Defenses are So bad!!!

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

spike damage yeah but not 10k physical damage in a single hit. What actually does 10k pure physical in 1 hit? Shaper slam and....? A vaal oversoul slam in a tier 14 maze map when you have vulnerability on you maybe. Thats it, I doubt I have ever been hit with 10k phys in a single hit while mapping ever in 12k+ hours played.

Very high armour will be effective against small hits, yes thats true, but its also true to say medium amounts of armour will be effective against large hits. Its like saying 1 million dps barrage can kill a white crab, its true but if youre saying in a way that suggests that is all it can kill then it becomes extremely misleading, it paints a false picture overall. Builds with mid amounts of armour like 20-25k trivialize virtually all physical damage while mapping.

I dont think stacking something like block is as easy as stacking evasion for example, I think evasion is actually really quite easy to stack. I can hit 20k+ evasion without spending a single point on evasion itself or running an aura, just what I get from life nodes and dex traveling passives. You say 3 passives for charges, you have to take the duration nodes before them so its 6 passives to have 6 endurance charges, vs 0 passives for 20k evasion. I have a marauder who has over 20k armour and 14k evasion at the same time, total passives spent on exclusive defense nodes is 2 passive points to get cloth and chain, I run 1 aura which is grace. It doesnt take a ton of passive investment + 2 auras to make an effective armour character, it takes 2 passives to make an effective armour character and 2 passives + 1 aura to make character than has effective armour and effective evasion.

I dont think the investment is anywhere near as bad as people make out and I dont think the incoming damage per hit is anywhere near as large as people make out.


I know theres a lot of spike damage in endgame, but I personally experience hardly any at all. Evasion builds are pretty shit and so are armour builds, I never really play either of these things seriously because theyre trash. So should they be buffed? Yeah perhaps they should. But I do use both armour and evasion a lot, just not on their own. Should they be enough on their own? Maybe, but theres also a train of thought that says crit strikes are not enough on their own, does that make crit shit? In order for crit to be good you have to stack it with increased damage, increased attk/cast speed, several layers of more damage, you need not only crit chance but also crit multi, so does all this add up to crit being shit because just stacking crit chance is not enough on its own to carry your damage completely? Armour doesnt carry your defenses completely either, you also need endurance, and probably a flask, some life, either block or evasion, fortify, and were making the case that because we also need these other things that armour is shit. Well, theyre there, and everyone using armour properly is stacking all these things just like everyone using crit chance is also stacking a ton of other damage layers.

I think theres a middle ground where armour and evasion should probably be a little better, but I dont think they should be massively better because they can and should be stacked with other things and they are already functional in that role, they shouldnt carry your defenses alone. They nerfed basalt flask, and this is more where I think a good balance should be made, basalt was nerfed, should maybe be slightly nerfed again to say 12% and mob damage maybe slightly nerfed to compensate so that they remain about the same for non armour characters using them, and then vaal pact needs to go. I dont even know if you need to buff armour and evasion after that, maybe slam an extra 2% on to every node that has armour or evasion and call it a day.

I think they could do something like that which would make them rly good and people quite possibly wouldnt even notice. I think the big changer might be vaal pact, if you remove that source of overpowered sustain then youre going to force people to use mitigation. People said life was shit, unplayable, and they destroyed es now everyones playing life, the extra 20 life on ur gloves and boots we got only just makes up for the 40 life we lost from oak and now everyones doing just fine with life. It hasnt improved, all the people who said life was too shit to work are now playing life and shapers are still going down, atziris are still being killed, and they havent actually buffed life, essentially they made it worse because to escape the oak nerf you lost defenses on your items.

I do not disagree with a single thing you said, besides mayb that 20K-25K armour trivialise all physical damage while mapping. However again that was not my agument. Yeah, armour and evasion are a nice EXTRA with little investment. As you said though you CHOOSE to not invest in them. Look at the skill tree, and look at crafting. There are TONS of armour and evasion passives, yet nobody picks them unless they are hybrid with something else. Look at rolling items. Armour/Eva need 3 top rolled mods which would cost hundredes of exalts to craft, yet MOST times, Belly, Kaoms or another unique specific for a build will be a better option than at TOP rolled Armour/evasion Chest. The potential for investment is there. The game gives you the option on invasting in Armour/Evasion MORE than anything else in the game, but does it worth it?

