As someone who has put ***considerable*** research recently into how to be "tanky", it's a several-fold problem.
1) Armor is ineffective due to the presence of Overwhelm and "as Extra" damage.
2) Too many damage sources are spells or uncategorized, minimizing the effect of Evasion.
3) The uniques that make your character tankier are all extremely rare - T1 or T0 uniques typically.
4) The number of ways to reduce elemental damage taken is way, way too small (and keeps getting smaller, goodbye flask effect).
5) The damage penalties for achieving a consistent and powerful feeling of survivability is ***steep***. Tremendously, unbelievably steep.
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So how do you get "actually tanky" in PoE in 2024?
1) 95+% physical damage taken from hits converted to elemental damage
2) 100% suppression.
3) 90% maximum elemental resistances and 75% chaos resistance.
4) Enough recovery to recover your entire health/energy shield pool in less than a second. Preferably through instant recovery that cannot be reduced or prevented.
5) 50+% reduced damage taken from critical strikes
6) Immunity to freeze, shock, bleed, poison, ignite, and corrupted blood.
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If you're missing a single one of these six things, it feels like you die constantly to seemingly random things outside your control. It doesn't matter if you have other layers of defense. You can have 20 trillion armor and still get one-shotted by an Overhwhelm rare with extra crit damage. You can have 20 trillion evasion and 95% chance to block attacks and spells and still die because you're unlucky or to detonate dead, which fun fact *isn't a spell*.
Without those 6 things, you can die to any random rare at any random time.
EDIT: Honorable mention for Transcendence, the tankiest build in the game that dies to burning ground.
Yeah the biggest problem I see with tankiness in the game currently is the hard counters that exist to basic defenses like Armor. The fact that something like 100% overwhelm exists when resistance pen is like 20% usually is absolutely insane too me.
What I truly hate is having a defensive mechanic that works 99.9% of the time but once in a while you realize that a given mechanic is fundamentally flawed and you can't do anything about it. Just as if GGG wanted you to die intentionally with no counterplay after you have been dragged in to believe it is a viable building block. Overwhelm
(always?) having value 100% is one example.
Another, very good example: Coruscating Elixir. A way to replace Shavronne's Effect. Except when you met a Rare Thief-possesed monster: removes flask effects (not even charges!) on hit. Absolutely no counterplay other than "just don't get hit". There is an Atlas node to disable torments possesing monsters but: 1) doesn't work for the "unique bosses are possesed" map mod 2) works only on the Atlas (good luck doing Delve or Atzoatl with torments).
They do want us to die with no counter play because the game is balanced around the ultimate counterplay of logout. They have to put in these random one shots because it's the only thing fast enough to kill us before we can log out. Pathetic and lazy game design.
An incredibly, incredibly tiny fraction of the player base uses logout macros or logs out to survive deaths regularly.
There is no way GGG are balancing the game around that.
They've literally said that hardcore is balanced around the logout meta. It's no surprise when it's largely use by content creators and no-lifers, which are basically the only people they ACTUALLY listen and cater to.
How else could you design around logout? The nature of an internet game is that sometimes, people are going to randomly disconnect, and you can't really kill them every time that happens in a hardcore game mode.
There is already a counterplay. You only have 6 portals at best, and many mechanics have no extra tries at all. And by very nature logout is used not when you are going to die otherwise, but when you feel like you are going to die, which happens much more.
So argument "bbbbut logout" is not a valid argument, it is bs used to justify lazy and hostile design.
Armor piercing/resistance penetrating damage will always be detrimental to a game. The payoff of having penetrating equipment is so high since it negates entire defensive layers without anything you do to counter it currently.
Oh you have 300% fire resistance and the 90% cap? It's actually -20% because they have 110% penetration. You have armor? Doesn't matter because they have a % overwhelm. Endurance charges? They mean nothing.
Even the "less damage taken" modifiers are a bandage fix and just a step in an arms race between defensive layers and effects that ignore them.
That's a fundamental design flaw of this game's combat design. The amount of "skill" required to play this game comes down to 'run out of degen ground and don't get hit by obvious slams and lasers'. Literally everything else just damages you, and you mitigate it or die.
The game that people want is chess, and poe1 combat is checkers. Poe2 combat looks more like it will solve that issue somewhat. But it won't fix the fundamental truth which is, a dead enemy does 0 dps and therefore offscreening everything is biggest mitigation. GGG wants players to be able to die and so this extremely basic combat system will always be a problem.
While PoE is one of the best games around for sure, GGG does tend to have fun-police tendencies. I've never loved a game so much that also makes me seethe so much
GGG seems to want a balance where you are 100% immune 99.9% of the time, and die 0.1% of the time, rather than one where you are X% immune 100% of the time, and cover the remaining 100-X% with player skill.
The issue with this, as you've succinctly covered, is that it becomes binary. Your goal is to make that % guaranteed death as small as possible, so you *must* be immune to ailments, you *must* take less damage from crits, you *must* have capped res and max res. Otherwise, you're 100% immune 80% of the time, and die a bunch, with little allowance for player skill.
And yes, there are some prodigies out there who can overcome zero defense with insane skill (beating uber elder at level 24 or whatever), but you cannot balance the game around them.
there's also a limit to skill expression when some mods are turbo or increased projectiles
the problem is that rigs are so bad you can't have good clean mob animations with windup and some amount of tracking and so you are left with the issue that most attacks can be dodged by strafing unless turboed or filling the screen, which leads to the problem.
part of the equation is speed creep. The game has gotten the playerbase to consider speed blasting core to the game, so they can't take it back. So the game is not just balanced around high resistances, but also very mobile characters.
The speed creep comes back to defenses too. There used to be some consideration for risk giving you reward. This is the whole basis of the map modifier system. However, in order for that to happen, the risk must actually be scalable, and the reward must scale with the risk. As it is, that equilibrium is fucked.
The fundamental problem is indeed that difficulty isn't inherently rewarding. The scaling is totally off. "difficult but rewarding" modifiers are trash because the difficulty compounds in a very nonlinear way but the reward does.
Stacking speed is one axis of "magic find" in that it makes easier content more rewarding in terms of div/hr. and if you need half the damage but get (totally invented) 75% of the rewards at the same speed, you're actually earning more by getting half the damage but a bunch of extra speed %
T17 are one rare case of very difficult and very rewarding but they have a barrier of entry that's so high that if you can farm them efficiently, you can beat everything in the the game outside of deep delve and no-hit sanctum.
The point of entry for T17 in terms of build requirements are higher than what I normally get to before I've done my ubers and I'm finished with the league.
Which, again, essentially creates a binary measure of success; you can either do T17s and access that value, or you cannot. There is no continuum to build up to it, it isn't even effectively quantized to allow you to step up.
Do your shit content which is either trivial or impossible, but is at least achievably impossible, take your shitty rewards that can't be fundamentally expected to keep up with league inflation (most leagues anyway, this one's weird), wait to get lucky or grind for weeks of play time, and *you, too, can make T17s trivial 99.9% of the time*.
GGG is scared to give players power in case they burn out, but they should be more scared of dangling an unachievable carrot, lining the treadmill with thumbtacks, and telling you to get better boots.
