What's the best defense - stacking armour or evasion or evasion converted to armour?

I have the build I want damage wise but not sure if I want to go pure armour gear, pure evasion or evasion converted to armour. What gives the best survivability for a melee (granted one that freezes everything)?

I don't know which values go higher either.

2h build btw.

Well if you are melee, I'd say go for life (if you plan on doing high lvl maps), lemme give you a picture of the Oh' so mighty village ruin boss.:

No mod boss leap slam punctures for 5k dam + bleed aftereffect, if it's enraged it's even worse.
Same boss has a vengeance skill that does 4-5k damage, given that you are melee if you get hit by this, and then the boss hits you afterwards... (this is the kind of scenario your chosen defense should help with, evasion will help here given that you have an anti bleed flask, and your evasion rate is 51%+, armor... well maths it out)

Kaom in 82 map leap slams for ~5k (I got hit for almost 8k with +100% cold dam mod and 75 resists)
Eva wins here, unless you get hit again...

Mageara firestorm does insane dps (somewhere around the 1-2k/sec range), and neither armor or eva will protect you vs it. Life wins

Chaos bosses ( jungle spider, zana museum maps, village chicken) Neither of those will help you here really, if you get hit with some mod on map you are gone. And the chicken degen is more than 1.4k dam/sec with -48% chaos res I can say that. Life+regen wins here too.

Bearers of frost/fire/storm, neither helps you here. Life does.

Physical spells, armor help. So does life.

If you just plan on casual mapping I'd go for armor, for it can greatly reduce the damage from small hits and can make the deadly hits only almost deadly.

Thanks for the response! I'm only a casual and don't think I'll ever do end game content like that or atziri etc. I just want something that will be able to farm maps (low level ones up to 72 or so)

I have some life on my tree but probably need more. Can never have enough. I feel like evasion gear atleast the uniques have better bonuses. Like I need to run a few auras for my build to shine so I'm thinking alphas howl. I'll also be right by the keynode to convert evasion to armour so I think I'll do that!

POE is about layered defences. In general just having one form of defence is not enough.

So if you have armour you should look at adding endurance charges and block.

If you do evasion getting dodge (acrobatics), spell dodge and block all help.

Personally I like evasion now you have arctic armour, fortify and chaos golem to provide % damage reduction as well.

Going armor/evasion hybrid can be very effective too, depending on the build. Evasion suffers major diminishing returns after 8k or so, and although you can never really have enough armor, you'll find that it has somewhat of a diminishing return effect too at a certain point. Mixing them can get you the best of both worlds without wasting any excess of either.