And since you mentioned crit, here is the exact opposite. Crit needs alot of investment, far more than resolute tequnique, but the investment here is TOTALLY worth it. So that again is my point. Armour and Evasion are PRIMARY defenses, that you can INVEST tons in them, both in gear and passives, and yet they feel secondary defenses and not the other way around. Yeah, they can be kinda helpful, but they are the leftovers that nobody seriously invests on.

I beleive both need a massive buff, even if that means nerfing other defenses (take that with a grain of salt since GGG always go overboard with nerfs), and of course nerfing the overall player damage. GGG has stated that top rares should always surpass uniques, and generally the better your gear is the more powerful you are. But the primary defenses that have the most potential to SCALE with gear are always outshined by other means.

my take on why 'there are EV or AR or ES nodes everywhere' is exact opposite of yours: it is this way so pretty much everyone can pick at least few nodes no matter what he tries to do

there being lots of these nodes around does not mean you are supposed to take all of them.

both AR and EV have very strong 'soft cap' effects around ~10k and this value is rather easy to reach (not trivial but easy with 'end-game' gear).

10k AR + 6end charges makes pretty much all phys damage out there trivial. you do not need 50k (ofc it makes it even more trivial) but the skill is in knowing when to say 'enough' and start picking other defences

it takes like 2 items to get 1000 base EV on any build (400EV gloves and 600EV helmet - not difficult to get), this with few passives gives you 2000 before flasks. on an AR build. without any other investment. sure - it is not A LOT but it is perfectly enough to save you from stupid death from barrage of snakes or dying porcupines

nowhere in this game notion of stacking ONE defences can be found. on the contrary - content, gearing and general passive tree layout should make people understand immediatelly that 'maxing one thing' is.. not optimal

btw. kill Vaal Pact, kill it with fire..

Yeah, but then again IMO, armour and evasion rolls on items should be simplified to just one, because in general, how hard is something to roll (or aquire in general), would be somewhat in line with how effective it is. Stacking 3 T1 armour mods on your chest for belly to be better feels just meh. For example crit daggers were the hardest weapons to roll, since they needed top rolls in crit chance, crit multi, dammage and attack speed, AND they could roll caster mods which made it even harder, so they rightfully were the most powerfull weapons (this should not be THE BEST for every build, just the highest potential DPS).

Using enduring cry and having fortify on a movement skill gives you 32% Physical damage reduction (against everything) with absolutely zero investment. This IMO is not good as well because mob damage is also tuned with that in mind.

I do not think they should kill vaal pact. I think they should nerf player damage by A L O T, and then nerf Vaal Pact to have something like 40,30,10% -i do not know- leech effectiveness, in order to only be viable (but still dangerous) to TRUE glass cannons that also have Godlike weapons that cost shitloads of currency. In the current state, even if they remove Vaal Pact not much will change. Leech will still dominate since bosses end up being DPS race anyway.

For me it is:

-BUFF defenses by ALOT
-Nerf player damage by a hell whole lot
-Nerf Vaal Pact
-Reduce endgame boss HP
-Reduce non telegraphed spike damage

I miss the time when a cheap Bringer of Rain block character could clear the whole game, SLOW BUT STEADY, and the only of myt characters that could deal crazy damage was a 300ex Flicker Striker, who still died more.

Whatever; people are biased. The fact is if you get a bit of everything you can survive. But only if your DPS is also through the roof.

10k or even 100k armor is not enough by iteself. For mitigating physical damage. When 6 endurance charges or even Basalt Flask + Fortify will be better then just about any amount of armor you can get. Heck there are many flask that are better then any amount of aromr you can get.

Yet you get people like Yesu who think there tanky, because of defensive stats. And what do they have? A million other things going other then the primary defenses. The dude can't even take 3 auto attacks, and claims his defenses are fine.

This game is not really good at all when it comes to defenses. Your 100% better off getting a large life pool through ether HP or ES then anything else. And then life leaching it back up. Even if they remove VP. This won't fucking change.

The defensive stats themselves suck. When 4% reduced physical damage from endurance charges will always be better then any amount of armor or evasion you can get.

