Massive difficulty spike?

DrTchock - We can´t see your tree/items bcos of XboX but the real problem are your resistances (don´t care about chaos now though).

You can get some nice items to solve this problem from other players but I don´t know much about trade on XboX.

Do you have your hideout and masters there and doing their dailies? (you can level them and craft some resist on your gear by using their crafting benches)

You can farm some easier areas and get some stuff or you can pick up any white 4 link item that fits your needs and use orb of alchemy or essence that offers resistance (you maybe get lucky with roll).

You can use any purity auras to keep your resistances up.

Vampiruga - Evasion is just one layer of the defense and might be really strong but you need other source of mitigation and lots of life anyway.

Concerning the evasion vs. armour discussion: It's easier to hit 95% evasion + 40% dodge than it is to get 90% physical damage reduction against hits over 3k. If your life pool is high enough to take two non-armour-mitigated hits, you should be fine with evasion.

Other than that, here's what I experienced:

First character after 3.0:
Died at least once to every mechanic of avarius, had a hard time against some of the packs in act 5. Resistances were maxed of course, but it was an ES character and I didn't know about the nerf when I made it. Also, I tried Storm Burst, and my build just sucked / the skill isn't worth the channelling effort.

Second character:
Figured out the avarius mechanics, evaded all of them, barely took any damage whatsoever. Oh, and I was offscreening trash mobs before with legacy death's opus + lightning arrow. Bursted down the boss without issues.

Third character:
Too much dps to hit any of the boss phases except the mandatory mob spawning one. Same happened with Kitava, even in act 10. Act 9 Doedre died in a second before the mechanics started. Having issues with survivability now that I'm doing maps, but solved that by getting 4 defensive flasks (stibnite, jade, granite, basalt, with suffixes staunching, adrenaline, reflexes, iron skin = no bleeding, movement speed, evasion, armour). Also, my build chills everything, I have a decoy totem and I constantly have fortify. It's not yet enough to avoid being onehit by izaro, but I have close to no problems against trash mobs.


I love theorycrafting and I'm spending more time in Path of Building than in Path of Exile. The builds I play (except the Storm Burst one which I just used to try out the skill) are usually well contemplated and calculated. I tend to prioritise offence more than what is good for me, but the problems only appear from uber izaro and red maps onwards.

There are several approaches how to tackle this problem.
First, as has been suggested, follow a guide, however closely (more information by someone before me)
Second, follow more general guidelines (like the hc guidelines below).
Third, theorise your own builds, preferably with Path of Building, now that it exists. Before that, most people had their own tools / spreadsheets as well as stuff like poeplanner.com.
Fourth, do by trial and error. This can be the most fun for people who like to play their own style, but you have to accept, that you'll end up with a lot of unplayable characters before you earn enough experience to make a good character based on instincts.

The fourth method used to be a lot more viable because you could play the whole story before hitting the difficulty spikes. After that, the story would just repeat anyway. Nowadays you will have to be content with playing the first five acts until you manage to at least get to kitava the second time to play the full story.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.

If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”


― Sun Tzu, The Art of War


-Know the enemies abilities, and how to dodge/counter them.

-Know what you are building, know what your characters strengths are, and also weaknesses.

-Know how to play around/through enemies that you are weak against.

The thing I absolutely love about this game is that while other ARPGs shape the content to the player, PoE shapes the player to the content.

I not understand this logic: taking over40000 evasion with dodge AND kiting all of possible damage. For what you need evasion+dodge in that case? Be better if i take over40000 armour and kite damage and will not fear if game decides to kill me by random success hit through evasion+dodge. By the way there are a physical based spells that cannot be evaded only dodged, some rare monsters have affix "Accurate" or accuracy aura that greatly decreases effectivness of evasion and nightmare affixes such as "Strong crits" that can easly kill you through all avoidence if you not use good negation.