[Guide] Comprehensive Guide To Defense In PoE - Asmo's Defense Bible

Hi guys, Asmo here!

In this post I would like to offer a comprehensive guide to defensive mechanics in PoE. A lot of people are currently voicing their struggles with the Arch Nemesis mods and the current state of the game. This guide will give you a lot of examples of mechanics that are easy to add to your character without breaking the bank. I will start by explaining the basics of defence in Path of Exile, that will put everything in a greater context.

If you want to skip the basics, you can jump straight to part 2, which will cover specific problems that your character will face and many examples of solutions to those problems. I will also provide you with an example budget build that utilizes the principles described in this guide, as well as a video guide and PoB for it. Enjoy!

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Part I: The main layers of defence.
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The main layers of defence can be separated into 4 different categories:


1) Avoidance - which is your character's ability to avoid damage - primarily from hits. Examples of avoidance include: Chance to block attack damage, Chance to block spell damage, Evasion, Spell Dodge, Chance to avoid Physical damage from Hits, Chance to avoid elemental damage from Hits, Chance to avoid ailments, Chance to avoid all damage from hits (Elusive).

As you can see there are a lot of forms of avoidance, but almost all of them will protect you exclusively from hits and won't help you against degeneration / damage over time effects. This is why it is important to incorporate multiple layers of defence into your character. If your character naturally has a lot of avoidance, it's a good idea to look into adding a lot of recovery to it, as they synergize very well. If your character isn't taking damage for a while but every now and then loses a lot of HP, you'll need an ability to quickly recover it, to avoid staying in a vulnerable position for too long.

2) Mitigation - is your character's ability to reduce the amount of damage taken. This includes Elemental / Chaos Resistances, Armour, Physical Damage Reduction, Spell Suppression, Immortal Call, Lethe Shade, Fortify and more.

Mitigation is the layer of defence which will stop you from getting killed in 1 hit and will leverage your health pool to protect you from more damage. If your character naturally has a lot of mitigation, it will make every point of HP you get worth much more, so make sure to increase your Health Pool as one of the priorities.

3) Recovery - is your character's ability to gain back lost Health/Energy Shield. This includes leech, gain on hit, regeneration, recovery, recuperation, recovery from flasks and other abilities.

Recovery is relatively easy to get while mapping but it is a much more scarce resource when bossing, however if you can solve that issue, your character will become a much better bosser. Recovery is also great when you pair it with high avoidance, such as Life/ES gain on block or Ghost Shrouds. Depending on your character's Health pool, you'll want to invest in flat regen (for example "54 life regenerated per second") if your character has low HP, and focus on percentage regen (for example "0.5% of life regenerated per second") if your character has a high HP value.

4) Life Pool - is the total amount of hit points you have, which includes Life, Energy Shield and possibly Mana. This is what people sometimes mistakenly call EHP (effective hit pool) - EHP is actually a much more complicated value which represents the combination of all your defensive layers against damage dealt to your character - you can check and compare this value in Path of Building, but it is not fully representative of characters survivability.

Your Life total is the most superficial layer of defence which is the first thing that people tend to notice, however you shouldn't be fooled by it because it is very easy to make a 4k hp character that will be twice as tanky as a 7k hp character. As with all the other aspects of defence, this is just one layer of it. That being said, the more you invest in avoidance, recovery and especially mitigation, the more value you'll get out of every single point of Life you add to your character.

These four main types of defence work best in combination. You'll never be tanky by just investing in one of them. It's the combination of many layers of defence that makes a character feel immortal. The more layers and defensive mechanics you add, the more return you'll get for each of them. Just like with damage scaling in PoE, the defence also goes up exponentially the more you put into it. Remember to always have at least one solid mechanic covering each of those defensive aspects.

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Part II. What makes a good character
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Making a good character is not just about damage or defence, it is about efficiently ticking off all the right boxes. The game progressively gives you new challenges and problems, and as a player you'll have to address them if you want to have a good time and smash all of the content.

An example of those challenges could be something like Act 4 - Belly of the Beast mobs that use Puncture to apply Bleed to you. You can choose to just run through them spamming your life flask and you have a good chance of surviving if you don't get too unlucky but you can also take this opportunity to address this issue for your character, grab a Colossal or Sacred Life Flask and Beast Craft a "of Sealing" mod on it, which will make you extremely safe against any bleed/corrupting blood in the future (You can find a list of bestiary mods on this page: https://poedb.tw/us/Bestiary_league#BestiaryRecipe just search for "Life or Mana"). You can also get a Steelskin Guard Skill and use that instead.