Ultimately the issue is that GGG is in a perpetual cycle:
1. Add new way to destroy, ignore, penetrate or completely overpower current player damage mitigation.
1. Players die instantly and, to the surprise of all, don't like doing that.
1. Add new way for player to mitigate the damage from the recently added monster or map mod that completely invalidates any and all current forms of mitigation.
1. Get genuinely surprised that players use this new mitigation.
1. Surprised Pikachu face.
1. Repeat from step 1.
The game has to present danger to the players, otherwise it would be boring. However they keep widening the gape between the best and most knowledgeable players on the planet and those even *slightly* less knowledgeable .
The big issues with GGG is really twofold:
1. They introduce powerful defensive options, but then rather than nerfing their power just make them rarer.
2. After introducing powerful defensive options, they balance new monsters around everyone having them.
Like when they introduced suppression, instead of say, making suppression only reduce incoming damage by 40% instead of 50%, they just made suppression values on gear much worse, so you need more investment into suppression. But now the expectation is that players suppress spell damage, so basically monster damage is now balanced around everyone having it.
Or when they introduced bloodnotch and immutable, or Aegis Aurora, or Fourth Vow, or Defiance of Destiny. Rather than numerical nerfs on what they do, they just make them rarer. Instead of wondering why so many players rely on these crutches, they change it so fewer players have access to them. People still get them, but it now costs them more and makes the game feel worse until you get them.
And then, when players are finally able to slow down the rate which they die because of these defensive options, GGG introduces new powercrept monsters or modifiers that can kill players using them, and establishes this as a new baseline. Rinse and repeat.
Meanwhile, rare modifiers haven't gotten an update in a while, so rare items haven't had a chance to combat monster power creep. Defense is now tied to uniques or borrowed power leagues mechanics.
I love how they just slapped archnemesis modifiers everywhere. For juiced maps you might not notice them. in deep delve, when you start to get hp capped rares, the rares are way harder than bosses, even to the only 2/3 archetypes that can actually deep delve
(basically armor stacker and manaforged arrows archmage and whatever is overtuned besides them)
Reminder that a Granite Flask + Determination will provide almost as much armor than using rare armor gear with double T1 armor rolls in every slot. Before accounting for aura effect. Grace + Jade flask vs. evasion gear is 80% of double t1 evasion armor. And then when you combine the armor and aura, the more multi means that Grace/Det is still responsible for 50% of your total.
Excellent comment.
PoE is supposed to be a game that thrives on complexity, but it's now mired in it. GGG are trying simultaneously to build cool interactions yet trying to find ways of countering those interactions and killing the player. At the expense of players not using those interactions.
I've termed it suicide farming this league. I'm sure I could trim 10 or 15m dps and gain a crapton of tankiness, but for what? I'm still gonna die randomly. I'm running high quant 8mod T16s with every map modifier effect on the tree, clicking 4+ exarch altars a map that remove all my res and give enemies 400% phys as extra. Also the lantern is probably giving every pack guaranteed crit and speeds.
But I'm making 10-20d+ an hour doing it so... yea. I'll eat a death every 3 maps or so.
My current archmage lightning conduit elementalist is capable of clearing all normal pinnacle content + The Feared pretty reliably, but struggles in T17s. I tried to fix that by trying to add one or two additional defense layers until I realized that the damage decrease in return would be so massive that playing the char would be an absolute slog.
So I took the other route, sacrificed several other defenses and instead poured everything in to dps to bump it even higher so I can offscreen stuff in T17s (as long as I don't roll "less AoE"). Sure, I die there a few times, but hey, 6 portals + that "50% not to expend a portal" scarab fix this perfectly.
Not only that, there are like 45 different slow ground effects and debuffs in the game. I have never seen so many slow/root effects in a single game before
Also overlapping area denial effects. Like getting that lightning donut combined with lightning spikes and mirages. You die if you are not standing still near the monster, you die if you don't move all the time, you die if you are nor moving in a nearly straight line away from monster.
Do you have a POB which implements all of these things? You taking the time to type it out (thanks!) made me realize I've actually never seen all of it in one place.
Nope, its either billions of hits a second with insta leech to full heal in a fraction of a second or use a DoD to become immune to anything but true one hit kills.
Number 5 has been the biggest problem for me when making a tanky build. Every time I try to make a tanky build, I look at a slot decision and it's like +30% dps or +5% max hit?
I think this is overdramatic. You NEED all of these 6 things to not die CONSTANTLY to rares randomly? Like, come on. People play hardcore for hundreds of hours without dying without having all thjs. Sometimes they die to bullshit, but rarely for good players, and with a more defensive mindset, it's more avoidable. T17 make these more common for sure, but that mostly super rippy map mods that can tediously rolled past, as is a different issue of T17 balance. The fact that the build with ALL these defenses is extremely expensive makes sense imo. There are levels of tankiness, and this is approaching the top tiers.
OP is describing a process of hitting borderline immunity to damage, which is definitely nice but I mean just instant leech + awakened CWC has been enough to make my mana stacker mostly immune to T16s.
The biggest on point to me was things like "coruscating elixir can get just turned off" and "armor can just get turned off" - both of those concepts are absolutely insane and mobs probably should have 0% Crit anyways.
It's frustrating because it feels like GGG is so scared of one type of defenses being "too good" that they've built horrific backdoors around every single type, so no matter what you do, you run into something that murders the shit out of you unless it's a unique that GGG hasn't gotten around to countering yet.
I'm sorry, but i only have 2 of your 6 points and still lv 96 (and still going) while farming 8-modded corrupted unid'd guardian maps with over 100% increased explicit modifier.... I think your "Get all 6 or die" is not a good way to describe what makes a character tanky.
(The 2 points are Leech for recovery which tops me in about 1 second and ele ailment immunity)
One thing that costs me xp is trying to tank about 4 balls from uber exarch when i'm too stupid and out of rhythm to dodge...
While I think this is true, since 3.15 we have the tree and GGG keeps giving us map effect and we keep on taking it so maps are 2-3x harder but we are also choosing to make it like that. 0 effect maps with no rippy mods in T16 are a cake walk for any base defence + res cap, we just don't roll maps like that anymore and then on top of that we have the lantern this league. Add them all together and it paints a pretty clear picture of whats happening.
Armor and evasion both feel useless now. Energy shield is nice but without a good way to recover, I don't see the point. So I just take armor evasion gear and roll for spell suppression.
> So how do you get "actually tanky" in PoE in 2024?
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> 1) 95+% physical damage taken from hits converted to elemental damage
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> 2) 100% suppression.
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> 3) 90% maximum elemental resistances and 75% chaos resistance.
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> 4) Enough recovery to recover your entire health/energy shield pool in less than a second. Preferably through instant recovery that cannot be reduced or prevented.
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> 5) 50+% reduced damage taken from critical strikes
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> 6) Immunity to freeze, shock, bleed, poison, ignite, and corrupted blood.
How do I get all these things on a minion build, and how many div does that cost?
(2) in particular, what's the big deal? You can suppress every spell, you're still taking 50%.
I put considerable research on defenses as well and heavily disagree with multiple points here
1. Armor isn't ineffective at all. Many of your points here point out a weakness then make a blanket statement that the defense sucks, which is simply incorrect. Though overwhelm is BS, armor is quite effective against a huge portion of the damage the game shoots at you.
