I kept dying a lot. As amazon I would get 1-2 shot a lot.

I asked a friend to help, he added ES gear and ES nodes and now i die less……

I hate the fact that i have to build ES on everything. It’s like ES is mandatory on almost every class.

Don’t forget CI, turn ritual into a joke, super deadly volatile plants not a problem anymore, half the DoT ground effect not a problem anymore. Everything in this game tell you to go ES and CI

If your armour doesnt say 90% it’s not enough. Because 90% is actually way lower than 90%, and 40% is actually way lower than 40%. My tankiest character is a titan with 4k life and about 38k armor at full scavenged plating stacks and 8% PDR from shield. Only time I die is in the 15th wave of t4 deli or I mess up a mechanic in t4 arbiter. Armor is harder to scale than energy shield, sure, but the reason people say it’s absolute trash is because they think 10k armor is enough.

I felt super tanky with 90% ele res, 20k armour and 1k life regen.

Didn’t hit any damage though 😅

I’m fine with seeing ES, ES/EV, EV on the tree on one side. We need to have things like ES/HP, HP, HP/AR, AR, AR/EV though to even it so every side of the tree has proper building. Then each side has sprinkles of the opposing.

On top of that, Armor needs a full formula rework.

75% block with 4k health 90 res is way stronger than 10k ES, if you’re using the same attack build. ES is only good if you can kill things before they reach you.

Waystone mods matter more than all of that basically. If you don’t run horrible waystones 4k health 90% res etc (as your one example) is hard to die.

But people run elemental pen, extra damage as X etc and then wonder why they die

They gotta add some % increased max life nodes near the dex side of the tree or something. Trying to stack life without it or significant strength investment is painful. If you could get like a total of 50%-75% boost in maximum life through those passive nodes then you’d be in a good place with a dexterity build that has decent life modifiers on gear.

defense balance is quite difficult, thats not happening in a .2x patch, earliest 0.3 imo

plenty of 0 es kitavas on the hc ladder doing just fine

Fix your game GGG. It’s been a while

I’m pretty sure they’re addressing it eventually. we’re just at 0.2. long road and lots of updates and balancing until 1.0.

It kinda ridiculous that you have to have close to 3600 health and ES at min to not get one shot. It does not matter if you have 90% evasion. Ghost dance has now replaced Grimm feast as a must run skill gem. I don’t even run maps with more than 2 suffix anymore just way to much risk with absolutely zero reward

ES is so comically overtuned compared to the other shit. Like I’m glad that they addressed Grim Feast, but then left like trivially getting 150% increased energy shield that you can get on the tree with like ~6 points of investment while Life is limited to uhh let’s see… 3% on the tree???

Like dude really? Like just imagine talking to the dev who thinks this is OK balance.

Sounds more like it’s a damage issue on the monster side. Nothing should be able to one shot you if your resist are maxed and you have that much life armor and/or evasion except for some of the boss abilities.

40% armor.

Bro, that’s like wearing chainmail socks and expecting them to fend off stabs to your heart

Laughs in 93% block chance warbringer

Same issue here, huntress with high evasion, still die, smith of kitava basically maxed out, still get killed off screen, and I have max block with svallin shield too, which rolls lucky on the projectles and i still die.

Also why on earth does armour slow the player down, shouldn’t the strength stat essentially negate that slowed movement speed (logically speaking too). Make armour more (or almost) universal and the elemental resistances just bonuses please.

Evasion builds should have something like cheat death, which should scale with evasion, mby GUARD scale with evasion but with cooldown, somthing like that

I rather having them fix the game optimization.Compared to the smooth experience in D4 and other games poe2 is a mess.

The sad thing is… it won’t matter if they addressed the specific concern. The end game is a lot like a unique drop…it could give you every resistance known to the game…while also having “btw…if you’re blinked at, you die. Have fun!” attributed to it.

And therein lies a dichotomy of the game…because the player base is forced to build one tap mechanic characters…only to have the game shift the goal posts and tell that wasn’t the way they meant for it to be.

I’m no one tapper…and truth be told, I don’t understand how that constitutes “playing”, but to each their own, and I feel truly bad that segment.

