How to build more durability for a witch?

There are a number of factors you have to think of.

The first and most important one is just having enough hitpoints. You should aim for at least 150% increased life, I prefer 170-ish. If you get all life nodes near the Templar, Witch and Shadow starting areas, you can easily surpass that.

When playing Witch and when you reach the 60s and onward, it's generally more efficient to use the ES nodes combined with the high intelligence you get from the northern part of the skill tree. ES gear is a bit more expensive but with good reason - it's simply more effective at building a large hitpoint pool. With good gear and some leveling, you could easily reach 8-9k energy shield with a much smaller passive point investment than what you would need to reach the same numbers with life.

If you don't like CI and lowlife, you can also play hybrid - get just the most effective life and ES nodes from the passive tree, look for hybrid ES/life gear and use Vaal Pact, Ghost Reaver and life leech to keep your ES up. You will be vulnerable to chaos damage and you'll have to learn to be extremely careful with chaos damage sources and maybe carry an amethyst flask, but apart from that, hybrid is a pretty good budget version.

There also are mind over matter - eldritch battery - ghost reaver/zealot's oath comboes, or just pure mind over matter builds, but here it gets a bit too technical and IMO you should steer clear of them for the time being.

Once you have secured a decent hitpoint pool, you have to think of other damage mitigation or avoidance mechanics.

You can go about that in a number of ways:

1. Rely on just a decent baseline hitpoint pool and having a ton of damage - killing everything before it reaches you. This is perhaps the strongest approach for softcore as you'll have excellent clear speeds and just the occasional death here and there won't be the end of the world.

2. Gear a strong endgame character with a large ES pool (CI or lowlife) and rely on a ton of damage with instant leech via Vaal Pact and Ghost Reaver. If something doesn't oneshot you, it can't kill you. That's a leech tank and some of the strongest builds in the game function like that, for example cast on crit dischargers. You can also be a hardcaster. This, however, is an expensive option and generally not recommended for new players.

3. Grab the Occultist +1 curse node and/or the Whispers of Doom node, grab Leadership for 30% radius and run with blasphemy - temporal chains and enfeeble. Once you get some level and quality on the Temp Chains and especially if you get the curse effectiveness nodes, this becomes extremely fucking strong. The monsters can barely move and you rarely get hit at all. Unique bosses have reduced curse effectiveness but it's stron even against them. This is in my opinion the strongest and most effective defensive option in the game at the moment if we consider how much you're getting out of a relatively modest investment.

4. Play Necromancer, get Mistress of Sacrifice, get the Sanctuary and/or Deflection clusters, link a mid-level CwdT with Bone Offering - Increased Duration and a level one CwdT with Tempest Shield-increased duration and you'll get almost maxed block and some spell block for just a few passive points. Another highly efficient defensive mechanic. Can be scaled further to get max block and max spell block with items like Rathpith Globe, Rainbowstride, Stone of Lazhwar and reckless defense jewels.

5. Be a summoner and let your minions do the tanking.


These are just the basics and what I can think of - there are many other tricks, details and approaches to getting survivability. It also depends a lot on your gameplay - proper flask usage and positioning make a huge difference unless you simply have too little hitpoints when there isn't much to be done.