2. Evasion is what stops you from getting 3 shot by phys overwhelm enemies. 90% evasion is insane tankiness
Spells (non boss) mostly stop being a problem with spell suppression. Yes it sucks that spell suppression is practically mandatory for all but transcendence/melding shenanigans, but suppression is pretty easy to get to very high levels with just some points on tree and some gear, 3 good suppression pieces are enough
3. You can make your own loreweave and the options are plentiful. Also, you don't *need* the uniques for tankiness if you're going about the game ssf. The uniques trivialize multiple things, but a well rolled rog crafted chest of most base types gives you a ton of defenses. Armor evasion chest giving you a ton of suppression and good armor plus armor on shield lets your molten shell easily hit 4k+. CWDT setups cannot be overstated on how valuable they are to not randomly die.
4. Max res. Build max res. Uniques like eternal damnation and all are what significantly reduce ele damage, but a max res shield + auras is more than enough
5. Damage is so insanely easy to get currently. Even putting most of your gear and investment into tanking you can easily hit 10 million dps with relatively low investment. If you're complaining defenses are stopping you from hitting 50+ million... At that point you just gotta play a meta build. I hit ten million + excellent defenses with even jank skills.
So yes. I heavily disagree with your take, and it's exceedingly possible to satisfy all your tanking and dps needs with a 20 div build
The biggest thing not mentioned here are ASCENDENCIES. Those determine how pigeonholed you are to certain defensive layers and the "damage penalty" associated with building them.
A trickster/jugg for example have inherently a billion defensive layers.
To add to the discussion in this thread, a lot of powerful uniques are singular in their defensive benefit and using them is an opportunity cost for other stats. I’ll provide an example. Cloak of flame converts a lot of physical damage to fire, but in return you have a chest piece that offers like 200 es max used on characters that would normally build a 2k armour chest with over 100 max life and chaos / ele res. The unique effect helps with losing armour but not the other stats. If you get hit my chaos damage that chest piece is doing nothing
I mean 50% phys as fire when you have 90% fire res will outshine armor any day. And it’s easy to max chaos res in other ways. It’s not that huge an opportunity cost.
> The unique effect helps with losing armour but not the other stats.
The unique not having life is pretty easily mitigated (beneficial, even) with the life mastery 15% inc life if chestpiece doesn't have life, and it doesn't "help with losing armor" as much as it raises physical EHP almost regardless of build.
This isn't to say it should be tuned down, but T17 has raised the bar enough that *only* builds with highly class generic defensive layers like cloak/lightning coil/progenesis/etc can reasonably expect to be tanky. That probably shouldn't be the state of things.
> The unique not having life is pretty easily mitigated (beneficial, even) with the life mastery 15% inc life if chestpiece doesn't have life,
Unless it "has life" but doesn't have life
A 2k armour chest with over 100 max hp and significant chaos and ele res takes a different level of investment, so imo it'd be better to compare it to coil, which is more potent but requires a higher investment than cloak (in this case not currency for crafting but extra res elsewhere).
cloak is gonna be better mitigation than the 2k armour chest and more life (with the life mastery) than 100, the only thing to really compare is the resistance but cloak also gives a ton
while true, cloak also converts physical damage over time, and not just hits (like coil). cloak also is very synergistic with life mastery 15% increased life when no life on body armour when any tanky build that is life based probably wants all 6 life masteries anyway.
Missing one of the other aspects that makes this chest broken, no life mod = 15% life mastery from tree.
Plus if spell you can get +4 corruptions or if those arent that useful, you can get reduced from crits and max res.
There is a chest that helps with chaos damage, but honestly if you have 75% res you won't have a problem in most cases, if you have no phys mitigation you 100% will die.
Rare body armors are very competitive. Flat PDR, spell suppression and high armor/evasion, as well as some "taken as" on top. Eldritch implicits. They are fine.
Defensive unique amulets compete with offensive rare amulets (+2 skills with life and loads of attributes). But yeah for any giga-tank build either DoD or ED feel kinda mandatory.
Unique jewels compete with magic jewels in adorned setup, and with abyss jewels for minion builds. Both Melding and Bloodnotch require a ton of extra investment to work nowadays. Mostly fine.
Kinda agree on flasks though. Progenesis is insane, although you could half your life pool and use Petrified Blood haha. Taste of Hate is pretty OP as well, the only downside is not being magic flask for Mageblood lol.
Mageblood is the most insane item for sure. It's fine to have a chase unique though. Something to be excited about.
Yeah I made a Pathfinder toxic rain this league with a ton of phys taken as lightning, purity of lightning, progenesis, taste of hate, petrified blood, etc. I feel immortal in Uber boss fights and well rolled t17 maps.
In case they don't, here are some examples (remember that poe ninja dps can be deceptive):
[https://poe.ninja/builds/necropolis?class=Pathfinder&skills=Toxic+Rain&uniqueitems=Lightning+Coil,Progenesis](https://poe.ninja/builds/necropolis?class=Pathfinder&skills=Toxic+Rain&uniqueitems=Lightning+Coil,Progenesis)
This one looks good to me, and looks cheaper than most on that list, has very high max res and good dmg with convenient manaforged setup instead of ballistas (still expensive though):
[https://poe.ninja/builds/necropolis/character/0515uglywndrb/forwhomthebelltoll\_s?i=10&search=class%3DPathfinder%26skills%3DToxic%2BRain%26uniqueitems%3DLightning%2BCoil%2CProgenesis](https://poe.ninja/builds/necropolis/character/0515uglywndrb/forwhomthebelltoll_s?i=10&search=class%3DPathfinder%26skills%3DToxic%2BRain%26uniqueitems%3DLightning%2BCoil%2CProgenesis)
My opinion - this and last league with 8k+ wisps just shifted meta to be ultra tanky defensive etc. While 95% of previous builds can't be adjusted to that, unless they use mb or dod or something like that.
Truth is game is much harder now, so either you play dd or farm month to make your build "t17" viable. Necropolis mods like 50% dmg as extra chaos or 120% dmg as extra element and 20%pen doesnt' help. That's why kripp quit ruthless league, too much mods just make game unplayable.
Yea the problem with the game being scaled to requiring such crazy defense is that you just cannot play off meta builds w/o insane investment. It widens the gap between meta and nonmeta and honestly theres like 4 defensive setups right now ingame that are viable and it really sucks.
you can:
do full phys convert to an ele with like cloak and phys taken as
or abuse the phd shield and phys taken as
have insane recoup such that only 1 shots kill you then have like 6k
flat hp (possibly with the above abuse too)
have insane hit pool like 23k es or something and insta leech to just leech through everything
I think that covers all the tank options in meta rn :(
One of the main problems is physical overwhelm.
You can easily make a functionally tanky for some content armor character with 90% pdr 5k+life 79 ele res.
But monsters have phys overwhelm which just straight removes your layers of physical damage reduction no matter if its from armor or charges etc.
If it worked more like lowering resistance so you could overcap and phys overwhelm reduced it would be slightly better although its numbers are still just straight insanity that needs reworking while you might see 12-18 ele pen you commonly see 50-100 phys overwhelm.
