simply put : don't bother with armor.

It's shit in this game : it only works when you spec a lot in it (as in : full armor nodes+determination+iron reflexes with godlike equipement) and even with that it's completely destroyed by enemy crit or big hits (kole for example). And it's again behind evasion when enemy has elemental damage mod (evasion can avoid it, armor takes all in the face).

Just spec you character with :
-armor/ES equipement preferably, of anything you can equip if you need elemental resistances
-life/ES or pure life nodes, forget about armor nodes; life will give you a much bigger buffer than armor and works against everything
-Cast When Damage Taken +enduring cry + immortal call + increased duration (upped as you need them, you don't need lvl20 gems, i usually go for CWDT at lvl5/6)
-Cast when stunned + molten shell + decoy totem/shockwave totem and some other spell (i like cold snap for the freeze chance)


With that you should have a much better survival.

You can go without IR and get 20k without pots.

IR kinda sucks to be honest if you have good gear, you can build 10k armor and 40% evasion together.

Just get 2k on the chest, 1.5k on the shield, 500+ on helm. It's all about the gear.

If you you only want a couple k, like you said, just use a granite.

"

Kranyum wrote:

so nobody has any solution?

Looking at your tree, adding the Body and Soul cluster with a decent chest would get you your 2k+ armour.


Would become even more effective if you could also add a way to generate Endurance charges.

Something like Daresso's Defiance would fit the bill.