Defenses are So bad!!!

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astraph wrote:

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.

Not sure I get what you're trying to prove here..

You overinvested into defense to a point were you had nothing at all left for offense (20k with a mirrored dagger?). If this was all "for science", good job, but of course it doesn't work like this. Same as the other extreme doesn't work, 0% life trees with all damage nodes taken.

You need to find the right balance for your own personal playstyle, that's the whole point of creating a build and "making it work".

If we put offense and defense against each other, not in terms of "number of skillpoints spent", but what you try to accomplish in the grand scheme...
Your build was ~99% Defense / 1% Offense.
Mathil is usually somewhere around 30% Defense / 70% Offense.
I'm usually more around 60% Defense / 40% Offense.
Potato computer, need a bit more tankiness.

I think this game is in a good state when anything between 25%/75% and 75%/25% can be played, while 0-24%/76-100% and its counterpart are garbage.
With the one extreme paying the price in lower clearspeed, and the other paying with constant risk of death.

And I don't think we're too far off that state.
Change fortify.
Change Vaal Pact (directly or via lower player damage).
Lower monster damage.
Burn the bridges between offense and defense (righteous fire, dark pact ... more life should never equal more damage).

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astraph wrote:

2) Armour does not do anything against elemental damage. So practically you are building a tank that is useless against over HALF the damage in the game. Having resists is a give. Damage is balanced with capped ele resists in mind. When you build a tank you want and need more.

see this is why I never go ham on armour. Sure you can make 50k armour tanks, but I never do it. I think at the point it starts taking a serious investment youre wasting your time really. Im more about getting the good prefixes on gear, using the natural armour from life nodes, maybe grab a couple of armour nodes, maybe bench armour % on a ring, if Im a marauder I might go jug and take the cant be stunned + double armour node. But then when ur at 15k, 20k, 25k armour, whatever you got, Id then go for 15k evasion using an aura, some gear prefixes etc, or Id go for decent block, some way to avoid all attack damage including elemental and chaos. Id do the same thing with that, Id look to make a small investment in an effective amount and then tap out before it really cost me. Maybe I get 60-70% block, perhaps as gladiator with it doubled to spells. What does it take to get the 78%? I got to find another 7 nodes to get to here and then I got to use the amulet and... no, too far, Im gonna stop the investment while its still quite casual, grab some easy endurance charges, socket fortify, roll a chemists basalt, maybe we cna squeeze in arctic armour.

I feel like the minute you start saying youre dropping an amulet that has life and damage and youre dropping entire wheels of life or damage on the tree to go that extra mile on any given layer of defense its probably a waste of time. Stacking too much of the same thing with a different name is also a bit questionable. Endurance, basalt and armour are additive, they help each other and its an easy stack, but theyve all got the same weakness, you have armour and that leaves a hole in your defense which is elemental attacks and spells, then youve stacked 2 other things on top and none of them have plugged that gap. Its the same with evasion and dodge, I have evasion so i get 1 shot by phys, and then I added dodge and I still get 1 shot with phys... ok, what next? Shall we add some block maybe? No, because thats still another "I avoid damage X amount of times and then get 1 shot" defense. Better to lose some of that evasion, come down from 30k to 20k and get a coil or a kaoms thats actually going to fill in the gap, and then a basalt and a taste of hate. So now you got ev and dodge which avoid stuff, not extreme amounts but enough, and then you got phys taken as ele and basalt which reduce phys, again without really investing that much. Now you bomb passives into every single life node and jewel slot you can get to have as much hp as possible.

Thats seems kind of rounded and air tight. Putting all those investments into armour and saying hey man I got 5.5k life, 50k armour, when I pot it goes to 80k and I have 8 endurance charges? That sounds like a build thats going to end with an "armour sucks" feedback post.


The thing that kills the 20k armour build also kills the 80k + 8 endurance armour build, because that thing is a burst of elemental loaded attacks that bypassed armour entirely. The thing that kills the 14k evasion build also kills the 50k evasion + 60% dodge build, because its the phys 1 shot that scored its chance to hit. But the thing that kills the 14k ev build doesnt kill the 20k armour build, and vice versa. The ele spells that kill both dont kill the 7k life build. The dots that kill all of them dont kill the build that has 6% life regen and a catalysed flask



because he didnt take vaal pact, spent 2 extra passives on dedicated regen and used a second life flask. Being all of those things at once takes the same sort of investment it takes to just be the 50k armour + 8 endurance guy. In that sense armour sucks but I feel like it cans till play a role in a defense that doesnt suck.