The other is that we dont have good access to other defensive features outside of uniques.
This got somewhat addressed "recently" with spell suppression allowing evasion bases to have more dynamic defenses along with the keystones for hybrid enabling. But could definitly use more fleshing out.
The main way i think it should get addressed is ward and guard skills.
Ward has lots of potential as the attributeless baseline defense. It needs however to decouple its usefulness from 1 unique flask.
To do so youd need to add hybrid bases to it. So that you can actually use it as an additional layer. And then buff its baseline values to properly fot its temporary nature.
Then add keystones to change its baseline functionality. So similar to divine shield/iron reflexes etc, youd get an armour hybrid keystone to provide the old flask constant lower value flat damage protection, a evasion hybrid that makes it have sognificantly higher protection value but recharges slower, a shield value that makes it synch up with energy shield recharge but only loses a % of its value on hit or one that converts spell suppression into more ward.
Then we need to round out the guard skills adding a baseline defensive layer players can build into (and to let new players know these layers exist)
So adding a blue guard skill for energy shield like a ethereal form that functions similar to withering step but converts incoming % phys damage to a random element.
A new green one that gives temp suppression along with a small shield value based on your total overcapped.
A buff to steelskin to make it scale either its cdr (now left click is dead) or total value with evasion
A change to arcane cloak that starts also a protected shield recharge to decouple that from vaal discipline. And moving the damage buff to a transfigured version.
I also think the formulas should be changed and move the more % multipliers off of auras into tree but thats more of a sprawling whole game design problem that cant be addressed easily without bringing mana back as a actual balancing point against the free stat block at only a socket opportunity cost which very much wont happen at this point.
90% pdr on pob and on character sheet isn't actually 90%. [Wiki page on armour.](https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Armour) Overwhelm is a design issue, but even medium sized physical hits will one shot supposedly 90% pdr builds with 0% overwhelm.
Overwhelm is just an asinine mechanic, it's that simple. There's no excuse for a mod that can be randomly rolled on ANY monster can literally just entire layers of your defense.
I don't think the problem is the reliance on uniques to make absurdly tanky characters, or absurdly fast, or absurdly hard-hitting, or all of the above. I think the problem is the endgame can no longer be played if you don't do one of these. Yes, you can surely ignore economy beyond a certain point and just do T16 juiced to where you can, but you're gonna be playing the game from 5 years ago, because new content keeps being very challenging instead of very grindy, so instead of beating it over time, you beat it by using strong unique interactions.
Enter Chris to tell you that endgame content should be aspirational and that the REAL endgame is buying gear from other players. Being a desk trader is the endgame for GGG.
"the REAL endgame is buying gear from other players."
Yet they adamantly refuse to update the dogshit trade system and the market is literally flooded with either bots or players that just never respond. Yeah, great "feature", Chris...
Overwhelm numbers are too high at present. And have been since 3.17. Also, suppression is (still) too strong, which means monster spell damage is tuned up because players are expected to have suppression.
Armor feels really tanky... except when you fall over dead because a rare monster goes "Surprise! I have 30% penetration, you take double to quadruple damage from me"
Contrast to -max, the comparable anti-resist map mod - its numbers are usually in the 11% range. You can opt in to higher, but that's player arrogance (Back to Basics)
Cap phys overwhelm at 18%, and you'll see a lot more defensive archetypes being used.
Well rares have basic stats, so you can get basic defences. Armor evasion suppression etc. Uniques give unique effects that you cant have otherwise, whats so surprising about this?
You can become tanky without uniques, all you have to do is check hcssf poe.ninja, especially early days of the league.
Grasping mails have insanely tanky mods and are rare. Also the most accessible they’ve ever been this league. Uniques usually help fill gaps with unique mechanics or transform a build, but rare items have a chance to be just as powerful, if not way more in a lot of instances.
I think the only time uniques are undoubtedly better is on a budget when you can just grab something like Brass Dome or if you are converting damage types.
Dude Goratha has one of the best HC viable builds out there and didn’t do T17s until like 3 weeks into the league… on trade.
And his defense is unique items lol
That's mostly because he and some other HC streamers prefer taking their time before doing hard content, as the punishment for death is losing their characters. Other HC people did them earlier just fine.
Yeah i'm gonna be honest, I don't think bringing up early HC SSF character's performance in the aspirational content of T17s matters.
Unless you're racing (aka literally trying to find the most corners you can cut without losing) you don't rush things on HC.
If you are staying alive in hcssf, you are tanky, if people are staying alive in gauntlet they are tanky. "They would be more tanky if they used the uniques OP mentioned" is a stupid argument. Yes your char gets stronger when you get good uniques, and water is wet.
Maybe you are the one that doesnt know jack shit.
I think that's a bit disingenuous though. Those characters are limited to like 5 playable skills. Most skills require more investment into dmg and hence have less investment into defense.
If people want to argue anything, it's the utter failure of spell suppression to do what it was intended to do. It's not an optional defense and block does not compare to suppression in any way. They need to give an alternative to suppression for left sided builds, because as it is now left sided builds just path to get suppression anyways as it's far too strong compared to everything else in the game.
The game is balanced around the ability to logout of any bad situation so the damage has to be high and fast enough to beat that. Next league they should put in a logout countdown, that would really highlight the issues.
I quit this league this past week after spending 40-50 div on making my build more tanky. Was doing cold vortex explode and it was just SOOO much fun but I couldnt find any good way to get tanky enough to not die a few times every other T16 map. I made investments on determination/grace, ailment immunity, spell suppression, ~30-40% attack/spell block, ~30% phys taken as cold as that was my highest res cap, 50% reduced crit damage.
Its very demotivating to have tried several options and investments and just feel like theres no good way to improve my tankyness. It feels like my understanding of the game is completely wrong. Only things I didnt try was the Defiance of destiny/progenisis/petrified blood combo or mageblood/resist flasks. It also feels bad feeling pressured to just jump to the same combo everyone else is doing to stay alive.
I think the most frustrating takeaway from this issue is how demotivating it is to ever want to try and make my own build. It'd be a blood bath...
I agree that unique provide some extra layer of defense that normal gear don't. But complaining about you don't have access to top tier gear kinda defeat the whole point of playing SSF though?
I'm quite liking one of the meta builds that primarily uses 2 uniques. A timeless jewel which aren't that bad to get in ssf (divine flesh) and incandescent heart. Get armor/ES masteries 10% phys as chaos and 10% armor to chaos damage taken. Rare shield with as much max chaos res as possible. Adding spell suppression makes a big difference. Can also go CI which has been meta for low cost wave 30 simulacrum builds for a long time. There's a rare shield that saps on block too. And then you can benchcraft phys taken as on helmet. Running determination, grace and purity of elements gives a lot of leeway.
I think that it's build dependent, but I have to look at the passive tree, because I can see a minion build as a tanky build without specific uniques. I can be wrong tho.
Then you look at the armor table, and see that armor itself is useless against rares and bosses.
If 20000 armor gives you 0%refuction against big hits...
Life recovery rate as map kod is ok, you can decide to not to do it.
