Armor and Energy Shield And Evasion Ratios

I AM NOT LOOKING FOR WHICH IS BETTER! I am well (enough) versed in which does best where and where each should be used.

The game designers, designed the three types of defence to be equal, no one was designed to be the "best." As such there is gear sets for each, silk(ES), leather(evasion) and plate(armor.) But there are three more sets of gear, chain mail (ES and Armor), Scale (Armor and Evasion) and Padded (ES and Evasion)

My question is more for the hybrids out there, those that stack evasion and armor or armor and ES or ES and Evasion. Primarily what is the golden ratio(s?) for a half and half character?

Just looking at gear, armor and evasion points scale on a one:one ratio, Is this actually true in terms of % increased and % more buffs, (not from uniques) or is it easier to get more points off one than the other? (I am aware of the existence of Iron Reflexes.)

As for energy shield, on a hybrid character, one that uses chain or padded armor pieces, what is the direct conversion ratio, mathematically?

Looking only at white gear, the following is true:

White, endgame; best evasion vs best ES gear appears to be; 3:1
White, endgame; best armor vs best ES gear appears to be; 79:25
White, endgame; best armor vs best evasion gear appears to be; 553:525

However these ratios vary greatly depending on, level of gear, gear set (ratio of s̶c̶a̶l̶e̶ plate vs slik, compared to the ratio of chain) and type of gear (gloves vs boots vs helms ect.) With no one staying consistently in the lead. (It can be said that ES lags behind in pure numbers, but ES vs Life ES wins in numbers and ES is basicly more Life(I am aware that ES and Life do not function identically to each other.))

I suppose a good way to look at it might be to make three characters, one that has all "more ES" nodes, one that has all "more evasion" nodes, and one that has all "more armor" nodes, put them in the best white gear to make that stat shine, and see which is highest, get those ratios and use them? But dex and int contribute to evasion and ES respectively while str does nothing for armor. Or do we need to balance silly little things like damage, elemental resists, mana, health recovery and playability into these ratios?

First time posting on this forum site, hope I put this in the right forum section!

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55hi55 wrote:

My question is more for the hybrids out there, those that stack evasion and armor or armor and ES or ES and Evasion. Primarily what is the golden ratio(s?) for a half and half character?

There is no golden ratio, if your char uses ES as a defense you want to get gear pieces with as high ES as possible. It may happen to have armor or eva too but it's generally not sought after unless you got socket color problems, granite flask is more often used if you need an armor boost, not gear.

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raics wrote:

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55hi55 wrote:

My question is more for the hybrids out there, those that stack evasion and armor or armor and ES or ES and Evasion. Primarily what is the golden ratio(s?) for a half and half character?

There is no golden ratio, if your char uses ES as a defense you want to get gear pieces with as high ES as possible. It may happen to have armor or eva too but it's generally not sought after unless you got socket color problems, granite flask is more often used if you need an armor boost, not gear.

And that didn't answer my question in the slightest. Mathematically this ratio exists. I don't care if it's playable. Full stop.

Secondly, you only addressed ES. This ratio exists for armor and evasion as well. As a matter of fact it makes sense to make a hybrid armor/evasion toon, and then grab Iron reflexes. If it is easier to scale evasion than armor, then it makes more sense to make a pure evasion character then grab Iron Reflexes.

Thirdly, THAT'S WHAT A GRANITE FLASK DOES!?!?! I thought it allowed you to ride a unicorn into battle. I'm not talking about quick boosts. I am talking about your base character.

Logically Armor reduces damage to life, ES gives you more life. Armor/ES means your ES lasts longer.
Logically ES recharges after a few seconds, Evasion keeps you from being hit, if you can evade for a few seconds your ES is back to full.
Logically Armor reduces damage taken, but not as much from big hits, if you can evade a few of the larger hits, you will stay healthy. (Though a jade flask would be better for this purpose.) --> If this doesn't work out Iron Reflexes turns you into a pure armor character.

What ratios allow you to make the most of this type of play?

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55hi55 wrote:

Mathematically this ratio exists. I don't care if it's playable. Full stop.

Why do you need the ratio then, just curious?

