Defensive strategies; some are surprisingly overpowered in this game.

Purists rejoice, if you're considering a pure defense build then you have to know your options. You can go all-out defense depends on the "kind" you spring for, in Path of exile, there are several categories, each with advantages and disadvantages. Feel free to fact check me on this.

**Armor:** Very straightforward. The higher the armor, the more damage that can be reduced. But elemental damage does NOT factor into this, only physical. Elemental damage goes straight through armor. You can have an armor level of 10,000 with 90% damage resistance (an easy temporary stat with a granite flask) and still die instantly from a high elemental damage attack.

**Block chance:** is a specific and separate status that can be thought of as another form of dodge. If you block, none of the physical damage is done. But blocking takes a brief time to recover from. Shields are by far the best blockers, (up to 75%, even elemental blocking with some modifiers) but the 2-handed staff and dual wield can also block.

**Chaos inoculation:** is one of only a handful of nodes that directly block chaos damage, which directly harms and bypasses the energy shield.

**Dodge:** is a separate variable that increases your chances of dodging an attack. It does NOT work for spells. Also, remember that it is NOT additive, but multiplicative. 20% evasion chance and 20% dodge chance is not a 40% miss, but a 36% chance to miss.

**Elemental resistance:** fire, cold, and lightning caps out at 75% (and in rare cases as with special items, it can go higher) It is worth noting that each additional difficulty level will reduce everyone's 3 elemental resistances by 20%, so that merciless difficulty will automatically incur a -60% resistance. If you play into the endgame, especially with pvp, a player that does mostly elemental damage would be taking advantage of the fact that their attacks do 20% more hurt with each new difficulty. In my opinion, this makes elemental damage overpowered (as it ignores armor, and gets better in the later stages of the game against other players). You will also find, as you'd expect, that elemental damage is often what kills you. The basic 3 defensive stats (Energy shield, evasion, and armor) all increase on equipment as the game goes on, but elemental resistance requires specific player intervention to increase, and it gets incrementally worse as the game gets harder. You'd have to have very good reasons for sacrificing a nearby elemental resistance node, because without it you're likely dead.

**Elemental Status resistance:** of a different nature than the above 3, in that the player can reduce their likelihood of being affected by an element (shocked, burned, or frozen) Being frozen obviously sucks, alot. In my experience it's best to ignore nodes that buff this, and simply carry around a flask that instantly dispels the status.

**Energy Shield:** - is another pool of health, on top of your existing pool of health. In the early stages of the game it is frustrating to use, because in the thick of combat it requires both a delay and a recharge rate to replenish. In the later stages of the game, if the delay is short then it can be worth it, as the recharge rate will be far higher than any health regeneration. But it will always require a certain amount of retreat tactics to pull off.

**Endurance charges:** give automatic physical resistance and elemental resistance as they accumulate. They also allow you to use the very tempting "immortal call" skill which makes you immune to all physical damage for a short, increasable time but (sadly) does not protect you from elemental damage.

**Evasion:** - Roughly, the higher it is, the more likely you are to dodge the full amount of an attack, including any of its effects, and also chaos damage. NOT including spells. I cannot find a source for this, but they had to tweak evasion so that if an attack is not successfully evaded, a high level will allow some of the damage to be bypassed. In my opinion, evasion is one of the most useless defense types.

**Health** - Can be buffed up to astronomically high levels. I have heard of players reaching the thousands easily. More importantly though, is the health regen and there are quite a few nodes to help with that. One more effectively easy way to gain health is with lifesteal weapons (typically fists). If you're ever considering the investment, just think of more health as the thing that allows you to stay in one place and use your weapon more often. It's easy to sacrifice some health nodes, but Low health will have you running around in circles, doing nothing useful.

**health regeneration:** almost always useful, except if you have chaos innoculation, which buffed your Energy shield and dropped your health to 1.

**Critical hit resistance:** useful later in the game, especially in pvp against players with overpowered crit and diamond flasks.

**Minions:** are easily some of the most overpowered, overlooked defensive units of the game. Some of my builds have minions that have more health than my main character. Any class can benefit from an extra 3 distracting zombies from walking around. Skeletons are can't quite match the zombies in staying power (since they expire automatically) But spectres are the best of all, especially if you can manage to snag the kind that auto-cast curses. Simply put, the more minions you have, the less attention enemies can pay you. At later levels its critical to boost minions with health gems so they can stick around. Marauder and duelist classes tend to eschew these guys since the support nodes are so far away, but can still benefit from the red domination blow skill, which will turn an enemy to your side for a little while after you kill them.

*Projectile dodge:** same as above, but only for physical damage done with projectiles.