Go ahead and keep lying to yourselves when you say that the defenses are fine.

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Yet you get people like Yesu who think there tanky, because of defensive stats. And what do they have? A million other things going other then the primary defenses. The dude can't even take 3 auto attacks, and claims his defenses are fine.

lol. You again? As i said you have no clue what you are talking about. You seems to have no idea how much damage must be mitigated in the t16 i showed you. To sum it up the char has currently 6.1k hp 54k armour 8ec(+tukohama+solaris) 31% reduced damage taken against phys , 39% against elemental and 12k evasion, with blind on melee range when needed. Yet usually i would not have run such mods in a t16 coz i know , even for my build , it's not recommanded(especially if i want to do the boss).

Move on dude , you trolled enough.

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astraph wrote:

Look at rolling items. Armour/Eva need 3 top rolled mods which would cost hundredes of exalts to craft

http://poe.trade/search/ihuhanodikonit

or you can get a good armour chest for about 2 chaos on poe trade?

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TheLockedGuy wrote:

6 endurance charges or even Basalt Flask + Fortify will be better then just about any amount of armor you can get.

that isnt actually true.

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TheLockedGuy wrote:

Heck there are many flask that are better then any amount of aromr you can get.

thats also not true.

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TheLockedGuy wrote:

The defensive stats themselves suck. When 4% reduced physical damage from endurance charges will always be better then any amount of armor or evasion you can get.

If you want to make a thread on the subject and have the people who wrote the maths that these systems use in the game take you seriously then its probably worth actually looking at the maths and understanding it.

A case could be made for buffing armour and/or evasion, but if the justification given is that endurance or basalt or fortify etc are better than armour at mitigating phys, which isnt true, then youve made no case for it. If people give a justification that armour only works against small hits, and that is false, the devs know its false, then its the same thing.





astraph says no one invests in armour or evasion, thats not entirely true but its no far off right? Very few people are actually investing in them, its pretty close to the mark. Very few people were investing in them before 3.0, and now 3.0 has landed they have nerfed the amount of life we have via oak and in order to get that life back we have to lose even more armour/evasion from our gear, making ar/ev less worth investing in than they were before, and it was already the case that very few people bothered to invest in them.

MoM CoD AA was nerfed because too many people were using it, it was essentially a pretty shabby defense that didnt need nerfed because of its power, it wasnt powerful, it was simply popular. This follows with a lot of GGG balance, so why not buff ar and ev a bit? Right now the defense trinity, AR, EV, ES, none of them are popular things to stack. We can go back and forth with opinions on their effectiveness, but ultimately balance happens because of player trends more than actual power most of the time and player trends says that the entire defense trinity right now sucks.

Theres no escaping that the game is designed around these 3 primary defenses, people are not using them = shit designed game, poe defense right now is a design failure, its not fine because thats just the meta, its not fine because theres always good and bad things so its ok for things to be bad... No, these are CORE mechanics that have been designed to be used, are present on all our gear, and if they are not being used because they are perceived to be worthless then it is a design failure that needs addressed. Mana being the most popular defense back in the CoD days was an issue, but at least the mana came from energy shield back then, at least is was a use of 1 of the 3 primary defenses. Now mana isnt even tied to es, and having mana + vaal pact as the only widely perceived credible defenses in the game is an abomination that needs dealt with. Not changed so that theres a temp meta that uses the 3 defenses which then gets cycled out again, they must ALWAYS be good, these arnt skill gems to be rotated in and out to keep things fresh, these are core mechanics which must always remain used and important.

imo.

it is not only the design. it is also about 'playerbase education' - i.e. beliefs, myths and other popular theories that are simply wrong

example? MoM. 95% of the playerbase did some risky and ineffective tricks with it while ignoring THE way of playing MoM (damage gained as mana on hit). even now - with the nerf - it is THE way of playing it. but instead of trying and making it work people prefer to play some impractical 'regen' setups and run OOM more often than not.

more recent example? 'poison is dead!' and then Mathil happens..


and this is ALSO on the developers. GGG does 0 communication in this area. ZERO. NADA. not a single comment, tutorial, explanation, guidance - NOTHING

developers SHOULD intervene once their vision and playerbase' vision start to diverge. build of the week is a cool tool but right now it only showcases stuff that should be nerfed/removed anyway (vaal pact) and has little to no educational value. it could be used to showcase that AR/EV are in fact worth using - with relatively good gear (not 6linked 98 percentile stuff) to make people believe it. noone takes seriously when people with mirrored stuff start giving advice - regardless of its merrit


oh. and the young generation 'all want it now' + 'all or nothing' + 'broken OP vs useless garbo' approach to life does not help. they all want to start with new BMW at the age of 23 and will not, absolutely NOT accept any worse just because. no middle ground.

