Defenses Guide: Building an Invincible Character in Path of Exile

Defenses are crucial in Path of Exile. This guide, covers the three types of defenses - avoidance, mitigation, and recovery - and how to layer them to create a powerful, tanky character.
Read the full article: maxroll.gg/poe/resources/defe...
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0:00 - Defensive Layers
1:55 - Defensive Overview
3:37 - Defensive Mechanics
18:46 - Examples
#poe #pathofexile #defenses

[@Tenkiei]

This video was put together before the PoE 3.21 Reveal/Patch Notes, and while I can't update it every time something changes (I'd love the ability to live-update YT videos), I can update the article on Maxroll! So when you're curious if anything's changed head over to maxroll.gg/poe/resources/defenses-and-defensive-layering and check the changelog!

[@KVenturi]

Face tanking every organism in path of exile is the most satisfying thing ever

[@alancode2147]

Super detailed without expecting the players to already have a bunch of knowledge about the uniques/passives in the game.

[@finisheseverythi]

I really enjoyed this guide and learned much, very well thought out. Something this does not answer which I would love to know is: - When we are looking at our defensive layers on Path of Building, how do we know when we have reached the right amounts? For example, how much EHP should we be aiming for? Just how much armour do we need? What are the breakpoints here. - When we die in maps, how do we troubleshoot our builds and work out what we need more of? Maybe these are hard to answer, but I struggle with these every league. Thanks for your work

[@NitsugaV33]

This is an amazing video, one of the best guides I've seen since engineering eternity. You all are doing an awesome work with the maxroll page aswell. Happy to have this type of content after all these years, it was needed. Thanks for your effort, this series is pretty high quality. (Sorry my rough english)

[@Tenkiei]

You're welcome! I'm glad you enjoy the content.

[@BGuitarify]

Amazingly useful resource, thanks for working on this series! Comes at a good time when prepping defenses for hardcore. Excited for the next video

[@Tenkiei]

You're welcome.

[@derbengel8172]

Really good explanied. This should really help people making their own builds. Especially with the new patch coming up and having more options in terms of recovery and defences. Pretty hyped to create some new immortal builds!

[@adam6383]

You are truly a saint for people like me trying to understand the game better. Bless you sir.

[@UnholyDungeonCrawlers-ry1xt]

Fantastic work.

[@procrastinathor4594]

Great summary, great video!

[@Aurel59123]

2:12 I love how you forgot to remove your cut, I find it cute :) thanks for the guide !

[@ChuTV_poketchu]

I love this series as it guides me on my journey to learn how to make a build. I hope it will resume at some point. :)

[@Tenkiei]

I'm sure it will, but these episodes take a long time to produce so I can't do them too often.

[@ChuTV_poketchu]

@@Tenkiei sure that ! Making what you want is making what needs to be done, too.

[@brentritchie6199]

Very helpful thank you

[@zombiejesus7445]

thinking of making a arc totem hir. debating if I should lean more into Mind of matter or use defensive auras. what are your thoughts? at what point is it better t get the armor aura over mind of matter? or is it just the way to build the tree?

[@aroace7913]

It should be also noted that even in softcore dieing has a cost as in time, if you for example do 100 maps and die 10 - 15 times you not only have to load back into your hideout and into the map but also if you don´t have a cast on death portal walk back which can add quite some extra time especially if you rely on killing monsters for extra movement speed.

[@MandruDuce]

You kinda touched on it at the end but not very specifically. My most valued defence (and it is no meme) is my time to kill. It obviously falls under category 1 (avoidance). If is very easy to get overwhelmed in this game if you hit like a wet noodle and allow monsters to swing/cast/fire at you several times. And except for very niche setups made by people that know very well what they are doing, you WILL die regardless of how much you invested in defences if a full screen of mobs is constantly spamming shit at you. It is also the flaw I see in this newfound SC mentality where the main rhetoric is around defences. People overvalue them and end up investing way too much in wanting to have it all at the expense of affixes, offensive auras, way too many passive points, etc. As a consequence they don't kill mobs fast enough, they get shot way too often for any defence to hold up and they still end up dying and getting frustrated. Good video overall. Will have to parse through the written guide too.