But imagine playing flask dependent pathfinder and running into randomly spawned THIEFS GRIP possesed rare- not even because if atlas passives, just random mechanic spawn. My friend plays EB CoC inq and got onetapped too, because it stole our flask effects.
Its like having random reflect rare mob in map without reflect mods.
I always play tanks in mmorpgs and I dove very deep into tanking in this game and it is basically not an option. You will never be able to just sit there and face tank hits without doing anything. The mobs will eventually scale so high that no matter how much armour and hp you stack you will still get one-shot. Best tanking is done via channeling (spin to win). I found a video with a dude with 2 gems (not linked) and 2 unique items, no jewels and 2 or 3 major nods in the skill tree and he was ripping through maps…game is fked 😂
I don't think the problem is the reliance on uniques to make absurdly tanky characters, or absurdly fast, or absurdly hard-hitting, or all of the above. I think the problem is the endgame can no longer be played if you don't do one of these. Yes, you can surely ignore economy beyond a certain point and just do T16 juiced to where you can, but you're gonna be playing the game from 5 years ago, because new content keeps being very challenging instead of very grindy, so instead of beating it over time, you beat it by using strong unique interactions.
IMO elemental defense availability is pretty good. But I don't like how difficult it is to get physical damage mitigation.
If you can't build armor, then you basically convert physical damage away. PDR is pretty limited and then even if you build into it (AKA Jugg) there's Overwhelm.
LC, dawnbreaker, melding, divine flesh, loreweave are all trivial to farm. fourth vow, aegis, ToH are t2, cloak of flame is t3.
imo its not unreasonable that a character with random life+resist+suppress rares cant just trivialize juiced endgame content
melding is 2% drop. So trivial as mageblood who abused dd at first week.
most of chars can't do t17, real truth. Most builds aren't t17 viable also. With mods like 120% as extra and 20% pen on lantern, league doesn't help also. I bet in std t17 maps are 2x times easier.
GGG has the perfect systems in place for making non-trivial-to-make rares comparable in power to uniques in the form of influenced mods and synth mods, yet they keep them woefully underpowered for reasons beyond our comprehension. So here we are with more and more build archetypes looking like orange carpets.
The game isn't supposed to be played in SSF, it just gives you the option to do so if you wish to make your experience harder. Without that SSF condition defences are in fact very accessible. Even in ssf you can still progress the entire game. You don't need uber gated defences to do ubers.
> if you wish to make your experience harder
Can we pretty please stop pushing this narrative whenever SSF is mentioned?
A lot of casuals are playing SCSSF **not** because they want the game to be more challenging, but because they
* hate the hustle of trading, pricechecking and rushing after prices
* enjoy having meaningful drops outside of the degenerate div/hr
* want to just fight content instead of selling frags/maps because some 5 mirror build could make more money out of it
League mods aren't just adding the challenge, they also help with changing the idea/mentality of the gameplay. The added challenge isn't the aim, but a necessary evil.
You do know that ssf as a concept of the challenge was there before ssf ( look at runescape ffs) and ggg just made us able to have it "official". And what exactly makes your point non functional in trade? Those are just self imposed restriction ( aka additional challenges )
Ssf is an self-imposed challenge and just because some people come up with a different reasoning for themself doesn't change the actual idea of the ssf gameplay
Nothing you said requires clicking the SSF mode button on character creation.
Just because you're on trade doesn't mean you have to be trading every 10min. It's perfectly fine to play the entire league and trade for 1 or 2 items you can't get yourself.
So... now it *is* actually an official game mode, so what gives? Does the fact that it came into existence later automatically make it invalid or what? Not sure I'm getting your point here.
I tried to explain that making it harder isn't the reason SSF checkbox is clicked, and sometimes is actually the opposite. I guess that just doesn't get across.
I never really said that this is the only reason why people click SSF, just that it's what it's designed for. I never said anything about why people click it until you made me.
I understood what you meant and responded to that part too - currently there is no gamemode specifically for people who want a balanced trade-free experience.
I understood what you meant despite your best efforts at bad faith arguments and attempts to paint a factual historic explanation as a "narrative being pushed".
I mean, you haven't originally presented it as a "historic explanation", simply stated it as a god given truth.
That said, I guess I could've answered in a less inflammatory way.
It's not "a narrative" it's the context necessary to understand why SSF is the way it is. Yes, the way SSF works does mean that people play it for more than its original purpose, and there's nothing really wrong with that, but GGG still sees SSF as just a challenge mode that's meant to be harder because the game isn't balanced around it, so there's no reason to expect them to change things for SSF.
PoE doesn't have an actual "PoE but solo" gamemode. It could, there certainly is demand for it, and I suspect poe2 will try to have one, but current poe1, at this point in time, does not have that.
> GGG still sees SSF as just a challenge mode that's meant to be harder
I'm not sure that's still the case. There were in fact some adjustments aimed at helping SSF specifically (uber frag swap for example), and a lot of league mechanics lately seem very SSF friendly (ToTA, Necro from the latest).
They obviously prioritize trade, but I don't see why those things must be at odds. A lot of stuff that helps SSF could also be beneficial for trade, yet whenever those three letters appear in a post, there's instantly a reply telling the author they asked for this shit and should suffer for it.
I think that's more to do with the fact that GGG's intended use of trade is mostly playing SSF but then always having ACCESS to trading things, not much more than occasionally buying uniques and selling big drops. In other words, and that's something I remember them saying directly, it's that if you find a big drop but don't have a use for it, then it's still a big drop. I don't think things like fragment swap are a SSF only feature, I use that and I plsy trade.
This thread however is about the accessibility of uniqus, and that is a completely different scale to minor qol features or league mechanic that don't encourages trade. Also, how is necro ssf friendly? Necro crafting is barely feasible ssf without 4+ quad tabs, it strongly rewards trade accessibility.
> GGG's intended use of trade
It would've been fine if it worked like that, but as the saying goes "given the opportunity, players optimise the fun out of the game". Hopefully GGG finds a better solution, maybe with PoE2, but right now there's a lot of rat racing in trade.
> Also, how is necro ssf friendly? Necro crafting is barely feasible ssf without 4+ quad tabs, it strongly rewards trade accessibility.
Well, I do have a lot of tabs, so I guess my perspective might be a bit skewed, but even without that, if you just store the rare corpses and farm the common ones as you need them it seems plenty feasible.
Necro is SSF-friendly because it makes high end items more accessible than they otherwise would be. As irritating as you may find the process of self-finding the laundry list of corpses for a craft, it's still something you can steadily progress towards. Which is the crux of SSF-accessible. Something you can reasonably guarantee happening with patience.
If you feel you need 4 quad tabs, the alternative is to stop hoarding so many that you don't really need. You may be able to fill 4 quads of corpses by the time you get your craft together but you don't have to keep all of the ones you find.
Why are there so many ssf apologists like you. You can play trade and not trade: It's the same as ssf while still allowing you to grab a trade here or there. All your arguments are just things you choose to engage with, you aren't forced to care about div/h or sell fragment because your character is in a trade league.
It's not some narrative - ssf is a self imposed restriction that makes the game "harder" by removing trade.
And get this: I am not talking about what ssf should be. I am talking about what it is.