All right but how are you supposed to know all of the problems you're going to encounter ahead of time? The game usually exposes you to them over time, one by one, but here is a list that can help you with that:

- Physical Damage
- Elemental Damage [Fire, Cold, Lightning]
- Chaos Damage
- Attacks
- Spells
- Stuns
- Crits
- Projectiles
- Degeneration
- Elemental Ailments [Freeze, Chill, Shock, Ignite, Brittle, Scorch, Sap]
- Bleed
- Poison
- Curses
- Maim
- Grasping Vines
- Body Blocking

Here are some examples of efficient ways to tick those checkboxes for your characters - I'll try to stick to ascendancy neutral solutions that can be used by many different builds. Different ascendancies offer defensive mechanics that completely or partially tick a lot of those boxes, but regardless of which class you want to play, there are always things you can do:

1) Physical Damage -

One of the best ways of dealing with physical damage is adding Endurance charges to your character - here are some options for you:

-Enduring Cry on left click + Call to Arms keystone,

-Aggressive Bastion Notable from passive skill tree,

-Disciple of Unyielding Notable from passive skill tree,

-Minimum Endurance Charges on Rings and Amulet (Betrayal Unveil / Bench Craft),

-Enduring Composure Notable from Small Armour Cluster Jewel (You can use Defence reforges from harvest on item lvl 68+ small armour cluster or just spam alterations)

And more: https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Endurance_charge

If you're generating endurance charges but don't stack armour, I also recommend using Immortal Call. Cast When Damage Taken Immortal Call pairs very well with Enduring Composure for example.

You can also stack armour. Pay attention to your item bases, their quality and get a Determination Aura. Granite flask with increased armour during flask effect can also offer a massive boost to your armour. Never neglect your flask setup. It should be one of the first things you invest into when you get to maps.

Many rare items can also offer modifiers such as "Additional Physical Damage Reduction" on body armour, or % of Physical Damage From Hits Taken As Fire/Cold/Lightning/Chaos - such as "20% of Physical Damage from Hits taken as Fire Damage" on the Cloak of Flame unique.

You can go to https://www.craftofexile.com/ and type "taken as" into the "search for an affix" field, to find possible ways of obtaining those mods on items.

2) Elemental Damage -

Elemental damage is very straightforward to deal with. Unfortunately many people still have the attitude of - "my resists are capped at 75%, why did I die?". Getting to 75% resistances is just a minimum requirement. These days it is very easy to go above the 75% resist cap and you should definitely take advantage of that.

-You can do it through passives on the skill tree, such as Crystal Skin, Prismatic Skin, Soul of Steel

-You can get Searing Exarch implicit modifiers for max res

-Max res modifier on shields

-Purity auras

-Melding of the Flesh unique jewel and more.

You can also take advantage of the "taken as" modifiers, such as "50% of Elemental Damage taken as Chaos Damage" on the Divine Flesh Keystone from the Glorious Vanity Timeless Jewel.
Increasing your maximum resistance is more powerful than most people realise because every additional point you get, gets you more and more damage mitigation. This is true for most mechanics in the game. To illustrate this in an easy example, let's say you have 0% fire resistance and you're going to take a 100 damage fire hit to the face. If you get an additional 1% of fire resistance, you're going to now take 99 fire damage from that hit, which means you've reduced the incoming damage by 1%. Seems straightforward right? Now imagine you have 89% fire resistance. The incoming hit now deals 11 damage to you. If you get that additional 1% of fire resistance, it will reduce the incoming damage from 11 to 10. That is over a 9% difference! Which means at this point the same 1% of fire resistance is worth nine times as much in terms of reducing the damage you've been taking before. This works similarly with mechanics like block, evasion and other hard % damage reductions (such as additional physical damage reduction).


3) Chaos Damage -

Chaos resistance is one of the more neglected stats when it comes to easily available defences. Softcore and Hardcore players alike are constantly dying to chaos damage while simultaneously refusing to get any serious amounts of it. The game is not balanced around having 0% chaos res anymore, so if you're running with your chaos res value in the negatives, you're asking to get clapped by the Toxic Volatiles. Good news is that if you decide to invest in your chaos res, you're going to feel significantly more tanky and the Toxic Volatiles will barely tickle you.

