End game defenses

From my analysis, and after watching Kripp play and his own experiences with the game - I'm convinced there are only two ways to build defensively end-game:

Stack health, get light amounts of armor and evasion; don't seek out those stats, just get them easily. Focus most on getting health.

Stack energy shield, get evasion/armor easily as you can.

Basically, this game rewards high life pools due to:

Chaos damage
Burst damage

It punishes high armor amounts because hard hitting monsters come in small numbers with large life pools. Light-hitting, swarms of monsters that armor is good at dealing with, come with low life pools. Area of effect abilities effectively negate your armor investment.

Evasion is good at avoiding strong hits, but you need a life pool to take a hit.

Energy Shield is great because of its rapid regen, synergizing greatly with frozen enemeis (which buy you time to regen), evasion, and kiting.

Although I understand GGG wants there to be "optimal" set ups so that it is a challenge to acquire "optimal" gear - I would appreciate it if you could make high-armor, low/medium life investment be a viable alternative to high-life low/medium armor investment. Both should come with their own downsides, but currently, it is not a viable option to have a low life pool under any circumstance.

I'd also like to see some more encouragement for hybrid builds. People should be given some interesting bonuses if they try to stack ES and life, or armor and evasion. Certainly, some classes try to do this, but usually they end up specializing in one or another, with how the current passive system is set up.

This is a common complaint of players but I don't think I quite agree with them. It is important to realize that no type of defense will ever replace a decent amount of hp/ES. However, I have had success with a high armor build. In order to achieve it I had to play as a ranger with iron reflexes and full evasion armor. Obviously, this is not the best way for this to be handled. But, my character did make it to level 77 and could handle level 65 maps just fine.

I will admit that I eventually died due to my own stupidity and that my character could have been further improved, but that does not change the fact that I got armor to work for me.

Some of my character's general defensive stats:

Armor: over 14000 at one point. Eventually settled for around 13500.
Health: about 2300 with around 60-80 hp regen per sec.
ES: negligible amount that was always less than 100.

Hope this input helps.

High armor is extremely rewarding if you use effects that reduce the damage of monsters even more.

Enfeeble and enduring cry are good examples.

Actually I guess high armor is only countered by non-physical-damage, exspecially chaos-damage.

It is easy to build a 81% Ele-Resi, high-Armor Marauder, which will still die to chaos-damage.

Actually a lot of armor and good resistances are a fair trade for hp and it is the same the other way around. If you have more hp you need less armor/resi to survive.

Evasion is a bit different, since you always need a lot of HP, which is one of the reasons why evasions really sucks, since you can't compensate a lack of HP with it, which you could do with good resis and armor, since Chaos-Damage-Burst are very rare.

Anubite, there are a few things that the players haven't figured out yet.

With the right combination of flasks, and the appropriate number of endurance charges, a 2H mara/templar can over-cap DR against anything in the game. Without a shield, even with really poor armour rating pre-flask.

I've been dared to make a video of face tanking oversoul, but I'm still a bit chicken to do that. But, now, I have a 66er in default that I can test with.

Just know that there are things that the testers haven't figured out. Stacking health is just the most obvious way to go about it. Other options exist.

DR *can* be capped against very large hits.

Kripp is probably a pretty smart guy, but he hasn't considered every angle. The approach he chooses is simply the one that occurred to him most easily.

Ofc, armour and resists aren't worth that much by themselves. You need the HP to back it up, every point of armour, every % of resists and every souce of DR in general makes every point of flat HP that much stronger. The so called "effective HP".

The problem atm is that IR builds outperform pure armour builds. And that pure evasion and evasion/block builds may have the same average mitigation than the other builds, but die in one hit if neither of the defenses kick in, since the damage a hit does if it connects is massive.

And WTF is a kripp ?

"

Unhold a écrit :

And WTF is a kripp ?

Kripp is a guy that streams his gameplay.

I tried making a melee-ish witch with high amounts of ES as a sub for HP. The results were not good.

1st
I build on just ES
// 2 sec recharge cd
// CI
// + ES gear n passives

In the 1st 2 difficulties all was well. Nothing in particular was that hard so I breezed through it. Then I entered the last 2 difficulties and everything changed. I had the ES to survive multiple hits, but because my effective hp was so low (and monster damage took a huge leap)I kept getting stunned.

So even ES doesn't work "by itself". It's either ES + HP (which is weird O_o) or ES + eva. ES + armor doesn't really work since the 6 sec you need to recharge ES will only happen after everything is dead.

I tried a shield Templar (got to 50% block), but it doesn't look good neither without HP.

I tried an elemental resist + physical resist Templar, and it is not as effective as pure HP with HP regen.

I think something is not right, maybe the damage is too high, and the HP nodes with STR bonus is too good.

Life passives are too important for any build (except CI builds), for every stat there should be a true choice. With hp, you have no choice to stack it with gear and take at the very least 50% bonus. This is because you can't survive with less than 1000 hp.

I'm not suggesting mob damage be lowered, I don't think it's an appropriate solution. I would increase life per level while nerfing a bit life passives. So you can get 1000+ hp without specing into it.

I don't know the exact numbers but, without gear and passives, a lvl60 character has about 500 hp (depending on strength), this is not right in my opinion.