The biggest problem is armor scaling is fully dynamic and evasion is semi-static so you would need damage numbers for all enemies, the chance of each enemy to spawn, ratio of 'accurate' enemies and even then you would need your map running average. And that's where the whole thing becomes worthless, you could calculate it versus a specific enemy but it would have no practical value, there are way too many variables.

The strength of ES is high buffer, unlike armor and evasion it scales linearly, there are no diminishing returns which means ES has no value after which investment becomes pointless. That's why you don't plan for hybrid defense with ES, it isn't suited for it.

On the other hand, hybrid AR/EVA stacking can be very efficient because most enemies do amounts of damage that can be successfully mitigated with moderate amounts of armor and versus heavy hitters having double or triple wouldn't help much, that's where evasion kicks in. Like I said, armor screws up the calculation big time here so there are no players known to me that bother trying to calculate the ideal ratio, the usual rule among hybrids is 'get armor above 10k and evasion above 50%, everything past that is a welcome extra'.

Sorry if that's not what you're looking for, I don't think you will have any luck with finding the exact answer.

No that was really helpful. The reason I want to know is I'm curious, mainly. That and it would help people make unique and interesting builds. I also feel that if we could find a way to make hybrid builds work better, it would allow for a much more diverse metagame.

Evasion/ES seems like it could work really well. I understand that they don't lend themselves to stacking well, but Chaos Inoc to replace life, and ES/Evasion gear- you would have a small HP pool but if you could keep evasion high enough, ES regens so fast (once it starts that is) it might just work. Combine with a movement primary attack- leap slam, flicker strike, smoke mine, lighting warp, or even high movement speed- and it should be very possible to guerrilla warfare the crap out of any group of enemies.

Armor/Es seems about like Armor/HP to me. And with Zealot's Oath and life gain/ leech on hit, keeping full or near full life, for that beautiful "melee damage on full life" support gem. You might be able to kill rare mobs in a single non-crit hit.

The current meta-game is all about tanking. It's very little to do with how much damage you do, and all about how much you can take. The most popular builds are not high damage, they are high survivability. Personally I love glass cannons, and for a long time I didn't play POE for that reason, you are forced to be one of three types of tank. I suppose I'm trying to find a way to make a glass cannon that can stand up to hardcore.

EDIT: While looking at each enemies damage and accuracy might be one way to do it. Another is to look at your total armor points, and total evasion points. You might have to break out a calculator to figure them out. Knowing that 10k armor is good, is 10K points of evasion good? There are nodes that add +50/+10/+whatever to evasion, so there is a numeric value to your evasion, and knowing that number at end game gives a good number to shoot for, or even shoot for half of.

Its a strange question, Im not really sure I understand exactly what you are looking for tbh. I play a lot of hybrid builds, Id say the majority of my main builds are hybrids of 2 of the 3 options on offer.

when making a hybrid character, how you go about that, what amounts of each you stack and what corresponding gear you get changes a lot depending on what the character is and what you are trying to achieve. I dont think there are any universal mathematical constants if you like, for a given example of a character there will be a mathematically sound way to achieve what that particular character is trying to do given the opportunities its tree, socket colours, aura situation etc dictates, but that is particular to that specific character.

If you want to go evasion ci, can you run grace and discipline? Is that possible given other auras you want to run? that might depend on your access to reduced reserve nodes, so where does your tree set? Is this a melee char? Is it a spell caster? where do your other node commitments for your build dictate where you go on the tree? If you dont have the oppertunity to spec much % evasion but ample oppertunity to stack a lot of % shield then maybe you run grace and if the reverse is true maybe you run discipline, or maybe you can and do run both and then it becomes a question of which you prioritize on gear. Maybe most of your gear is pure es because you can spec a lot of evasion % and run grace, maybe your gear has to be high % evasion and flat evasion because you cant spec a lot of % ev or cant run grace... Its a fluid situation for almost all hybrid specs.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

Its a fluid situation for almost all hybrid specs.

That makes a lot of sense, and I understand what you are saying. What you want your character to do, and what direction you want to take the skill tree is very important.