*Speed:** is the often overlooked ability to simply run away from, or out of the way of various projectiles and enemies. Fast = good, faster = better. There is no such thing as too fast.

*Spell dodge:** one specific node called *phase acrobatics* is used at the moment to factor this in. Although, I believe they are beginning to realize that magic is a bit overpowered because otherwise spells are pretty much guaranteed hit and guaranteed damage. The next patch will include flasks that increase spell dodge for instance.

**Shield/Staff:** see block

**Stun resistance:** Maybe it's just me, but I've never found myself in a situation where I was saying "darn, I wish I wasn't stunned right now." It wears off very quickly and for ranged characters it virtually never happens. I've never invested in this.

**Totems:** are a great way of creating an area that says "This is my circle, step in my circle and you die." Most of them will distract enemies but early on they have pitiful life levels and die quickly.


Despite the broad variety in defense, there are two basic types: those that help with close combat (staying power) and those that help with ranged.

**Better for close combat: High Health, health regen, Endurance charges, Elemental resistances, Armor, Shield**

**Better for ranged combat: lots of minions, totems, Energy Shield, Speed**

Worthless: Evasion, dodging: as long as spells cannot be dodged, and as long as skills like flicker strike and viper strike are in play as is(no signs of them being removed) I will continue to see dodge skills as worthless. Early in the game, when enemies attack more slowly, they can have their usefulness, but dodging is playing a game of luck. Relying on it too much means you haven't buffed up your health or other defensive skills as much, and as enemies begin to strike quicker and harder, it's all the more likely that you'll get one hit killed.

I would reccommend the "iron reflexes" node to any character if they can get it, which converts all evasion to armor. Perk up your elemental resistances, and you'll be fine.

So the path of the exile ultimately is simple: Kill first, or be so hard to kill that you have plenty of time to do the job. Defensive strategies are above, but if you want to go all out-offensive instead, as opposed to a highly defensively buffed character, I would go minion and totem heavy to beef up the number of distractions around you.

One of my characters is a witch, which can produce about ~24-26 minions (even uses dominating blow) and she virtually never dies, despite having a crap energy shield, few elemental resistances, and armor and evasion you could sneeze off. Simply put, the enemy AI is too busy dealing with her army to focus any attention on her. You have to try hard to die. In PVP however, where the minion AI is drastically inferior, a character can simply single her out of the crowd and kill her pretty easily.

A second character that is almost completely non-defensive is my ranger, who uses totems and only 3 zombies. The zombies are incredibly buffed up with health. I just let them wander around and basically act as punching bags. While my archer, which has taken every offense node available for bows, deals out the damage from afar. It's the kind of strategy where "the best defense is a good offense." And at such a high dps no enemy survies for too long. At later levels, the bow becomes something akin to a multi-shot machine gun. The clarity skill regenerates pvp so fast that it becomes an effectively infinite pool of mana. In pvp, she would be very hard to get close to and kill, unless the enemy uses flicker strike/viper strike, which instantly closes the distance. Fortunately, my archer used a pure evasion build and then converted it all to armor with iron reflexes, so she's as tough as any maurader.

Purely offensive builds are much more difficult to pull off for close ranged characters.

I'll leave you with one last thought. Yes, elemental damage is very over powered, and even if your opponent has resistances to it, there are skill modifiers that allow you to punch through that resistance. It's an absolute necessity for any offensive build.

100% disagree with ur theory on dodge. Im going acro, 41% dodge chance and double for ranged(not % but #) so its not 82% of course, but againt ranged attacks I get hit by 1 out of every 20-30. With evasion all u need is enough health to survive the big hits and sustain(of course). Armor get diminishing returns from higher hits, making getting 1 shot similar to having evasion. A,lot of life is needed for big hits, not armor. Evasion works perfectly fine, in some cases worse then armor and in some cases better then armor.

"

**Armor:** Very straightforward. The higher the armor, the more damage that can be reduced. But elemental damage does NOT factor into this, only physical. Elemental damage goes straight through armor. You can have an armor level of 10,000 with 90% damage resistance (an easy temporary stat with a granite flask) and still die instantly from a high elemental damage attack.

10k armor is pitifully low. Armor sucks in this game.

"

**Block chance:** is a specific and separate status that can be thought of as another form of dodge. If you block, none of the physical damage is done. But blocking takes a brief time to recover from. Shields are by far the best blockers, (up to 75%, even elemental blocking with some modifiers) but the 2-handed staff and dual wield can also block.

There is no distinction when blocking other than Attack/Spell. I personally believe that shields are incredibly overpowered, and one of the most poorly balanced aspects of this game.

"

**Chaos inoculation:** is one of only a handful of nodes that directly block chaos damage, which directly harms and bypasses the energy shield.