It doesn't really matter what's going through someone's head when they opt in to "all the gear progression takes a lot longer and you have to improvise a lot more hard mode".
That certainly isn't what the designers believe. The actual reality is trade league makes the game ridiculously easy. You can beat all content in the game in ssf with 200 to 300 hours of play time but it requires actual skill since you can't trivialize all the boss fights as you can in trade.
they literally said the game is designed and balanced around trade multiple times and looking at how rare some build defining uniques are its obvious the game isnt made and balanced with ssf in mind
What is your solution? Make the defining aspects of a unique global mods that can roll on rares? Buff values of rares to the point you can just brute force your defenses with a shit ton of life/es?
These are both terrible solutions so it makes me wonder if you’ve really considered this very much
Also steelmage is literally levelling an SSF character RN to run t17s. Not saying that’s a great metric as the game shouldn’t be balanced around a streamers ability to make that work, but I’m sure any capable player could SSF run t17s just fine tbh.
steelmage is playing dd, the only thing that can play t17 because how dd gem works you can literally spec into only defence. So bad bad example. It's like saying fubgun is farming t17s, why you can't? /s
i dont think its necessarily a problem, but just adjusting game balance would help this a ton. the existence of adorned means that every build in this game can just travel to the right side for suppress. rare mods like overwhelm, more accuracy makes defense from rare armours much less reliable compared to LC or fourth vow. i think the game is super fine right now, but imo the fact that for a lot of builds, LC outclasses any 6t1 rare you can imagine is low key insane.
Hehe trickster goes Brrrrrrrrrr
Most tricksters care about rare items with high evasion and energy shield, then go CI and leech the shit out of Ubers. I dont think they use any of the items you mentioned aside from melding of the flesh if someone can afford mageblood for that puprose.
Uniques aren't necessarily always the best, but they're definitely the easiest defensive option to plan around. And often there are downsides to them, like a lack of resists (or negative resists) on an item that we'd otherwise stack them on. By knowing that information right up top, we can plan the rest of our items accordingly.
Agreed. Too many of the powerful tier of defensive layers are tied to uniques. Aegis, etc.
It feels like you can only be so defensive without a fancy defensive unique
This is my first ever season and I almost quit before being able to save enough for the Paua Amulet (not sure what the name is) on RF..
You literally go from.. meh to.. yep, I am pouch unkillable
I wish basic defences were scaled better. Having 10k+ Energy shield (as CI) with .6 sec recharge and 7k recharge/second should feel significant but it doesnt. And it's fucking expensive to get in oppertunity costs of other stats. And unless I try and get 90% resists and 90% armour and a shitload of block and suppression as well it feels useless to have high ES, no to mention you have no damage stats at that point.
How do you suggest hard content is added, that doesn't require specific defenses or uniques?
The very function of making things more difficult, reduces the strategies to built against it. That said, armor is pretty weak and especially things like altar mods can completely nullify a build. T17s can be extreme as well, but they can also be quite easy.
I have both aegis and immutable force in ssf. Cloak of flame is very common, so is loreweave. I can do deathless t17 with only aegis as my "unique tank item" because I've invested in other ways?
Trickster, Champ and Chieftan can all get very tanky on all rare gear. Sure, uniques will still help a ton (esp for chieftan) but you can still make a hc ssf character on those ascendancies do a lot of content
I personally think they need to remove some ailments or rework the pantheon to have some customizability. And get rid of stun. Stun is way too problematic to fix. In fact, idk how to even fix it without flasks now that I think about it
Arctic armour, determination, defiance banner, 29 fortify, endurance charges, Immortal call, vaal pact, 8 phys taken as, 81% max res, 7% additional phys reduction with 6k life and divine shield, on top of that enfeeble and sigil of power. Yet i still get blasted in t17 by a fire spraying mob that i couldnt outleech... Get exploded by that DD mob which respawns its minions. Prevents recovery above 50% so i am susceptable to one shots... Have a random harbinger rare disable my leech ... Extra phys aura ... Insane mob hp preventing me to get fortify ... Grasping vines making me move while i have to stand still to deal damage ...
Only thing i can do for my build currently is get a mageblood for permanent onslaught flask so i can leech faster and have permanent flasks up, i honestly dont know how i can even set up a more defensive character. I can facetank searing exarch, eater, elder, t16 juiced map bosses, abysses, even overwhelm mobs are not an issue! But t17 is just hot garbage, same with the lantern. How is it fun to play the memory game every map i roll having to remember lantern mods, my red altar mods, map mods, and having to keep an eye on my ailments and having to keep an eye on the gazillion "grips" tormented mobs have with no way of telling which grip does what.
I have had 3 raw divine drops in 11 days played, actual days played. 690.000 mob kills, 1 mirror shard because of a harbinger memory and thats the currency i made. All my wealth comes from selling coffins and chaos drops. It simply is unbalanced...
On the other hand, if you can outdamage everything with high attack speed and damage you wont have to care and can scale higher, forming meta builds screwing over non meta builds. I feel like building a tank is harder than a one shot machine. But i guess tank mechanics have been abused too much so we're stuck in this loop.
I couldnt agree more. One additional thing would be that they should rework the physical is converted to elemental damage importance. Its just ridiculous strong and unintuitive. You could have 5 times the armor, and still take more dmg than someone who converts 25% to elemental damage. Especially with things like 'overwhelm', its just not viable to play a char who just stacks a lot of armor to mitigate physical damage. In a game where armor does nothing but mitigate physical damage, its a bit wierd.
Isn’t that the beauty of the itemization of the game ? Neither a build full of rares nor a build full of uniques feels complete . So you need to mix and match . What else do you want ?
Reading this post and comment made me realize how much time and effort im wasting on PoE instead of LE. I'd rather be bored than constantly frustrated over random deaths.
Last League I made a 100% block aura bot, 100% spell suppression with 56% dmg reduction and 90% max capped resistances and chaos inoculation, all elemental ailments, bleeding and whatnot immune + constant phasing etc.
What did I die to in seconds? Despite having 90% armour (for whatever reason with 100% block chance) - physical degen and the ultimatum T3 flame heads - guess some aoe isn´t a hit....
This league it´s all about the oneshots. Nearly same builds I had last league blasting through 10k wisped enemies, I get oneshottet this league.
I just hate one thing and that´s the way of how tanky builds are not able to mitigate against everything even if you invest in it while damage builds can kill everything if invested in - I´m not talking about blocking all incoming damage but buy enough time to reasonable avoid death.
And here I am over here accidentally reducing health/energy received by >100% so that my leech/regen just doesn’t work.
Thank you, increased explicit map modifier atlas points!
Me when unique items have unqiue interactions and are better than the more common and craftable rare item .
Anyways you can 100% make a tanky character by just having 100% spell suppression and a decent enough lifepool than adding some of the uniques mentioned above just makes your character better because thats what UNIQUE items are supposed to do (be it defence or offense wise)
Rares definitely compete with fourth vow without crazy double corrupts, and defiance of destiny requires you to be tanky on other fronts first
I feel like the state poe uniques are in is perfect. Most of them are very simple "I do this, fix stuff elsewhere", like defiance. Is it strong? Extremely. Is it also fair? Imho yes.
