Defenses Guide: Building an Invincible Character in Path of Exile

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

And now you understand IRL risk management.

ive been enjoying petrified blood and if im correct its mitigation

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!

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

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. :)

is there a written layout of your gear ??

Very helpful thank you

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

Great summary, great video!

block ?

I want the old dodge back. xD lol

congrats, you can read

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.

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

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

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

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

Good idea 👍

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

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

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.”

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.

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.

i fucking hate this game defensive system

Favorite Defensive layer = cast on death Portal

"everyone uses one movement Skill" *cries in ruthless*

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.

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.

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?

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.

Leech is the best

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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?

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)

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