Glancing Blows - courious

Hey, not so experienced casual here.
Can someone simply explain me when and why Glancing Blows is better than not taking it.

For example, where is the point that i dont need Glancing since its not efficient anymore, or is it always good to take it, no matter how much Block chance i got without it.

Cheers :)

GB was nerfed in 3.12. Before the nerf it served 2 purposes. 1) It synergizes very well with life/ES on block mods on gear. You go for max block with GB and every time you block you gain life. 2) To reduce variance. On average there is no difference in damage between 50% damage taken with 80% block and 100% damage taken with 40%, the former just has lower variance.

With the nerf 2) is no longer valid, I mean you still reduce the variance, but you increase the average damage taken that way so not a good idea in general. 1) is also weaker now but still viable, if you have lot's of life/ES on block and can't reach max block without GB then it's ok to take it. In general though i'd aim for high block without it.

Let's just overlook DoTs to keep comparisons simple.

Let's say we can break defenses into three major categories:
1. Avoidance
2. Mitigation
3. Restoration??

Block, Dodge and Evasion are in the first category. Being capped or at high percentages makes them the best defense I would say, but nearly useless otherwise. From zero to 50% avoidance, you take 50% less hits than before, i.e. your survivability doubled. But in order to FURTHER double your survivability, you don't have to add another 50% avoidance (that makes you immortal!) but just add another 25% to grand total of 75% avoidance. The more percentage you have, the less addition you need to again double your survivability. Eventually, imagine taking no damage at all from 9 out of 10 monster attacks. If boss has 1 sec per attack animation, then you have on avg 10 secs to recuperate your life loss thru regen/leech before you have to tank again. Expect to lose a lot of XP if you don't have over 50% avoidance and no other layers of defense.

To me, the legacy Glancing Blows have been somewhere between 1st and 2nd category. But with the recent changes, they've strayed away from 1st and has completely become just a "mitigation".

Assuming you have capped your block chance at 75%, they are now just a stronger version of Fortify (35% vs. 20~25% extension of your EHP pool) with a 25% chance of "downtime" when it provides no defense at all.

Once you combine with "ES/life gain on block", then it adds another layer to your defense which I would categorize it as the third type: restoration(??). Because it now becomes something like leech, regen, Ghost Shroud, Aegis Aurora, etc.

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utakata00 wrote:

Hey, not so experienced casual here.
Can someone simply explain me when and why Glancing Blows is better than not taking it.

For example, where is the point that i dont need Glancing since its not efficient anymore, or is it always good to take it, no matter how much Block chance i got without it.

Cheers :)

It depends how many spare points you have in your build to reach the keystone. The biggest nerf to glancing blows was the removed access to the keystone itself from thread of hope, so now there's quite a lot of passive points you would need to invest to get it. The actual numerical nerfs amounts to nothing noticable as long as you have your %life/es gain on block shield mod.