how much life is enough these days?

I came back to PoE for the expansion and have been getting roflstomped by act 4. I've been playing off and on and have been generally frustrated trying to find a build that satisfies me and is tanky enough to avoid having to sacrifice my current level progression to the poe gods in ordered to get by act 4 cruel.

I haven't progressed much with a tanky character yet (my vigilant strike + endurance on stun dude is, though effective, quite boring). I have a shadow trapper with whom I tried to grab as many life nodes on that side of the tree as I could reasonably reach, but cruel Malachi still stole his virtue multiple times before I entered merciless. Acrobatics and the like wasn't able to save him.

So yeah, how much life should I stack before I can have reasonable expectations not to die miserably over and over? It seems difficult to hit 150% without playing Path of Life Nodes and ignoring build plans. Or should I just be playing Path of Fortify+Endurance?

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wheffle wrote:

So yeah, how much life should I stack before I can have reasonable expectations not to die miserably over and over? It seems difficult to hit 150% without playing Path of Life Nodes and ignoring build plans. Or should I just be playing Path of Fortify+Endurance?

It's business as usual.
Do not build "path to damage notables, and takelife nodes along the way", but the other way around. Especially on an Acrobatics character, you can never have enough life. I'd aim for 6000+. So I'd highly recommend heading for the Scion life wheel.

You can use "whirling blades + fortify" if you want this buff, it's basically 20% damage reduction (or "20% more total life") for free.

Endurance charges are not a real "must", but again, if you manage to cast EC regularly, why not? You can have 4 charges without fancy gear or travelling to the left side, why not use them?

My poison arrow duellist in Tempest right now "DoctorThrax" has almost 5800 life and still has close calls here and there. I got vaal slammed in Merciless when trying to help someone kill the oversoul with 300 ping and barely survived on ~200 hp with 25.6k armour.

The damage output of monsters these days is nuts.

1 k on normal
2 k on cruel
3 k on merciless
5 k for endgame

I consider that bare minimum - otherwise you should expect some deaths. Depends on your build. Picking offensive nodes near life nodes seems to be vital. It's better to do some Act 4 bosses in party - extra decoys make fights much easier.

I do uber with this build with 4200 life

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1195956/page/1

It's an "all in" yolo evasion build. Idea is kill them before they kill you. No way I'd play it in HC tho. I had 6000 life last time I died at 81.

Just depends man.

Right, depends a lot on the build, if your build gets good defenses and crazy life return, like for instance LoH on fast GMP molten you can get by with less life because you get killed only by oneshot.

Still, I wouldn't go into mid maps with under 4k no matter what.

Thanks for the posts and example builds guys! I'll regroup and try again with a different build, I think.

Is rolling +life on gear crucial as well?

Yes, you want a high life roll on every non-unique piece of gear.

It also depends a lot on if you are playing HC or SC.

In SC even though you don't want to die you can afford two things:

1. Having less life at certain states in the game, since you can die your way through

2. Not having this extra buffer for situations that should not really happen

Extra Life mostly mean you can afford to not react quite as badly. There are hardly oneshots often what people call oneshots are situations that make your life drop to 0 within one second. But the damage still often comes from multiple sources (or from meant-to-dodge skill). So for SC the amount of life often reflects your confidence to avoid those situations, however up to a certain life-pool (or amount of defense in general) this actually increases your clearspeed since it allows more careless approachs to fights.

I don't think you need more than 4k on a ranged char or more than 5k on a melee in standard if you are confident enough to avoid certain hazards and know how to approach dangerous fights... oh and to not rush a Zana mission in a fracture map that wants you to kill the boss in 5mins by just running through, that might not be working.

Remote Casters like Trappers, Totems or also Summoners can often get away with less HP mainly because they (partially for Summoners) can deal a bit damage while walking. Totems are best for this, Firetrap and Poison Arrow trap work as well, summoners have a few issues with the minions stopping attacking once they walk.

Is there a rule of thumb for how much +% max life is enough from the passive tree when planning a build?