Primodial beast in delve lvl 180 just one shot my max block gladiator

"

Shagsbeard wrote:

Block isn't a defense against 1 shots. You'll have less of them, but you'll still have them. You need some other defense if you're going to take hits. Or be ok with dying. Your choice. Armor is good for small hits, but sucks for damage like that. Find some other way to reduce damage.

"

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!

"

innervation wrote:

"

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!

/u/poorfishwife on reddit