I’m just gonna leave the Torchlight Infinite armor formula here, compared with the POE2 one. Note that TL:I armor bases have about 4x higher values than POE2 ones because it’s a different game (Literal POE clone though which is why I’m using it for comparison), so mentally scale down some of the flat numbers accordingly.

The formula TL:I provides is:
Your DMG Reduction = Your Armor/(0.9 x Your Armor + 3000 + 300 x Min(Enemy Level, 90))

As opposed to POE2 where it appears to be:
Your DMG Reduction = Your Armor/(Your armor + 10 x Raw Phys Damage Taken)

Big difference here is that POE2’s armor gets weaker with the size of the hit. TL:I gives consistent damage reduction, based on a more complex formula that involves the level of the monster hitting you, up to a cap of 90 it seems. Doesn’t matter if that hit is from a little fast ankle-biter or the juiciest, most dangerous essence Rare or boss you’ve ever seen.

And it provides 60% of its benefit to non-physical damage.

I played a warbringer to start the season. 80% perma block, turtle charm, insane life leech, capped res and chaos res, huge armour.

Died in t1 maps all day.

My lich that cost 80ex to gear? Immortal.

I feel this is not being mentioned enough and it’s a key balance that’s needs to be addressed. Imagine the effect if Armor wasn’t bad, new builds and classes would shine, 33% of rare Armor drops wouldn’t be worthless and it would make for some gigachad tank set ups, which a lot of people love.

> 85% evasion with acrobat

you need more layers for evasion. As it has always been for poe1. But maybe what’s available in poe2 doesn’t quite cut it yet.

You can think about damage taken as effects.

You can get some “damage taken from mana before life” effects. This second feels very intentionally placed for pure evasion characters with Lucidity existing where it does, but perhaps there are a few things wrong with it (it does not get noticed often, you need a bit more than the passives provide, so then jewel itemization becomes more complex, also the state of mana scaling is a bit problem)

Many get a little ES (say, subterfuge mask + ES helm) and use ghost shrouds, and maybe that’s good, but to me it feels anti-synergistic.

I haven’t made it work either, just throwing out ideas. I feel like divine flesh will be a huge enabler (the xibaqua jewel), but is it possible to obtain right now? Last I checked only Vorana was in.

Playing Deadeye with Hyrri’s and full evasion just flop.

Okay I added some hybrid still flop.

Replace head, gloves, and boots with pure ES flopping less now.

Start using second weapon set with 24 points dedicated to ES cutting my damage in half just so I can map without the random oops evasion stopped working and you died one shots. https://poe2.ninja/builds/dawn/character/Volitar-3691/HunterxHeadHunter now I don’t flop.

I’m planning a final swap where I change my From Nothing, drop Hyrri’s and get an ES chest, dropping all evasion and just going pure ES and CI on my dex based softcore character.

Evasion sucks ass. Armor sucks ass. Health sucks ass. The only thing that isn’t ES that doesn’t suck ass is being a Warbringer with Svallin and 90% block chance which is a true 90% and not a oopsie you evaded too many times recently so you are going to get hit no matter what the number says.

The issue is energy shield provides additional HP and the other forms of defense do not! Well you could say armor essentially does but overall doesn’t add to your total hp pool! The fact that energy shield nodes are essentially locked to the north side of the passive tree means you must sacrifice all other points to gain additional EHP to drive up survivability! I don’t know what the solution would currently be with how they have structured the tree… to me energy shield should be a stat on all gear… some has more some has less… some has pure ES… because with the current inability to scale life you almost 100% have to have a minimum of 1k ES to be able to not be 1 shotted by mobs/slams!

I do not like the fact that I have to spec into ES and essentially wear a ES chest piece and helmet to be able to boost my survivability! Basically it causes all other chests and helmets to be useless in the end game! I know you can stack different layers but with those layers having such high attribute requirements and being locked to a certain section of the tree it’s really frustrating! I should be able to go 100% armor or evasion and still be able to survive!