-You can find chaos res on the implicit modifier of certain bases such as Amethyst Rings or Fugitive Boots

-You can force a chaos resistance roll with Essences of Envy

-You can also use the bench to craft 15% elemental + 15% chaos resistance on rare items (this can be further increased by Prismatic Catalysts on Jewellery.

-There is chaos resistance available on many passive nodes on the passive skill tree, including the Asylum and One with Evil wheels which also give you access to very powerful passive masteries that are worth taking.

-If you have at least 38% positive chaos resistance, you might consider the Cleansed Thoughts anointment which doubles your Chaos Resistance.

-There is also an option of crafting a Small Chaos Resistance Cluster Jewel with up to 8% chaos resistance which together with the base 12% per node and a 35% increased effect of small passives can provide as much as 75% chaos resistance for 3 passive points + the jewel socket. Even without going to that extreme, looking for chaos resistance on cluster jewels you're going to use anyway, is usually a good idea.

If you're looking for a good number of chaos res to aim for, I would recommend 40% positive chaos resistance + an amethyst flask which is going to take care of the remaining 35% as an easy solution.

4) Attacks -

To protect yourself from attacks, usually you'll want to invest in some form of avoidance. Evasion being the first and most obvious choice. You can stack evasion using the combination of your gear, passives, flasks and the Grace aura. Evasion is also increased by your dexterity so if your character naturally gets a lot of it, it's probably a good idea to invest in some flat evasion to boost up your defences.

If you're using a significant amount of Evasion then it is also helpful to incorporate Blind as a defensive mechanic. Blinded enemies will have a lower chance to hit through your evasion as well as give you a higher chance to hit them. You can blind your enemies by:

-picking up passives on the atlas tree, such as Dazzling Strikes

-the Claw Mastery

-or you can delegate this task to your minions and pick up an abyss jewel with a chance for your minions to blind enemies on hit.

Attack Block is another way of avoiding damage from attacks. It usually requires using a shield, staff or dual wielding. You can increase your chance to block through modifiers on your shield and passive skills on the passive skill tree. Glancing Blows keystone will also double your chance to block but I wouldn't recommend picking it up unless you also have some form or Life or Energy shield recovery on block that will justify taking the portion of blocked attack's damage. One of the most powerful examples of that mechanic is the incredibly strong Aegis Aurora shield.

**Overall block is an extremely strong defensive mechanic which will drastically increase your EHP if you invest in it.** It also has a lot of associated mods that can be found on unique and rare gear, ranging from increases to your block chance, to recovering a portion of your life whenever you block. As before I recommend heading to https://www.craftofexile.com/ and typing "block" into the "search for an affix" window to find out more.

5) Spells -

Damage from spells will be usually mitigated by your resistances or the physical damage reductions, but it is worth investing in another way of mitigating spells specifically - Spell Suppression. It's a stat that can be found on the passive skill tree as well as modifiers on Evasion and Hybrid Evasion bases of boots, body armours, gloves, helmets and shields. Spell suppression is especially effective against bosses, where you might encounter powerful single spell hits. Getting your Spell Suppression to 100% chance, will mean that every single spell hit you take gets reduced in half (or by 55% if you also take the Inveterate + Spell Suppression Mastery). If your character paths around the right/bottom part of the passive tree, it is highly recommended to utilise spell suppression. Spell dodge - which is now accessible through the Acrobatics keystone is only effective if you're specifically trying to mitigate a lot of smaller spell hits, where none of them have a chance of one-shotting you. Otherwise Acrobatics is not as good as relying on pure Spell Suppression.

6) Stuns -

Stuns are a very dangerous and often overlooked mechanic (You might be noticing a pattern by now - yes, most mechanics are overlooked and that's usually why people struggle). Especially for characters which base their recovery on Leech/Life Gain On Hit, because you can not attack while stunned. Without getting any health back, you'll quickly find yourself dead, because if the monsters are hitting you hard enough to stun you, that means you're in a seriously dangerous spot. Stun is based around the damage done by a hit, compared to your maximum life. The higher the percentage of life that you lose the higher the chance to get stunned and stun duration. Characters stacking a lot of life will get stunned much less frequently than characters focusing on energy shield or having low HP pools in general.

Here are some ways to deal with stuns:


-Soul of the Brine King Pantheon - which will stop you from getting stunlocked.