[@irrelevant12]

For PoE you want to pick your defenses based on the content you are planning on doing. Some bosses bypass blocks, dodges and have special atacks that negate evasion, others have high penetration base with skills that also adds penetration, for this reason a well rounded character with 75% block and 90 to all resist can find themselves getting 1 shot by some boss skills and leave the player wondering why they can afk in red maps without taking hp dmg but randomly die to bosses. Shapers yellow balls have 25% cold penetration, the cortex boss smash negates block dodge and evasion, and sometimes is really hard to avoid it, so for this situations you want specific set of defensive stats like high hp/es pools that allows you to withstand a unlucky highest possible crit. The same way a build with 5k hp and 90% all resist feels as tanky as a 15k ES build but in practice the 15k es build can do elemental penetration and - max resist mechanics with not much concern.

[@triash]

Ty for this comment, it was really helpful. I love POE, I really do - but sometimes i think it kinda needs a "glossar" or something ... INGAME ... like you said, you die to a certain boss - u click "info" and can read what this boss does. Yes, there are 3rd-party-websites who provide that, but cmon ... there has to be a better way.

[@zipzap8937]

So happy to see the next video in this series. I understand it is difficult and takes a long time to produce, but they are extremely valuable and worth the wait. Given the length of time between the videos for obvious reasons are you worried about anything becoming out of date, or is this such a core discussion that isn't a consideration?

[@Tenkiei]

My goal is to talk about broad topics and concepts so (hopefully) the videos remain evergreen. A good example of this is Avoidance, Mitigation, and Recovery. This has been the basis of defensive layering in poe since very early on in the game's history. In the past it might have been eva + dodge/spell dodge + phys taken as + leech, now it's eva + suppression + armor + lgoh. But the core concepts remain and the article can be updated more easily than a YT video.

[@sambatgaming1787]

Good idea 👍

[@ZenOnYch]

really good content for ppl who don't understand basics, thanks! as for me, I'm using Eternal Damnation and Transcendense on Scion with Pathfinder. So I forgot how -10% looks like.

[@Tenkiei]

Thanks, and you're welcome!

[@moresnackspls]

These videos are really helpful! Do you know what topics you'll cover next?

[@Tenkiei]

I'm not sure what I'll cover next, it depends on demand and what I have time to cover, because videos like this take 3x to 10x the time of a normal video. There's a lot of time required to research all of the mechanics, make sure they haven't changed or that I'm not misunderstanding a key aspect. The goal is to cover basic topics like ailments, resistances, flasks, and more advanced topics like damage/defense scaling, item synergies, and passive tree navigation.

[@Dontbenchmeplz]

@@Tenkiei This video was pretty useful, thank you very much for covering such complex topic! I am looking forward for more lessons!

[@Macalaka]

This is a great explanation of defenses! I realized that in the past my builds would either be all in avoidance or mitigation and I never really took much recovery lol. Are you planning on making a video similar to this one for dealing damage? I always seem to plateau mid-late yellow maps and can never manage to increase my damage enough. Thanks for the guide!

[@Tenkiei]

At some point, yes. But I'm not sure when that will come out as these take a long time to make.

[@tomsant6098]

I want to watch more path of learning videos, but they aren't labeled as such and so they are hard to find. Can you make a playlist called path of learning? Or include path of learning in the video title? I'm particularly interested in your craft your own build series

[@cougarmama7589]

Excellent deep dive. It’s great to see your face, but moving it to the other side in that blank area would be nice for better clarity.

[@robertrose9307]

So when I make a build I always do decently on my defensive layers. But for the life of me when I try to make a build from scratch. I can never seem to figure out how to scale my damage very high.

[@amongabriel3383]

Aside from obviously resists my most used defences are armour and life regen if im on the left or life on hit on the right side of the tree. my favourite defence though is xibaquas glorious vanity

[@tanguynicolas6531]

Même deux mois plus tard c'est encore utile et d actualité.. gg😊

[@jaykay308]

is there a written layout of your gear ??