Does any of that matter if vaal pact alone is enough? For me yes because im the kind of clumsy idiot thats still going to die occasionally on a vaal pact build to trivial magic monsters that a passive defense build could have just stood still in for 5 minutes while I play with my cat. For most people I think the answer is no.


I quite like the idea of a hard limit on vp, "...up to X# life per hit..." so you get whatever is deemed a good number, 140 life on hit instant and then whatever leech is left over works like normal over time rate leech.

@Snorkle_uk
While I agree with everything you write in your last post (especially the "don't go crazy on a certain type of defense" part)... what do I do on a 2h build?

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Phrazz wrote:

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Yesu wrote:

I wonder who's the troll here....

What a lot of people "hate" about defenses in this game, is that when high tier maps comes along, a "tanky" build still has to dodge (most of) the same things a DPS oriented build has to. I only watched your Hydra video, and you really didn't do much "tanking".

Don't get me wrong, I do NOT think that any character should be able to face tank everything in this game (MAYBE with "perfect" gear). But as it is now, a glass cannon with VP and a certain pool CAN face tank most things in this game. A character built around defenses can not. That is a flawed balance, if you ask me.

I had a max block gladiator which was the first build I took into end-game maps. I ditched the build after a few months because a few things became obvious to me.

Tanky builds still have to dodge the same 1shot mechanics that glass cannon builds must dodge. So tanky builds are gimping their DPS for survivability against map trash. With less DPS the boss fights are longer, that means having to dodge more 1 shot attacks during the course of the boss fight.

My Slayer on the other hand, it can kill most bosses in 25 seconds or less. 9k health and 160k base tooltip damage. Fights against the guardians go much faster and so I have to dodge fewer 1 shot attacks.

If anything, the health pool change on bosses has me considering picking up more DPS nodes and dropping some health. A boss that can 1 shot me at 8k health will still 1 shot me at 9k health. So why invest skill points for the extra 1k health, when I could boost my base dps by 10k which translates to about 50k boost with flasks and charges.

Yeah, defense is shit against bosses.

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Tanky builds still have to dodge the same 1shot mechanics that glass cannon builds must dodge.

It really depends of your definition of a tanky character because you have in this very thread some examples that show the exact contrary.

LOL Vaal Pact is the only viable option? Are you off your meds? Armor and life regen are a huge part of surviving. If you can mix evasion, armor, and life gen you are even better or just goin full evasion with Iron Reflexes. Sounds like you are just a noob OP. A very salty noob.

EDIT: Hardcore player here too, yeah....surviving is possible, you just don't know how to do it.

Armor is almost worthless to avoid death, because killing a character is an elemental damage in most cases. Regen is also worthless, because enemies in high tier map deal a damage as over 5k instantly. Regen is too late.

In this game, the way to survive in high tier map is to kill enemies before being killed by enemies basically. Only number of life and VP are worth investing, but investing in other defenses is really worthless. A character staying in the pack without doing anything will die in no time even if it has armor over 20k or regen over 1k/sec.
Playing this game with defensive build really sucks, because a character cannot avoid death even if player invests a lot in defenses.

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enoecarg wrote:

Armor is almost worthless to avoid death, because killing a character is an elemental damage in most cases. Regen is also worthless, because enemies in high tier map deal a damage as over 5k instantly. Regen is too late.

You are wrong with regards to regeneration. If 5k hits are a problem for you, you are not stacking enough recovery and don't have a large enough pool for it to act on.

And that's fine - not every build needs to be a tank build. If you want a high damage build, you are unlikely in the extreme to get the amount of regeneration and buffer you need to make regeneration kick arse.

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In this game, the way to survive in high tier map is to kill enemies before being killed by enemies basically. Only number of life and VP are worth investing, but investing in other defenses is really worthless. A character staying in the pack without doing anything will die in no time even if it has armor over 20k or regen over 1k/sec.
Playing this game with defensive build really sucks, because a character cannot avoid death even if player invests a lot in defenses.

