hi Z here with another video. In this video, I am going to cover just some thoughts about early defenses in Path of Exile and just talk about a few different defensive setups and how they work. I am not preparing much for this video. It's just 4:00 a.m. the day before league start, and I was like, you know what, I want to make a video about defenses. So yeah, it's going to be more of a spitball kind of like not thought out episode. Um, so a bit of a lacy one. If you enjoy the really structured ones, this is not for you. And um, maybe my editor will yell at me and make a proper structure and go through it later. Early defenses in Path of Exile. So one of the number one things that you want in every build is layered defenses, right? You don't want to rely on one defense being your one-stop shop for the reason that you don't die. And as a quick example of like super endgame things and why light layer defenses are

good here is a character with virtually it's L Immortal um, and as you can see, you get a very high Elemental mexit chaos mexit. It's very hard for this character. It's very hard for this character to die. So you're combining a large pool of Ro HP, High reses, um, etc., plus avoidance. But I want to focus on early defenses in this, and a lot of you might have seen a lot of block. And block is incredibly good as a layer of your defense, and it basically replaces Evas. Obviously, you have armor, you have evasion, and energy Shield as your three base types. Energy Shield is just your actual raw HP. It's the same as life, and there's no difference between one life and one energy shield. Now raw HP is very, very important, but it is like a buff to your other defenses, and some of the tankiest characters I've had have actually had as little as three or 4K life, uh, which is actually a little bit funny because then a lot of people will

be like Omega. He's going to try Ubers on a 3K life character, and then they'll be like question mark, What the hell? when I'm face tanking Uber attacks. So stacking mitigation and layers very, very important because if you have 90% reduction and you get another 40% reduction on top of that, you know you can get some really good mitigation by having multiple layers. First, let's talk a little bit about Block versus evasion. I personally don't love having both, so you'll notice in most of my builds that are block, I will as soon as I have 30 to 40% block, grab iron reflexes and unwavering stance. This means that all my Evas is turned into armor. So as you can see without it, I have 14,500 Evas and I have 20,000 armor. Now together, I get 40,000 armor because I get to enjoy a little bit of double dipping, basically with things that are doing things like this. It's doing

evasion rating per frenzy charge, and armor rating per frenzy charge. Um, so yeah, you basically end up getting a little bit of double dipping. And another thing with that, you also have a bigger benefit of a jade flask than a granite. So I actually put both here just to show that. Um, so if you see when I use a jade flask, it goes to 54,000 basically. And with a granite flask, you're only 52 or 53. So not a huge difference but a little bit. Um, now I do want to have at least 30 or 40% chance to avoid the attack of monster. And that's the important part here. Now, um, wait, block is true random, right? Po block, perfect. Now, there are some big differences in how block and evasion works. So, uh, block is true random. So that means that with even 90% chance, there is a world where I get hit by multiple attacks in a row. With evasion, that is not the case. Uh, let's say that you have 20,000 evasion. If you get hit by an

attack the next Monster is guaranteed to miss you there like it there's a lot of convoluted Mechanics for how that works but that's what's so strong about evasion and why evasion characters work so as long as you can tank one hit and you have enough evasion you're never going to be hit by one and then maybe three or four attacks later another one like there there can be quite a gap between hits um so that's really cool now block little scarier it is true random you could block 10 hits in a row and you could get hit by 10 hits in a row but the m main thing here is that both of these are a protection against you being swarmed by white and blue monsters in a map and that is really scary now some people that are watching this video might have played maybe a fourth vow character and you might have had like 100 200k armor and really good defenses and you're like man I'm getting chunked in maps I actually feel less

tanky so on some of those characters, I would actually get rid of iron reflexes when I'm not bossing because evasion and just not being hit that often is incredibly strong for that right. So I always want my characters to have some sort of every hit is not hitting me mechanic so whatever build you're choosing, make sure it has something like that. So even a little bit of evasion and uh stuff like that goes a long way. Now let's talk about armor. So even if you have a little or a lot of armor, there are a lot of uses for armor. So during the campaign, a small amount of armor, even 1.5k, will make you basically have 90% mitigation towards hits. And armor, you don't have a way of knowing this in-game, but the way it works is if it's a small hit and the way armor works, it does not actually grant the percentage reduction to physical damage that the tooltip states like if you press C and clicked on your defense, you might say 90%.

