What is the point of building defenses?

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Nubatron wrote:

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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".

i have a 97 RF inquis, legacy melding, aegis etc i just got giga fucked by a harbinger in a map

this game is a silly ass joke when it comes to defense even when ur tanky ur not really tanky

no altars, no extra shit, im doing witnessed guardians for maven farming
just giga fucked by a regular harb in my map

non sensical bs

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roundishcap wrote:

My 2 cents.

Actual gear pieces and passive nodes are incredibly weak without auras.

Buff the tree remove auras and a lot of common build mistakes go away.

It is stupid that determination with 2 flasks and like 30% aura effect is more than like 50 passive points of armor nodes.

The grace determination banner suppression setup needs to be reevaluated if it works for every build as effectively as it does.

This doesn't fly without extra steps, we already don't take defensive passives on the tree very often due to point constraint to meet damage objectives so they would have to free up power somewhere else.

At which point most of the playerbase would immediately use it to go even more glass, even more cannon.

oh please. people complaining about not being tanky always half ass their defenses, thats what it comes down to.

poe is a game where if you half ass anything, it feels like 0. if you cheap out on damage investment, you do zdps, likewise if you cheap out on defenses you feel no different than going glass cannon

already see people in this thread talking about how they put in so much effort but they start naming basic shit like fortify.. molten shell, max resists, etc. these defense layers cost almost nothing to slap on your build. and i bet if you look at their gear, their gloves will have fully maxed out dps mods but not a single defense mod, not even a life roll.

Yamface just coming straight out and saying it to their faces lmao, but agreed exactly the case.

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RitualMurder wrote:

i have a 97 RF inquis, legacy melding, aegis etc i just got giga fucked by a harbinger in a map

this game is a silly ass joke when it comes to defense even when ur tanky ur not really tanky

no altars, no extra shit, im doing witnessed guardians for maven farming
just giga fucked by a regular harb in my map

non sensical bs

The most obvious hole in your defense is your chaos resistance. The game has a way of finding the weakest link. Aegis/Melding isn't perfect either. It is just a relatively cheap way to build defenses effectively. Also, are you using the traitor with 0 empty flask slots? That's strange.

Sorry if I missed something, it was a very quick look.

Either way, your build isn't immortal, but it's good enough to avoid dying most of the time if you're careful. I have a nagging suspicion that you're not being careful.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

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.

While your whole point (mixed armour + eva > one maxed) is correct overall, armour does not have that much of diminishing returns. You compare mitigated damage with total armour, expecting a linear approach, but of course this can't be, as mitigated damage can't exceed original damage value.
You are supposed to compare damage taken with defense investment: if I double my defenses, do I take twice less damage, meaning I double my EHP ? And with this you can see thatarmour and eva do have diminishing returns but in a much lower proportion that your example implies. with your numerical values, 150% more armour (20k -> 50k) gives 100% more EHP (50% less damage taken, 667->333), which in turns means 20% diminishing returns. Not that bad.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

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.

That is not true. 70% block is much harder to get than 20k eva, but there are much more recovery on block than recovery on evade, which makes block far superior in terms of negating burst damage.



For the rest, yamface said it all. The fact that some players hit lvl 100 HCSSF every league or so makes this whole thread irrelevant.

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PoitelMarto wrote:

The fact that some players hit lvl 100 HCSSF every league or so makes this whole thread irrelevant.

This is the worst take on balance you could have. The folks that play HCSSF many times dont engage with much of the content, nor do they do anything even remotely risky. Not to mention it represents literally the smallest segment of players league wise.

I have respect for the HCSSF folks, but they are absolute outliers in terms of normal game experiences most players have.

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DarthSki44 wrote:

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PoitelMarto wrote:

The fact that some players hit lvl 100 HCSSF every league or so makes this whole thread irrelevant.

This is the worst take on balance you could have. The folks that play HCSSF many times dont engage with much of the content, nor do they do anything even remotely risky. Not to mention it represents literally the smallest segment of players league wise.

I have respect for the the HCSSF folks, but they are absolute outliers in terms of normal game experiences most players have.

I mostly agree with this take. HC seems to be more of a test of patience than skill. HC players that take chances and hit 100 certainly exist, but it feels more common that they just never take risk.

Source: check out achievements (not challenges; achievements) for the HC players that come into threads and say stupid things like "softcore problems" or "laughs in HC". Before anyone jumps on this "Source", it's a joke (mostly).

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DarthSki44 wrote:

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PoitelMarto wrote:

The fact that some players hit lvl 100 HCSSF every league or so makes this whole thread irrelevant.

This is the worst take on balance you could have. The folks that play HCSSF many times dont engage with much of the content, nor do they do anything even remotely risky. Not to mention it represents literally the smallest segment of players league wise.

I have respect for the the HCSSF folks, but they are absolute outliers in terms of normal game experiences most players have.

I get your point. Let's say then that there are tons of online videos from standard and SC/HC league players that face and tank most mechanics in the game, including Uber slams and various mod combinations without a scratch.

It is true that it is close to impossible to truly tank absolutely everything. As a tank player, I 100% feel how much GGG favors glass canons over pure damage sponges (Sanctum league mechanic being the latest example), and I fully understand how investing in defenses can feel unrewarding.

However, stating that defenses are trash as OP did is plain wrong. When I started PoE in 3.10, I did not even defeat Sirus on 6 portals. My 3.20 char tanked regular Sirus's maze within a 5 div budget. This league I climbed up to lvl 100 on solo play, while running Uber Atziris and semi-juiced T16 (ie 8-mod with Altars and maxed monster pack size, but no deli or 20% deli at most). I die to some Simulacrum combinations, some Uber moves, and standing still in a middle of beyond ranged monsters. That's it. Defenses 100% work. You just have to accept not playing zoom zoom or not being on a budget.

(not that I a actually arguing with your quote, which was indeed a good point)

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Nubatron wrote:

I mostly agree with this take. HC seems to be more of a test of patience than skill. HC players that take chances and hit 100 certainly exist, but it feels more common that they just never take risk.

Source: check out achievements (not challenges; achievements) for the HC players that come into threads and say stupid things like "softcore problems" or "laughs in HC". Before anyone jumps on this "Source", it's a joke (mostly).

Some of us take risks still you just take them when you feel ready to do so, and the reason you can do that is because defences do infact work if you put the work into them.

That isn't to say we don't play cautious too because we do but really HC is about knowing where your characters at vs the content you are currently trying to do, you use skill and patience both to get there.

There is no way you could get 40 challenges done if defences didn't work but it is truly difficult to cover every type of encounter. I've done all the other challenges but I still can't finish a Simulacrum you just need so much defence vs mass trash its a very niche thing.

So really think its a bad take on it to say 100 in HC SSF makes this irrelevant, whether they dodge content or not the very intent of rolling modded shit is to increase the difficulty, if you never died it wouldn't be harder would it? That isn't defences not working thats the modifier system doing its job properly. People forget but there was a time when running corrupted 8 mods was rare as fuck for most builds now its the norm lmao