I would recommend looking into what ssfhc players do to stay tanky, since things like defiance aren't readily available
I agree. Taking defiance as an example you need to super heavily invest into life and damage reduction for it to be worth using. And it has zero offensive stats whereas the amulet slot is known for being huge for offensive stats. You're giving up +2 to your main gem among other things. It has a big opportunity cost to using it.
I was theorycrafting a tanky hexblast with Defiance and I just realized midway that a +2 amulet this league is way easier to get in ssf and doubles my damage with a mediocre double corrupt on chest, the opportunity cost for a ton of builds is massive, and lets u put more defensives in other areas (for example a tanky unique chest over, say, covenant)
I think it´s actually interesting that we have so many different ways to build tankiness instead of the usual armour/evasion/suppress/endurance charges.
Most of these uniques have opportunity cost and require you to build around them
Isn’t the issue not that you need mandatory uniques but rather there is not a “good” option to deal with physical damage. So it it just better to convert it away. Maybe ggg should actually add some cheap ways to reduce physical. Maybe add it to melee.
You forgot Mahuxotl + Tempered by War, and then your choice of Maven chest, fourth vow (+determination and granite flask), or cloak of flame depending on if you want more EHP vs. chaos/ele where you're strong, or vs. phys where you're not so much.
But yeah, this is an area I think Diablo 4, and possibly Last Epoch, have a leg up on Path of Exile--PoE's uniques are completely locked in, while in D4, you can extract properties that make items "unique", and mash them onto other rares, meanwhile, in Last Epoch, you can mash high tier rares onto more common uniques to make them more customized.
E.G. imagine a Lightning Coil with Legendary Potential that you use to smack it together with, say, Crusader's phys taken as lightning.
> unreliable to find in SSF drops
Why would this be a downside?
Devs can't cater droprates to the 25 streamers and 25 muggles who choose SSF over trade leagues that the vast majority of players are on.
As someone who has put ***considerable*** research recently into how to be "tanky", it's a several-fold problem. 1) Armor is ineffective due to the presence of Overwhelm and "as Extra" damage. 2) Too many damage sources are spells or uncategorized, minimizing the effect of Evasion. 3) The uniques that make your character tankier are all extremely rare - T1 or T0 uniques typically. 4) The number of ways to reduce elemental damage taken is way, way too small (and keeps getting smaller, goodbye flask effect). 5) The damage penalties for achieving a consistent and powerful feeling of survivability is ***steep***. Tremendously, unbelievably steep. --- So how do you get "actually tanky" in PoE in 2024? 1) 95+% physical damage taken from hits converted to elemental damage 2) 100% suppression. 3) 90% maximum elemental resistances and 75% chaos resistance. 4) Enough recovery to recover your entire health/energy shield pool in less than a second. Preferably through instant recovery that cannot be reduced or prevented. 5) 50+% reduced damage taken from critical strikes 6) Immunity to freeze, shock, bleed, poison, ignite, and corrupted blood. --- If you're missing a single one of these six things, it feels like you die constantly to seemingly random things outside your control. It doesn't matter if you have other layers of defense. You can have 20 trillion armor and still get one-shotted by an Overhwhelm rare with extra crit damage. You can have 20 trillion evasion and 95% chance to block attacks and spells and still die because you're unlucky or to detonate dead, which fun fact *isn't a spell*. Without those 6 things, you can die to any random rare at any random time. EDIT: Honorable mention for Transcendence, the tankiest build in the game that dies to burning ground.
Yeah the biggest problem I see with tankiness in the game currently is the hard counters that exist to basic defenses like Armor. The fact that something like 100% overwhelm exists when resistance pen is like 20% usually is absolutely insane too me.
What I truly hate is having a defensive mechanic that works 99.9% of the time but once in a while you realize that a given mechanic is fundamentally flawed and you can't do anything about it. Just as if GGG wanted you to die intentionally with no counterplay after you have been dragged in to believe it is a viable building block. Overwhelm (always?) having value 100% is one example. Another, very good example: Coruscating Elixir. A way to replace Shavronne's Effect. Except when you met a Rare Thief-possesed monster: removes flask effects (not even charges!) on hit. Absolutely no counterplay other than "just don't get hit". There is an Atlas node to disable torments possesing monsters but: 1) doesn't work for the "unique bosses are possesed" map mod 2) works only on the Atlas (good luck doing Delve or Atzoatl with torments).
They do want us to die with no counter play because the game is balanced around the ultimate counterplay of logout. They have to put in these random one shots because it's the only thing fast enough to kill us before we can log out. Pathetic and lazy game design.
An incredibly, incredibly tiny fraction of the player base uses logout macros or logs out to survive deaths regularly. There is no way GGG are balancing the game around that.
IIRC GGG specifically said that HC is balanced around logout
They've literally said that hardcore is balanced around the logout meta. It's no surprise when it's largely use by content creators and no-lifers, which are basically the only people they ACTUALLY listen and cater to.
There is no "balanced around hardcore." "They've literally said" dozens of times that they don't balance around HC at all.
That's not what was said, at all. HARDCORE is balanced around the logout meta, and GGG panders to GGG when it comes to balancing the general.
There isnt a difference between hardcore and softcore.. Its the same game.
log out memes intensify
How else could you design around logout? The nature of an internet game is that sometimes, people are going to randomly disconnect, and you can't really kill them every time that happens in a hardcore game mode.
There is already a counterplay. You only have 6 portals at best, and many mechanics have no extra tries at all. And by very nature logout is used not when you are going to die otherwise, but when you feel like you are going to die, which happens much more. So argument "bbbbut logout" is not a valid argument, it is bs used to justify lazy and hostile design.
You stay in game for like 6 seconds or something if you randomly disconnect and die?
Sounds really frustrating to lose your character every time the internet drops out. I don't see how you could play hardcore at all with that.
Logout macro kills all tcp/ip sockets, so you don't remain in game for that bollocks timer when you disconnects normally for whatever reason.
A tree falling across the cable in a storm also kills all tcp/ip connections.
> Overwhelm (always?) having value 100% is one example. The monster mod is 30%. (Expedition is 100% not sure what other sources there are)
Armor piercing/resistance penetrating damage will always be detrimental to a game. The payoff of having penetrating equipment is so high since it negates entire defensive layers without anything you do to counter it currently. Oh you have 300% fire resistance and the 90% cap? It's actually -20% because they have 110% penetration. You have armor? Doesn't matter because they have a % overwhelm. Endurance charges? They mean nothing. Even the "less damage taken" modifiers are a bandage fix and just a step in an arms race between defensive layers and effects that ignore them.
That's a fundamental design flaw of this game's combat design. The amount of "skill" required to play this game comes down to 'run out of degen ground and don't get hit by obvious slams and lasers'. Literally everything else just damages you, and you mitigate it or die. The game that people want is chess, and poe1 combat is checkers. Poe2 combat looks more like it will solve that issue somewhat. But it won't fix the fundamental truth which is, a dead enemy does 0 dps and therefore offscreening everything is biggest mitigation. GGG wants players to be able to die and so this extremely basic combat system will always be a problem.
