The recurring problem I keep running into every league.

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If you get all of the following you get better survivability:
- Strong Phys mitigation
- Good buffer (life) with good recovery
- Immunity to bleed & corrupted blood.
- High chaos resist & over capped max ele resists
- 100% spell suppression or equivalent
Block & evasion are optional and will help but they aren’t necessary in the same way the above are. So from the POV of current 3.18 PoE your character description sounds like it has severe holes in defences.

I try to do that atm. So far I switched to Armor via Iron reflexes which makes my phys mitigation far better, while retaining 100% spell suppression and 100% ailment immunity, got 50% chaos resist and capped ele resistance. Only thing missing i corrupted blood that’s not tied to guard skills but I probably find a gem that does this too. And I play a elemental claw so life leech + lethal pride works pretty well.

And yes I am still feeling meh for dying and losing exp every time without a way to mitigate the loss. Which also is interesting to me because I never felt bad when dying in a Souls Borne game. Maybe that’s because in Souls Borne you have safety nets like the souls/runes/echoes that store amounts of exp you can use later without risking a loss on death.

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hats paper thin, it would have been paper thin even before nemesis rares and scourge.

That setup basically reads I survive til my evasion doesn’t work = dead.

Yes, which is why I wanted more reliability for Evasion based playstyles. Day after I wrote the thread I took Iron Reflexes and have to say Armor feels so much more safer then Evasion when playing.
So from my exp Evasion really needs a reliability buff so it is on par with armour and you can go for either or as one major defence layer in the trinity of defence through equipment of Energy Shield, Armor and Evasion.

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most poe problems could be reduced to GGG loves quantity over quality

instead of having 654684 monsters that can be killed in 1 hit cluttering the screen just to drop items that are 99% of the time trash we could have small packs or single stronger monsters that take a bit to kill and actually drop something worth picking.

defensive layers are also more manageable when fighting smaller packs for the sole reason one can actually see what is going on and dodge what you know your character can not tank.

smaller packs also increase the viability of skills, lots of skills are considered bad because they can’t wipe the whole screen in a second an move on to the next.

I agree with that but it also goes against what the preferred playstyle of an action Rpg like POE is. The targeted style of play is see a screen full of monsters go boom and drop tons of cool loot on the floor. Same goes for bosses. I still know how happy I was when killing mephisto and he drops a tal Amu in Dia 2.
So in an ideal world good to great drops would be common occurrences from high lvl mobs and bosses while the monster danger is manageable and the boss difficulty is high enough to get some mechanics in but not too high to exclude builds (a good example for that problem being Baal who had elemental immunities in his boss encounter).

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same for crafting, on an ideal world crafting means collect materials dropped from different creatures and bosses, put them together and get the desire item. Meanwhile in here for some reason crafting means throwing currency at a black hole named RNG in the hopes of a good item coming out of it.

I could write 10 pages on crafting from a economist standpoint and how the current system damages the play experience and lowers enjoyment significantly. To make it short, rng is never fair and the statistic is always against the individual player. If you combine that with the current disastrous form of bulk trading, which is loaded with scams and price fixing, you get a overall negative experience for the majority of individuals that interact with the system.