I Strongly Dislike the Defense Systems in PoE - from a new player

defenses are perfectly fine, in fact we have way too many defensive layers available to most builds. it's always the newbies who complain about defenses in poe, you just don't know how to build a character.

in kalandra I played two builds and both of them were immortal in 100% deli maps and still had over 30 mil dps with good clear speed.

last league I had 110 mil dps and 230k ehp and I didn't even have a mageblood. wave 30 kosis was just tickling me on that build.

this league my character looks like this in pinnacle setup with dot capped dps and insane clear speed, immune to all elemental ailments, curses, stuns, bleed, poison, and I have 301% movement speed



any build can do this if your setup is good. true, the power creep is real, but the power creep is also a thing for defensive layers. you'll never see a good player complain about defenses, we don't even see that many hc death clips anymore. heck, even zizaran doesnt die in hc at this point. why? because defensive layers are so easy to build

"

auspexa wrote:

defenses are perfectly fine, in fact we have way too many defensive layers available to most builds. it's always the newbies who complain about defenses in poe, you just don't know how to build a character.

in kalandra I played two builds and both of them were immortal in 100% deli maps and still had over 30 mil dps with good clear speed.

last league I had 110 mil dps and 230k ehp and I didn't even have a mageblood. wave 30 kosis was just tickling me on that build.

this league my character looks like this in pinnacle setup with dot capped dps and insane clear speed, immune to all elemental ailments, curses, stuns, bleed, poison, and I have 301% movement speed



any build can do this if your setup is good. true, the power creep is real, but the power creep is also a thing for defensive layers. you'll never see a good player complain about defenses, we don't even see that many hc death clips anymore. heck, even zizaran doesnt die in hc at this point. why? because defensive layers are so easy to build

Maybe you should try to play hardcore or at least ssf

Not that you weren't right

But playing the game in regural mode when it's so easy for you is at least strange...

Unfortunately, there is a small percentage of PoE players that have been around for a long time, and what they do is find game-breaking ways to play the game, and then GGG designs 80% of the end game content around those players. Over the last decade, this has accumulated. A very small percentage of super elite players inadvertently dictate the game's development to some extent. You have discovered one such issue, and that's defenses. This is PoE. It's a get used to it type of game. Even though I've played off and on for a long time, I still battle my frustration's with GGG.

In the new mechanic, I'm around rank 1600. The AI will automatically try and lose your matches for you on purpose at times. I've watched my team just walk back and forth in the same spot as the enemy AI just wipes them and takes totems. I've had the enemy entire defense leave when I die and take my totems. Many different situations where the AI was far more advantageous to the opponent exist. This has happened multiple times. The AI will steamroll you and that's that. It's designed on purpose, and it completely ruins the game and GGG doesn't care. That's how they deal with super elites that have super high DPS and things. Dumb little things like this that don't make sense add up over the years and you end up with the cluster that is defense. Super elite players made practically invincible builds off and on for years and GGG tried to accommodate those specific players a bit too much over the years and now we have where defense is at.

Defense is overcapping ele res, maxing chaos res, well over 90% phys reduction, curse, ele ailment, poison, corrupting blood, maim, hinder, and blind immunity and true end game you take some phys into ele somewhere in your build. You can do this easy with a lethal pride jewel making phys into fire so it goes through both phys and fire res reductions. Then you have to have at least 4mil DPS because some rares roll glass cannon, so if you don't honestly one shot them, they will likely kill you at full rare t16 juiced maps. Also, if you can incorporate destroying enemies in your build, that will eliminate their post death stuff. Lastly, you can explore block, suppress, and possibly blind, increased ailment or blind effect on top of that, and you can make it so attacks are far less likely to hit.

I both agree and disagree with the OP.

I agree in part because, unless you completely max out really ANY of the defensive mechanics offered to us...they are almost totally useless. Run around with 10k armor and you may as well have none. Run around with 40-50% block and you may as well have none. Run around with 50% chance to suppress...you get the drift. The game itself shouldn't be throwing stuff at us so REGULARLY that this happens. Beefy rares and bosses, sure...but it feels like every single monster can spike damage so high or so fast that you HAVE to remove the "chance" from the equation in all your defenses.

I disagree in part because you SHOULD have to choose between offensive and defensive buffs. That is an essential part of any character building and rpg game. Removing constraints in the way of a "separate defense passive tree" would completely obliterate any amount of strategy out of the passive tree.
No player or build should feel entitled to EVERY damage node or EVERY defense node all the time. You the player need to choose, based on available stats gear and points, what the most optimal spread is. Balancing offense and defense, choosing to forego defense for offense, or choosing to forego offense for defense are all basic elements of rpgs.