Why protecting yourself from physical?

Hi,

I wonder why a lot of builds have defense mechanics shifted towards protecting from physical damage? Like taking Iron Reflexes with grace and arctic armour, stacking armour, wearing Lightning Coil, using basalt and granite flasks, etc.

Why not utilize a huge HP pool, like 250%; or get MoM instead? Both can help with physical and elemental damage, and huge HP pool can also help vs DoT.

250% increased max life is only 25% more than 180%. That's equivalent to 20% reduction in incoming damage; same as fortify or five endurance charges. By stacking other defenses you can easily gain multiplicative effects.

For example, my totem marauder from Prophecy only had 154% increased maximum life. However, he also had 24k armour, seven endurance charges and a chaos golem. That's easily 90% damage reduction against trash enemies and I've estimated it to be 50% or more even against big hits from Izaro or Argus. To get similar survivability with life alone I'd need something like 400% increased maximum life.

OK, but what about non-physical damage? Isn't 154% life too low against elemental damage? Or maybe I am wrong and all huge hits are physical and 75% elemental resistances is already 4x more?

I tried searching, but couldn't find any information about nature of the most big hits in the game. Also I examined top HC players and it looks like a lot of them are CI/ES, i.e. they still stack a pool of (abstract) hitpoints.

About elemental damage, one of my recent close calls (not on HC) was when I opened a chest with my hybrid summoner (4k life + 4.5k es) and it left me with 500 life. It felt like an ice nova from the chest crit me, but I can't be sure because there is no combat log in the game.

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Rhans wrote:

OK, but what about non-physical damage? Isn't 154% life too low against elemental damage? Or maybe I am wrong and all huge hits are physical and 75% elemental resistances is already 4x more?

Elemental damage doesn't seem to be as much of a problem. I'm not sure if it's the resists or the nature of the hits. My non-armour characters always seem to have the most trouble against physical bosses. The biggest elemental hit I remember offhand is the ice nova from strongboxes, which can hit for 3-4k damage through capped resists.

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Rhans wrote:

I tried searching, but couldn't find any information about nature of the most big hits in the game. Also I examined top HC players and it looks like a lot of them are CI/ES, i.e. they still stack a pool of (abstract) hitpoints.

Stun threshold and elemental status ailment durations are calculated from pre-CI max life, so stacking life does benefit CI builds.

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databeaver wrote:

The biggest elemental hit I remember offhand is the ice nova from strongboxes, which can hit for 3-4k damage through capped resists.

Got it, thank you. We may also add more to big elemental hits like this: Atziri pizza and Ice Totem boss on a map. (I am not sure what melee characters can do vs the totem.)

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Rhans wrote:

Got it, thank you. We may also add more to big elemental hits like this: Atziri pizza and Ice Totem boss on a map. (I am not sure what melee characters can do vs the totem.)

Ah yes, Atziri's empowered flameblast is quite powerful. Due to how resistances work, increasing the cap is usually vastly more effective than increasing life. Consider these items:

(The important thing in the sceptre is the purity of fire gem.) Those give 18% increased maximum fire resistance, for a total of 93%. Compared to the default cap of 75%, it reduces incoming fire damage to almost a quarter. How are you going to match that just by increasing life?

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databeaver wrote:

Those give 18% increased maximum fire resistance, for a total of 93%. Compared to the default cap of 75%, it reduces incoming fire damage to almost a quarter. How are you going to match that just by increasing life?

Well, the question was not about life vs nothing. :) You can have all these items + 250% life, or you can have all these items + 180% life + 10k armour. So I am just asking why people prefer the second option.