Dying repeatedly in Path of Exile 2 can be frustrating, but improving your survivability is key to progressing smoothly. In this guide, everseen will discuss the defensive layers and how to avoid dying in PoE 2.
1. Evasion
One of the strongest defensive layers in Path of Exile 2 is evasion. Evasion can be a tricky mechanic because it feels effective only when your chance to evade is around 75% or higher. It becomes particularly powerful when combined with other defensive layers. The more layers you stack on top of your evasion, the more effective it becomes.
What sets evasion apart in PoE 2 compared to PoE 1 is its ability to evade spells as well. This is essential for any evasion-based build, as players rely on spell suppression to reduce spell damage.
Acrobatics
Acrobatics is an excellent Keystone passive skill in PoE 2. It removes the cap on the number of hits you can dodge, unlike in PoE 1. While Acrobatics significantly reduces your evasion in PoE 2, the benefits are substantial.
With this Keystone, you can dodge all hits, including on-death effects and boss attacks that typically cannot be evaded. To enhance evasion further, Acrobatics serves as a strong example, particularly as an endgame strategy.
Wind Dancer
Wind Dancer synergizes perfectly with evasion builds. This spirit gem increases your evasion rating with each stack, providing a total of three stacks. You lose one stack when you get hit. Since it enhances your evasion rating rather than increasing it, this effect is multiplicative. In the game, "more" is multiplicative, while "increased" is additive. This means that all your existing evasion bonuses from the passive tree will be multiplied, resulting in significantly more evasion.
Make sure to fully quality this gem when possible, as it allows for up to four maximum stages. Wind Dancer grants an additional 15% to 19% evasion rating per stage, depending on the gem's level. Even at the lowest level with four stages, you'll gain an impressive 60% more evasion.
Furthermore, Wind Dancer not only provides substantial evasion but also does an attack outward from your character in a Nova, which can apply different benefits if you put support gems in it. One highly effective support gem is Blind.
Blind
Blind provides a 100% chance to blind any enemy, which results in a 20% reduction in their accuracy. In PoE 2, "less" functions as a multiplicative stat, similar to "more," but operates in the opposite manner. This means that enemies suffer a significant decrease in accuracy, causing them to hit you less often. As a result, this enhances the effectiveness of your evasion and gives Wind Dancer more time to recover its stacks.
Wind Wave
Wind Wave is another incredibly valuable support gem. When you are stunned, this gem causes Wind Dancer to knock back enemies away from you. This provides protection against chain stuns, or it prevents you from being completely surrounded, giving you a crucial opportunity to escape.
There are numerous support gems that work well with this skill, such as Pin, Maim, and Culling Strike, all of which offer great benefits.
2. Recovery
let's discuss recovery in conjunction with evasion. Recovery isn't easy to achieve in PoE 2, but there are a few exceptions. For an evasion character, investing in life regeneration can be challenging, so it's generally better to focus on the energy shield instead.
Grim Feast
Grim Feast provides a 50% chance to create a Remnant that can recover about 200 energy shield at a high gem level. Killing a whole pack can restore you to full HP, making it the strongest form of recovery currently available, as it's essentially instant. Additionally, Grim Feast can double your energy shield value through overflow, making it incredibly strong.
Atziri's Disdain Gold Helmet
Atziri's Disdain Gold Helmet is one of the best and most affordable items for life and energy shield hybrid builds. This helmet states that you will take 20% to 25% of damage through your energy shield. At first glance, this may seem detrimental—why would you want to take damage through your energy shield if you have, say, 1,500 life and 5,000 energy shield?
However, when you combine this with Grim Feast for energy shield recovery and use Cannibalism on one of your spirit gems, you'll recover both energy shield and life simultaneously since both are taking damage. This is beneficial because instead of recovering just energy shield, you're recovering both resources at the same time.
The most impressive aspect of this helmet is its modifier, which grants 25% to 30% of your life as energy shield—more than most rare helmets can provide.
Ghost Dance
Ghost Dance is another spirit gem that can help with recovery. Ghost Dance allows you to accrue ghost shrouds, and when you are hit, similar to Wind Dancer, you can consume these shrouds to gain 5% of your evasion rating as energy shield. For instance, if you have 10,000 evasion (which is relatively low in the late game), each time you're hit, you would gain 500 energy shield while having a ghost shroud. That's a significant amount of recovery.
3. Block
Another highly effective form of defense is the block. This mechanism operates similarly to evasion, where you take no damage from a blocked hit. Block has a chance to block, which is considered as passive block.
Unblockable Attacks/Wailing Wall Effigial Tower Shield /Turtle Charm
However, active block differs significantly. With an active block—using either Raise Shield or Shield Charge—you can block at 100% effectiveness in the direction you are facing, except for unblockable hits. For instance, attacks marked by a red circle above a boss's head cannot be blocked, and you will always take damage from them. But, a unique item called The Wailing Wall Effigial Tower Shield allows you to block damage from all attacks, including those from bosses, making it incredibly powerful. You can achieve a similar effect through the Turtle Charm Ascendancy point from Warbringer.
Lucky Block and Svalinn Crucible Tower Shield
A discussion about blocking wouldn't be complete without mentioning the most powerful interaction: the lucky block. This feature is obtained through the Svalinn Crucible Tower Shield, which was recently introduced in Path of Exile 1. The Svalinn Crucible Tower Shield is one of the best unique items in the game due to its lucky block ability. Currently, it is the only way to achieve luck on block in Path of Exile 2, making it an extremely valuable item.
In Path of Exile, luck works by interpreting two values instead of one whenever you perform an action, whether dealing damage or taking hits. The higher of the two values takes priority and is applied.