physical reduction, but that's not the case. It's a hidden mechanic where armor only runs 20% of the armor as reduction, so 50,000 armor will only ever mitigate 10,000 most. Now, I can't remember if my command I'm reading that from is outdated 'cause I do remember they doubled it, but the premise is the same, right? There is a cap on how much it can do. So what armor ends up being really good for then is, again, mapping. It ends up being extremely good for small hits, and it does not be really good against shaper slam, etc., anything like that magnitude like a 10-20K fist hit. You are going to need either a shi ton of armor or endurance charges, and endurance charges were actually buff this league. And now you're maybe starting to see how you maybe want to have some avoidance to not be like Zerg down by attacks, some armor so that if you are getting hit by a lot of attacks, they aren't dealing that much damage 'cause

getting 50-60% damage reduction with armor and against normal monsters is quite easy, right? And then for the really big hits, endurance charges are incredibly potent. Like in my glad SST guide, you see here that I have eight endurance charges. Very nice. It is giving me a large amount of both physical mitigation and Elemental mediation. So if we look here now, you can see that if I take off my endurance charges, I go from 73,000 to 48,000. And be careful as well, a lot of builds might accidentally have molten shell on. This is very normal. Um, so if you are really trying to figure out how much you can tank, make sure that molten shell is not on, right? Um, in a lot of builds, it can be up a lot of the time, and it will help a lot while mapping. But if you're trying to calculate, um, if you're going to be able to tank a shaper, Su or not, well then you better be casting your mol shell manually if you want to make sure that it's up.

is a really good thing to do especially early leue. If I'm doing like shaper, I very often will take it off my cast when I'm was Shen. And every time you do a SL boom, I'll molten shell and guarantee that I'm living with that extra health. So keep that in mind. But as you can see here at the endurance charges huge buff, um, 27,000 fire maxit without and 40 without. And the the fist maxit is basically doubled. And as you can see it does not affect chaos. Now you might have seen another set moving as well. So how does that work? What is this effective hit pool stat? Well, it's a little bit. I honestly think they should remove it. I'm I'm not a big fun of uh this stat. And I'll show you like a a fun thing. So let's say that we make a shaper shield and I add this stat. Now it is probably going to either go up a lot or just say infinite. Yeah. So now it says my

effective info is infinite. I can't die. I'm immortal now. Um, uh, for most intents and purposes, during Maps, I am already immortal. But this effective hit pull St is kind of useless. It gives you a little bit of an idea of some things when you really know how it's calculated and how it works. But it's just, just trying to calculate like how are you against rapid hits like, and it doesn't take into account a lot of things. So honestly, at the end of the day, the number one thing I'm looking at is these: what is my Max hit? And then you can go in here and look, right? So let's say for the league starters, I'm obviously not going to be doing Ubers, so I don't care if a Cyrus meteor is going to kill my character. I'm not planning on tanking a Cyrus meteor, right? So you can see here that, yeah, I can tank 0.22 Uber sire meteors. Now we're going to go to something that I might actually be having to deal with, and that is a shaper.

slam, and thankfully even without molten shell, I can tank 1.8, and with I can tank 3.6 shaper Slams on this build. So I'm pretty tanky against something that I'm genuinely worried I will get hit by. Now this is actually not enough, and you can see that I've taken roll range already at 100 here. Normally it estimates, uh, 70, and for softcore, this is fine because it's probably not going to hit that high most of the time. What I also like to do is roll range at 100 and Critical Strike chance to 100. This also really makes you learn to drive home the point of how important, uh, crit reduction is 'cause even 30% makes a huge damage. Now you can see that it's 2.16, so thankfully with molten shell, I can tank it. However, without, you really want to be full HP before getting hit here. So a little bit scary, um, but let's say that we are crit immune. You can see that it's almost twice the damage. Now a quick

thing I want to mention about crits from bosses and how it works. I will use an exile, the one that fires wallpark, as an example, and the shaper. So the shaper fires three shaper balls, and the way enemies crit in this game is the entire skill is always a crit or always not a crit. So when you're firing three shaper balls, the first one crits, all of them is a crit. It can never be that the second one is a crit but not the first and the third, right? So that means you're taking a lot of damage from some multi-hits, and this is why that vpark Exile is so scary because if that crits, every single projectile is a crit. So you might have seen, especially in the past where exiles were stronger, you might have seen streamers just getting insta-popped to the vpark XL, and what's happening there is that it's a crit, and then it's just absurd amounts of damage.

big fan of the way crit calcul it's from monsters, and I don't think monsters should have crit, but there it is. So again, a little bit of a lesson: be careful with how defensive skills and how active they are and how you calculate with them. Using them manually is really good for figuring out about bosses. Now I want to cover a few other things as well because a lot of builds in the other side of the tree, and it's why you're probably not seeing a lot of witch guides at the moment. And honestly, both Shadow and Ranger are a little bit of danger, especially on the hardcore. Will be a lot less League starters with that, and that is because conversion has been nerfed a lot. So how does conversion work and why is it good? So there's a few steps to conversion and why it's good, but on the right side of the tree, it might be harder for you to access enduring stes. And honestly, enduring stes is a little op right now. People are going to be

throwing urine surges in every single build they can where they can, right so they're very strong but um getting a decent amount of armor is really hard, and what we were doing last patch especially on Pathfinders is we would do 100% of physical damage taken as Elemental. Now the reason this is good is um, well first off you don't have to worry about armor at all, it is mitigating it just on your Elemental resistances, and you can get 90% max on those characters, and you are just super tanky against the entire game, right so that is incredibly good. Now right now we can get 70% uh, 78% or 77% conversion, so we can have a lightning coil, this is 50%, and there's obviously loads of really good corruption outcomes and double corruption outcomes, so it's an incredibly good test still is incredibly good and 50% conversion um, on top of that we have the uh, Dawnbreaker Shield, this goes up to 20, so very very good shield now it