I'm not looking for these ratios to achieve a mathematically "perfect character," I'm just looking to set some guidelines.

For example, by end game you want upwards of 4000~~ health, ES or HP regardless of what your defences look like, because you will take damage, and it will be a large amount. Armor will help some, but I've seen builds with 10K+ armor and they still complain about too little health when they have 6000~~ of it. I'm just looking for good numbers to aim for, like the 4000+ health, or the 10K+ armor, that these characters/builds have.

This is less about concrete numbers and more about, guidelines. Trying to make hybrids a little less complicated. The first step to making anything simple is to understand it completely, so I want to hear from a number of "pure" builds, to understand how much ES, how much Evasion, how much Armor you need. Then looking at how these scale, how fast you can gain ES compared to how fast you can gain Evasion.

So that hybrids that need more defence don't have to stop and wonder "Do I need more of this one or that one?" Which is a big trip up, they can just look and say, "According to the fourm 55hi55 started, my armor to ES ratio is too high, so I need more ES, to balance that ratio."

For evasion we have a good reason to aim for 50%, if you go over that value you will never get hit twice in a row thanks to entropy (unless the enemy has 'accurate' mod) and the next good value to shoot for is 66% where every third attack will hit you. Above that it gets more difficult to scale it as EVA has a flatter curve than armor.

For armor it's a lot more complicated, 10k is just a nice, tidy number that can be achieved with reasonable effort and is proven to make a significant difference overall. You can go beyond that but it's usually not required, when it doesn't work 20k wouldn't save you either.

And ES is the same as life, it has a minimum comfort value but you stack it as much as possible for added safety and to get faster leech and regen rates.

Thanks. That does help with everything. So you would want 4000+ ES cause you don't wanna get one shoted, 50% evasion, cause, it's hard to get more than that with a hybrid character. Does anyone know what 50% evasion looks like endgame, like what number of points of evasion get you that percentage? That's just helpful when planing what nodes to take in what order.

I don't play armor characters, can anyone tell me how easy/ hard it is to get that 10K armor? Is that feasible for a hybrid (say evasion with that 50% number), without an aura, and flask? While keeping life up? And does it take too many nodes? Could you have it by level 50? Level 60?

evasion when given as a % on your character sheet is a hard thing to exactly quantify. Each mob has its own accuracy, the % shown is an estimate based on the average accuracy of a white mob at your level as a character, so at lvl60, given your evasion number (lets make up some fictional numbers just to ease the example), say you have 5k evasion, it will show what it thinks is an average level 60 white mobs chance to hit you through 5k evasion, lets say thats 45% just for the sake of it. When you level up to lvl61, check your evasion %, it might show 44%... because its now estimating a lvl61 mobs average accuracy against 5k evasion... so maybe 12k evasion gives you 50% against an average lvl72 mob, but youll only show that when you are also lvl72. When you are in a lvl72 map and happen to be fighting a type of monster that is somewhat average accuracy wise that will be true. If you then go into a lvl75 map youll have less than 50% though ull still be showing 50%, if you level to 80 and go back into a 72 map with the same evasion youll still have 50% but will be showing less % in the character pannel because its now estimating against a lvl80 mob.


Its one of those things where youd have to check as you level to get a rough idea, but itll always be a rough idea. When you hit 78 maybe just chuck a load of different ev gear on to see what it takes to hit those %s or above and then ull have an idea, then you cna ignore the fact it will go down when u hit 79, 80 etc because you know the evasion number that estimated 50% or 67% against a lvl78 mob.

edit: note thst 67% evasion is extremely hard to achieve, recently looking at my stats I had 2,500 evasion showing a 22% chance to evade, going up to 8,500 gave me a 44% chance, getting to 17,000 would probably have barely taken me over 50%, so theres really harsh diminishing returns on it. Note those values as estimates on a lvl91 character so not actually true against mobs in the 60s or 70s, but the way it scales is accurate for giving an example. Pushing evasion beyond the mid 50s requires a somewhat all out approach.





