Discussing Defences and How to Get Tanky in Path of Exile

I know I missed a bunch on my little impromptu spreadsheet, so let me know what I should add, and then I might make a more thorough video! PS. I wasn't thinking about T17s when going over this, but T17s are stupid and overtuned as hell and so terribly balanced that they aren't even worth discussing right now. BTW if you missed it, here's my HC playthrough stream highlight: https://youtu.be/eFlbuEt-AzY

The issue is the oneshots. If you had bigger time windows to gage the power of a rare mob, you could play around it.

The POE idea of tanky is what most games would still call glass cannon. My biggest complaint though is that I usually have no idea what it was that killed me. The game never gives any feedback indicating what kind of damage and from what source you are taking. There are debuffs, that appear in the far upper left corner of the screen, which isn't anywhere near where you should be looking. But even those debuff icons only help if you have time to mouse over them or memorize what they look like, and can check it in the fraction of a second that it takes to go from full hp to dead. A combat log would fix a lot of this by giving you something to parse and figure out where the hole in your defense is.

i love having 77% block 75% spell block 90% phys reduction crit immunity ailment immunity 10 fortify stacks capped chaos res 100% life recovery per second (i'm not exaggerating) minion taunt offscreen dmg (holy relic of conviction) AND STILL randomly dying in T16s. excellent design, 10/10

Yeah I love that 90% evasion, 100% suppression, stun immune, ailment immune, 30% block, 40% phys dr, automated 21 immortal call, 21 rallying cry, 6k es, HUGE es leech (trickster), heartstopper, phys taken as chaos, ele taken as chaos, and probably more wasn’t even REMOTELY enough to do T17s consistently.. all while doing about 30 million pinnacle dps… this game is legit starting make me not like it. My ehp pool was 68k i think. I could do some easy maps but usually got 1 tapped by any of the bosses.

I agree with the original poster. Getting everything is not the problem, it's getting everything in a non-meta build while juiced mapping. Too much shit happening during maps to call things "skill issues." Ubers are a joke compared to mapping because everything is super telegraphed. If you make a rare mistake you can just log/die and use another portal. PoE shouldnt be seen as a game where you need skill to grind out gear. Ubers? Sure. That should definitely be seen as a "yeah im just that guy" type of achievement and you should be rewarded accordingly. But during mapping i just wanna sit down play around to make my character feel like an immortal god vaporizing anything it looks at no matter what alter I click on or map mod I run. The game is much more fun when I can just go brain dead after a long day and just slaughter and hear "TINK" as a reward every now and again. I bet you anything this post is coming from the perspective of a casual player that is used to alch and go with his t16 maps and then going into t17 maps and then feeling like he just swapped places with one of the mobs he was culling through. That feeling of wanting to run juiced t17s to really make bank is awful especially for people that get FOMO. Side note, i blame the lantern a ton for making it feel like mapping is less frictionless than it should be. Probably wont be as bad when we dont have it next league.

Just my 2 cents but the best defense in this game is to clear off screen. Sounds bad but it is what is

That post was some extreme hyperbole, but the core points were true, it’s annoying that suppression feels mandatory or you keel over. Phys taken as ele should be a clever way for non Armor builds to handle phys damage but is just straight up better than armor

Hey Locohol, I've given the game up for 2 leagues now but this video seems interesting, so wanted to add my take. To properly define tanky, we need to know whether someone is referring to "hands off the keyboard" or "playing intelligently and not dying randomly" (which you covered) but also the intended range you engage at. A ranged character can have 1 set of defenses and feel tanky while a melee character with the same set will feel squishy. Just as our own damage uptime is important to actual dps, so is the monster's. When I played the game actively, I always played ~6 characters per league. One of those builds each league was always a totem guy since that's the style I enjoyed playing most. My totem guys had NONE of the defenses listed in the reddit post. What he always had was ~4k life, ~3k mana, MoM, and 75 all res. That's it. No suppression, evasion/armour values under 4 figures. No block, no dodge, nothing. Yet he very rarely died and never "randomly" (if I died, I always knew why). I always managed to reach L95 without even capping res and I never really had to focus too hard until 97. He always made it to 100 and the last couple of leagues I played were in SSF. In fact, the final couple of weeks before I quit the game, I wanted to challenge myself one last time and rolled totems in HCSSF with an unascended Scion and made it into the mid 90s multiple times before getting bored. Why does this work? Well I believe it's because I have a few inches of range to place my totem, which then has a full screen of range for attacking. That means the guys I'm killing are usually REALLY far away from me. If I needed to fight those guys up in my face, there is no way I could pull any of that off. The thing is, PoE is more and more becoming a game of "the longer sniper rifle that explodes the screen" (one of the reasons I left the game for and also one of the reasons ~2 of the 6 builds I play each league are melee). A game where it is easy to turn on God Mode does not stay fun for long for players who like to challenge themselves (which is the purported audience of this game). Because ranged play is dominant in this game, they have to keep scaling the defenses back to at least allow a chance for mobs to kill a skilled player. This obviously means if you enjoy melee, it becomes harder and harder to get anything that's actually tanky because defenses are balanced around ranged characters (since they made their game such that any character can get any defenses). Ironically, until this "freedom of any character to get any kind of defenses" is removed, this is also why melee will always suck no matter what.

