This reddit post should be required reading for everyone posting outside of tech support/off topic

https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/o91bpj/abandon_defence_all_ye_who_enter_here/

/u/poorFishwife

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Explain it to me as if I was a golden retriever or a small child, please.

I like your attitude! I've thought about writing an article about this for a while. I'm making this long so I can share it with others in the future.

Hopefully you find it helpful.

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I tried to build a dungeon crawler character, and yes, it is slow, and yes, it is a zpds build, and yes, it sucks. That is fine. But what is not fine is that it can not tank... the character still just randomly gets vaporized and ceases to exist.

You're probably getting close to your goal! Try to recognize that your observation of being "randomly vaporized" is a product of your own understanding, and not a secret magical limit of the game -- and once you realize that, you'll be able to overcome the issue.

Staying alive in POE is arithmetic. If your goal is an immortal character, and you die, that is merely feedback that your math was off.

I've reviewed many, many builds. From what I've seen characters most often die due to some combination of these problems:

Insufficient Physical Damage mitigation for large incoming Hits
No mitigation for incoming Critical Strikes
Inadequate total recovery
Insufficient overall avoidance for getting "shotgunned" by dozens of small hits at once
A lack of immunities for problematic debuffs (especially Shock)

Here are a few examples that can help diagnose these problems.

Big Physical Hits

Say you're running a white Minotaur map. Minotaur uses Burrow and crits you. You're taking >10,000 Physical damage in a single hit. Can your build survive that?

In POB, click Configuration, and under General, enter "10000" in the Enemy Hit Damage field. Now click Calcs, and scroll down to your Physical Maximum Hit Taken. Is it high enough to survive? How about surviving the next attack after this one?

If not, you know you need more Physical Hit mitigation in your build.



"Shotgun" of many incoming Hits

Say you're fighting Veritania and you want to facetank all 20 hits of her Shard Barrage for ~2500 Cold damage each in rapid succession. That's 50,000 incoming Cold damage -- but it's spread across many Hits.

Or maybe you jumped into an Incursion and 30 Vaal Constructs spit their Phys/Chaos projectiles at you all at once.

Or perhaps you get tagged by multiple Maraketh Legion archers and Flicker Strikes (Wasteland Scouts & Guardians).

How many of those Hits are you ignoring due to avoidance? Are you OK in the Legion case because they're Attacks (Evasion, Block, Dodge), but suffering in the Veritania/Incursion cases because they're Spells (Spell Block, Spell Dodge)?

Find your avoidance weakpoint and improve it.



Recovery

Maybe you have 7000 Maximum Life and great defenses. But how quickly do you recover?

After Minotaur hits you with Burrow, will you recover enough to survive a follow-up Sweep? If not, maybe your effective Maximum Life is a lot lower than you expect.

Recovery is extremely important for this reason. It's why so many players feel Agnostic Archmage is so "tanky", even though they often have horrible Physical Damage mitigation. If you're always at max HP, you're much more likely to survive a bad situation.

If I had to give a rough guideline for "I want to play Softcore but very rarely die", I'd probably suggest the following list. The current version of POE seems to be designed to "expect" all of these for top-end gameplay.

100k Effective Hit Pool in all damage categories
60%+ Physical Hit mitigation for big Hits (raw mitigation and/or Incoming-Phys-to-Ele conversion)
60%+ Chaos mitigation for both Hits and DoT (or higher for extreme cases of Poison/Desecrated Ground)
70%+ overall avoidance for Attacks
50%+ overall avoidance for Spells
Many Ailment Immunities (especially Shock, but ideally all Elemental Ailments -- Delirium content can Scorch and Brittle you, for example)
Recovery of >30% Max "HP" per second, ideally much higher
At least a small dose of Incoming Critical Strike mitigation (and if not, more of everything else)
One major Recovery strategy, such as high LGOH, Gain on Block, or quick fingers and good Flasks
One major general defensive mitigation strategy (e.g. choosing and optimizing one of: high-effectiveness Fortify; Divine Flesh; Transcendence; +maxres; etc.)

All of these are achievable. But if you're missing any single one of them, there are plenty of scenarios where you'll get splattered.

And obviously this is just a general list. For specific extreme scenarios, you'll require specialized tricks, especially if the damage isn't "meant" to be tanked. If you want to tank Uber Atziri Empowered Flameblast, you're dealing with a gargantuan hit that comes loaded with Fire Penetration -- so +maxres strategies are less effective, but Fortify/Transcendence is viable. If you want to tank Maven Memory Game Failure, be prepared for a ton of finicky setup in anticipation of the telegraphed blow, and so forth.