-Unwavering Stance (Only recommended if you have next to no evasion, for example while using Iron Reflexes)
-Uniques such as Presence of Chayula and Kaom's Roots

-Boot Enchant which grants up to 70% chance to avoid stuns if you've killed an enemy recently

-Chance to Avoid Being Stunned crafts from the crafting bench as well as various modifiers on rare items (check https://www.craftofexile.com and search for "stun")

-Stun and block recovery modifiers which will reduce the duration of stuns on you

-Unwaveringly Evil Cluster Jewel Notable which will prevent stuns from interrupting your cast of chaos skills

7) Crits -

Crits are very dangerous for obvious reasons. Luckily it is possible to completely negate their effect in many different ways:

-Claw mastery "Enemies poisoned by you can not deal critical strikes"

-Viridi's Veil

-Sanctum of thought notable on passive skill tree

-Critical and Armour mastery on passive skill tree

-Belt of the Deceiver

8) Projectiles

Enemies fire 2 additional projectiles is a very nasty modifier to encounter, especially in maps with Eater of Worlds influenced "titty bitches" which fire those extra projectiles in a straight barrage, directly multiplying their damage and making them one of the most dangerous monsters in the entire game. Here are some ways of dealing with projectiles:

-Soul of Lunaris pantheon upgrades, wich give you 10% chance to avoid projectiles and 100% chance to avoid chained projectiles (very important when playing with minions)

-Flesh and Stone - less damage taken from enemies that aren't nearby

-Arrow Dancing Keystone

-Lioneye's Remorse

but above all, one of the best defences against projectiles is to continuously move around the monsters which will make them miss most of their damage.

9) Degeneration -

This one is causing people massive issues, especially with the new Arch Nemesis mods. Good news is, you can negate almost all of it in a very simple way. Most of the degeneration ground effects in the game currently come from two sources: Toxic Volatiles and Chilled Damage Over Time Ground. To deal with the first one, you can:

-Invest in chaos resistance as mentioned in one of the previous points

-Use soul of Arakaali upgraded pantheon for 10% reduced DoT damage taken and 40% Chaos Resistance against DoT's.

-Exposure Therapy cluster jewel notable which gives 30% Chaos Resistance against DoT's

And in order to deal with the Chilled Ground DoT you can:

-Combine upgraded Soul of the Brine King which gives 50% reduced effect of chill on you with ring or glove bench crafts which give 40%/51% reduced effect of chill on you

-Pick up reduced effect of chill from the Anointed Flesh wheel on the passive skill tree

-You can also get 100% chance to avoid chill/elemental ailments which will stop the chilled ground from applying to you at all

In general the degeneration effects are quite obviously countered by regeneration. Many people neglect life regeneration rolls on gear but they do add up and help your character deal with the constant pressure on your health put by the enemies. The game always wants to kill you and it is never a bad idea to get a good amount of Life/ES regeneration. For example a T1 life regen roll on boots can give you up to 96 Life regen per second. That would require more than 150 mana reserved by Vitality. And speaking of Vitality, it is an extremely good aura for leveling and counteracting the effects of blood rage. If you're struggling with your mana reservation while using it, you can always pick the Life passive mastery for 100% increased mana reservation efficiency, allowing you to raise the level of your Vitality and get much more regen out of it. Regeneration is one of the most powerful defensive mechanics in the game because it is unconditional and works regardless of how many enemies are around you and whether you can attack them or not.

10) Elemental Ailments [Freeze, Chill, Shock, Ignite, Brittle, Scorch, Sap] -

Elemental Ailments are extremely dangerous and game changing, but also pretty easy to become completely immune to. If you don't take care of this step, every single other mechanic in the game will be more dangerous because of it. Degen will do more damage to you if you're shocked. More projectiles will hit you if you're chilled. Your regen won't be helping you when you're losing life due to ignite. They're all extremely deadly and it's best to just get rid of them all.

