The problem with defences.

This season we did see GGG trying to fix the defences problem but they didn't got to the REAL problem, and why health is so important in PoE. I will try to be the most analytic and fair possible here:

First, it is obvious that health is important to all defences, since it is the base of your "hit pool", but it becomes even more important depending of which defence layer you have.

Let's start with energy shield, the golden son of defences, energy shield can be translated as a different type of life, since it adds a 1:1 comparison with life, it is the same as life but without the natural regen every time, even better if you have recharge bonuses, if you would need 10k of life to survival a hit, having 10k energy shield would do the same. That's why Chaos Innoculation exist and is viable, since you dont need to build life and also you get way more ways to build energy shield compared with life.

Now lets analyze evasion and the new deflect. Well the hole base of evasion is the chance to not get hit, but it creates a problem, since it still a chance you will need a way to have enough life so if you get unluck you can still tank the hit. This league they added the new deflect, that is a second layer of evasion which will add ,IF you have sacrificed some node points and/or resistance slots in your armor piece ,another chance to, this time, reduce by a fixed amount the damage taken by 40%(without any of the few nodes that increases the reduction), if we get generous numbers, you will have about 85% of evasion and about 75% of deflection(i'm using some of the deadeye builds from poe ninja as base), with these statistics you will have 3,75% of chance getting hit and 11,25% of receiving about 60% of the damage. With theses numbers we can see why it was a big deal for evasion builds to have deflection, since the old 15% chance to receive damage has dropped by about 4 times the value. BUT it still have a problem, it needs to have some type of "hit pool" to survive the unluck cases since the damage reduction is like a "hit pool" multiplier(indirectly).

Now lets go to armour, the black sheep of defences. Lets start by saying that armour just like evasion still need life, more even that evasion needs it, since armour by default only work with physical damage you can see that if a attack is pure elemental or chaos, it will be like the character has no defence, and the hit will go straight to your "hit pool". That is the main reason why armour is in a bad state. But we cant forget the new modifier to allow armour to impact elemental damage, it was a gifted dropped by the heavens(GGG), with this new layer of armour it allowed the damage reduction from the armour to work against elemental damage, which combined with the resistances it allowed for a good damage reduction for the armour builds. We also can't forget that armour have a problem that still isn't solved, the damage reduction calculation, for those who don't know the damage reduction is based not only by the armour but also for how much damage it is taking, making it not ideal to deal with some big hits, but something we should recognize with elemental damage this problem doesn't appear since we have armour working together with resistances allowing the damage to be doubled reduced. So in the end armour still have two big problem, it's inefficiency against big physical damage and the lack of ways to allow it to reduce the chaos damage, these two damages are the most common in the game, that's why armour still in a bad spot.

Now that we have settled how the situation with defences is atm, we can make some points:
1. Energy shield is basically a form of life that can be better than life it self if done right, removing the need to have life. Since it works just like life it will be efficient against all type of damage.
2. Evasion is a form of defence that give you A CHANCE not take damage, so it becomes at some times efficient against all the type of damage.
3. With the new deflection it allow the Evasion builds to have a chance to multiple how efficient is their "hit pool" at most of time, but still create the need to have life or another way to increase their "hit pool".
4.Armour is a way to multiple how efficient is their "hit pool" against physical damage, with the new multiplier it become really good against elemental damage if combined with a capped elemental resistance. But stil bad against physical and chaos damage. So it still create the need to have life or another way to increase their "hit pool".

With this currently situation with defences i have some suggestion if you guys want to read:
1. We need more ways to receive a bigger "hit pool", or better saying life, since most of defence still doesn't have a way to increase it.
2. Deflection is incredible for evasion builds, but still a chance, to allow evasion to work against all damage, my suggestion is to every hit that isn't evaded to become deflected, and the damage reduction that deflection give to be based in how much evasion rate you have, just like armour, allowing it to reduce the damage in every case you was unlucky, making deflection to be a type of "semi armour".
3. With the new modifier armour is now a good way to reduce elemental damage, but to put a par with all the other defences it should be changed to reduce all damage. Also since even if it works against everything it still be at the same situation with physical damage, so i would also add a new type of resistance, Physical resistance, and since we will be adding a new type of resistance we also should remove some of the resistance reduction that we receive while leveling, to be a par with chaos resistance just like it is right now.

Well that is, if you have anything to add please just comment here, and please be respectful, i and everyone else just want a better game.

ES it's weak vs damage over time effects: in my CI character, ignite is one of the most dangerous threats to me (also corrupting blood), because i can't recharge ES until the debuff expires. That's why i'm using convalescence as a 30 spirit "tax" to avoid that.

Also, Chaos damage does double damage vs ES but you know, CI exists, so you can "ignore" that as a CI character.

I think pure evasion is the worst defense of all 6 defense combinations because you need to count on your life pool. In my pure evasion playthorugh to lvl 92 i was prioritizing life above all, just using body runes in almost all my gear once i reached 75% res to just don't die to random oneshots. Deflection seems underwhelming (i just not tried it yet).

I think base life pool should be a little higher, that would solve a lot of the problems. Also make more sources of damage over time to punish CI builds.

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Sulik7#2502 a écrit :

ES because i can't recharge ES until the debuff expires.

Ignite is solvable with charms. If you have blue gems, you can get immunity to chill as well.

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Sulik7#2502 a écrit :

I think pure evasion is the worst defense of all 6 defense

Evasion does feel the worst, deflection passive nodes are very underwhelming too. Not all attacks/effects can be evaded, incl all the ground effects. Evasion is reduced vs accurate monsters too. Most evasion builds still have 2k5-3k ES to boost the 'life' poo(l).

Armor can get really high 300%+ vs elemental damage. The gear affixes are just much higher than deflection ones.

