Quick Guide to Scaling Defenses & Defensive Layers
By Cinder.
In a game such as Path of Exile, it can be really easy to get caught up on building a ton of damage. But, early on, especially at league start, or even if you’re a new player, defense must be priority if you’re going to survive. Even if you’re not hardcore, dying still sucks and dying less will make you a better player.
The game does not emphasize how important defense is from the tooltip. The first layer of defense you usually end up focusing on is capping your elemental resists and increasing your raw hp at least 300 hp per act.
How to cap your resistances:
- Elemental resistances are a critical part of your character’s survivability.
- From act 5 onwards enemy damage is balanced around your elemental resistances being capped (75%). If you have 50% resistance instead you’ll take double the damage of someone with 75%, so doing your best to cap your elemental resistances is vital.
- You receive a 30% penalty to all resistances at the end of act 5, and lose another 30% at the end of act 10.
- Chaos resistance can be ignored while in campaign, but rises in relevancy the further you get to end game. Getting above 0% for maps is a good idea.
Ok, are you done reading about resistances? Cool, now let’s discuss how layering defenses work. In PoE, there are many different damage types in game, but it can be difficult to get started when most sources of damage can chunk you or one shot you.
We have elemental damage, chaos damage, ailments, attacks, and spells. In terms of defensive layering options there are the 4 major types: Armour, Evasion, Energy Shield, and Ward. But, let’s focus more on the first 3 since those are accessible earlier than Ward is. Knowing how your build scales offensively can give you an idea for how to scale the defensive layers on it.
In addition to the defensive types, there are other defensive layers that include Leech, Spell Suppression, Block, Dodge, etc. Having defenses that accounts for multiple different damage types will help your build immensely and keep you from dying/taking too much damage. Let’s dive into how defensive layers work in the game and then toward the end, we’ll talk more about how you can build around these sources of damage.
Avoidance
The first layering of defense is preventing the damage from hitting your character, or preventing damage when you’re hit. You can’t avoid every hit or ailment or get 100%, which is why avoidance is capped between 75% and 95%. Some examples of avoidance include Evasion, Block, and Chance to Avoid Ailments.
Avoidance is extremely useful in situations where you’re taking minimal hits, but when you take that one savage hit, that’s where the next element is required.
Mitigation
Mitigation works to reduce the damage you’ve already taken. Some attacks hit particularly harder and thus, mitigating damage is a challenge. Mitigation also only works on hits, it does not work on DoT damage.
Mitigation is specific to armour and physical damage reduction, so things like Molten Shell linked with Cast When Damage Taken are one of the most common mitigation setups that can protect you in situations they’re called for. But, POE has more layers of effects in addition to guard skills.
Recovery
In many situations, taking savage hits or large chunks of damage that would one-shot you would spell almost certain death. The third form of defense is recovery, whether that be recovery to Life or Energy Shield. Recoup is a stat that takes damage from a hit before applying the effect. Leeching would also be a form of recovery, as it requires you to hit enemies to restore life or energy shield.
Evasion
Evasion is an entropy-based system that grants you up to a 95% chance to evade an attack and is unlike other defensive mechanics. It means that you are unlikely to take consecutive hits but one hit is all it takes in some situations.
Evasion is limited to attacks, and one of the weakest forms of defense. Some ascendancies, particularly those in Ranger, Shadow, or Duelist tend to scale their defenses through stacking evasion, like with Jade Flasks, or utilizing the Grace Aura just by virtue of having so many evasion nodes on that side of the tree.
Block
Block is one of the most powerful defensive layers in PoE. Keystones such as Glancing Blows and items like Tower Shields offer chance to block. In addition to mitigating damage, block can also be used with recovery mechanics, such as life recovery on block, or energy shield recovery on block.
Both effectively solve 2 problems with mitigation and recovery that blend so well together. It makes many duelist, marauder, and templar builds tankier on average.
Spell Dodge
a form of mitigation that works against spell hits, converts damage taken from spell hits up to 75% chance to dodge. It is especially useful on many right-side tree builds, but should also be used with other defensive layers when possible.
Ailment Avoidance
Most builds will want some way to deal with ailments. The most common form of ailments are elemental in nature. These can include shock, scorch, chill, freeze, brittle, ignite, and sap. There are many ways to deal with ailments, such as the Purity of Elements aura, and Stormshroud Viridian Jewel, which converts all shock avoidance to apply to all elemental ailments. In addition to elemental ailments, there are also bleeding ailments (not to be confused with corrupted blood).
Bleed is easily fixable with bleeding immunity on a flask, preferably a Divine Life Flask paired with instant recovery. The last ailment we can account for is poison. Poison is particularly nasty on some bosses such as Al-Hezmin, which is important that you have some chaos resistance when going into that fight, however, it is usually last on the priority list. Best thing you can do in that fight is just run for your life while dpsing that boss.