TLDR energy shield should be on all gear in some form!

if you die that is on you lol. i never die even without Acro at 90% Evasion. it’s all about knowing how to do your defences. also the Evasion is a Estimate. if you do maps with monsters having 100% increased accuracy your evasion is also Far lower.

for Evasion you need Blind and other debuffs to slow monsters down and reduce their overall chance.

also if you do Deadeye you have that really really strong 30% less damage taken with 10 stacks of tailwind which is really easy to maintain.

Energy shield is not necessory if you know what you are doing.

Armor is something you could also use instead to reduce the overall small/medium hits but it requires alot of investment to get it going and ideally you would want the 25% of physical converted into a element damage so you only take 75% physical.

Currently doing a bleed ritualist with armor and ev.

On t18, I have 80% armor and 72% ev (8% MORE for melee). Only time I die is getting crowded and oneshotted.

There needs to be more increases to hp on the tree. I’d rather they significantly reduce every source of healing and give us way more eHP.

This is not new, it was a problem in the earliest days of PoE1, they’re just making all the same mistakes over again.

Truely. I don’t want a ES nerf, what I want is an EV and AR buff. Like i was hyped to try a tanky warrior and not have to worry about being 1-shot. Come to find out my actual tanky character is my Lich with 10k es and inability to change life totals.

40% armor is very low, you can get much higher than that and add life recoup which will make you much tankier. Also with 10K energy shield, monsters with multiple projectiles will still shred you to pieces, unless you kill them fast enough or play sacrosanctum life/es recoup. The only thing that changes is that usually you are on 10K es with a ranged build that will kill them before they start firing.

The problem is that pure evasion or armor evasion hybrids that are not going all in on strength and using some ascendancy that gives you life are completely cooked. I was getting one shot by everything on my tactician because I could reach 2.5K life at most and even having 70% armor didn’t help when some random frost archer remnant would one shot me with cold damage from out of the screen…

Going pure evasion feels awful.

In 0.1 I played a QOTF build that had like 60k evasion and it was horrible in juiced maps, like you’re practically invincible against most mobs but some hits, especially aoe damage which is everywhere and un-evadable, you just get one shot with such low max hit.

In order to get better survivability I had to drop to like 40-50k evasion and even resorted to MoM and mana stacking lol. Also added the orloth flask on top of that.

Still felt worse than just having like 10k evasion and 3k energy shield, which is also way easier and cheaper to get.

It was a huge trade off of survivability just to have a decent movement speed. In the end it wasn’t worth it for me, and I’m someone who really hates how slow the ms is.

Luckily they nerfed QOTF into completely uselessness for mapping so I’ll never have to play that build again!

It’s more fun this way

Probably straight after they address servers being torn apart due to lags

They only look one step forward, and in only one direction. It’s like they think one action can only have one effect.

And they made so many arbitrary and definitive choices, to solve a single. They didn’t want people taking all of the health nodes on the passive tree, or people to not take them, die, and complain/quit because they aren’t tanky enough.

Sure, not having health nodes prevents people from taking them all. Just like chopping your arm off stops your hand from itching. But it doesn’t address how the 3 main defenses were designed differently for the sake of being different and not for being equivalent. Armor is basically worthless until you get to the comically large amount that doesn’t sound like a real number and is still worthless against non physical damage or certain mods. Evasion removes variance so you will be hit eventually. And energy shield is just health that needs to recharge.

Armor doesn’t get much at all from the passive tree or spirit auras. Evasion get more from the passive tree and spirit auras. And energy shield gets the most, synergizes incredibly well with evasion, and bypasses all of its downsides from the passive tree and spirit gems. It’s probably a result from designing for Chaos Inoculation.

So we end up with no one having HP, and they can choose a thing that works sometimes but against scary mobs, a thing that makes sure you die at best but unrealistically 5% of the time, or a thing that gives you the most HP with ways of overcoming all of its downsides and synergizing well with a second one.

They are just lost. They can’t figure out. They know it’s a problem. They’ve known it’s a problem. But people still play it so it can’t matter too much. No one else has ever figured out reasonable or good ways of dealing having different defenses to look for inspiration. They’ll just keep sweeping it under the rug saying their copy paste excuses for who knows how long.

When will they make melee viable? When will they make staves viable? The answers are between a few years and never

Yes, evasion is not a substitute for life or ES.