Ok, in terms of what numbers on stats u look for, Ill post out my rough thoughts on it, Ill do categories because its about scaling too I guess. Note these are my opinions, theres no facts here, its just the feel I have for each, what I would aim for. Es I will give for CI, aka pure es, and hybrid, as in you have this on top of a life pool



Minimum defense to be effective and worth having, below which I would not consider worthy of any investment made to get it. I would feel weak with these values but could conceivably have them in a self found/early league situation.

Life: 4,000
Armour: 4,000
Evasion: 4,000
Energy Shield (CI): 6,000
Energy Shield (hybrid): 2,400
Endurance Charges: 3


Decent defense, values I would aim to have as a minimum personally because I tend to demand a lot from my defenses.

Life: 4,800
Armour: 6,200
Evasion: 6,200
Energy Shield (CI): 8,000
Energy Shield (hybrid): 3,200
Endurance Charges: 4


Good defense, the point where I think the defense starts to really become what it should be and do its job well

Life: 5,400
Armour: 8,000
Evasion: 8,000
Energy Shield (CI): 10,000
Energy Shield (hybrid): 3,800
Endurance Charges: 5


Strong defense, the point where you have a beefy amount of something, more than 'enough', this is what I would like to see my stats at in an ideal world

Life: 6,000
Armour: 16,000
Evasion: 14,000
Energy Shield (CI): 12,000
Energy Shield (hybrid): 5,000
Endurance Charges: 6


excessive defense, the point where youre probably starting to go beyond levels that make sense to actively pursue, but with defense more is always better, so you could conceivably end up with totals like this.

Life: 7,000+
Armour: 22,000+
Evasion: 18,000+
Energy Shield (CI): 14,000+
Energy Shield (hybrid): 6,000+
Endurance Charges: 7+



for mixing defenses I would aim for totals between 'good' and 'strong' for deep endgame, but if you can get totals somewhere between 'decent' and 'good' then youre on the right track and youre making effective use of your layers. Thats my take on it anyway, as I said those numbers are just the feeling I get from playing, the sort of reactions I would have seeing numeric values on my character sheet, where I would be happy etc.


When it comes to speccing/gearing hybrids, theres some considerations with auras. You have Grace (evasion), Discipline (energy shield) and Determination (armour). Of the 3, determination is pretty shit and grace is awesome, this is why. Determination is a % aura, 50% more armour is what it does. So in order for it to do a lot for you, you already have to have a lot of armour on your gear. Grace gives a flat 2k evasion, it doesnt require you to have evasion on your gear to do what it does, same with Discipline, though Disc is a less meaningful amount given. To get flat armour from an aura you have to have Iron Reflexes, to turn Grace into armour, which removes all your evasion. Fine if evasion wasnt part of your hybrid setup, but if it was you cant do this.


So evasion as part of a hybrid requires the least actual gear because you can get a lot from grace, energy shield requires a reasonable amount from gear + the aura, where as armour requires a lot of armour from gear unless you can spec IR. Determination is somewhat ruled out for hybrid speccing in my experience as its demanding a lot of armour on gear and the aura. The hard part of hybrid specs is getting enough of the flat amounts of defense on the gear for the % you stack on the tree to amplify. Theres a lot of hybrid nodes on the tree, life + es, armour + evasion, damage + armour, damage + evasion, life + evasion etc, its not too difficult to get your %s up to par as long as you can maximise the amount of flat defense youre feeding them.

So hybrid armour + evasion for example, you have grace, right away thats 2k evasion, so to get a 50/50 split presuming youve got a 50/50 investment tree wise, you need 2k more armour on your gear than evasion. Thats if you want a 50/50 split, for a melee I would be leaning more towards having higher armour than evasion, like 15k armour + 10k evasion for a really beefy setup, where as for bows a) thats not realistic and b) you dont need to facetank so much, so maybe Id be looking more for 7,000 armour + 12k evasion. Though given where bows sit on the tree, you dont have access to as much armour %, its probably all coming from the hybrid ar+ev nodes in duelist where as youll probably have a ton of % evasion, so to get that you might still be wearing armour gear for the majority and running grace on top.

I could go on all day about speccing different hybrid defenses but those are just some thoughts to illustrate some of the issues with how you go about it and how the goals and methods may shift character to character.