In my view the only thing they need to change in the game is add a death recap, combat log, or both so you can clearly divine what actually killed you. Include the damage type, the monster performing the attack, and visibly show the debuffs you were afflicted with at the time of death. It's ridiculous that these conversations around defenses even need to happen in the first place, the player deserves to have access to more information.

spell supression is pain in the ass, shouldnt be required for every character meanwhile theres noway to target craft it, everyone just fracture base with desired suffix>spam essence for chaos until spell supression appear... GREAT DESIGN

The original poster actually missed something incredibly important. Even at 90% max res, you can still get blasted by spells with penetration. Only way around that is to shift damage types, for example if you go Mahuxotl + Tempered by War, then you can only take damage as either Fire or Chaos. There is also a Grasping Mail Haunted modifier which gives "Fire Resistances Cannot be Penetrated". With this setup you can go 90% fire and chaos res, and be immune to damage penetration except for Wither. Unfortunately this setup does not fully account for phys overwhelm

POE moving the goal post for ubers being mandatory in softcore kinda sucks ngl. and tehy gate keep those ubers by making sure you have a quality mapping build. we have a crafting league and progression feels kinda buns unless your doing a meta build whicch unironicall is probably one oof the few things to not get nerfed in the last 4 years.

The worst thing for me is the fact that you can have a 20k raw hp build with 200k armour and 2k leech and still die to a blue pack of just any projectile mob in less than a second and the game makes no attempts at telling you why that happened Was it a bunch of unlucky crits? Was it bc the pack has as extra and my res was fucked for some reason? Was it bc my flask dropped? Or was it something else entirely? I can only look at my deaths with hindsight but some of the information I need to really understand what happened is gone now and the game doesn't care

Dying on poe is not a skill issue, its a knowlegde issue. You have to know what your build has amd what is gonna kill otherwise you'll get deleted. Theres just so little of skill demonstrantion while playing poe.

If I remember correctly the main point of that reddit post was how defensive scaling always pales in comparison to scaling offence until you reach the t1-t0 items. the post is obviously exaggerated (probably from a moment of frustration. I won’t judge) but I do share the sentiment that defences on top of the bare minimum feel waaayyy less valuabable than simply investing in more offence. The best defence is usually just killing the enemy before they reach you.

My main issue with defences is the ammount of layers you need to build in to not die often. Like you need something from almost every category you wrote down. And that is the main frustration. So the build you use as an example you are using 10+ layers of defence Ofc life is always needed. i don't really count that.

Armor needs a fix and suppression is basically mandatory which sort of feels bad

This league defenses feel really bad imo. I’ve got 50% MoM, 7k total life & ES, corrupted soul, 30% phys taken as, defiance of destiny, leech life mana & ES, frost shield & arcane cloak. More damage than I need for mapping and normal bosses (instaphase). I can even clear T17 maps ok. But the bosses feel horrific to fight. I’m used to doing Ubers at end of league, and idk if I’ll even get a shot to try them this league. My next step is rebuilding my gear around a Mageblood. But this feels well past the point I would start Ubers last league.

broo i have 200k hit pool tank exark slam and hold in to the beem have 100% supp cap eve 95% 90% phys all ress 75% and i just got F in the asssssss from a random mob from Allflame Embers that give you Omen's and white mobs just delete me when i kill them and i can tank so much more stuff no problem and is not like they have the DD mod on them oo and i have max fortify and insta leech + 1-2k regen per sek ever 2 sek from armor and eve mastery 1%