How much defense is needed?

Hello everyone,

i am a new player who started playing about 2 weeks ago. I am currently Act 6 with my templar and i've run into a problem that i don't really understand. My templar as he is right now, has all 3 resists on 60%, 1,2k life 180 Energy Shield and 40 damage reduction from Armor which i thought was solid.

Unfortunately it seems to be complete garbage as i get outright otkd by pretty much every boss i come accross. Latest offender was Abberath where i died like a dozen times because most of the time when i got hit by one of his attacks my templar simply bit the dust.

Normal mobs and even elite mobs don't pose a real problem, i take damage but i heal fast enough to take them head on, but those bosses don't leave me any chance to even use a flask.

So my question is, is this normal? Are my defensive stats just complete garbage? If so what should i aim for and where do i have to farm to get the gear for that? The stuff that drops on the way isn't excactly overloaded with resists and life. And also, if some minor Act 6 boss is already this powerful, what kind of stats do i need to survive endgame bosses? 20k + life?

Hey Baharoth15

First of all capping your resist to 75% is extremely important as you get so much more mitigation. Yes from 60 to 75% is a BIG difference. Second thing try to have a rough guideline to get 300hp/ACT so 300x6=1800HP. 300HP/act is bare minimum, 400hp/act is nice and 500hp/act is really good. If you get 300hp/act you should be fine. Another thing is I feel like your build is not optimized if you are doing it yourself unless you are following a guide. If so don't hesitate to re-roll and improve your build. You won't learn much by throwing your corpses against bosses hoping to kill them. That's one of the reason why Hardcore is good to play for learning purposes because if you die you immediatelly study why you died and never die to same thing again. Another thing if you are scaling armour you should have at least 50%+ physical dmg reduction. That's all I can think of. Would need to see your build to talk more about specifics. If you need any help let me know.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Hello everyone,

i am a new player who started playing about 2 weeks ago. I am currently Act 6 with my templar and i've run into a problem that i don't really understand. My templar as he is right now, has all 3 resists on 60%, 1,2k life 180 Energy Shield and 40 damage reduction from Armor which i thought was solid.

Its fairly important to max out your resistance. It's about a 20% increased elemental damage taken per 5% resistance you are missing. So at 60% resistance. You are taking 60% more elemental damage.

Armor is also calculated differently. There is an armor damage equation involved and that 40% physical reduction only applies to the average hit from a monster of your level.

Bosses obviously do much more damage and unless you have a lot of armor. You got next to 0 physical reduction against big boss hits because of the armor equation.

Health wise. The general idea for most builds is to get around 400 hp per act. So at act 6. You should have 6x400 = 2400 hp. You are about half the hp you should have. But of course, that's just a general build tip. You can be a little lower, like 1.6k hp - 2.0k hp but yeah. You have low hp for your act and can die easily if you don't dodge the big hits.

"

So my question is, is this normal? Are my defensive stats just complete garbage? If so what should i aim for and where do i have to farm to get the gear for that? The stuff that drops on the way isn't excactly overloaded with resists and life. And also, if some minor Act 6 boss is already this powerful, what kind of stats do i need to survive endgame bosses? 20k + life?

Yeah, your defense are a bit garbage. Its normal to die a lot if you aren't dodging things like a pro speed runner. At this point in the game, most of your problems will come from mistakes you made in your skill-tree.

You skipped a lot of life nodes and now it is coming to bite you in butt.

For gear vendors all the necessary gear you need if you look for it. You should aim for resistance for all your gear starting out. Anything with +fire resistance, lightning resistance, cold resistance. With life being a second thing to look for.

It may not be great gear, but vendor will sell everything you need if you aren't finding it through monster drops you get from going through all the acts.

For endgame bosses most players aim for 6k+ life if your life based (aka not using energy shield). Anything over 9k+ life is a premium tank as far as I'm concerned. You can take on most of the big heavy hitters in the game.

If you are using energy shield or are a hybrid of both energy shield and life, people typically aim for 9k+ EHP (effective life or total life combined) with the really rich people in league getting like 16k+ ES for endgame content. (aka LL RF Guardian) since you don't/less flexibility using health flasks. You need that larger health buffer for bad things happening to you at higher tiers maps.

Thanks @Rpglitch and GokuB now i have a rough guideline on what to aim for. I've already made some adjustments to my gear maxing out my fire resists. I've also skilled mind over matter which i probably should have done earlier but up until now i never had any survival issues so it wasn't high on my prio list.

My build is certainly not optimal, in fact i don't even have one. It's my first char and seeing that massiv skill tree and all the active skills and combinations in the game i thought i had two choices, spend a week or two reading into all the information that's present here or just start without really knowing what i am doing and find it out the hard way, i opted for the latter since it's more fun :D

I've skilled mostly the stuff that seemed generally useful to my class, aka all the stuff next to my starting point on the skill tree. Elemental damage, Mace and Shield stuff, Life and armor skills etc.

Which brings me to this:

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You skipped a lot of life nodes and now it is coming to bite you in butt.

What exactly do you mean with life nodes? Do you mean all the "5% max life" and that kind of stuff on the skill tree? Because i've taken nearly all of them that are next to my starting point. I've played enough other RPGs to know that life is always important but i don't really know how to possibly reach 2k+ life with the gear i found so far. Most of my items have max life on them, i got some upgrades today but i am still only at 1,3k. Are there any specific nodes i need to look for?

I've done Abberath again btw after adjusting my gear and getting mind over matter and he wasn't much of a problem any more. He still did quite a bit of damage but i could take a hit or two which is enough for me. Was dodging most of his attacks anyway but yesterday i literally died every time i failed to dodge his attacks.

That's a bit simplistic, but it works: 300 hitpoints per act, high or maxed resists in acts 6+.

Don't worry about armor, it's next to meaningless if you don't stack a fuckton of it plus fortify and endurance charges. The "40% reduction" tooltip in your defense screen means nothing. It's estimated damage reduction against an average white monster at your level. The thing is, there are some blues and rares and bosses which hit like trucks in comparison, and the hardest the hit, the least effective armor is.