WHY is the Defense System Like This?

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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tinghshi wrote:

1. The three defenses I states have close to no effect on elemental damage

This is not true. Only armour is limited to physical damage.

Evasion is still limited to Attack-based elemental damage, so compared to Energy Shield it still gets the short end of the stick.

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Flab wrote:

To me, 6k armour seems like quite a lot tbh, I'd have to waste skill slots, passives and prioritize to get more than that.

An armour user shouldn't be forced to spend many passives, have great gear, use shields, use Granite Flasks, Endurance Charges, Grace, IR and Determination all at the same time.

I think armour is garbage overall and evasion is only slightly better (great on average, awful at times).

I have 6k w/ IR and grace while only using leather and steel with the 2 similar nodes in the duelist starting area. I've never had too much of an issue getting 5k+ armor.

Zaka keeps trying to convince me you can make an armor tank which will function as well as a life tank and I'm on the same side as you are. He's going DW (block), granites w/ iron skin, 5-6 charges and determination. This is so limiting just to make up for what 4k life and much less effort can get.

While I don't think it's impossible and Zaka is out to prove that, it's just impractical. Not every build can run all those defensive skills, passives and what not nor do many want to. Stacking life is much easier and as effective as all the things you mentioned.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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tinghshi wrote:

1. The three defenses I states have close to no effect on elemental damage

This is not true. Only armour is limited to physical damage.

Well of course evasion and block has SOME effect, but still negligible in what I'm trying to say.

And of of course you can make any build you want, and if you spend enough time into it, it could be viable. However, those builds concentrating on PD, block, evasion are severely underpowered compared to Life.

High life builds also get a greater advantage from flasks, since they will be recovering more of the time. Evasion characters usually rely on instant heal potions which quickly stops the secondary recovery effect.

I think we finally all agree that the purpose of this thread is to protest the fact that there is far fewer ways to build your character to survive than there are defensive stats. That done right you should be able to pour everything into one and be fine. And if not out of the box viable, viable with uber gear and/or uber skill.

1 or 2 keystones will fix this(I prefer 2 for build diversity)

keystone: 0.1% per 1000 armor rating is applied to your elemental resists
i.e. 3000 armor would be .3% of 3000 or 9% resist all
or 10000 armor would be 1.0% of 10000 or 100% resist all.
This makes the keystone helpful for many people. But Uber if you base your build on it, as it should be.

Then do a similar one for Evasion. I would separate these two by many nodes as they should not be taken together.

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sadeiko wrote:

I think we finally all agree that the purpose of this thread is to protest the fact that there is far fewer ways to build your character to survive than there are defensive stats. That done right you should be able to pour everything into one and be fine. And if not out of the box viable, viable with uber gear and/or uber skill.

1 or 2 keystones will fix this(I prefer 2 for build diversity)

keystone: 0.1% per 1000 armor rating is applied to your elemental resists
i.e. 3000 armor would be .3% of 3000 or 9% resist all
or 10000 armor would be 1.0% of 10000 or 100% resist all.
This makes the keystone helpful for many people. But Uber if you base your build on it, as it should be.

Then do a similar one for Evasion. I would separate these two by many nodes as they should not be taken together.

Well theoretically you could take acro and phase acro if you focus on eva, where you get some extra def against spells as well (better than nothing ;))

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Mark_GGG wrote:

And evasion can avoid chaos damage, which ES can't.

Not in all cases sadly. CI comes to mind and I wonder what percentage of ES users get it and I don't imagine it can be considered a small exception. It's true for viper strike and the spitting snakes but for poison arrow you can only avoid initial chaos damage which is a lot lower than the cloud and annoying vaal thing projectiles if I remember right are considered spells so evasion is of no help here. I can't think of any other chaos damage sources. This of course is subject to change with Act III.

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0nin wrote:

Evasion is still limited to Attack-based elemental damage, so compared to Energy Shield it still gets the short end of the stick.

Yes but it is better against attack based damage than ES because you avoid some of it. ES is all round but offers no damage mitigation.

@tingshi

First of all, no offense but from your posts I think you don't fully understand the difference between attacks and spells. Mechanics threads has all the answers and terms and after you get that out of the way your point would be much clearer.

But I think I do get what you are trying to say. You are always forced get life from gear and passives because the base amount in higher levels is very small. Small enough that even if you went all out on any form of defense surviving would be very difficult. If you don't have a certain amount of life no matter how much you invested in other defenses is not going to make a difference. This forces a situation where some amount of gear mods and passives must be spent on life limiting how much can be spent freely.

Note that this might not hold true for ES. I haven't played ES character for long enough and just don't know how much ES can you gain. CI mixes things up even further removing life from the equation.

A possible solution would be increasing the base hp and probably reducing the effect of life passives and gear mods.