[POE 3.24] Which is better, more offense or more defense?

I think a big part of it is that offence is "Master of one" and defense is "Jack of all". Hyper specializing is generally the right way to go for damage. We don't build to counter enemy defenses, we just focus on overwhelming them. Defense on the other hand must counter every different type of enemy attack scenario. Hit vs DOT. Spell vs Attack. Phys vs Ele vs Chaos. Evasion & block. Stuns, Ailments, & Curses. Reflect. Spike vs chip. Ground effects. Corpse Destruction. Movement. Minions (decoys & meat shields). You can get away with missing layers, but you must have an answer for every scenario you will face. Also, many defenses are all or nothing. 99% spell suppression is 1000x worse than 100%. Whereas 5% chance of double damage is worth way more than 5% more due to the way ailments work. The only way to make attack work like defense is to give monsters actual immunitys Which suck & feel bad.

I think it is pretty clear cut and universal across all builds that in Softcore it is always better to pursue Offence instead of Defence once you have the very basic layers of defence on your build. What I think is a more interesting discussion is to try and think about how you would even change that? Are Defence options too weak, too strong, too difficult to get, too easy to get? Why exactly is it better and can that be changed? In some ways I find defence options to be too weak. Currently you can progressively upgrade your defence layers on a build and almost never feel an improvement because you encounter situations that feel "untankable" The wrong combination of monster mods, on the wrong map mod, with the wrong altar effect, and then this league with the wrong necropolis lantern effect. It still feels like you just randomly die and that's kinda because you do. It's only once you invest a ton of effort and gear into a defence do you start to feel the rewards of it. To me unless your build is at the point where it can tank basically everything in the game, it just won't feel worth it. Being able to tank 50% of situations vs 70% of situations doesn't really change how your build feels, but being able to tank 100% of situations definitely does. Compare this to offence where increasing your damage by 30% almost universally leads to 30% less dangerous situations because enemies just die before they can do anything. Take Guardian maps as an example, why learn to avoid their mechanics or build tanky enough to tank them when you could instead pursue just killing them before they attack? Going from 2 Pheonix Aoe nukes down to 1 is a massive increase in survivability and then going from 1 nuke to 0 makes dying to Pheonix almost impossible. To get the same returns from defence, would require much much more investment. So what is the solution? Is the solution maybe counter intuitively to buff or make defence easier to acquire? If players could realistically reach the upper echelon of tankiness with less effort, would they pursue it? Another thing to consider is the current reward structure and incentives for players, especially this league with T17s. Currently players are really incentivised to pursue farming in T17s but with how dangerous the maps are we are seeing more and more builds go towards all offence glass cannon to tackle this content vs building defence to tank it. If T17s are our endgame, then why would you build tank when you need offence to clear the map? Some food for thought. I ultimately don't have an answer or solution, but I think it is pretty clear that Offence is king in PoE as it currently stands.

Will melee ever stand a chance in the Off-screening giga DPS meta?

A similar question is, "What's the most important side of a triangle"

I play characters that scale their damage off their tanky stats for the most part. Armor stacker/replica dreamfeather, SS trickster ephemeral edge etc, and I like the balance these builds provide. I always prioritize the bulk as somone who enjoys Uber bossing and delve, but with mapping characters I can certainly see where more dps could tip the scales

If you have a way to disable enemy recovery (Such as being an Occultist) Defence is technically the correct answer, since you will eventually kill everything even with 1dps (Especially if you do Chaos damage)

tl;dr Both, or you will have a really shitty time. Too much damage with no defense? Randomly get 1 shot from stupid off screen or on-death mechanics. Too much tank and not enough damage? Take 20 minutes to clear maps and still die because of entropy. The greater chance for certain mods to stack together perfectly for you to get destroyed.

reddit post was removed by mods cus: Rule #4 - No criticism or complaint posts/comments - This is a sub specifically for talking about builds and mechanics, this is not the place to complain about the state of the game. kinda bummer good that you read and covered these fully! Maybe you could put these posts on pasta as well for future.

If you dont have enough offensive, defense does nothing. But if you have ultra offensive you start wanting SOME defense because you will keep getting 1 shot which becomes annoying. But if i have to choose one offensive > defenses. You killing more content faster = you making more currency = you getting stronger which is also a path that makes it possible to get more defenses.

Great vid!! I’m new to your channel as of this video, I gotta say I like hearing your opinion and probably wouldn’t be huge on hearing the summary of another opinion

I have a hexblast occultist, and a splitting steel trickster. Hexblast is kill them before they kill me, SS is rly good dmg but I can charge into a group and kill them without worrying if I’ll die. I prefer defense.

I definitely feel like defences has become less worthy over the past year or so. I had a TS build in 3.23 that had bloodnotch/immutable, spell suppression, wind ward and a few other layers as well. I still died way too often to get past level 95 with 15 mil. dps. With 30 mil. dps i probably would've died less.

Depends on the content you would like to farm, a good balance always helps.

Stuck at lvl 94 with tanky meta build in softcore SSF. Going to try going to try quite tanky with lots more dmg to see how it goes :). The league mechanic can easily be rippy 100% phys as extra cold with 10% pen those exploding corpse spike things, lol

1M ehp and 1B damage here and to do both Is extremely difficult but i think the best thing is to have a build who stack defense and with the combination of item, jewel etc it also stack offense like stacking armor. Best build i ever played

Matters if you are HC or not

You have a typo in the title!

I think this guy messed up something. Also probably didn't concerned himself with what mods he ran, what altars clicked, etc.. etc. maybe even had Back to Basics allocated. Tankiness comes not just from the build but choosing content you run carefully. Hell, it's mostly about the latter unless you have fuck you levels of tankiness. As for damage and defences. It's nuanced. You need to meet baseline for both. You need enough damage to not let pack hammer on you and enough defences to be able to not worry about most things that are not supposed to one shot you.

This will be even more prevalent in PoE 2 where skill/ active dodge can make up for a lack of defensive stats

Either way, endgame builds are limited. They are gatekept by extremely expensive items. You have to have one of the few skills that scale for offense. Then you have to have all the awakened gems too. With necropolis it's even more pronounced. I can breeze through any content in the game but t17 maps. If i can actually get one to drop. One t17 map with a map based atlas tree. It's pretty ridiculous that the least accessible game in the ARPG market just got more elitist. T16, 8 mod maps are doable with my softcore build. One death every 2 or 3 maps. When i cant replace that +7 proj, elements penetration elite mob with 6000% increased defense.