Purpose of Defences: Classical vs Prevention

PoE 1 has armour, evasion and ES as the basics. Onto that it has block chance, dodge chance, spell suppression, fortification, petrified blood, "damage taken as X" rerouting, lots of Max Life, etc as further passive defences to mitigate after you got hit. Then it has guard skills, temporal rift, dash, minions, frost wall, knockback, extreme movement speed, etc for active, preventative defences. As well as extreme recovery options like life flasks that pretty much instantly full heal (with passive tree investment).

PoE 2 still has the basics but the lower Life counts make them feel inadequate (aside from ES). Some active defences have been re-distributed: the only Guard skill currently is an ascendancy passive. Temporal Rift is also an ascendancy passive. "Dash" is situational: Monk's palm skills and Rake move you fast towards a target. Lightning Warp requires planning ahead instead of investing in passive skill gems. Raise Shield and Dodge Roll are the more widely accessible active defences and they have their own downsides. Frost Wall gets new cousins like Glacial Bolt and Shield Wall. Mass slows and knockbacks become more important as enemies don't die easily and are faster than the player.

In PoE 1, defences just have to last long enough for the screen to be blasted. Mouse movement and dash cooldowns made it hard to get out of the way so some hits were inevitable. Skill gems were also competing with support gems and reservation gems ("spirit gems" in PoE 2) for sockets. There wasn't room for much preventative defences, you leaned on your gear and passive skill tree to tank the few hits before everything died.

Currently in PoE 2, most builds need players to pay attention to preventative defences. There are players who don't know about active and preventative defences so they seek blaster builds. There are those who know, but just don't want to use them: Fun for them is blasting, not interacting. Then there are players whose definition of Fun is economic dominance and they seek blaster builds regardless of how they feel about the combat as faster kills means more income (and more dopamine hits from hearing divines drop).

GGG's vision of "slow, methodical combat until you earn godhood" is fragile. There will always be players who want to blast and any flaw in balance will be exploited to blast. At least in trade leagues, players will "earn" godhood by buying pre-dropped, pre-crafted OP gear (or enough crafting currency to DIY it). For blasters, they want passive defences so they can focus their combat attention entirely on nuking. In other words, "I want to be a glass cannon except it's reinforced, bullet-proof glass". Putting too much passive defences really will kill the vision as it lowers the skill floor to play glass cannons.

At least for players who seek blaster builds as they don't know about active and preventative defences,