Defence is terrible and big factor why endgame engagement sucks.

Preface
I’ve put roughly 2,500 hours into PoE2 so far and genuinely enjoy the game. One of the things I appreciate most is the freedom to break the expected archetypes and create unconventional but functional builds. For example:

A Pathfinder that abandons the traditional bow setup in favour of a spear with unlimited poison stacks, using magnitude scaling, spear fields, bleed/knockback, and a crossbow for ice spikes and tunnel hazards.

A Smith of Kitava using a Mjölner‑style weapon with cast‑on‑block interactions to create a fire‑themed spell‑tank hybrid.

A Witch Hunter running two entirely different builds depending on weapon choice.

This level of creativity is what keeps me engaged

Core Issue: Defensive Complexity Increasing Each Season
My main concern is how defensive layers have become progressively more complicated each season. The result is that players often feel forced into one of two extremes:

Stack as much defence as possible, sacrificing most damage, and still risk being killed quickly.

Go full glass cannon, which performs well offensively but leads to frequent deaths, XP loss, or character loss (HC), causing progression to stall around levels 75–80.

In Season 1, a moderate amount of life and elemental mitigation was usually enough. Now the defensive landscape feels significantly more fragmented and demanding.

Details and Pain Points
Max Life
There are relatively few sources of maximum life, and while certain niche items can boost it, they often come with trade‑offs that limit overall build flexibility.

Armour-Based Characters
Armour, block, resistances, and stun threshold are straightforward to invest in and feel the least punishing to scale.

Evasion-Based Characters
Evasion, stun threshold, ailment threshold, deflect, and resistances all compete for attention. Because evasion is percentage‑based, any hit that gets through often deals full damage, which is especially punishing when max life is already low. Even a small fraction of hits getting through can be lethal.

Energy Shield Characters
Max ES, recharge rate, recharge start, and ES stun threshold create a system that feels like “life with extra steps,” with the added drawback that chaos damage bypasses it entirely.

Hybrid ES/Evasion
Trying to scale both systems simultaneously feels inefficient. Leaning toward one side or the other often results in being noticeably weaker than a pure version of either.

Hybrid ES/Armour
Slightly more manageable than ES/Evasion, but still difficult to optimise without heavy investment.

Uniques
Uniques are thematically great, but many lack higher‑level versions. This forces a choice between using a unique for its interesting mechanics (and sacrificing defence) or abandoning it entirely. This reduces endgame build diversity, which runs counter to one of PoE2’s biggest strengths.

Non‑Unique Gear
Regardless of build, gear requirements tend to converge on the same defensive stat combinations. This would be fine if not for the large number of irrelevant or low‑impact stat rolls that make finding or crafting good items significantly more tedious.
Common defensive affixes often boil down to:

% increased defence
Flat increased defence
% increased resistances
Flat max life
Threshold increases

This creates a sense that gearing is more about filtering out noise than making meaningful choices.

Conclusion
The end result is that many players either:

Plateau around level 80 and lose motivation to push further, or

Default to one of the few meta builds that reliably survive endgame content.

This feels at odds with the game’s core appeal: the ability to create wildly different, expressive builds that still function in endgame. When defensive systems become too fragmented or punishing, the incentive to experiment diminishes, and the game risks drifting toward a more rigid, cookie‑cutter meta.