The simplest way to do that is to:

-Pick passives from the passive skill tree which give you chance to avoid elemental ailments

-Essence craft boots with Chance to Avoid Elemental Ailments

-Use Eater of Worlds Implicit on boots with Chance to Avoid Elemental Ailments

-Bench Craft Chance to Avoid Elemental Ailments on your Body Armour

-Use Soul of the Brine King

-Use Arctic Armour for freeze immunity

-Use tempest shield for Freeze immunity

-Combine jewel implicits with chance to avoid being ignited/shocked/frozen with other passives to achieve 100% chance to avoid these ailments

You can reduce their duration, their effect or get a chance to avoid them. Pick whichever is most efficient and easiest to get for your build and do that before making any other major upgrades. You will die at least ten times less frequently than before if you successfully protect your character from elemental ailments. It should be one of your top priorities.

11) Bleed -

Bleed is a very straightforward mechanic to deal with. For most characters all you need to do is:

-Use a life or mana flask with bleed removal/immunity

-Take a mastery node on the passive skill tree for corrupted blood immunity or use a corrupted jewel with corrupted blood immunity implicit

-You can also use Steel Skin to remove bleed

-Soul of Ralakesh pantheon reduces the damage from bleeding drastically.

12) Poison -

Poison is one of those mechanics which you probably won't notice for most of your gameplay until you meet a monster that synergizes with it particularly well (Hunter influence monsters and Al-Hezmin for example), and then you'll suddenly die. High amount of Chaos Resistance and sources of Chaos Resistance against DoT damage mentioned in the Degen section will take care of poison completely. If your Chaos res is good enough, you will never need things like:

-Poison remove/immunity on utility flasks

-Unaffected by poison while affected by malevolence

-Maw of Conquest

Those extra poison protections are an overkill and only necessary for things like the Golden Rule Jewel builds.

13) Curses -

Curses - which include Hexes and Marks are extremely dangerous and should be treated with similar respect to Elemental Ailments. They will multiply the damage that your character takes and make many other mechanics much more dangerous. It should be one of your priorities to get a decent amount of "reduced effect of curses on you" early on. Here are some anti-curse mechanics you can take advantage of:

-Curse removal on utility flasks (this one is not recommended, and is pretty much useless)

-Reduced effect of curses on you during flask effect mod on utility flask (this one should be your go to suffix for one of your utility flask on most characters

-20% reduced effect of curses on you Masteries from the passive skill tree

-30% reduced effect of curses on you from the upgraded Yugul pantheon

-Viridi's Veil

-Asylum wheel on the passive skill tree

-25% reduced effect of curses on you Ring bench craft

-Consecrated Ground

14) Maim -

Maim is a very common effect which slows your character down and makes you more prone to receive extra hits. You can deal with it by:

-Picking a passive tree Mastery which will grant you immunity to Main as well as Hinder (the spell equivalent)

-Using a corrupted jewel with an implicit "You cannot be Maimed". This is a fairly common and inexpensive corruption to get.

15) Grasping Vines -

We all hate these, but depending on your usual mobility skills of choice you might not know that it is possible to instantly remove all vine debuffs from yourself by using a blink skill. This includes:

-Flame Dash

-Blink Arrow

-Dash

-Smoke Mine

Try to include one of those in your build, in order to combat this mechanic.

16) Body Blocking -

Lastly let me mention body blocking, which together with stun, belongs to the category of those "invisible" mechanics that many players might not notice, but they make your character get stuck and killed by a gang of angry monsters. The way to deal with this is naturally Phasing. You can get phasing from:

-Quartz Flask

-Searching and Hypnotic Eye Jewel mods

-Warlord wand/bow/quiver

-Elder quiver

-Withering Step

-Phase Run

-Multiple uniques such as Tinkerskin and Voidwalker

-Freedom of movement and Avatar of the hunt passive tree wheels

Phasing is a mechanic that adds a lot of quality of life to your character but for some builds I would consider it mandatory. Builds that should always get it include builds that have some sort of delay in their damage delivery such as:

-Toxic Rain/Caustic Arrow

-ED/Contagion

-Trappers

-Miners

-Heist Farmers


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Part III: Build Example.
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This concludes our checklist of problems and solutions. Hopefully it will help you better see what your character is missing, what to prioritise and what it takes to make a good build. If you want to see an example of a cheap starter build that performs well and ticks most of these boxes, I've just posted a guide for such a build here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PLs2I0_8pM

If you're just interested in the PoB, here it is: https://pastebin.com/dawammM3


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Part IV: Other Defensive Mechanics.
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Lastly, I feel like this guide to defence in PoE (which somehow became Asmo's Defence Bible by how long it is getting) would not be complete without honourable mentions of powerful defensive mechanics that deserve some more highlighting but they didn't fit any of the generic categories:

1) Molten Shell/Vaal Molten Shell.

