Best defensive gem setups for ranged/bow characters...

My standard gem setup for most standard bow characters.

6L AoE
6L Single target (weapon swap if using Kaom's)
4L Herald of Ice - Curse on Hit - Assassins Mark - Aura (Grace / Hatred / Wrath)
4L CWDT (lvl 6) - Immortal Call (lvl 8) - Ice Golem (lvl 8) - Increased Duration
4L Increased Duration - Vaal Grace - Vaal Grace - Blink Arrow.

The last 4 are the big defensive setup. You should have close to 75% / 64% dodge against attacks / spells. Since you have 2 of them it's not hard to have up running more or less permanently. This helps immensely in tough situations.

Blink Arrow is also extremely important. Use it wise. It can get you out of almost any situation.

As for pure mitigation:
Elemental (especially lightning due to reflect) mitigation shouldn't be a problem. Try to get your hands on a Vessel of Vinktar flask.
Physical mitigation: In general this is hard to come by as a bow character. Yes Arctic Armour helps and so does Taste of Hate or even Lightning Coil but all in all your physical damage reduction will almost never get that high. Remember that most of these sources are multiplied and not added together.

My suggestion: Even though you are using Shrapnel Shot don't count on your stats to do the tanking for you. Play as a dodge based character and try to avoid as much damage as possible through positioning. If you want to play a "stand-still-tank" kind of bow character it really takes a lot of effort.

Perfect Form doesn't raise your Evasion based on "the amount of cold res under the cap you are". it's actually the opposite - Perfect Form increases your evasion by your total possible Cold resistance, unaffected by the 75% cap. If your character sheet lists 143% Cold resistance, Perfect Form's Uncapped Cold mod is equivalent to: "143% Increased Global Evasion".

The Perfect Form is an excellent Evasion base armor if you can work with it; I personally consider it to be one of the top unique Evasion body armors, right up there with Kintsugi or Queen of the Forest, and potentially competitive with enduringly popular options like Lightning Coil. Free Arctic Armor is very nice, and getting Phase Acrobatics for free can save you four points in the tree or allow you to benefit from spell dodge without sacrificing armor or block chance by going through Acrobatics first. I have yet to do so, but there's some notions I've seen for builds that stack capped or close-to-capped spell block and spell dodge using the Perfect Form.

...anyways. All fangirling over one of my favorite armors aside...

My bow characters often don't really end up doing standard triggered defensive gem setups. CWDT is of strictly limited utility, especially with the Giganerf of Chilled Ground (i.e. CWDT Arctic Breath or Vortex both suck now), Immortal Call is becoming less and less relevant as a triggered skill, and there's not much else to replace it with. Usually I find that the best way to mitigate damage with my bow characters is to not be where the hurting is. Use the bow's reach and a bow character's usually-excellent mobility to just manu-dodge stuff and not take damage in the first place.

That said, going to second the endorsements for Enfeeble. BlasFeeble is probably my favorite defensive set-up; even if bosses shrug off half of my Enfeeble curse effect, that's still half an Enfeeble's worth of damage reduction. That's better than most any CWDT trigger set-up can do for me as a bow character, and if I'm too far away from the critter for Blasphemy to reach it? Then I'm also generally too far away from it for it to worry me.

For Point Blank-y builds like Shrapnel Shot? BlasFeeble, get you a Stibnite flask for on-demand Blind clouds, and then bake some damage avoidance into your tree/gear. If you've got stacked Dodge, Evasion, Enfeeble, and Blind all going at once on top of active positioning and don't-stand-in-the-fire smart play? That should hopefully be sufficient.

That makes MUCH better sense! Thanks for the explanation.

worth considering tossing Phase Run into your cwdt setup too, if you're not using frenzy charges (or have no problem building them back up).

When it procs, enemies won't be able to see you very well, and most will either stand around doing nothing or shift their aggro onto something else. In particular, it works quite well if you've got a golem that can become the focus of their aggro, or if you have an 'of Reflection' enchantment on your gloves, which will create a clone of you when you're struck (which will then become the focus of most enemy aggro when you become phase-run'd, which will often happen at the same time with a low level cwdt setup). Even if you break it shortly after it procs, that brief moment you were 'hidden' can shift aggro elsewhere quite nicely.