In the end Player DPS should be greatly nerfed on several skills (and maybe buffed on others). That is a FACT. Investing on defense in general does not have the same returns as investing in damage. I do not play PoE serisouly since 2014, but i have made several characters for fun. I usually build glass cannons because that's the playstyle i enjoy in most RPGs. I might even say that i was even one of the first guys to popularise glass cannons in the Shadow class back in early 2013 with this build that was VERY popular back then (i might say on of the most popular shadow builds of all time). That was on my other account "Poutsos".

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/417287

But back then the game was very different. Builds with over 200hundred exalts could reach 200K+ DPS, and they were still kinda dangerous, and most times it was not worth it, because a block character of 5 exalts total could still clear the game much slower, but safer. Nowadys people reach millions of DPS with 100-200 chaos worth of gear. Every next day you hear "hey guys it;s Mathil here once again, with my new 200 chaos build that has 2 million Shaper DPS" etc. As much as i love masters and Ascedancy, they made scaling DPS so easy that practically made investing seriously on defenses obsolette - THAT goes toe to toe with severe nerfs in defense in the past as well. Nerfed Block, Nerfef acrobatics, nerfed shields etc.

But since i am talking about investment, and defenses vs damage, i made an experiment around chrstmass. I said since i am usually trying extreme glass cannons, let's try an EXTREME tank. So i built an insane gladiator. Legacy Kaoms, Legacy Aegis, Mirrored dagger to have some damage etc(400 exalts or something). Results: 9K HP, 78% block/spell Block, 40K armour before flasks, 1K Es, 8 Endurance charges, close to 1K life regen, fortify, chaos golem, tempest shield, artic armour... Basically EVERYTHING you can imagine. This dude had 20K DPS (which was ENOUGH back in Open Beta/early release to clear the whole game). This also was not meant to be a balanced build. This was meant to be an extreme immortal tank, same as the extreme glass cannons i made. Results? I could not kill a single guardian with 20K DPS, and while i was immortal on most cases still damage overtime destroyed me since my DPS/leech was not enough to overcome it, essentially making a generic 1 ex DPS dude more effective in even SURVIVING in the long run.

So yeah. This is not player perception etc. Defenses are not worth the investment compared to Damage. And damage can be scaled WAY too high. THIS is the biggest problem. Not vaal pact.

In the end, armour/evasion or even ES as a DEFENSE (and not HP), were never popular on theirself, so that goes beyond player trends. Player invested alot in armour in the past because it synergised well with Aegis Aurora. People were investing alot in evasion at some point because it synergised well with capped block(which was easy before the block nerf/shield nerf) and acrobatics (which did not reduce block chance back then) etc. There was not a single point in PoE\s history where people were: Look at my amazing armour character. Block on it's own can be sufficient (with minor armour/eva). Acrobatics on it's own can be sufficient (with minor eva) and high DPS. ES on its was sufficient only with CI used as a buffer. High HP/ES on it's own with some damage + leech was ALWAYS sufficient. Insane DPS(even with cheap gear) +instant leech is always sufficient etc. The three main defense were never greatly balanced in PoE's history, and only were effective as a cute extra or a side effect of something else. Sure most builds will synergise alot of layers of defense/offense, but some definetely stick above the others, and core mechanics like evasion were never one of them.

Watching a good rolled Armour chest with high HP cost 1 chaos is painfull. But that's to be expected, when the most important thing in chests is having enough HP and 6 Links to scale your damage (it again goes down to damage+buffer+leech), and when uniques like Belly of the beast will anyway outperform it.