Yes, armor is not a substitute for life or ES.

Yes, ES is way too powerful (hulking form warrior can get 18k+ ES right now) and the game rewards you for putting all your passive points into ES (defeating one of the design goals of poe2, which was to prevent people from stacking life like in poe1).

GGG will definitely nerf ES at some point. But I think they are super overwhelmed internally. 0.2 was very light on content. It took them 3.5~ months to deliver 0.2.

If they take 3 months per major update, v1.0 will be with us 2 years from now :)

I am confident by v1.0 POE2 will be “The Vision”, and I don’t think ES will be OP by then lol.

If you want to stack evasion, you still need at least 3k life, but even that’s not really enough. You need at least 4k life to feel “safe” in T15 maps, and I would argue you still get one shot too much. Burst damage from enemies needs to come down.

It’s not defenses, it’s life

Evasion is good but with a low life pool you’ll die eventually, armour is not bad at all vs most stuff (specially with titan) but the fact that you still get one tapped by ele stuff due to armour not working on that

Either buff life or nerf ES while nerfing damage overall and defenses are fixed

Removing life from the tree was the wrong choice and it will never be possible to balance the game between Defenses when one of them is literally Blue Life while the other two don’t actually block most things that kill you (armor does nothing against chaos and ele hits and also does nothing against giant slams since armor is LESS valuable against larger hits, Evasion does nothing against attacks and effects that cannot be evaded, even with acrobatics you still get one shot by undodgeable slams)

You cannot remove all life from the tree AND make it so there’s no source of Leech outside of gear AND massively nerf recovery and recoup on the tree and then have +500% energy shield available on the tree when ES is The Cooler Life.

Evasion needs some sort of counter/gameplay mechanic attached to it. Every time a hit gets through you lose one tick and then eventually you take damage, something like that. It’s the all or nothing of it. That is the problem without some way to interact with the stat. It’s just a dice roll. With energy shield you see your energy shield deplete, and can adjust your gameplay. Evasion doesn’t have that.

If they want evasion to be a viable defense choice and not require people to use, hybrid defenses, evasion needs a complete rework from the ground up on what exactly the stat does.

Last league I tried 20k+ armour, shield with 8% additional damage reduction, 75% block. Felt pretty tanky in t15s. I’ve read someone saying they felt tanky at 30k without all the extra, kinda want to try that out sometime.

The only way I get life builds to feel good is getting max res and using cloak of flame for halving phys damage taken. It’s practically forced on life builds because armour is Soo shit unless you have insane gear and investment. No longer one shot potential

Then I use a shield like surrender, or defiance amulet to tank everything.

Man I hope this issue rises to the upper echelon of their fixes before 1.0.

Try the surrender shield.

I’m playing a smith of kitava, and I’ve got 3.5k life, 75 block (from the node which doubles block but block only stops 50% dmg) and I’ve got the 90% elemental res and 72% chaos. Also life regeneration is massive. I’m at about 550 /second.

Projectile mobs heal me more often than not now. I got the shield for 1 div and it’s great.

But otherwise, don’t call armour shit if you’re only running 45%. 70% is pretty easy to achieve and is a massive difference.

I admit it’s not great but still.

The Most Defense in this Game are one Button all destroy builds

“I tried everything that does not use energy shield and it fails”; no you didnt, because I use armor and I just killed arbiter with my own home cooked build just fine. chill

Bro didn’t even build into armour and complaining like it doesn’t work. I guarantee you don’t have a Smith for 90 all ele, 75% block and 4k life. I know because I have a Smith and he is unkillable. He can’t stand there and tank 1000 projectiles like a moron, but neither can 10k ES. So many people talk shit about Life Armour and I don’t even think they’ve tried it. Could it be better, sure, but it isn’t some paper defense.

Preach, This is one of the biggest issues in the game RN. Evasion and armor just suck compared to ES and they GUTTED acrobatics so it’s even worse.

This is EA, why are you expecting quality? /s

Ok tell me how can I survive by playing Titan 4k HP 75 res . I am slowly like a turtle. ATK speed is mandatory with move speed . There is huge disbalance between slowly titan class