has lost its corruption outcome, and on helmets, we can get um the eer world's influence. Uh, you can take as chaos or Elemental, and this goes up to eight at the best rooll, but most likely you're going to have it out a six or a seven, so that does help quite a lot, and it makes armor a lot better even at 50%. If you have 2,000 armor, that is the same as 4,000 armor because the hits that are coming and are physical are a lot less. So very, very cool still and will be useful. Uh, it's just not as broken as it was before. And I'm not going to cover Transcendence and stuff in this. It is a bit complicated. I will cover one more defense. I will cover one more defense, and that is the second form of taken as, as well as uh just some fourth wow memes, and I will cover a legion Keystone called colorus vanity um zaka. Uh, so the fourth bow, its armor also applies to chaos damage taken from hits, and this is

already nice in itself because the chaos damage that's going to be taken after your chaos resist is already quite small, and then when armor applies to that, even if you have 20 to 30,000 armor, that is basically going to get another 90% damage reduction on it, right? So if you have 75 or 80 followed by the 90, your chaos, you don't care anymore. It might be as low hits as 30, 40, right? Now, how can we use this to be even better? And that is actually through a keystone called Glorious Vanity, which actually has several really good use cases. So we have Divine flesh. We're going to add that here. Here, let's just put it here for now. And what it does is it converts any Keystone. We only care about the name, the number actually just changes the small nodes and notables, but we care about the name, and that is of Zaka, and that makes Divine flesh. Now here we see 50% of Elemental damage is taken as

chaos and plus five Max chaos resistance. Now I will just go ahead and do uh plus 100% to uh chaos resistance so that I'm kept um cuz I want to show the calculations a little bit with and without. And this has a few really good uses. Now, first off, it's only 50% of the damage so it will be smaller hits, which is again better for armor, right? Um, 100% would be good too but kind of for a different reason, but yeah, smaller hit armor better good guideline. Um, so we get really good mitigation against that 50% and um, you know, we are still taking the full effect of the 50%. So for this, I am going to show um, let's see, I can actually put on a fourth while here, uh, I'm going to show shaper balls because shaper ball are something that's really scary called penetration, meaning that if our resist cold resist is 75, it counts as being 50. It's is deadly and very scary. So let's say for our first

example. I am going to have none of this. I am just going to see how much damage shaper balls do. So here we have shaper ball, and as you can see, it is um, and here we have shaper balls, and as you can see, it is a ball that does 14,000 damage with a pen of 25, and with a zero pen, it's not that scary, but we do have to deal with that pen putting our resz at well 53 in this case. So we can see that hits before death is 128 with each ball after the 78 cold rest dealing uh 4,500 damage, which is a big chunk of our life. Now let's put on Divine flesh with no fourth vow, and you can see that um, the damage on the cold part is down to 2.8. So just by activating this, it's already going 128 to 8, right? So we're already getting quite a lot more mitigation just with that. But you really want to combo this with a fourth vow, and now with a fourth vow, we

can actually survive two whole balls. And you can see that the cold damage is done down to doing um 2,298, and the chaos portion, the thing that did get converted, that's now down to 273. So really, really good mitigation on that 50%, really, really good that um. So it would be completely bunkers if if it was 100%, but um, it really shows you the value. So being able to shift the damage around is super strong. Now let's say that you have a Talis that does um 50% of cold damage taken from hits as fire. What's the wording on that Avan tman peee um? Now let's add 50% of cold damage from Hit taken as fire with something like the Avan talismans. Then you can see that it is actually HED in damage. It's only 1,200 now, and the chaos port that got converted. And now you can see that the fire damage is down to 977 because of the lack of penetration, and the K damage is at 273, meaning that

you can literally face tank these no problem, especially with the block, but I didn't want to like include that. So, incredibly nice. We now tank 4.5, so that is a really nice thing about shifting. And there are a few different things like Maven has penetration. It's zeri, although you're not going to face L the double very flame L anyway, so gives you a bit of an idea. Um, so it gives you a bit of an idea of how strong damage shifting is. So, I think that's it for this video. Um, I might make one a bit more structured with my editor helping me work out a structure early in the league, but either way, let me know if you like this sort of just off-the-cuff talk about defenses video and if it helps you, uh, especially. I hope it helps people pick how they're going to do the defenses for their build and why it's important. Let me know what was valuable and what was not valuable in the comments down below so I can make a

Better video next time, but either way, thanks for watching. Sub if you like it, but more importantly, try to die less than I do.

How to make your builds tankier in Path of Exile

I'm Zizaran, Path of Exile & ARPG content creator since October 2015.
I stream daily on www.twitch.tv/zizaran