Immunity, not block. And i don't see what you're getting at here, is this just pointing this out?

"

**Elemental resistance:** fire, cold, and lightning caps out at 75% (and in rare cases as with special items, it can go higher) It is worth noting that each additional difficulty level will reduce everyone's 3 elemental resistances by 20%, so that merciless difficulty will automatically incur a -60% resistance. If you play into the endgame, especially with pvp, a player that does mostly elemental damage would be taking advantage of the fact that their attacks do 20% more hurt with each new difficulty. In my opinion, this makes elemental damage overpowered (as it ignores armor, and gets better in the later stages of the game against other players). You will also find, as you'd expect, that elemental damage is often what kills you. The basic 3 defensive stats (Energy shield, evasion, and armor) all increase on equipment as the game goes on, but elemental resistance requires specific player intervention to increase, and it gets incrementally worse as the game gets harder. You'd have to have very good reasons for sacrificing a nearby elemental resistance node, because without it you're likely dead.

Elemental damage is almost never what kills people except in normal, or vaal's fireslam.

Taking resistance nodes other than diamond skin nodes is stupid. You will easily max out your resists with your gear.

"

**Elemental Status resistance:** of a different nature than the above 3, in that the player can reduce their likelihood of being affected by an element (shocked, burned, or frozen) Being frozen obviously sucks, alot. In my experience it's best to ignore nodes that buff this, and simply carry around a flask that instantly dispels the status.

This is true, the nodes should be better in my opinion.

"

**Endurance charges:** give automatic physical resistance and elemental resistance as they accumulate. They also allow you to use the very tempting "immortal call" skill which makes you immune to all physical damage for a short, increasable time but (sadly) does not protect you from elemental damage.

If it protected from elemental damage it would be more overpowered than it already is. Which for the record, it's disgustingly overpowered.

"

**Evasion:** - Roughly, the higher it is, the more likely you are to dodge the full amount of an attack, including any of its effects, and also chaos damage. NOT including spells. I cannot find a source for this, but they had to tweak evasion so that if an attack is not successfully evaded, a high level will allow some of the damage to be bypassed. In my opinion, evasion is one of the most useless defense types.

Evasion is all or nothing, you don't avoid parts of attacks.

"

**Health** - Can be buffed up to astronomically high levels. I have heard of players reaching the thousands easily. More importantly though, is the health regen and there are quite a few nodes to help with that. One more effectively easy way to gain health is with lifesteal weapons (typically fists). If you're ever considering the investment, just think of more health as the thing that allows you to stay in one place and use your weapon more often. It's easy to sacrifice some health nodes, but Low health will have you running around in circles, doing nothing useful.

Just pointing out that "thousands" of health is not astronomically high. 6k life is very standard for a level 75+ hp build. Kaom's heart can bring this up to 10-11k

"

**Minions:** are easily some of the most overpowered, overlooked defensive units of the game. Some of my builds have minions that have more health than my main character. Any class can benefit from an extra 3 distracting zombies from walking around. Skeletons are can't quite match the zombies in staying power (since they expire automatically) But spectres are the best of all, especially if you can manage to snag the kind that auto-cast curses. Simply put, the more minions you have, the less attention enemies can pay you. At later levels its critical to boost minions with health gems so they can stick around. Marauder and duelist classes tend to eschew these guys since the support nodes are so far away, but can still benefit from the red domination blow skill, which will turn an enemy to your side for a little while after you kill them.

Just pointing out that they aren't overlooked, most players are aware of how ridiculous minion builds are, but they are also very boring for the most part.

"

*Spell dodge:** one specific node called *phase acrobatics* is used at the moment to factor this in. Although, I believe they are beginning to realize that magic is a bit overpowered because otherwise spells are pretty much guaranteed hit and guaranteed damage. The next patch will include flasks that increase spell dodge for instance.

No such flask has been announced. Only certain spells are overpowered. (Freezing pulse is the best example.)

"

**Stun resistance:** Maybe it's just me, but I've never found myself in a situation where I was saying "darn, I wish I wasn't stunned right now." It wears off very quickly and for ranged characters it virtually never happens. I've never invested in this.

This is true. Even unwavering stance doesn't seem particularly useful, and from what i hear it doesn't work on rhoa stuns which is the whole reason i considered getting it.

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Worthless: Evasion, dodging: as long as spells cannot be dodged, and as long as skills like flicker strike and viper strike are in play as is(no signs of them being removed) I will continue to see dodge skills as worthless. Early in the game, when enemies attack more slowly, they can have their usefulness, but dodging is playing a game of luck. Relying on it too much means you haven't buffed up your health or other defensive skills as much, and as enemies begin to strike quicker and harder, it's all the more likely that you'll get one hit killed.

