A Few Thoughts on the Game's Defense Mechanics

When it comes to survivability in the game, physical damage is still the deadliest source of lethality. Armor provides almost negligible resistance against physical damage—so much so that it’s practically useless.

For example, when a 10,000-damage physical attack hits a "Life" build character, they might only get around 20% damage reduction, taking 8,000 damage. Meanwhile, a shield-based character with no armor at all would take the full 10,000 damage. That’s just a 20% difference in mitigation—but the actual survivability gap is massive: Life builds might barely reach 4,000 HP late-game, while shield builds can easily stack over 8,000 effective HP.

And it gets even more absurd: shields also have a “one-health” talent—if you fully abandon health (Life), you gain immunity to Chaos damage, which is the second-deadliest damage type in the game. What does “immune to Chaos damage” even mean? Sir, could you please translate that for me?

Right now, the meta for survival clearly favors:
Shield > Life,
Evasion > Armor,
Having Block > No Block,
Fast Clear Speed > “Monkey Play” (i.e., tedious rotations where you have to manually cast every skill like playing piano).

Mark claims that “shield isn’t the same as life”—but how on earth did he come to that conclusion?

Here's that one scenario which ruins your day:

You sprint and some glowing porcupine spits at you. It hits you in the eye and You fall on your face, some skinny bois are kicking your guts when you're down, trying to rob you.

Armour survives, ES dies.

You are correct about the contrary in scenario of a big hit.

You can avoid both risks when playing skillfully. Not using Sprint when not supposed to, and dodging the Boss abilities.

PS. we are getting whole new layer with Runic Ward. I am hyped, let's see what they cooked.

PS2. I made a character with 3k life, no armour/ES/EV and it can tank 20k Physical hit. How come?

why

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Evergrey#7535 wrote:

PS2. I made a character with 3k life, no armour/ES/EV and it can tank 20k Physical hit. How come?

I'm curious to see that character, do you have a pob link?

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arandan#3174 wrote:

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Evergrey#7535 wrote:

PS2. I made a character with 3k life, no armour/ES/EV and it can tank 20k Physical hit. How come?

I'm curious to see that character, do you have a pob link?

Things like Cloak of Flame, Shaman Adaptation ascendancy and sources of flat %physical damage reduction and taking hit damage over time.

It's basically some way to convert the physical damage you take to be elemental, and then mitigate that elemental damage - it's easier than mitigating physical damage.

Taking hit damage over time as opposed to all at once is useful when you can build your character around recovery like recoup/regen/leech etc. and there's also things on unique items like defiance of destiny and undying hate jewels, etc., that help here.

When you combine those things you'll end up with players who have like 2k life and 200es and can sit there and AFK tank multiple endgame boss slams one after another. They do tend to have some "Achilles heals" like phys DoTs or something like that usually though.

Kind of beside the point these threads are discussing IMO though.

While I think it's nice to have those items, I don't think they are very relevant in this discussion.

Seems like OP is trying to have something like a discussion around the fundamentals of defenses: eg. how much investment should be required for an all-rare wearing AR/EV hybrid player to have a max physical hit that won't result in being guaranteed one-shot for missing a dodge roll one time in a juiced map compared to the level of investment required if they were building that same character with say, ES instead of AR as the other part of their hybrid approach. Currently, it's just less effort going the ES route to avoid a comparable level of punishing game play outcomes.

Unique-enabled solutions are good, and maybe it's just me, but I don't think the practical viability of entire defensive archetypes should revolve around mechanics enabled by super-rare unique items. I think defensive capabilities should be able to stand on their own using rare items. It keeps REALLY GOOD rares as a "default" BiS viable gear piece to aim for, and while super-rare uniques can still be built around as an alternatively viable gear option, I do not think they should be the "default" option or as something that "proves" non-ES builds are "good", or whatever.

And don't get me wrong, it's possible to build good AR, EV, AR/EV characters right now and you don't need all t1 prefixes (you need at least t3 and some t2/t1 lol), the issue is you also need a lot of additional investment across other supporting layers from the tree and suffixes and jewelry pieces to the point where the compounded requirements constrain the practical viability of building adequate max-phys-hit defense for most players, compared to the much more accessible solution of simply scaling ES.

None of it will enable you to build a character capable of taking 20k max phys hit with a 3k hp pool and no other defences. Even heavily investing in armour will not get you there.

Poe1 has 10x more phys dmg taken to elemental conversion options and you'd struggle to pull it off there with that life pool.

The simplest way to fix this disparity is to either add more life scaling options, or add actual phys mitigation nodes to the warrior side of the tree.

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arandan#3174 wrote:

None of it will enable you to build a character capable of taking 20k max phys hit with a 3k hp pool and no other defences. Even heavily investing in armour will not get you there.

This build actually takes way more than 20k physical damage. It's just that poe.ninja doesn't show the real numbers in their ladder due to PoB limitations.

Here's the link to my post where I tested this.
It also has links to the PoB and to adapted builds from other community members.
Feel free to dig into it in your free time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile2builds/comments/1sivd4g/2700_life_shaman_tank_no_esevarmourblock_stacking/



P.S. I'll be glad to hear others' comments.

I stand corrected.

This is a crazy amount of min-max required in order to reach something a lich can get for free in mediocre ES gear (and that's just talking pure max phys taken hit), therefore my stance on this remains the same.

Either add more life scaling options to this game, add more ways to mitigate/convert phys dmg taken, or finally do something to ES.

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arandan#3174 wrote:

I stand corrected.

This is a crazy amount of min-max required in order to reach something a lich can get for free in mediocre ES gear (and that's just talking pure max phys taken hit), therefore my stance on this remains the same.

Either add more life scaling options to this game, add more ways to mitigate/convert phys dmg taken, or finally do something to ES.

You're jumping to conclusions way too fast. In my example, the level of defense is definitely overkill. You don't need any kind of gear min-maxing to feel on par with ES builds on maps. You just need to clearly understand what you're building for. Do you want a glass cannon, a balanced all-rounder, or an unbreakable tank? Should it handle all content in the game, or be specialized for a specific mechanic? Or maybe it's just a learning project to better understand game mechanics—like in my case.

Does it feel like builds based on Armour or Evasion are weak? Yes, probably. And that's been analyzed a dozen times already — what their limitations are.

But that's exactly what creates the magic of the game: you can choose what playstyle and archetype you enjoy. Personally, I don't need some sterile, perfectly balanced game.

Just forget about maximizing efficiency for a couple of hours and enjoy what's there — unless you're an RMT addict, of course.