question about defence-types on armour (equipment)

Hey out there,

i have a question about the defence types from equiped armour. Is it recommended to focus on one type, like evasion, or is also a mix of two of them good to go?

I am playing a lvl 76 Hierophant with the "Sanctary of Thought" notable skill atm. Furthermore, i´m using armour/ES mixed- armour and the "mind over matter" keystone passive.

I started to mapping around a little bit, and i´m not sure anymore if the armour/ES mix will be good to go in the future. Should i focus on one defence type?

Thx for helping everyone.


PS.: i didn´t found a similar question at the forum. If there is one, im sorry.


Edit: corrected "armour/EG" -> "armour/ES"

Usually you want to focus on one at most. It's very unusual that a build will want two, and many builds don't really care about any of them. Mind over Matter generally falls into the last category - focusing on both life and mana means you can't really stack another defense, nor do you need to. Usually you'll get a small to medium amount of ES from gear and call it a day.

Further notes:

-Armour sucks unless you can get heaps of it (think 20k plus). Due to its mechanics it's useless against scary mobs otherwise.

-ES is fine to have random bits of. It's basically a second life bar after all.

-Evasion is somewhat effective with only a little investment, and also rewards being stacked. The problem is that it doesn't reduce the damage dealt by single hits, so you're very open to being one- or two-shot unless you combine it with other layers of defense.

There a advantages and disadvantages for both options:

Advantages of going single defence:
-strong against physical damage (armour)
-good to not get hit by attacks (evasion)
-higher effective life pool than actual life, good against ailments, immunity to chaos damage thanks to CI passive (ES)

Disadvantages:
-weak to elemental damage (armour)
-weak against spells, also you WILL get hit eventually (evasion)
-weak against stuns, no real damage reduction, without CI or other countermeasures weak to chaos damage (ES)


Advantages of hybrid:
-able to deal with pretty much all types of attacks, can still take a hit or two (AR/EV)
-able to avoid attacks, higher effective life pool can deal with spells (EV/ES)
-high damage reduction against physical attacks, ES deals with elemental damage and ailments (AR/ES)

Disadvantages:
-none of them is as specialised as a single defence type
-ES/?? hybrids have usually trouble with chaos damage
-if you want to improve EV/?? Hybrids with dodge, the other defence type suffers
-still weak to elemental spells (AR/EV)
-cannot deal well with with dot effects, a large amount of fast, decently strong hits or strong spells
-strong elemental or chaos hits and dot effects like ignite can still become problems

In general, hybrid defences aren't recommended to new players. They need a lot (and I mean a LOT) more fine tuning than the mono defences to make it work well. They can be quite powerful if executed correctly though.

Sometimes the skills you use in your build will dictate what kind of equipment to wear based on socket colors. Items with armor want to have red sockets, evasion items want green, and ES want blue.

This matters most for your 6 socket items like 2h weapons and chest pieces, items with 3 or 4 sockets can be easily set for colors using the Vorici crafting bench. It wouldn't make much sense for example to use a pure evasion chest piece if you need a 6-link with nothing but blue sockets for gems.

Hybrid items are the easiest for working with socket colors, they only have 1 off-color compared to 2 for pure items.

This is just something to consider as you design your build otherwise you may need to spend 1000 chromatics just to equip your gems.

Tanks a lot for your profound answers, they gave me a feeling about what is important and what is secondary for my question.


So my conclusion is:

"

viperesque wrote:

It's very unusual that a build will want two, and many builds don't really care about any of them. Mind over Matter generally falls into the last category

"

Kelderek wrote:

Sometimes the skills you use in your build will dictate what kind of equipment to wear based on socket colors.

i have to focus on one kind of damage mitigation (mind over matter in my case) and make a passive build around it (life + mana). What defence-types my armour have is secondary (in my case). What counts more is the fact that different types of armour have different chances for a certain colour of their sockeds.

please correct me if i forgot something important. Thanks a lot!

yes this is essentially correct.

I presume ur playing spells? If so then u want to look at ur gems, probably mostly blue but are there some reds? If so then you are fine sticking with the armour+es gear or simply going for pure es. Essentially the type of defense on the chest is irrelevant cause u wont be investing enough in it to make it do anything, its mostly just socket colours.

Thing with es gear and armour+es gear is that they can roll mana on them along with life, so look for stuff with high life and high mana, thats the priority.











On the general topic, defense stats typically need a certain level of stats to be effective, and then theres a higher threshold where they become powerful. Combining defenses can be a very strong way of building, but only if you can make all of them at least effective, for it to be worth it often you have to be able to make 1 or more of them powerful, with the others being at least effective to warrant them being there, as everything you have has come at the cost of not having something else.

It can take a lot of experience in making builds and playing the game in order to make a build and acquire the gear necessary to pull off many different defenses working together well. Quite often a new player may struggle to get any aspect of their defense into the powerful, or even effective range. While there may be players combinign all sorts of things at the high end, its best to work your way up to that because doing a lot of things badly is worse than doing a couple of things right.



Life: its the most basic defense stat, if the amount of life you get isnt good enough nothing else you do will make up for it. So I would advise concentrating on life as the number 1 priority, get as much as you can, try and have life on every bit of rare gear you can get it on.

then your secondary defense is mana in this case, get it where you can, try and squeeze it in on gear and passives as long as it doesnt compromise your life total too much.


further down the line when you are very confident stacking life well with a secondary defense you can try them all out, stacking life + armour, life + evasion, life + es, depending where you are on the tree and the gem colours of your build a certain type of defense will be an obvious choice, so go with that.



When you get to the point where you dont rly need any advice from anyone youll find yourself able to stack combos of things, lots of life + lots of armour + lots of endurance charges + a decent amount of evasion + smaller but effective amount of block + effective amounts of life regen. These kind of crazy combos are possible and extremely strong but quite hard to pull off while also having good damage, the passive point efficiency and the level of gear required is very demanding.

Its not that its not a strong end result, its just that if you were to try and stack life + mana + armour + es + + endurance charges + regen right now it would likely be a disaster and none of those things would reach the level where they are doing what they need to do. Simply stacking life + mana for you now and getting them to really good levels is a task in itself and will achieve far better results, if you get it right it will be more than enough to confidently play endgame and have a lot of fun with the character.




On a trivia side note, I find stacking armour + energy shield to be one of the least effective combos. It has its moments, its not that it cant be done well, but its an extremely niche combo, very demanding and very few situations where its actually worth doing. Of all the combos of the main 3 defenses, es+ev, ev+ar, ar+es, its typically the least effective of the bunch in my experience.