What is the point of building defenses?

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VolcanoElixir wrote:

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Well if you are asking to be immortal with no chance of death, I dont expect GGG is going to design it that way.

If we get to a point with some builds where death is impossible, that's not healthy either. (And we are close)

It's already happened years ago, I don't remember how it worked but GGG made changes that killed true invincible builds that were known at the time and were used for Delving by players that could create the gear needed to pull it off. So even if "we are close" to players being able to be fully invincible they'll just stop it again once it happens.

Oh I know it's happened before. I just meant with power creep and some new items we do have a few builds which are very close again. That's not great for the game to have a god mode enabled, regardless of how many bullhsit deaths we experience.

There is no immortal build in poe, because some of the end boss attacks are so strong that they ignore any player defense pool.
In such cases, the only thing that helps is knowing the mechanics of the fight manually (avoid impact by movement).

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RitualMurder wrote:

defenses in this game matter until they dont

im pretty tired of the random 1 shots on characters that can face tank end game bosses

if i can face tank shaper slam, sirus die beam etc a random monster in my map should not be able to 1 shot me

yet it happens

it happened today!

You've made this claim before if I recall, and I think your thread compared very different damage types to somehow prove you were tanky.

Being tanky against physical hits does not necessarily make you tanky against physical dots. At the most simplistic level, there are four damage types that fall into one of two categories: damage over time and hits. You could very well be tanky against 7 of those variations, but the game will eventually present the 8th variation that you are not tanky against.

"I can survive X, why can't I survive Y" is not a great way to describe how tanky you are.

Unfortunately, the game requires you to have layers of defense/mitigation for those 8 variations of things and there are certain things in the game that are not meant to be tanked. Those situations usually (not always) give you ample time to see it and move. Expecting to tank those situations requires extreme and not reasonable layers of defense. It's not impossible but I would venture that you would know if you had one of those builds - you dying means you don't.

isnt that 10 ? ;) phys, fire, lightning, cold, chaos x2 ? just splitting hairs.

just look at gauntlet stuff or hardcore race, game is balanced this way. you can have defenses but they try to put players on the edge always. the downside is that it s hard to chill in this game if you really reallys dislike dying

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SerialF wrote:

isnt that 10 ? ;) phys, fire, lightning, cold, chaos x2 ? just splitting hairs.

just look at gauntlet stuff or hardcore race, game is balanced this way. you can have defenses but they try to put players on the edge always. the downside is that it s hard to chill in this game if you really reallys dislike dying

Yup, 10. You are correct. Whoops. Should have focused more. Good catch.

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xaerobb wrote:

There is no immortal build in poe, because some of the end boss attacks are so strong that they ignore any player defense pool.
In such cases, the only thing that helps is knowing the mechanics of the fight manually (avoid impact by movement).

Leaving aside the floating orbs from Eaters arena any endgame boss attack can be tanked, it's just a matter of whether you care enough to get your defenses to that point. Many of the mechanics require so much def investment and are so easy to dodge that trying to tank them is honestly just a waste.

While it's true that there is no true immortality at the moment (there used to be builds that exploited certain mechanics to actually be immortal but they all got fixed), the reason isn't so much the damage numbers, it's the fact that there are so many things to guard against that any build will have some weakspot that can get him killed. There is also the matter of scaling monster damage via quantity and map mods. A bunch of legion rares can potentially dish out more dps than uber bosses.

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Nubatron wrote:

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RitualMurder wrote:

defenses in this game matter until they dont

im pretty tired of the random 1 shots on characters that can face tank end game bosses

if i can face tank shaper slam, sirus die beam etc a random monster in my map should not be able to 1 shot me

yet it happens

it happened today!

You've made this claim before if I recall, and I think your thread compared very different damage types to somehow prove you were tanky.

Being tanky against physical hits does not necessarily make you tanky against physical dots. At the most simplistic level, there are four damage types that fall into one of two categories: damage over time and hits. You could very well be tanky against 7 of those variations, but the game will eventually present the 8th variation that you are not tanky against.

"I can survive X, why can't I survive Y" is not a great way to describe how tanky you are.

