Ranking Defense in order of importance

Generally speaking for most of the end game content / bosses, what are the most important defense levels to invest HIGHLY in. I mean getting them at or near their top level.


Choose your top 3 in order of importance, or offer the best combo's to pair up with each other:


- 100% Spell suppression


- Max block


- Max spell block


- 85% maximum all resists


- Very high Armor / physical damage reduction


- Very high dodge / chance to evade attacks


- Just very high life or energy shield


- Life leech / energy shield leech depending on character

Honestly, given how varied "endgame content" is it's pretty hard to make a ranking. The most versatile combination of those is imo the current RF package so:

1) Max Block (with ES on block)
2) 85+ all res
3) High armor with MS

Depending on what you want to do it's not the best but it has imo the best coverage overall. Max block with ES on block makes you borderline immortal during mapping as long as your mitigations are high. 85+ all res and high armor do the trick for that. Since max spell block usually includes tempest shield you are also shock immune which is a big boon. All res protects against any kind of elemental damage which gives it better coverage than spell suppression and armor takes care of the physical part while doubling/trippling your HP pool with MS.

Leaving the general coverage aside there some noteworthy points.

Spell suppression is king for pinnacle and uber bosses. They are heavily spell focused and ubers use a lot of penetration which renders high resistance way weaker as a defense than it would be normally. Spell suppression helps with that. Alternatively or additively you can use damage taken as to convert to another element and ignore the penetration that way. Tempered by war or divine flesh are good options for this. Note that later Simulacrum waves also have penetration on the regular. For most guardian level bosses and Maven invitations suppression is somewhere between a nice add and useless. For mapping it's only relevant if you find yourself entirely incapable of manually evading lightning mirages and the like. Most trash monsters use attacks.

HP stacking, be it ES or life is, in my personal opinion, trash. It wasn't particularly thrilling before 3.16 and is just plain worse now. The damage income is way to high, no matter how big your buffer is, it won't be enough unless you can accompany it with strong mitigations and sustain which isn't realistic for the most part. I see my outdated 9k ES HP sponge builds melt in split seconds to trash mobs it's not even funny.

Evasion/avoidance in general is imo good as a secondary layer. If you already have decent mitigations, avoidance helps improving survivability. If you have only avoidance and no/low mitigations you are basically gambling with your life and the odds are heavily stacked against you.

Leech isn't really worthy a point by itself. It's sustain we need to talk about and it's one of the most important ones. How you obtain it is up to you but obviously there are better and worse options. ES/life on block is by far the best. After that comes life leech which can reach pretty decent levels with VP and the leech clusters of the Duelist area. 3k+ life per second isn't too hard to get.
After that it's honestly a choice between pest and cholera.

ES leech sucks, it's only 10% by default and has less scaling available. Would be fine if ES builds always had twice the HP pool but with how bad HP stacking is, that's unlikely to happen.
ES recharge is pretty bad unless you are fully ailment and chaos and bleed/Cb immune because degens fuck it over badly.
Using life flasks is also horrible because damage spikes usually come so suddenly that you are dead long before you can even realize there is a spike and press the button.
Regen can be strong but requires so much investment to reach relevant levels that there aren't many builds who can go that route.

/edit Also worth noting, chaos damage is much more prevalant than it used to be. Going -60 chaos in endgame isn't really a thing anymore. You want to be in the positives at least, 50+ with option of amethyst flask would be better.

/edit 2 yep transcendence is the strongest defense against elemental stuff. You'll need to deal with phys damage somehow though if you use it which usually means needing phys taken as on a lot of gear pieces.

90% max resists + high armor + transcendence. If you have some ruby/topaz/saphire flask permanently up, it's even better.

In 95%+ of cases, I die by elemental damage. For melee might be different though.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Leech isn't really worthy a point by itself. It's sustain we need to talk about and it's one of the most important ones. How you obtain it is up to you but obviously there are better and worse options. ES/life on block is by far the best.

Good summary overall, I´d simply like to add that while Life/ES gain on Block is awesome - it does nothing against degens.
You still have to have some sort of regen or leech as secondary method to sustain your EHP pool.

Great mitigation enables low EHP pools while still being tanky but combined with conditional EHP sustain is how you die to degens real fast. The moment your conditional sustain fails (nothing to leech off, nothing to block etc), you roll over almost immediately.


Degens are all over the place these days.
If you are aware and able to avoid those degens or keep your conditional sustain going, its all good.
But if you happen to be unaware of degens and/or cant keep conditional sustain going, you really want at least some regen. It wont prevent a RIP but it might buy you just enough time to get out of those degen AoEs.