to help me for 1.3 respec. a simple yes/no question inside.

For this time, I want to try out with no offensive nodes taken, mainly not taking nodes that boost your damages, critical strikes, attack speed, cast speed, etc etc.

Will you guys do the same? Yes, I can pull it off because I'm a full tank now? or No, it's possible but I prefer crit-ing to clear the map faster?

No, would never do that, I prefer glass cannons that focus on clear speed over MF or safety.

Part of the reason why I think it's a mistake is because no matter what you are going to get wrecked by something. Playing smart will help you survive way longer than being tanky. So if you're going to get killed anyways you might as well kill the mobs first before they can kill you.

You want to be as tanky as you have to.
Being more tanky gets you nothing in return.

In PoE, you have to tank up for rare "spike damage":
Having just 3000 life will be more than enough most of the time, even in higher maps, but then comes a situation that requires you to have 4000-5000 life AND some mitigation on top of it.
This can be bosses, or rare and blue monsters with cruel affixes, or a simple 2-3 second screen freeze.

So in Softcore, build a solid life pool, but then add more life or other tanking stuff only when you feel you die to often.
In Hardcore... well, if you don't know how much tank you need, don't play HC. ;)

Thanks guys!

Well, it's true that I do not know how tanky I need to be, just enough to survive 1-2 burst hits. I always play with more offensive nodes and more than often I find merciless "The Ledge's Kudoku" is deadly...

Which is why I'm thinking of using the 1.3 respec to overhaul my build and make it tankier, forfeiting the offensive nodes.

Hmm...I'll try to fiddle around the nodes again, see if I can achieve something balance.

I wouldnt do a pure tank.
Its not that useful in poe. But a tank who dual curses and lowers resists by EE or a aura spending tank can be very useful...

You will usually do best if you go for a balance between offense and defense and then adjust it in one or the other direction depending on your personal preferences. If you are going for a life based build you will almost always need a bare minimum of 100% increased max life or you will get one-shot, often. If you play a ranged char and manage to 'skill-dodge' most big hits you will be fine endgame with ~120% increased max life (example: i beat Atziri with 121% incr. max life (3301 life total) and 75/76/75 resists on my Ranger) but melee chars should usually aim for 140%+.
A similar rule can be stated for damage: if your damage is too low, mobs will pile up on you and you will get overwhelmed either by taking too many hits - or simply by boredom. Your tooltip DPS doesn't necessarily show your effective clearspeed for many builds but it is still a rough indicator of how much damage you deal. Most builds aim for a few thousand in Merciless and 10k+ for endgame maps on their main multitarget or AoE skill.

Elemental resistances are at least as important as raw life (if you stick to the above posted guideline of at least 100% incr. max life). Up to late Merciless you don't have to worry too much about armor or evasion from gear. Instead focus on getting your resistances to at least around 50% and 70%+ for the 'main element' of each act (I: cold, II: lightning, III: fire and lightning). In endgame it is very important to have all resistances at least capped at 75%. Once you have achieved that you can focus on getting your other primary defenses up to speed, mainly armor or evasion (energy shield is more of an extended life pool than a defense mechanism although it has elements of both).

After that come all the secondary and tertiary defense mechanisms like block, dodge, mind over matter, LIghtning Coil, Arctic Armor, Immortal Call etc. Most sucessfull builds will usually 'layer' one or more of the secondary defenses on top of their life and primary defenses for further damage mitigation.

The last layer of defense are your flasks and good flask management is a very important skill if you want to get to high levels, especially in hardcore. Flasks ave the benefit that you can easily exchange them to counter a known threat unlike the rest of your build, which is rather fix at a certain point. If you have trouble to kill Kudoku and you know it, you should simply bring a Topaz Flask just for that fight.

[TL;DR]: No

Staff Spectral Throw CWDT-Immortal Call Triple Purity Templar?

First thing that came to my mind, right before "disaster".

It might not be too bad though. You'd keep stuff at range with constant knockbacks, run around with 6 or 7 endurance charges all the time and cast Immortal Call if something hits you hard. Staves can easily get 8% crit chance so they shouldn't be too hard to scale from, i think about 60% crit is easily managable in a new league and this coupled with how ST works should be more than enough.

You could gear quite easily for crit/life because you wouldn't need many resistances thanks to the double/triple purity as well.

PS: I wanted to add CI to this to add chaos immunity but I don't think it's easily possible. Someone come up with a life and a CI tree to compare? I don't have access to the newest tree here.

PPS: I think going Hatred/Herald of Ice/prolif rather then purity will increase your survivibility because frozen enemies won't hit you at all and your ST will freeze the screen :D

The best defense against an enemy attack is simply denying your enemy the opportunity to attack. Punch first, punch fast, punch hard and it won't punch back.

Building a traditional tank is a bad ideea imho. There's always something that can punch through your defenses one way or another. That being said, there are plenty of defensive mechanisms available. You can let someone else take the "blame" (minions, totems, a hapless party member), you can leech, you can stun/freeze/curse to your heart's content...


@Dragone: might as well go glammer+msplash+mphys+aoe+prolif... add a couple of csnap traps... goddamnit now I have to make another build! XD

[off-topic]Merci difficulty is where max (or near max) resists become truly important, straight from act1. Sea witches, hellions, then electroskellies. The bosses are just icing on the cake.

I tweaked the my build a bit with the latest tree, and I saw this "4% additional physical damage reduction" node, is it just 4% alone? Or it adds up per endurance charges?

ps: Thanks for feed of thoughts, you all are awesome!

"

Naixshel wrote:

I tweaked the my build a bit with the latest tree, and I saw this "4% additional physical damage reduction" node, is it just 4% alone? Or it adds up per endurance charges?

This will obviously add up with armor and endurance charges.