Unfortunately, the game requires you to have layers of defense/mitigation for those 8 variations of things and there are certain things in the game that are not meant to be tanked. Those situations usually (not always) give you ample time to see it and move. Expecting to tank those situations requires extreme and not reasonable layers of defense. It's not impossible but I would venture that you would know if you had one of those builds - you dying means you don't.

basically play eternal damnation loreweave or get fucked

Hello there.

I'm currently playing my berseker with 45k armor + fortify + debilitate from punishment.

With this I can take down Elder and SHaper seperately (both down once but still need to work the mechs, the build is definitively good enough for this).

I can face tank shaper slams and Drox ones.

TO be more accurate I have :
- 6k hp
- determination
- fortify 20 stacks
- chill effect on mace hits
- punishment which inflict debilitate on hit for 2s
- 0 hp regen to 600 depending of the belt I use (I include the loss of life from triple rage berseker passive here).
- -40% curse and -60% crit, I use those to be able to run curse/crit mods on maps.
- I currently have way too much elem res (78/79 max, overcap of 170%+) in order to run eldrich altar and I am still working to replace some pieces of gear.
- 36 chaos res, 75% if I switch pantheon, for sirus.
- stun on full life with leap slam

So as long as I hit, I can get quite tough as long the hit is not a pure elemental damage (elder slam :(). Also chilling boss like Sirus help a lots. I also recently got sap from exarch implicit => -7% damage, still usefull while I don't have any better.

I obvisouly have molten shall with automatic cast and the vaal which I can use if I feel the need for it.

What is very... tricky for me is when I actally run mods like "add %phys dmg as <elem> dmg" either in maps of from eldircht altars. There are some boss that are pure caster => 0 dmg increased ez game GG ololololol, and there are others that I could facetank that suddenly become extremely dangerous (ex : droxx in maven challenge throw randomly his punch slow attacks while your busy with Veritania ice spike and those poison snakes). This feel like pur bullshit in terme of balance.



The %more dmg is less surprising, but If you're a bit too much used to facetank slams, you obviously can get some very bad surprise if you facetanks those boosted phys dmg. Usually, I don't run any %more dmg and %phys as extra <elem> dmg mods and %speed on maps, only those from altars if I want the rewards. I do run crits, and any curse mods.

For the speed mods, I a melee, I can die while jumping to mobs because they suddenly got faster to hit before I acutally jumped into them and stunned them.

I just favoured every map with a caster boss so I could get +200% phys a chaos dmg from exarch altar on the boss without giving a damn.... yes it's possible, bu it make me feel like shit to have to do that and be stuck on the fixed set of maps when there are many more of them, the variety does help to not get bored of farming.

In the endgame, the killer for me are pools : I actually have some life regen to compensate the life loss from triple rage passive. If I ever step on one of those freaking pools, which colors is always carefully chosen to make sure you will have difficulty to notice them, I suddenly die in 1s max, because dots weren't enough, they had to cut our life regen also so I get the full damage of life loss from triple rage.

And honestly, since I played grim dawn, I grew a huge hatred towards pools mechanics as it clearly feel like to me as a very poor mechanics to make people dies. New boss ? Let's get a new color of pool to drop on the ground yeah, how original how fun.

Also we can think about the pantheon, doing a fire boss ? Get -40% ignition from pantheon and put a gem with -less ignite duration. The problem ? Work in single boss, not in maven challenge...

But at least, playing with pantheon and jewels to make it up for what you lack in gear/tree, can help push towards the last levels of maps and first end map bosses.

Finally, we talk about HC player, but as I red somewhere else, the game is balanced about the fact that shit WILL happens and people will use logging out to not die, so much for building layers of defences. I will never play hardcore as it is not for me, but I won't even do something like logging out to not die, for me it just break the immersion in the game and a sign something is wrong!

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RitualMurder wrote:

basically play eternal damnation loreweave or get fucked

That's certainly one pathway, but by no means the only way. Aegis and Melding is pretty damn good. Armour stacking jugg is solid. Transcendence w/ damage conversion can get pretty silly. Just to provide a few basics.

The list isn't limited to do this one thing or "get fucked".

