Survivability issues

I'm having trouble keeping my ranger (level 82) alive. every hit seems to be a 1-shot or close to it. my elemental resists are 75,76,68, chaos is -11, physical is 81. I recently switched to an item that converts all my evasion to armor so I expected to get hit more often but I didn't think I would get hit so hard by everything. I'm sure some of it is just the higher level content, the highest i've ever made it is 88 and that guy used a shield.

My other character (level 86) has a much lower evasion rating than my ranger's armor but a lot more energy shield, and resists at 81%, -52 chaos. does 6% energy resist really make that much difference? Is evasion really that much better than armor? or is it just the energy shield? They have roughly the same hit points. My other character is also immune to many ailments/status effects but I figured that wouldn't mean as much on the first hit.

the 86 can survive most things by herself in rare yellow maps if i'm careful but the ranger will run into trouble pretty much anywhere. Ranger is a speed demon with high DPS (at least for me :) ) and fun to play so i'm curious what I can do to keep her alive.

Whats your Life totals?

Also Armor is best against lots of little hits but big hits hurt more because of the way armor is calculated.

"

Zornochio wrote:

does 6% energy resist really make that much difference?

6% overcapped elemental resistance, if this is what you're meaning, is way more impactful than you might think at first glance.

with regular capped elemental resistances at 75%;
If you're hit for 10000 elemental damage (assuming no other mitigation), you'll take 2500 damage.

If you have overcapped at 81% resistance, you'll only take 1900 damage.

Turning that 6% difference into a 24% reduction in damage taken.

___

Also, check your flasks as it's very easy to neglect them. If you're turning evasion into armour, you want to be scaling that, possibly both. Jade and Granite are both good options and ideally have %armour or %evasion on your flasks. Taking Iron Reflexes is typically something you want to invest into to get enough value out of it to be worth taking.

As Zornochio said though, armour scaling is unintuitive; the bigger the physical hit you take, the less protected you are by armour.

You mention liking how fast the ranger is and this is technically a defensive layer, or at least improves one of the often joked about defensive layers... walking in circles. Don't move towards/away from enemies, circle them, spiral in/out and loop if you need to change direction. In POE there is always SOMETHING about to happen that will kill you 1s behind your current location, don't be there, and don't move back into it.


Hopefully this helps a little without being a wall of text