[@22ATek]

Hi there, Great vid! I was hoping you’d mention numbers to aim for when making a build. For example: “most builds that focus on armor look to have around 20,000 and get X% increased from the tree.”

[@Tenkiei]

Those sort of numbers (even as general guidelines) don't really work. On one build 20,000 armor was plenty sufficient last league on another 50,000-100,000 is required or you feel squishy. Then on a third with a different setup 5,000-10,000 is plenty. The answer to numbers is: "it depends" on a specific build like Tuna's VG Deadeye I can say "you need this much armor" or on that CI CoC FR character I can say "you want at least 70,000 but up to 120,000 armor is nice." I know people often want very nice simple "do X answers" but that's really not how PoE is set up. How much armor you want in a build depends on 1) how much avoidance do you have, 2) are you using damage shifting to take phys as X? 3) what other layers of mitigation do you have (endurance charges, arctic armor, etc. 4) what content are you doing? general mapping (red or blue altars?) expedition? delirium? sim? uber bosses? each of these change the numbers yet again.

[@22ATek]

@@Tenkiei that’s a great point, thank you. Where I’m at right now in trying to understand the game is in attempting to learn what the approximate milestones are. Things like “20,000 armor will let you do X, while 70,000 will let you do Y.” Or “X evasion is good to shoot for at baseline, because investing more involves diminishing returns.” Is the wiki good for that sort of thing?

[@iaxyz]

You've missed the strongest defense of them all: 6 portals 😂 But seriously, I really liked the video. It is a great resource for new and more casual players like me.

[@loltroll2]

My Defense Layer = "Respawn in Town"

[@areo5000]

ive been enjoying petrified blood and if im correct its mitigation

[@Tenkiei]

Edit ok for clarity; Petrified Blood is mitigation with a recovery tax when you scale it. If you use it by default (no life flask / scaling) it's just a damage aura for enabling low life.

[@max3334441]

The first defense is movement speed/frostblink/leap because u can run away and dodge many hits/explosion

[@thoriandragontamer1411]

I want the old dodge back. xD lol

[@derva1019]

You forgot to mention they Most important Defensive layer, DPS. ITS the ultimate Form of damage avoidance. Out of classical defenses i prefer fortify.

[@JetBlackThreat]

block ?

[@Ilyak1986]

Damage shifting is *wonderful*. Particularly the new armor/es mastery that just says "10% of phys taken as chaos". So, if you're CI, well, LMAO, just oops 10% reduced phys damage taken just because, for 1 point. OP OP! There's *also* the new recover 4% of max life whenever you use a flask combined with flagellants flasks, and now that it's a flask mastery, you can also pick it up if you're in the witch/templar area. So...yep. Witches are now Pathfinders.

[@taiwanisacountry]

I strive for dying once every hundred map, and then it is because I did not read my map. But I am also striving for builds that can do all mods, no regn, no leech, combined. And normally I do manage to do so. :-) called life/mana/es on hit.

[@flamemano]

cool video i guess, but it is flawed from the outset. You can still make an incredibly cohesive and durable character without any "avoidance" but you cant say the same for mitigation and recovery. As a matter of fact most characters would prefer to forego avoidance in its entirety due to how inconsistent it is. These kind of mechanics are strong in maps where its not a great deal if the dice dont roll in your favor, but in content that matters theyre pretty shit

[@stefenleung]

layers of defense? people those days just run Grace and Determination with spell suppress ...

[@treeorwh2]

And now you understand IRL risk management.

[@Criscrosaplesos]

congrats, you can read

[@wilwaycoholland4337]

Hope you were the author of this article otherwise you really out here getting views for reading maxroll lol

[@Tenkiei]

You should look around the PoE, TLI, and D4 branches a bit :)

[@Badbufon]

i fucking hate this game defensive system

[@greatgamingendavour]

Leech is the best

[@ig_lisboa]

YOU ARE A GREAT TEACHER! I play sporadically since 2020, so i've never really learned how a lot of stuff in this game works. But now i can say i'm knowing a bit more. thx