And this shows how you fail to understand regeneration builds. 1k/s recovered is low unless it is a supplementary defense. If you are going for regeneration as primary defense, 6-7k/s recovered is pretty respectable with a decent buffer. You won't reach such numbers for recovery from regeneration without using game mechanics that increase recovery, but that's one of the things they are for and they really do work well with regeneration.

And if you do make your build based around regeneration as your primary defensive layer, and throw in another 2-3k/s from non-VP leech when fighting packs, that's the sort of numbers you'll see in 3.0.

See e.g this video demonstrating how the two separate +50% recovery bonuses turbocharges the recovery from regeneration of my 13.4k ES flametank build:

Recovery bonus demonstration video


Regeneration tanks don't have anywhere near the damage of a good VP build, of course, but they do allow the player to be rather less attentive with regards to boss mechanics, to go AFK nearly everywhere if real life calls and return later to a still living character, to pretty much ignore labyrinth trap mechanics, and all in all allow a more leisurely playstyle - for those players who prefer their entertainment that way to living on the edge.

This is gonna be a bit of a wall of text.

Long story short, the game, from the ground up, has devolved into something where it's no longer feasible to have a true defensive focus. Right now, it's an almost impossible task to take a 90% defense focused build through the absolutely endgame, such as Shaper or Uber Atziri. Shaper is, mechanically, a dps race as you will inevitably be swamped with vortex zones the longer it takes you to kill him. Failing to kill portal minions fast enough might kill you without zana shield during the bullet phase.

Essentially the game boils down to having just enough defense that you do not die, then all offense to burn the boss down, skip phases, etc.



Now, from what I've seen in this entire thread, both sides do have a good point. The trick is generally to layer defenses, from avoidance to mitigation and buffer, etc. The OP does have a good point that Buffer+VP is exceedingly good, often outperforming defensive layering. The reason often has to do with Opportunity Cost and caps.

A lot of the avoidance stats (excluding evasion and movespeed) you have to go out of your way to relatively stack. Block is harder to stack, nigh impossible with a 2h. Dodge cuts down other avoidance along with buffer. More points in this means less points in other things. These things are also capped at 75% (78% block with anvil) while Evasion itself runs on the entropy system which guarantees an eventual failure. There's also the fact that every point in avoidance actively diminishes the effect of points in mitigation. There's also the fact that manually dodging the damage is just as effective as investing 20+ points on block/dodge/evasion.

When it comes to mitigation, there's caps. Resistance has caps beyond which investing in more is entirely worthless. Armor has soft caps in terms of trash mobs, and notably diminished effect on boss hits. There's also significant opportunity cost as you're eventually trading points for more armor (that does not do much for bosses or elemental damage), resistances (which cannot break caps without flasks or auras), or one of the several hard to find effects of damage conversion. Some of those items come at the cost of buffer. There's also the fact that resistances come fairly easy with gear. Fortify itself is hardcapped for most ascendancies and the passive tree.

Things change substantially when we focus on buffer. Life/ES/MoM, are all things you generally stack to begin with since it's good against all damage you can take, unlike armor or evasion. Most importantly, do not suffer from anything resembling a cap unlike armor, fortify, or resistances; more is simply more. It is in this way that Buffer scales exactly like damage, point for point, you will consistently get full value against all things for what you put into it.

When it comes to replenishment, regen and leech both synergize with your buffer. Regen is mostly capped to a % barring a few increased life recovery builds, while leech scales incredibly with your offense.

It is here that we see why Leech+Buffer are popularly considered the kings of defense. Both operate upon things that are almost limitless. Stacking life/hp/mana have limits far beyond what you'd see with armor, fortify, or resistances. Leech scales with your damage, which is almost limitless in this game. Both work extremely well with any enemy you could encounter.

Given what I've said before about how much of late game involves a hefty dps race, we see again why most popular builds devolve into dps/buffer/leech builds as there's a lot of synergy there with almost no downside to what you're defending against.

Typical guy who jerked off to ES and probably rmt most of his gear, no wonder account is set to private. Didn't die much with that 12k es right boy? Good bye.