The core issue is that, HP pool just doesn't scale unless counting mind over matter, unlike ES, if you wish to have resistances and spirit.

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bestsss#7863 a écrit :

Ignite is solvable with charms. If you have blue gems, you can get immunity to chill as well.

Yup, mandatory ignite charm in my CI character.

evasion+es+ghostdance > armour stack >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> evasion / life stack / es >>>>> es+armor/armor+evasion

With the 0.3 patch, stackable elemental ailments are designed to kill you even if your resistances are at 75%+110. The game is still riddled with defensive flaws. If you're not playing Mirrors or +100 Div builds, you're going to die a lot. We're almost at the end of the 3rd league. Energy Shield is still our only refuge. Armor, Eva, and Deflect are still insufficient for basic defenses. The game inevitably pushes you to play Armor+ES and Evasion+ES.
And let's not forget, we don't have Flasks, which significantly contribute to instant defense or instant attack like in Poe1. Charms, on the other hand, are inadequate items that only provide utility. And we can still equip a maximum of 3...

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Sulik7#2502 a écrit :

ES it's weak vs damage over time effects: in my CI character, ignite is one of the most dangerous threats to me (also corrupting blood), because i can't recharge ES until the debuff expires. That's why i'm using convalescence as a 30 spirit "tax" to avoid that.

Also, Chaos damage does double damage vs ES but you know, CI exists, so you can "ignore" that as a CI character.

I did forget about the energy shield taking double damage against chaos, but even with that ES still has more "hit pool" than any other build, also it just make you more susceptible to take Chaos Inoculation.

About over time effects, i did put then a side since you can use charms, ailments thresholds and items to just ignore then, so i dont see then as a big problem for most ES builds, but if we go to that route we can also say that ES has a problem with stuns, but i don't want to complicate and insert the whole build problem here.

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Sulik7#2502 a écrit :

I think pure evasion is the worst defense of all 6 defense combinations because you need to count on your life pool. In my pure evasion playthorugh to lvl 92 i was prioritizing life above all, just using body runes in almost all my gear once i reached 75% res to just don't die to random oneshots. Deflection seems underwhelming (i just not tried it yet).

Yes pure evasion still one of the worst, since if you decide to take the modifier to get life you will reduce a lot your chance to evade, and with that you wont get one shot, but will be more frequently two/three shooted.

I do suggest you to build some deflection, just like i said in the original comment, it reduces A LOT your chance to get one shotted and stop you from needing that "hit pool".

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Sulik7#2502 a écrit :

I think base life pool should be a little higher, that would solve a lot of the problems. Also make more sources of damage over time to punish CI builds.

Yes i also agree with that, they removed the life nodes from the tree compared with PoE1, but if we bring it back, we will have the same problem where most of the build will need to invest 20+ points to take Life nodes just to not get one shooted.

They also could reduce the damage that monsters deal without change our values, it would solve some of the problems, but i do believe that they need to rework how defences work.

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JoTua#1329 a écrit :

With the 0.3 patch, stackable elemental ailments are designed to kill you even if your resistances are at 75%+110. The game is still riddled with defensive flaws. If you're not playing Mirrors or +100 Div builds, you're going to die a lot. We're almost at the end of the 3rd league. Energy Shield is still our only refuge. Armor, Eva, and Deflect are still insufficient for basic defenses. The game inevitably pushes you to play Armor+ES and Evasion+ES.
And let's not forget, we don't have Flasks, which significantly contribute to instant defense or instant attack like in Poe1. Charms, on the other hand, are inadequate items that only provide utility. And we can still equip a maximum of 3...

Yep, they did increase how much these effects can damage you to force players to take the nodes with ailment thresholds, the problem is that no one wants to allocate limited passive points to nodes that sometimes will be useful , if i would suggest something about that i would make these node all hybrids, you will get stun threshold + armour or ailments threshold + evasion, that way players will be taking these nodes because they also want the other bonuses. See poison builds, most of then endup immune to poison just to take +1 poison limit from the "Building Toxins" node.

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bestsss#7863 a écrit :

The core issue is that, HP pool just doesn't scale unless counting mind over matter, unlike ES, if you wish to have resistances and spirit.

Yes, right now we have a problem which is life is only increased if you decide to take the preffix with it, and since all your defence is in your preffix slot, you need to weight by doing defence or by doing life, which all of time defences win(except by armour, that is in a bad state right now and is more worth doing life), but not all defences in the world will make you survive in the currently form. We need some type of way to get more life or a defence rework.

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ReiCoringa96#2002 a écrit :

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JoTua#1329 a écrit :

With the 0.3 patch, stackable elemental ailments are designed to kill you even if your resistances are at 75%+110. The game is still riddled with defensive flaws. If you're not playing Mirrors or +100 Div builds, you're going to die a lot. We're almost at the end of the 3rd league. Energy Shield is still our only refuge. Armor, Eva, and Deflect are still insufficient for basic defenses. The game inevitably pushes you to play Armor+ES and Evasion+ES.
And let's not forget, we don't have Flasks, which significantly contribute to instant defense or instant attack like in Poe1. Charms, on the other hand, are inadequate items that only provide utility. And we can still equip a maximum of 3...

Yep, they did increase how much these effects can damage you to force players to take the nodes with ailment thresholds, the problem is that no one wants to allocate limited passive points to nodes that sometimes will be useful , if i would suggest something about that i would make these node all hybrids, you will get stun threshold + armour or ailments threshold + evasion, that way players will be taking these nodes because they also want the other bonuses. See poison builds, most of then endup immune to poison just to take +1 poison limit from the "Building Toxins" node.

Yup, pure Stun/ailment treshold nodes feel lackluster, but could be good in hybrid nodes