Barring silly bugs or disconnects, everything in POE can be tanked.

If you make it your priority, you can do it!

reading reddit...?

> gauntlet literally just ended with a variety of different classes high on the ladder
> ignores all of that and decides you can't tank anything in this game in sc... with 0 default mods enabled...
> and then asks why defenses are nerfed

Well written post. I exactly did what he wrote in Ultimatum league. I did successfully farm everything whole league. Build died to DC in The Feared though.

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GaripFikir wrote:

Well written post. I exactly did what he wrote in Ultimatum league. I did successfully farm everything whole league. Build died to DC in The Feared though.

Your level 100 trickster "pepechura" has incredible gear for SSF. Probably better than I usually get in trade leagues.

Thank you for sharing, I enjoyed it!

Wish PoE would tell you what killed your character when it dies.

Ok< so, there are defensive layers in the game, but there are also one-shot mechanics.

Asking a player with say 500 hrs/ played to know how to pick up the right stuff then know how to craft it a rediculous assumption on your part

It really is.

Poe is designed, top to bottom, for the top 2% of players, people with 1,000s of hours played, and who play 6-12 hrs/day

Melee skill that act as spells with greater aoe damage, overlapping area, and only require a simple 50-60 essence spammed weapon is what this game has devolved to

Poe is easy at it's core, your post is correct that these defensive layers should be learned about, prioritized, and then put into use, even by SC players.

But nothing can overcome how little the game is focused towards new-players, you had to make your thread bcoz GGG refuses to

People want to go from being newbs to doing harder content.

They do. They truly do. GGG does everything they can to prevent people from experiencing content until after you have thousand of hours of reading and playing under you.

Thousands and thousands. The game is unforgiving.

Plus, GGG don't really care. Like, why should I build a character to do juiced Ultis in say tier 5 maps, when in doing so you have trivialized all other t5 content, an it therefore becomes boring? Heck, if you can do Ultis in a 120 T5 maps deathless, you can most likely do Uber Elder. This is the real issue.

You either one-shot shit in this game or it one-shots you.

This is not a formula for fun or pleasure, it's a job. And besides the 150k people that get to let's say T14 maps, nobody wants to do it.

Defensive layers mean nothing when GGG steadfastly eschews giving newbs the info or tools they need to advance into red maps.

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People want to go from being newbs to doing harder content.

They do. They truly do. GGG does everything they can to prevent people from experiencing content until after you have thousand of hours of reading and playing under you.

There´s a difference between the lack of help and the aim to STOP people. Stating that GGG is interested in the latter is at least bold...
I think the game is just far too complicated to put into a single, small ingame-tutorial. And you might not like it, but there are plenty of community-ressources to learn everything there is to learn. How long you take to make that happen is up to personal commitment, but I can tell you that: It does not need thousands of hours.

walk behind the mob and dodge telegraphs will get you through everything in the game with enough dps

i'm in agreement with yamface on this one, if you think defences should be abandoned its because you've never played a character with comfortable defences.

Its difficult because some of the post content is good information for people but some of the conclusions drawn are just silly, that final checklist for example has far too many objectives which won't be reached by poor players that actually need survivability help.

this kind of post will put people off defence in the long run when they load up PoB and try to get anything like those numbers its just unneccesary.

Quite frankly perma fort with fort effect stacking + ailment immunity is enough defence to make a vast majority of the game safe and comfortable if you learn the tiny number of threats that actually threaten every character (revenants and pals etc)

The biggest issue I have with all these threads is I feel like players are trying to make their character indestructible rather than just learning how to play around a few trivial mechanics in most cases.

l2p is a key to doing most of the content on most of your characters, building godmode is a key to doing it on one only. Trying to shortcut that will always lead to dissatisfaction though I can perfectly accept it isn't an option available to everyone.

Edit: Also just as an aside I don't even know why you'd invest that heavily into this kind of build process on SC, GGG wilfully encourage glass cannon and if you are a SC player its quite likely you'll feel more satisfaction by buying full into that than trying to make a "balanced character". Until that philosophy changes I think devoting too much time to defence isn't the way.

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adghar wrote:

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GaripFikir wrote:

Well written post. I exactly did what he wrote in Ultimatum league. I did successfully farm everything whole league. Build died to DC in The Feared though.

Your level 100 trickster "pepechura" has incredible gear for SSF. Probably better than I usually get in trade leagues.

That is result of playing and min-maxing gear whole league. I think I had 9k ehp when got 100 level. Build was fragile to some content but now is nearly 13k ehp. I always careful about what kills this build through min-max progression.