Armour
Armour is one of the core defenses in PoE that mitigates physical damage hits. Armour takes the size of the hit relative to the amount of armour you have. Granite flasks, Determination aura, and guard skills such as molten shell. Phys damage mitigation is capped at 90%.
Spell Suppression
If you have a 100% capped chance to suppress spell damage, you take half damage from all spell hits. Many builds that are right-side tree dominant will want to take full advantage of this defensive layer. The further you are from the right, the more dependent on armour, usually evasion bases, you will need to cap suppression.
Damage Conversion
As of 3.25, many sources of easy phys taken as X elemental damage have been removed from the game. But, damage conversion requires taking one damage type and converting it into another. Applying elemental resistances to apply to physical damage or stack one resistance stat makes this a very powerful defensive layer.
It is important to pay attention to the particular language and formula. “#% of [damage type] converted to [other damage type]” removes the damage from the initial damage type hit. “Gain #% of [Damage Type] as Extra [Other damage type]” keeps the damage from the initial damage type hit.
Damage Taken Before Life
Some additional sources of mitigation include taking damage from another resource, such as your mana pool, with the aid of the Mind Over Matter keystone, which takes a % of damage taken before life. Not all builds can go Mind Over Matter, but be sure you know how your build scales and when Mind Over Matter is useful.
Petrified Blood/Progenesis
As a defensive layer, Petrified Blood or Progenesis Amethyst Flask prevent life from being lost. Not many builds can utilize petrified blood, and in most cases, Progenesis is a very valuable and expensive flask that provides life loss prevention as well as some chaos resistance, making it a BiS flask for endgame builds looking to min-max. But, when paired with good recovery like recoup or regen, the damage taken can be negligible.
Leech vs Life/Es/Mana Granted Per Hit
Life gain on hit and leech can look similar to the uninformed. Leech requires you to hit an enemy to mitigate hits and can also work at mitigating DoT. Leech works in tandem to your max hp and remaining hp after taking damage. Leech is removed upon reaching full life.
But, Slayer’s Brutal Fervour, sometimes referred to as Overleech, will keep healing you even after you’ve reached full life.
Energy Shield Recharge
Energy shield is one of the core defensive layers that is incredibly weak early and without any form of mitigation and recovery. Recharge starts if you haven’t taken damage for 2 seconds. This can be sped up with Faster Start of Energy Shield Recharge.
Recharge is scaled with ES recovery rate. The more defensive layers you add the better you can sustain and maintain an ES based build, particularly for CI or low life builds.
Flasks
Flasks are one of the first sources of recovery and mitigation the campaign starts you off with. Life Flasks recover hp and combined with effective affixes can cover a lot of defensive gaps for your build. For the purposes of most endgame builds, you will want to get a Divine Life Flask by the time you finish the campaign.
Eternal Life Flasks have the highest life/second recovery rate, but Divine recovers more in a short amount of time, which makes it perfect for Seething or Bubbling instant recovery mods. Losing a huge chunk of your life and needing to heal quickly is necessary especially against bosses or long sustained fights.
How to Layer Defenses
Now that you’ve learned the different defensive layers. There’s plenty of them out there, and many I haven’t mentioned, but how do we make them work with our build? Look for things that synergize with each other. In relation to where your class starts on the tree, equipping gear that makes sense to what you’re trying to build toward will carry you through the majority of the game.
Evasion Layering Defenses
A lot of Ranger, shadow, and duelist builds have access to evasion, avoidance, and spell suppression. Working so that all of them work together to have high evasion, 100% capped spell suppression, and ailment avoidance are easy to work together. Using good utility flasks to cover other grounds will make your build less paper and better at dealing with harder content. Of course, there might still be a chance that you will die, but at least you won’t die as much with these tips.
Energy Shield Layering
A lot of builds, especially Witch opt into low-life, which incorporates stacking Energy Shield instead of Life. Utilizing keystones such as Pain Attunement ensures that you deal more damage when you’re on Low Life. Low life is defined as below 50% of your max hp.
A lot of low life builds use the unique body armour Shavronne’s Wrappings Occultist’s Vestment, and many use Aegis Aurora Champion Kite Shield which helps aid ES recovery and block. Melding of the Flesh Cobalt Jewel can also be used. And then, others as mentioned before can be used to layer defenses for ES builds such as Stormshroud.
Summary
Defenses are super important in Path of Exile. Dying sucks even in softcore. Knowing how you scale your defenses will make you a better player. Defenses should be layered so that your build can avoid, mitigate, recover, and synergize so all the layers can cover each other’s shortcomings.
You won’t be able to tank every single thing in the game, and you most likely won’t be completely immortal, not counting meme or uber broken builds, but in general, powerful combinations are readily available to work with so you just have to go with what makes sense for your build.
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