If your character's defence includes a lot of armour, it would be a sin to not use this skill. The extra Health Pool granted my VMS, combined with an already tanky character can allow you to take to the face absolutely astronomical hits (for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCuNCvRVwCU&t=69s ). It is also very good when in combination with:

2) Cast When Damage Taken setups.

CWDT is a very good way to leverage your sockets and turn them into defensive power. Sockets are very valuable and you should always take advantage of any slots that your build doesn't need for the main abilities. Apart from guard skills you can also utilise CWDT setup with:

-Defensive curses such as Temp Chains or Enfeeble

-Frost Shield

-Cold Snap (for the chill and frenzy charge generation)

-Bone Offering (to remove corpses)

-Void Sphere for hinder and crowd control

3) Freezing/Chilling enemies

Freezing and chilling enemies is a massively effective way of reducing incoming damage. There is a reason why most hardcore boss race winning builds rely on chilling the bosses and slowing their action speed. It's just extremely effective. If your build doesn't do cold damage, there are always things like:

-Skitterbots + Unbound Ailments

-Arctic Armour

-Chill on block

4) Taunt

Having minions or totems taunt the enemies and direct their hits away from you is very strong. For summoners it is an additional layer of defence and can be accomplished by using "Minions have #% chance to Taunt on Hit with Attacks" mod from Ghastly Eye Jewels. For a Champion ascendancy - using totems that taunt combined with the Conqueror passive is a massive boost to their already strong defensive arsenal.



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Part V: FAQ.
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Q: How can I afford to spend extra passive points / items for defensive layers when my character already doesn't kill things fast enough? I need more damage!

A: Getting enough defence to dramatically reduce the number of your deaths is not very costly and will allow you to level up faster and reach higher levels which in turn will give you those passives back. Prioritising your character functioning properly over min-maxing your damage will lead to a much better feeling character in most cases.

Q: I'm using Grace + Determination + Defiance banner and I'm still dying. What is wrong with this game?

A: You shouldn't just copy a defensive setup without thinking about it. If you were playing something like a Champion, it's probably a great idea to run these auras, but otherwise you're probably not leveraging them both equally. Focus on one of them and add another layer of defence instead for a much better effect (for example Grace + Ghost Shrouds or Determination + Divine Shield/Aegis Aurora and Vitality instead of Defiance Banner)

Q: I can't afford an upgrade and my character keeps dying in T16 maps so I can't make the currency for defensive options and if I change my passives I'll lose too much damage!

A: Do lower tier/easier content and learn to farm your currency there. You can check this video for an example of how I was able to afford my Tornado Shot Omniscience build by running only T9-T10 maps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUCgfrRF-zs there are plenty of strategies that will allow you to farm up for your upgrades without the need to push corrupted T16's.

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Thank you for reading and try to die... less than Zizaran XD <3

Very nice defensive guide Asmo! Thank you very much for your time and for all the useful information you have gathered here, it helped me a lot!

"titty bitches" lol

Thank you for the guide. Anyone that wants to theory craft their own build should read this forwards and backwards.

Excellent information, thank you

Excellent!

Excellent!

I'd love to see some information about how to defend against annoying Physical DOTS like the one the boss of Crimson Township uses, even with a ton of regen and spamming flasks I still die to it

"

ContraOmnes wrote:

I'd love to see some information about how to defend against annoying Physical DOTS like the one the boss of Crimson Township uses, even with a ton of regen and spamming flasks I still die to it

This is boss mechanic issue, not a general build issue. If you cannot oneshot this boss, you should kill his clones as they appear, instead of trying to kill the boss no matter the cost and allowing him to grow more stacks of dot from clones.

"

Echothesis wrote:

"

ContraOmnes wrote:

I'd love to see some information about how to defend against annoying Physical DOTS like the one the boss of Crimson Township uses, even with a ton of regen and spamming flasks I still die to it

This is boss mechanic issue, not a general build issue. If you cannot oneshot this boss, you should kill his clones as they appear, instead of trying to kill the boss no matter the cost and allowing him to grow more stacks of dot from clones.

Posting an offensive/mechanics reply in a defensive guide is not very useful.

A lot of this guide is about physical mitigation. You can also see it in the calcs tab in PoB. Guessing this is an evasion player who needs to invest into physical mitigation.