Grace vs Flesh and Stone (Blind)

I was wondering about those 2 options.

Basically, Grace is giving you evasion, while Blind affects enemies.

When it comes to numbers, Blind gives more "evasion" in POB

But are the cases when Grace is actually better for endgame?
Are there damage effects that are not affected by enemy blind?

Blind does not increase your Evasion rating, but decreases enemy's chance to hit (making it 50% less), increasing your Chance to Evade. It's different.

On the net terms, if you use Blind you need far less Evasion in order to achieve very high chance to evade attacks, up to the point an unreliable Eva/Armour hybrid would be enough for most attack-related contents. If you are full Evasion AND you use Blind, well, you are not technically untouchable... but stacking that with a 75% chance to dodge and a maxBlock with a Mistwall makes you virtually so. Facetaking Izaro's reaves and Elder's whip lashes is a beautiful feelings.

Of course, you won't read much of it outside of Lab Farming builds because Evasion only applies to attacks and projectile attacks. Most of the endgame bosses are spell-only (Atziri, Sirus, Maven...), so only SpellBlock/SpellDodge will help you there.

Grace, overall, helps you raise even more Evasion in a pinch. You may want to have "unnecessarily high" amount of Evasion if you actually use that high evasion for scaling modifiers (for example, Queen of The Forest + Dreamfeather) or go Iron Reflexes.

EDIT: come mention it, Blind is also one of the very few things against which bosses have no natural dampening/defences. Curses have a natural 80% Less Effect on them, but Blind is always applied in full force to anything, from the t1 white mob to the A9 Sirus

Flesh and Stone is almost always better than Grace if it's one or the other. There might be some blind immune map bosses where it would be worse but if there are, there can only be a few of them. Against most bosses both work the same.

Most builds that use grace do so for the vaal grace as an oh shit button.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Flesh and Stone is almost always better than Grace if it's one or the other

Provided what the build is looking for is the Blind effect and not the 10% Less damage from non-near enemies (but, honestly, who would not like less damage taken). If it's just the blind effect, a Redeemer chest with "Nearby enemies are Blinded" can do the trick if one does not want to build up a 100% chance to blind on hit with passives

Thank you for the replies.

This basically supports my experience with those skills.

To not speak only theoretically, the reason I'm asking is to improve my build and the build guide I wrote. Hopefully to improve the defenses even further.
Previously I ran with Grace, but later switched to FnS.

The build does have relatively good defenses, but the thing I'm struggling the most are big damage spikes (no like it's a rare occurrence in POE, but still).

The ideas I can think of to improve it would be Wind Dancer, No Witnesses or Divine Flesh. Which I tried with a single jewel cluster, but now with 2 clusters there it's harder to fit.

Perhaps I'm missing something obvious

This is my latest PoB
https://pastebin.com/VHAt3GcA
Build thread:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2990048


p.s. if there obvious ideas regarding damage output - also very welcome :)

Well the trouble with oneshots and spike damage you have comes from the fact that all your defenses revolve around avoidance. You have 5k hp with no mitigations what so ever, only lot's of avoidance. This means everytime something gets past your avoidance you are most likely dead.

The only way i can think of to somewhat remedy this issue is to use Winddancer + Kintsugi for 40% less damage taken if you haven't been hit recently. Most other solutions would require a complete build redesign.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Well the trouble with oneshots and spike damage you have comes from the fact that all your defenses revolve around avoidance. You have 5k hp with no mitigations what so ever, only lot's of avoidance. This means everytime something gets past your avoidance you are most likely dead.

The only way i can think of to somewhat remedy this issue is to use Winddancer + Kintsugi for 40% less damage taken if you haven't been hit recently. Most other solutions would require a complete build redesign.

Armor is the main limitation in my case, since the build revolves around the body armor.
Come to think of it, perhaps a switching the Evasion pieces to Armor based with armor flasks would be more productive. Or even Armor/ES items to have an additional damage buffer and still rely on the Dodge + FnS to reduce amount of hits.

EDIT: probably not, since the only item I can switch for more armor is the gloves, and the amount would be insignificant

Even if you switched all your gear to armor bases, it would be worthless. Even with like 10k armor you will only negate like 10% from a damage spike, that will do nothing. To get results out of armor you either need to invest a lot in it or combine it with other sources of physical mitigation. Bit of gear and a flask does nothing.