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walfrat wrote:

What is very... tricky for me is when I actally run mods like "add %phys dmg as <elem> dmg" either in maps of from eldircht altars. There are some boss that are pure caster => 0 dmg increased ez game GG ololololol, and there are others that I could facetank that suddenly become extremely dangerous (ex : droxx in maven challenge throw randomly his punch slow attacks while your busy with Veritania ice spike and those poison snakes). This feel like pur bullshit in terme of balance.

what you are coming up against here is the problem that you have very strong defences against a particular specialised form of damage delivered in a particular way, but you have wide holes in your defence setup that have not been plugged by other layers of defence.


peo0ple talk about layering defences, but just having multiple layers isnt necessarily enough, its about having layers that work together to fill each others gaps.



people look at armour on paper and say oh, it works against small hits but not against big hits. it might seem that way on paper but thats basically bullshit in terms of how it actually plays out. in reality armour is amazing against this 1 big phys hit that comes in, it stops you getting 1 shot, it saves your life. what armour is shit at dealing with is bursts of smaller damage, lots of medium sized incoming hits clustered together, thats what kills you. smaller hits tend to come in quantity, barrages, packs of mobs etc.

this is particularly bad with elemental attack damage, as you are pointing out here.

what is actually good against smaller hits isnt armour, its block. what is even better against smaller hits is evasion because it forms reliable patterns, it reduces crits and you cannot be stunned by a hit you have evaded, block does not have those 3 qualities.

block and evasion work against physical and elemental attack damage. what you are finding dangerous about jumping into a pack of say 4 monsters, esp with extra damage as ele or mobs with elemental conversion skills, you might have 75% phys reduction against those monsters, but thats only working against half their damage. so really you are only getting a 37.5% damage reduction. if you had 75% block you would probably, on average, block the full 75% of their damage, and with evasion you would be guaranteed to evade 75% of it.






stuff like armour and evasion have diminishing returns. lets look at these 4 mobs you just jumped into, for easy math lets say the physical part of their attacks is doing 2k damage per hit.

with 20k armour you would mitigate 1333 damage from each one. if we boost your armour up to 50k, now you would mitigate 1667 per hit. so we more than doubled your armour and actually, we got very little in return for it. going from 0 armour to 20k took off 1333 damage, and then from 20k to 50k took off 334. the extra 30k armour is worth 1/4 of the first 20k armour, the return you are getting per 1k armour is getting worse and worse as you stack it when it comes to how it performs in practice when ur running maps.


lets look at evasion, you are in a t16 map, with 20k evasion you evade 70% of attacks, with 50k evasion you evade 85%.




so when you look at it, evasion leaves you open to getting 1 shot, but it stops you getting bursted down. armour wont stop you getting bursted down, but it will stop you getting 1 shot. if you have 50k defence, the first 20k of that is doing the vast majority of the work.

so having 20k evasion + 20k armour is a lot better than having 50k armour or 50k evasion on their own. in practice its not even remotely comparable. 50k evasion on its own is a death trap, 20k backed up by 20k armour to deal with the hit that gets through is really strong against packs of mobs in maps.



lets just theory a situation, you have 5500 life, mega juicy map, abyss monsters spamming, in the space of a few seconds you get hit with 20 attacks doing 2k phys damage each.

with 50k evasion you will get hit by 3 of them, so 3x2000 damage = 6,000 damage. you die.

with 50k armour each hit is reduced to 333 damage, 20x333= 6,660 damage. you die.

with 20k evasion + 20k armour you get hit by 6 hits each doing 667 damage. so 6x667 = 4,002 damage. you live.



in situation 1 and 2 you die with 50k total defences, in situation 3 you lived with 40k total defences but you had them split between 2 different mechanics. more than this those mechanics are most effective in different situations, so you dont have this all or nothing feel to your defences, they just work fairly well most of the time.







70% block is not as good as 20k evasion, but its similar, less reliable but will usually result in the same protection from burst damage.



so if you got 45k armour, thats good, but maybe if you had 30k armour + 15k evasion or 30k armour + 55-60% block chance it would feel a lot better, well rounded, not so situational.

now that isnt always possible, ur using a 2h, u cant really get block, can you get evasion? well you could replace determ with grace, but if you dont have the same % evasion multipliers to boost it maybe it just isnt effective to run.

these are just thoughts, im not necessarily giving you a fix for the build ur playing but something to think about for future characters perhaps.