Also while i think Snorkle's post is excellent, when he claims that basalt+endurance charges+fortify is NOT better at mitigating phys than armour, i do not see why it is not (at least when it matters). Yeah, my 10K physical hit was excessive, i admit, but 3K physical hits in red mads with stacked damage mods is pretty frequent. stacking a basalt with fortify and 3 endurance charges (EXACTLY 0 investment in gear and passives), will give you 47% damage reduction, so almost as much as 30K arour would give you. Stacking both 30K armour and the above will give you an additional ~700 reduced damage on top of the initial 1500. So how that is worth it in any case, while instead you can invest the extra passives/gear/currency into higher HP/damage. Yeah sure, 10-15K armour that you might have just from your gear/hybrid passives with something else will help abit but that;s not really investing. And it generally it does not worth to invest. Especially in armour. I actually think that since we can have so high mitigation from practically nothing (which is nota good thing BTW because monster damage is balanced accordingly), investing abit on evasion might be more beneficial.

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when he claims that basalt+endurance charges+fortify is NOT better at mitigating phys than armour

It's not what he said though. Troll Master was claiming basalt+ec+fortify is better than ANY amount of armour , which is indeed false even if the amount needed is important.

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basalt with fortify and 3 endurance charges (EXACTLY 0 investment in gear and passives), will give you 47% damage reduction

Not exactly, while basalt is additive with EC , it is multiplicative with fortify so the mitigation is ~41.6%.

well to be fully exact he said 6 endurance charges OR a basalt + fortify, which is 2 things neither of which are all 3 of the reductions together.

Fortify is a layer on its own so its not additive with endurance and basalt. So if you have 3 endurance + a basalt you get 27% phys reduction, 73% getting through, the fortify is then 20% of the 73% rather than adding to the total to make 47%. It gives another 14.6% to make a 41.6% total reduction.

30k armour is a pretty hefty amount, if we just go for 25k which I think is more reasonable for someone whos invested hardly any passives and no aura, youre gonna get a 45% reduction against the 3k hit. Sure, its in the realm of the other 3 added together. Thing is, your basalt, fort and endurance, they are not always up, the armour is always up and its essentially doubling your phys reduction when ur fully buffed vs just having the other 3. You still want to have the other 3, youre gonna be going armour + 6 endurance + basalt + fortify anyway, I dont think the armour becomes insignificant in that picture, its still the most effective single piece of that layercake, by far. But I have to attach a side note to that and say that I wouldnt play a character whos defense was 25k armour + 6 endurance + basalt + fortify, presuming this is a 6k-7k life character. To me that sounds like something that is going to die, not to a 1 shot, but to burst damage that will kill you virtually instantly and feel like a 1 shot. So Im not claiming that those things together make a great defense, just that when you look at the reductions armour can still be significant along side these other things.


Player damage is making vp stronger than it should be, and vp was fine back when we didnt have these damage levels. but honestly I think the damage is here to stay and vp is allowing a situation where people just have to say ok, life pool is the only defense I max out and from there the more damage I get the more my survivability goes up, so its feeding that dps meta. As long as damage = survivability via that node youll never make defenses important. If you remove it then people are going to have to look at defense vs dps as a trade off, not as a combined investment. When youve taken every life node in the area and you are turning to crit multiplier as your secondary layer of defense, and that is working for you, I feel like somethings gone wrong.


In my game vp is not an issue, because I basically never use it on life chars and it doesnt work on es now, I dont see it as a mandatory thing. But I think if you look at the wider community meta its pretty obvious at this stage that its gone beyond a problem, I dont see how it can remain at this point. The entire discussion of monster damage vs armour vs evasion vs es vs regen vs flasks, I feel like the entire defense balance debate cannot happen until that node is removed and we see what exactly we are left with. Ele reflect almost certainly would need calmed down, but all the other things? I agree with sid, i think defenses have been left in the dark for so long that the majority of the player base doesnt even really know whats there in the shadows. It might be good, might be too good, might be dreadful and in need of massive adjustments.



I know what my opinion is because I already use all the defense mechanics in a wide spectrum of different ways, I know what I think works and what is shite. But you just dont know where the community are going to go, what 50,000 minds trying stuff out are going to uncover that the 50 people currently using defenses other than vp and hp havent worked out.