Dodge is a free 20%, and evaison is very good if you stack enough of it. There are builds that allow for acrobatics to be picked up for essentially no cost.

"

I would reccommend the "iron reflexes" node to any character if they can get it, which converts all evasion to armor. Perk up your elemental resistances, and you'll be fine.

Waste of points unless you build for it, and even then armor is shit.

"

I'll leave you with one last thought. Yes, elemental damage is very over powered, and even if your opponent has resistances to it, there are skill modifiers that allow you to punch through that resistance. It's an absolute necessity for any offensive build.

Only on players. Elemental damage on enemies is a mixed bag of underpowered, overpowered and balanced.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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Xendran wrote:

Even unwavering stance doesn't seem particularly useful, and from what i hear it doesn't work on rhoa stuns which is the whole reason i considered getting it.

It does - it applies to all stuns, including those caused by Shield Charge.

Ah, i might consider getting it at low levels and then respeccing out of it when i hit A2 ruthless, then. Thanks for the info.

Shields/block can be very powerful with certain builds. I am working on a regeneration/blocker build at the moment. With a passive node and a unique amulet I have 66% of my block chance applied to spells. Combine that with lightning shield supported by lightning penetration and extra lightning damage that are both 14/15% quality and very high regeneration.
I have not finished the build yet but even at about level 40 I can basically just run around and get the monsters to all kill them selves without ever having to attack. I see potential for a build like this to be exploited by certain types of farmers...

Damage output can be further increased by :
a) Using the iron will support on lightning shield to increase damage due to high STR.
b) Using one of the Dex/Str type shields that have innate damage reflection. however with a build like this one of the stranger things is that you want to avoid evasion as the point is to get hit but take little damage.
C) Attacking with any skill of choice, lightning strike compliments this very well as it can be used with any melee weapon and provides a semi ranged attack that can be supported with mana/health leech gems to increase survival.

For a hardcore mode a build like this is good as one can focus primarily on defensive skills to increase damage output. You can even totally ignore any offensive passives and build pure defense to be a huge tank with little risk and still deal large amounts of damage.

Hey thanks for the replies on this, I'm sorry if some of it came off as negative or for the inaccuracies. The problem is, there are still some misconceptions out there about how damage is dealt and sometimes even the path of exile wiki doesn't provide a sufficient explanation.

My basic argument about armor instead of evasion is this:

Imagine you have the option of taking 10x hits at 100 damage a piece, with 90% reduced damage.

OR

You can take 10x hits at 100 damage a piece with 90% chance to dodge.

Evasion becomes more of a luck tactic, with the possibility that you could get very unlucky and get multiple hits in a row of very high damage.

Armor is more of a slow and steady tactic. You're always going to take damage, but it gives you time to react to it.

To each their own play style though. Evasion does tend to work better for ranged if anything.

"

coastermonger wrote:

Hey thanks for the replies on this, I'm sorry if some of it came off as negative or for the inaccuracies. The problem is, there are still some misconceptions out there about how damage is dealt and sometimes even the path of exile wiki doesn't provide a sufficient explanation.

My basic argument about armor instead of evasion is this:

Imagine you have the option of taking 10x hits at 100 damage a piece, with 90% reduced damage.

OR

You can take 10x hits at 100 damage a piece with 90% chance to dodge.

Evasion becomes more of a luck tactic, with the possibility that you could get very unlucky and get multiple hits in a row of very high damage.

Armor is more of a slow and steady tactic. You're always going to take damage, but it gives you time to react to it.

To each their own play style though. Evasion does tend to work better for ranged if anything.

Evasion rolls arent completely random though. There are negatives about evasion and you havent pointed out any of them, there are also negatives about armour and you didnt point out any of those either. People are more worried about these usually:

Evasion:
Does not work against spells/Shield charge or things that always hit

Armour:
Reduced effectiveness against hard hitting enemies

Basically all damage mitigation can be used if you use it for its strength.

As pointed out evasion is not random, 50% evasion is insanely good against bears and other hard hitting creatures.

Evasion with arrow dodging is just another league of win when facing rangers with mixed physical/ele damage.

Lets take your case with 90% armor reduction and 90% dodge.

1. reduction is much less effective against large physical damage
2. taking estimated reduction in consideration armor is better against crowds of mobs
3. evasion is better against large damage slow hitting mobs
4. as pointed out by metronomy 90% evasion will never allow your character to be hit 2 times in a row or even 3 times.

Once you see how all mechanics works you will see how much thought really went in to this system, thanks gameplay balancer/designer at GGG : )

To end it, you are supposed to feel overpowered from time to time.