gocalixto: Shield wall is popular because Mace skills are shit.

Tenosyn: Something that I had a lot of issues with on my health based builds is degens. There is nothing to explicitly reduce the damage from the, half of them aren't even ailments so ailment immunity doesn't fix it. Sources of health regen are so weak that investing in it feels like a waste. Ever notice that all of the defensive tools on the south side of the tree only apply to hits? Only "solution" is having a massive hit pool and that can only really be done by energy shield.

fernandoberriel2257: We need buffs to life more than nerfs to ES. A full build should be ranky

paulc5389: I feel like the bottom left of the tree could do with it's own version of CI. Something like "Armour applies to ele also applies to chaos damage. Life increased by X%. You have no energy shield". Otherwise anything they do to make none ES builds better will only make hybrid builds even stronger.

I believe I recall them saying in the last interview they want life to be lower than ES but for life to be easier to restore whilst ES was recharge only. So I imagine next league will see the ES leech gloves and Ghostdance get yeeted off a cliff.

ilovefanservice: the addition of the new unique vaal jewel has also opened up a lot of build diversity. im playing ci/eldritch battery with 100% dmg taken to mana before life, and with this jewel, i can solve my stun issues by getting unwavering stance without traveling to the bottom left of the tree.

michadybczak4862: Why people expect ES nerf? This is in ideal place. The rest of defenses need a boost to match it.

Tibasu: The defense choice I went for with my bear is 81% of phys taken as ele with Goregirdle. Only time my life drops to half is against chaos damage, or if I do a penetration/minus max map. I've even fallen over from accidental sprinting and I just face tank everything as I get back up.

barrywise7185: So many people underestimate how powerful speed can be as a defensive layer. And I'm not talking just about 30-35% MS boots, but going beyond that, and slowing enemies down through chill, hinder, etc.

One of my personal favorites was playing a Max AoE Titan using bleed earthquake for mapping. Screenwide Earthquake having a built in 40% slow makes it so easy to have a trail of monsters running after you trying to catch up.

Johnlee137: Tried Armour got it to 120k and still felt terrible. Swapped over to Lightning Coil for the 'damage taken as', paired it with goregirdle and a ton of "armour applies to elemental" and i've become unkillable. Biggest lesson I've learned is that it's better to stack multiple defense types than stack a single type. That was also true last season where I tried going pure evasion, but had to swap to evasion/es hybrid

cesare7285: I just wish they would make hybrid builds more viable....

deathwing1234: How about you remember the best defense in the game? Offscreening. If all these defenses are so good why did ggg need to nerf dots 4 times so far? Tell me how much these defenses work against dots. Answer In yes or no does armor do anything against dots?

bryansans2564: yea im rocking witch hunter shield wall and wow. overlooked and im good with it LOL

SunLordSlam: I league-started witchhunter this league. After only playing warrior before that, I found it crazy how easy it is to get tanky with sorcery ward. Crossbows also feel really powerful.

Mineral4r7s: the real reason ES, especially CI , is king is because you dont need to pay the chaos-resi tax you dont need to pay the deflect/armour-applies-to-elemental-damage tax

on top of the mandatory rarity tax.

CI only needs ES flat, ES%, resists and rarity; you might even have slots left for attributes.

Taqu3: Not much has changed. ES reigns supreme.

myka113_: Im trying to scramble a life charcter with cloak of flame and max res stacking. its a struggle. Best case scenario I can mimic a 6k ehp ES character for twice the investment.

Flanktank2: Hopefully when swords & axes get added, GGG does a big balance pass specifically on life/melee defenses. I agree with keeping life nodes out of the tree but in turn they need to buff life rolls on gear and vastly increase the EHP gained from 'reduction' based defenses like armor/DR/max res.

I think armor should provide much more pDR, and subsequently more eDR when applying to elemental, or make it apply after physical/elemental resistances. They also should add fortification for ~30% more EHP. Or maybe the large strength shields should have implicits with " % to max block chance" to go beyond the natural 50% block cap.

olafvonmaikowski5597: very nice video thank you for these insights! :)

clawsonsful: No matter how much defense I have the game kills me when it decides to. There seems to be no rhyme or reason for the deaths.

its_voletile: I play bear shaman. I went with Armour and Es, prioritizing armor stat lines. I run nodes that increase damage based on armour. I’m maxed out on all resistances and I walked through all of endgame. I thought arbiter might be slightly difficult but even that was trivialized.

UnnamedEntity-y6v: You would need a lvl 200 character worth of passive points to build Armour/ES defenses worth using, you lack for everything, regen is not enough, if you play anything elemental you leech is shit, you need to fix mana and if you go blood magic the sustain problem gets even worse. Block is the only thing on the left side of the tree worth clicking (talking defenses), and the armour reduces elemental, if you manage to click the nodes without handcapping yourself to the point you cant kill shit efficiently.

ngolanov: For god's sake, don't touch ES scaling. This is THE ONLY defence available for normal players. Surely someone can make it to 20-50k ES, but if you don't have infinite money, you can expect 6-10k ES max. Change the abysmal armour formula so that I don't have to stack hundreds of thousands of armour to make it useful! And fix the deflection

junk3996: i love the state of defenses right now in poe2. the more we get rewarded for playing defensive setups, the slower we end up becoming with our damage/clear speed and stuff too. its a good way for GGG to promote their vision.

if we build defensive and still feel like paper then people just go all in on the glass cannon and kill everything before being killed, but if we do feel tanky we don't feel the need to one shot the entire screen in a single button press. now obviously some people will always choose that too of course, but its nice to have the choice.

my tanky setup is kind of insane right now, and it needs to be. i run some CRAZY maps and run expedition, which can get crazy mods on top of those waystone mods. im talking double damage mods on waystone, plus minus max res, and on expedition there'll be technically 6x damage mods plus speed plus whatever else. crap can get nuts.

so im using shield, actively blocking all the time, 91k armour, 132k applied to ele, 24k to chaos, life leech sustain, immune to corrupted blood/ignite, 99% reduced duration of shock/freeze, 100% reduced effect of slowing debuffs, enemy has 100% uptime Debilitate, infinity stun threshold, 3700 life with 700 guard always up.

i like the feeling of not dying and not even in danger of it regardless of what im facing. however with effectiveness stacking it does temp me to put more focus on damage. when you get 80% effectiveness and 80% more life mobs feel like sponges

ulxtmx5018: Armor feels like a better place than 0.1 but I think it still needs work. The scaling feels like

Campaign Start = Weak af

Mid campaign to early maps = good

late maps, juicing endgame = bad OR you have so much of it you are immortal

You can look at like Carnarius build which is basically unkillable but the level of investment is absurd.

Demha96: the best defense right now is to not play with maces

TheGenn: its sad how I am never part of the '4 weeks in'-statistics

Jan 12 2026

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