Porcupine Goliath Damage is too much

im honestly not sure. A basalt + 3 endurance charges is what? 27% phys reduction? its not a lot but its something. I think a lot of the people just die, decide es sucks and stop playing it tbh, or simply live with dying so to speak, accept it as something that happens.

pure es like that is pretty sketchy, personally I dont recommend it, I havent really played with it since they removed instant vaal pact leech from energy shield, and even then it was kind of sketchy defence being propped up by a sketchy cheese leech mechanic.


The big regen tanks work, where people stack absolutely gigantic amounts of es and life regen with zealots oath. For regular es where you got 8-10k es... man, I just dont play it personally, i think its horrible. Its not alone tho, pure evasion is horrible too, so it pure armour. 2 is always more than 1, its as simple as that really, if you have armour + block its better than just having armour, of course it is, it has to be right? its simple logic.

Doing 2 things that work together is possible if its planned for correctly. Ci or life+es, they go well with evasion. If you add evasion in there its just so much better, to the point where I dunno why id play that sort of build without it. Block goes well with armour, evasion goes well with armour, phys taken as ele goes well with evasion+dodge...

if you get 2 things that do different things and put them together thats usually a solid start, and then u can crowbar in some little buff ups on top.

2 things that do the same thing dont count, evasion + dodge doesnt count, they both avoid damage, different mechanics but amount to the same thing. You can avoid damage (block, evasion, dodge), you can reduce damage (resist, armour) and you can absorb damage (life, energy shield). So you got 3 basic forms of dealing with incoming damage, everyone has an hp pool of some sort, standard hp pool doesnt count, when I say absorb im talking about getting an excessive amount of hp buffer beyond the usual 6k (ish) that would be recommended for every build.

putting 2 of these 3 general categories together is usually good. Majoring in only 1 of them is usually insufficient for 'good' defences. There can be a 4th category, which is recovery (leech, regen etc). Back in the bad days of vaal pact recovery was more significant, and im sure theres still regen tanks working just fine, but most of the time recovery has been too strongly curbed and spike damage is too rapid and deadly for it to be such a big factor. Its one of those things that you can crowbar in where you can on top of your major defences as a nice extra buff.


So thats how id look at defence in general. Life, es, mom, theyre all hp buffer, theyre all about absorbing damage. Thats cool, but if its proving insufficient and you want to step it up then pick something from the other categories basically. Different builds have different itemisation opportunities, different tree placements, figuring out what is the best viable investment is something you got to deal with on a case by case basis.

block? armour? evasion? phys taken as ele? dodge? these are all options to stack along side a build with a strong hp buffer that absorbs a lot of damage.


if worst comes to worst just going endurance, basalt, enfeeble and suffering through that sort of half measure defence setup might be the only realistic option given a character who is already far down the road of its existing build, but its something to think about for future builds while theyre still on paper.



evasion+dodge & phys taken as ele

armour & evasion

es buffer & evasion

armour & block

es buffer & block


these combos where u major in 2 things from different categories, they all deal with stuff like porcs no problem, they dont even register as a concern.