I just don't understand defensive stats and why they're so difficult to build up.

Not at all. Even low level heists should yield 1-4c per run. Even if you can only play an hour per day, you should have 30c in 2-4 days by running easy heists. Are you selling items as well? Are you picking up items for the Chromatic Orb vendor recipe so that you can trade chromes for chaos? Are you picking up low level currencies to trade for c? These are all things you can do to get a decent budget of chaos to fund your gear upgrades.

I would also put a guard skill into your build. I'm no expert when it comes to them but Steelskin and Immortal Call are both popular choices that make a MASSIVE improvement to defense. Reworking your sockets to get a CWDT guard skill set up might be difficult but you have a couple of open sockets that you could use to self cast when you're approaching tough encounters.

I'm not trying to insult you but at this point it sounds like you're just whining for the sake of whining. This thread has given you lots of advice that you could act on immediately or very quickly but instead of making the suggested improvements you're saying that you can't improve due to bad RNG. Do a couple of the suggested improvements to your character, then come back and discuss the results. Or don't. But don't act as if your struggling due to things outside your control.

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IntellectSucks wrote:

I would also put a guard skill into your build. I'm no expert when it comes to them but Steelskin and Immortal Call are both popular choices that make a MASSIVE improvement to defense. Reworking your sockets to get a CWDT guard skill set up might be difficult but you have a couple of open sockets that you could use to self cast when you're approaching tough encounters.

I've never personally been a fan of CWDT for Guard skills (ran some hypothetical numbers here for Molten Shell), especially now that they're Instant skills, which allow you to use them while moving and I'm almost certain also while using other skills. That, combined with the fact that Instant skills on left-click function as Move Only while the skills are on cooldown, make Guard skills on left-click a no-brainer defensive layer for me.

Steelskin + Increased Duration and Immortal Call + Increased Duration and then binding the Guard skill to left click is a nice 0 chaos method of improving survivability.

Additionally, as a reminder, if you still have respec points from quests, grabbing the Wind Dancer keystone is also a 0 chaos method of improving survivability, though I'm not sure how well it plays out in practice with only 7k Evasion and I-don't-know-how-much-Dodge-you-have.

Just get more damage lol. U cant get to 12k evasion without losing huge damage. Even worse if u wanna build different layers, is just dumb.