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Shppy wrote:

When it procs, enemies won't be able to see you very well, and most will either stand around doing nothing or shift their aggro onto something else. In particular, it works quite well if you've got a golem that can become the focus of their aggro, or if you have an 'of Reflection' enchantment on your gloves, which will create a clone of you when you're struck (which will then become the focus of most enemy aggro when you become phase-run'd, which will often happen at the same time with a low level cwdt setup). Even if you break it shortly after it procs, that brief moment you were 'hidden' can shift aggro elsewhere quite nicely.

Er... who told you Phase Run affects enemy targeting?

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Monster Response time: Phase Run causes monsters to fail to respond to the player's presence for slightly longer than normal.

As per the wiki (which is an admittedly fallible source), Phase Run doesn't really do squat for you once monsters have already 'responded to the player's presence'. At that point they're gonna do what they do until a taunt mechanic of some sort tells them otherwise, and the only taunt golem in the game is super bad at taunting things. At least reliably.

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adghar wrote:

Er... who told you Phase Run affects enemy targeting?

Er... the gem's own text?


https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Phase_Run


That's part of what phase run does. It makes you phased, lowers enemies' ability to detect you, and gives you a movespeed boost all until it's broken, and gives you a melee damage boost briefly after broken (and before, technically).

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1453R wrote:

As per the wiki (which is an admittedly fallible source), Phase Run doesn't really do squat for you once monsters have already 'responded to the player's presence'. At that point they're gonna do what they do until a taunt mechanic of some sort tells them otherwise, and the only taunt golem in the game is super bad at taunting things. At least reliably.

It works just fine after enemies have already seen you, especially if there's something else around for them to target (regardless of whether or not that something else uses a taunt). Enemy aggro isn't a static state, it's constantly prone to flux and can shift around even without the aid of taunts. Phase Run making you harder to see does indeed help you avoid/drop aggro even if enemy attention was already on you... it's actually kinda funny at times, on my trapper leaping/charging enemies will frequently land on me, triggering my cwdt-ic-phaserun-duration setup, and if i don't use any skills to break the phase run they'll often just stand there doing nothing for a little while even though i'm right next to them.


Trust me on this, cwdt-phaserun is a staple in my trapper builds in particular (because i don't have to act as often as other build types, which means i don't inadvertently break the phase run as often). When it procs, aggro drops heavily, only a fraction of enemies will attempt to follow me or attack until i break the phase run. I can legitimately let myself be swarmed alone, surrounded by literally dozens of enemies, and as soon as phase run procs, i can casually stroll out of the swarm and only a handful of the enemies will follow while the rest just stay there in a big messy pile... then as soon as the phase run breaks, all the rest will finally start following (unless something else drew their aggro while i was phase run'd, like a golem or reflection clone).

It's extremely nice, try it for yourself, i bet you'll like it... in practice it can feel sorta like a second, non-phys-only cwdt-ic setup; you take a bit of damage, it procs, and due to the aggro drop enemies stop damaging you further.

Oh, nice. Now if only all sources of Phasing did that.

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adghar wrote:

Oh, nice. Now if only all sources of Phasing did that.

yeah, it'd be too broken if all types of phasing did that, raiders would never even get attacked... unless using skills broke all phasing like it does to phase run, but then phasing would be pretty much useless for any purpose *besides* avoiding aggro.

That's truly interesting.

I never considered phase run, because I assumed it worked precisely in the way that phasing from the raider tree does.

So, phase run actually has some kind of baked-in, percentage based aggro drop?

...could I pair this with frost wall? Is it possible to phase THROUGH a frost wall? I would check, but I'm going to be away from my console all day today, and now I have a burning desire to know the answer to this. Because if you CAN phase through frost wall, that seems like a pretty great failsafe against a badly placed one while fighting porcupines, etc.