Life Recovered on Block/The Surrender
There are several nodes on the passive tree, such as Vigilance, Hunker Down, and Block, that grant life on a successful block. If you block frequently, this can lead to significant recovery.
In addition, The Surrender Stone Tower Shiled is particularly useful, providing 4% of your life back upon a successful block. This unique item, combined with a high block chance, will net you a lot of life recovery on top of blocking hits. For example, for a character with 3,000 life, recovering 4% would yield 120 life per block, which is excellent recovery and scales well with the higher amount of life you have.
4. Armor
Despite the buffs in patch 0.1.1, which made armor about 15% more effective, it still feels significantly underwhelming.
Evasion and block are crucial factors due to the sheer volume of projectiles and hits your character faces constantly. To effectively use armor, you need substantial recovery since you're going to take a lot of hits. While armor mitigates damage, recovery is equally crucial.
Evasion or block can greatly benefit armor-focuses characters by softening the impact of repeated blows, providing more opportunities for recovery. Additionally, life regeneration is crucial for armor builds. While mitigation is beneficial, it must be paired with recovery; otherwise, you risk being overwhelmed by hits and ultimately dying.
One of the most significant drawbacks of armor builds right now is that your character's armor can be broken by monsters, rendering it useless. This is another reason why some players find armor unappealing in its current state and choose not to play it.
Time of Need Tech Gives HUGE Recovery
While armor has had its downsides, there are still effective builds that have emerged. One increasingly popular technique involves significantly reducing skill effect duration—essentially maximizing it on the passive tree—while utilizing both Earthquake and Time of Need, as both skills benefit from shorter durations.
If you can reduce the duration of Time of Need to a 1-2 second window for a proc, the resulting recovery is substantial and cannot be overlooked—arguably even stronger than life regeneration. When combined with regeneration, the recovery becomes extraordinary.
Time of Need also cleanses any curses or elemental ailments, effectively granting immunity to both, making it incredibly powerful for armor characters. This synergy feels almost essential. Additionally, this setup turns your Hammer of the Gods into an instant hit, which looks impressive.
Maximum Elemental Resistances
Another key focus is on maximizing elemental resistance, which can help you mitigate damage more effectively. However, this is easier said than done. For evasion-based characters, there's often little need to invest heavily in maximum elemental resistances since they get hit less frequently than armor builds.
Maximum resistances are particularly powerful because their effects are exponential—the higher the value, the greater the mitigation. The difference between 87% and 90% mitigation is substantial. This is why many players opt for 90% maximum fire resistance, often utilizing the Cloak of Flame Silk Robe body armor, which converts 40% of physical damage to fire damage, resulting in significant damage mitigation.
5. More Unique Items that Enhance Your Defenses
The Hollow Mask Hewn Mask
The Hollow Mask Hewn Mask is a unique helmet that provides an additional 15% physical damage reduction. This is a valuable stat that isn't very common in Path of Exile 2. The only other way to achieve this level of reduction is through a shield, which offers half the value at a maximum of 8%.
Additional physical damage reduction is particularly effective against bosses, as many of them deal physical damage. However, keep in mind that physical damage reduction cannot exceed 90%. Gaining extra physical damage reduction will help you approach that 90% cap without needing an excessive amount of armor.
Anyone who has played either an armor or evasion build will notice that once you reach the 80% to 90% range, it becomes increasingly difficult to raise that number. This is where the Hollow Hask helmet shines, helping you push closer to that maximum.
Ghostwrithe Tattered Robe
Ghostwrithe is a highly effective body armor that offers benefits similar to Atziri's Disdain Gold Helmet, providing 50% of your maximum life as energy shield. This feature essentially doubles the helmet's advantages. Although this unique item may not be as powerful in the endgame, it remains an excellent choice for leveling or for characters with subpar gear. Equipping Ghostwrithe can significantly boost the power of hybrid builds, making it a fantastic enhancement to energy shield.
The chaos resistance it provides is also beneficial, as it's a critical stat for hybrid builds. However, the main drawback of this unique item is that you have to sacrifice your rare body armor, which typically offers the most evasion. Let's be honest: you're likely to use this on an evasion character, as there aren't many builds currently utilizing both armor and energy shield. While a few exceptions exist, most builds rely on armor, and armor itself is currently in a weak state. Therefore, it is generally not recommended to use these types of builds.
Doryani's Prototype Scale Mail
A couple of other examples include Doryani's Prototype Scale Mail. With this item equipped, enemies in your presence have lightning resistance equal to yours. Additionally, your armor mitigates lightning damage taken from hits, meaning it's your armor that provides the mitigation rather than your lightning resistance.
Blackbraid Fur Plate
With the Black Braid Fur Plate, all of your armor applies to elemental damage. In theory, this is a significant advantage, but in practice, armor's current inefficacy makes it less valuable. Nevertheless, this item is definitely worth keeping an eye on for future updates, as it has great potential.
Conclusion
After discussing various defenses, one clear conclusion emerges: energy shield-based builds are currently very strong. They can scale energy shield to levels that life builds simply cannot match, thanks to skills like Chaos Inoculation. The ability to achieve such high energy shield values, along with effective recovery options, makes builds utilizing Grim Feast particularly advantageous. Because being immune to chaos damage provides a significant advantage in PoE 2, this makes encounters like Ritual almost trivial.
More life scaling is expected to be reintroduced in the game, as it will provide better opportunities for maintaining larger life pools. Currently, many builds struggle to achieve sufficient life, often starting maps with around 2K HP. In contrast, hybrid builds can easily exceed 2K energy shield alongside life. With Grim Feast, you gain instant recovery and often double your energy shield, which can completely overshadow life-based builds.
Hope you found value in this video and gained a clearer understanding of the current state of defensive components. If you'd like to see more content like this, please subscribe to everseen's channel.
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