So what a lot of those build guides don’t explain is that you need more than one layer of defensive mitigation’s in order to survive one shots
For example in the video lethal provides above he explains no examples of defensive gem setups or any other methods.
The entire video basically leaves a watcher relying entirely on leech from the slayers ascendency which by itself isn’t enough.
If you look through the comments it’s full of people that are having issues like this. Either it’s that or mana sustain and things like mana reservation.
Examples of defensive mitigation’s.
- Cast when damage taken: linked with things like steel skin or other guard skills. What steel skin does is absorb a certain amount of incoming damage before that damage is then taken by your main life pool. It is activated when your cast when damage taken gem takes a certain amount of damage. You can level the gem to increase the damage threshold. There are other guard skills such as immortal call which give straight damage reductions to incoming damage. Some guard skills can be further buffed by supper gems or things such as endurance charges.
- Endurance charges, if you play a build which does not have built in endurance charges generation then you can get it via other sources. When you do syndicate encounter you can unveil mods like +1 to minimum endurance charges. These can then be crafted on to rare rings and amulets. Each endurance charges gives physical damage reduction/elemental resistances/life regen. By default most builds have a max of three allowed but you will need a source to generate them or a craft so you always have them. If you can’t craft it yourself ask someone else to bench craft it onto your rings.
- You can use defensive curse auras or defensive curses in cast when damage taken setups. A good cast when damage taken setup can include a guard skill a curse like enfeeble and potentially one more gem like increased duration if running immortal call.
- Block: you can make characters have high block chance towards spell or attacks. This takes some effort with some builds ascendencies with some being easier than others. If you are able to get high bloc chance with the assistance of your tree and gear then you can use items that have on block affects. For example a shield with 5% life on block/5% es on block.
- Blind: some items and crafts can include things like Blind. Blind will lower the chance of enemies hitting you by up to 50%, this is huge. You can get this with gems like flesh and stone. When in sand stance you blind nest by enemies. It also gives a flat damage reduction of over 10% from enemies that are outside its radius which lowers off offscreen damage by a tonne.
- If your an evasion based chars here flasks are important, jade flasks can make you take almost no damage. Evasion is deterministic as you will be hit in one of every four hits I believe. If you then stack mitigation’s like the above on then when you do get hit it’s very survivable and almost impossible to die. It’s not perfect, the same goes for other defensive builds like armor however armor is more complicated. Having tonnes of armor doesn’t stop you from being one shot.
Ultimately a good build will utilise at least two or more of these options in various ways depending on the ascendency or gear.
Many of these guides are noob traps that leave players lacking and without the right knowledge to fix their problems they simply die over and over again.
I would highly recommend people watch zizarans videos on Poe university detailing defences.
I play exclusively on hardcore so dieing isn’t an option. My currently build is max block runs cast when damage taken with immortal call and enfeeble, endurance charges/ high life regeneration/ max elemental and chaos resistance/ on block effects for both energy shield and life / advanced mods on belts that reduce incoming crit damage / physical damage to elemental mods on my ears to reduce physical damage. I have other defences too.
The simplest and easiest things to begin with are capping elemental resistance/chaos, using flasks that provide ailment immunity and defensive like physical damage reductions.
Flask examples:
- Basalt flask: damage reduction physical
- Jade flask: increased evasion rating
- Quartz flask: gives dodge chance and phasing to allow you to move through packs
- Sulphur flask: gives 40% increased damage but also drops consecrated ground that provides life regeneration.
There are also other options. You want your freeze immunities and curse immunities etc on the above type
Flasks. Never have freeze immunity ok a health flask as you will be frozen and it will be too late at that point. The ailment immunity stops if you are full health so a health flask is useless. Having it on one of the above flasks keeps the ailment immunity active for the whole duration of that flask.
I hope this helps, sorry for any typos. I’m posting this from work on a night shift lol.