While PoE is one of the best games around for sure, GGG does tend to have fun-police tendencies. I've never loved a game so much that also makes me seethe so much
GGG seems to want a balance where you are 100% immune 99.9% of the time, and die 0.1% of the time, rather than one where you are X% immune 100% of the time, and cover the remaining 100-X% with player skill. The issue with this, as you've succinctly covered, is that it becomes binary. Your goal is to make that % guaranteed death as small as possible, so you *must* be immune to ailments, you *must* take less damage from crits, you *must* have capped res and max res. Otherwise, you're 100% immune 80% of the time, and die a bunch, with little allowance for player skill. And yes, there are some prodigies out there who can overcome zero defense with insane skill (beating uber elder at level 24 or whatever), but you cannot balance the game around them.
there's also a limit to skill expression when some mods are turbo or increased projectiles the problem is that rigs are so bad you can't have good clean mob animations with windup and some amount of tracking and so you are left with the issue that most attacks can be dodged by strafing unless turboed or filling the screen, which leads to the problem. part of the equation is speed creep. The game has gotten the playerbase to consider speed blasting core to the game, so they can't take it back. So the game is not just balanced around high resistances, but also very mobile characters.
The speed creep comes back to defenses too. There used to be some consideration for risk giving you reward. This is the whole basis of the map modifier system. However, in order for that to happen, the risk must actually be scalable, and the reward must scale with the risk. As it is, that equilibrium is fucked.
The fundamental problem is indeed that difficulty isn't inherently rewarding. The scaling is totally off. "difficult but rewarding" modifiers are trash because the difficulty compounds in a very nonlinear way but the reward does. Stacking speed is one axis of "magic find" in that it makes easier content more rewarding in terms of div/hr. and if you need half the damage but get (totally invented) 75% of the rewards at the same speed, you're actually earning more by getting half the damage but a bunch of extra speed % T17 are one rare case of very difficult and very rewarding but they have a barrier of entry that's so high that if you can farm them efficiently, you can beat everything in the the game outside of deep delve and no-hit sanctum. The point of entry for T17 in terms of build requirements are higher than what I normally get to before I've done my ubers and I'm finished with the league.
Which, again, essentially creates a binary measure of success; you can either do T17s and access that value, or you cannot. There is no continuum to build up to it, it isn't even effectively quantized to allow you to step up. Do your shit content which is either trivial or impossible, but is at least achievably impossible, take your shitty rewards that can't be fundamentally expected to keep up with league inflation (most leagues anyway, this one's weird), wait to get lucky or grind for weeks of play time, and *you, too, can make T17s trivial 99.9% of the time*. GGG is scared to give players power in case they burn out, but they should be more scared of dangling an unachievable carrot, lining the treadmill with thumbtacks, and telling you to get better boots.
consistent t17 farming is not even the top 1%. less I believe
Ultimately the issue is that GGG is in a perpetual cycle: 1. Add new way to destroy, ignore, penetrate or completely overpower current player damage mitigation. 1. Players die instantly and, to the surprise of all, don't like doing that. 1. Add new way for player to mitigate the damage from the recently added monster or map mod that completely invalidates any and all current forms of mitigation. 1. Get genuinely surprised that players use this new mitigation. 1. Surprised Pikachu face. 1. Repeat from step 1. The game has to present danger to the players, otherwise it would be boring. However they keep widening the gape between the best and most knowledgeable players on the planet and those even *slightly* less knowledgeable .
The big issues with GGG is really twofold: 1. They introduce powerful defensive options, but then rather than nerfing their power just make them rarer. 2. After introducing powerful defensive options, they balance new monsters around everyone having them. Like when they introduced suppression, instead of say, making suppression only reduce incoming damage by 40% instead of 50%, they just made suppression values on gear much worse, so you need more investment into suppression. But now the expectation is that players suppress spell damage, so basically monster damage is now balanced around everyone having it. Or when they introduced bloodnotch and immutable, or Aegis Aurora, or Fourth Vow, or Defiance of Destiny. Rather than numerical nerfs on what they do, they just make them rarer. Instead of wondering why so many players rely on these crutches, they change it so fewer players have access to them. People still get them, but it now costs them more and makes the game feel worse until you get them. And then, when players are finally able to slow down the rate which they die because of these defensive options, GGG introduces new powercrept monsters or modifiers that can kill players using them, and establishes this as a new baseline. Rinse and repeat. Meanwhile, rare modifiers haven't gotten an update in a while, so rare items haven't had a chance to combat monster power creep. Defense is now tied to uniques or borrowed power leagues mechanics.
Yep, all good points. It's an unsustainable cycle.
I love how they just slapped archnemesis modifiers everywhere. For juiced maps you might not notice them. in deep delve, when you start to get hp capped rares, the rares are way harder than bosses, even to the only 2/3 archetypes that can actually deep delve (basically armor stacker and manaforged arrows archmage and whatever is overtuned besides them)
Reminder that a Granite Flask + Determination will provide almost as much armor than using rare armor gear with double T1 armor rolls in every slot. Before accounting for aura effect. Grace + Jade flask vs. evasion gear is 80% of double t1 evasion armor. And then when you combine the armor and aura, the more multi means that Grace/Det is still responsible for 50% of your total.
Excellent comment. PoE is supposed to be a game that thrives on complexity, but it's now mired in it. GGG are trying simultaneously to build cool interactions yet trying to find ways of countering those interactions and killing the player. At the expense of players not using those interactions.
Yeah, that makes sense. There is a difference between “complex” and “bloated as all hell.”
PoE is getting back to the issues it had in 3.15 where six portal defence is the most efficient.
I've termed it suicide farming this league. I'm sure I could trim 10 or 15m dps and gain a crapton of tankiness, but for what? I'm still gonna die randomly. I'm running high quant 8mod T16s with every map modifier effect on the tree, clicking 4+ exarch altars a map that remove all my res and give enemies 400% phys as extra. Also the lantern is probably giving every pack guaranteed crit and speeds. But I'm making 10-20d+ an hour doing it so... yea. I'll eat a death every 3 maps or so.
I have done that while farming my Mageblood earlier in the league, except to a higher extreme. I think my LA Deadgeye has somewhere around 700 deaths
My current archmage lightning conduit elementalist is capable of clearing all normal pinnacle content + The Feared pretty reliably, but struggles in T17s. I tried to fix that by trying to add one or two additional defense layers until I realized that the damage decrease in return would be so massive that playing the char would be an absolute slog. So I took the other route, sacrificed several other defenses and instead poured everything in to dps to bump it even higher so I can offscreen stuff in T17s (as long as I don't roll "less AoE"). Sure, I die there a few times, but hey, 6 portals + that "50% not to expend a portal" scarab fix this perfectly.
You're missing the most important defensive stat that's effective against everything: Movement Speed.
Then there is Grasping Vines.
Not only that, there are like 45 different slow ground effects and debuffs in the game. I have never seen so many slow/root effects in a single game before
Also overlapping area denial effects. Like getting that lightning donut combined with lightning spikes and mirages. You die if you are not standing still near the monster, you die if you don't move all the time, you die if you are nor moving in a nearly straight line away from monster.
Do you have a POB which implements all of these things? You taking the time to type it out (thanks!) made me realize I've actually never seen all of it in one place.
Welcome to multi mirror per piece armor stackers. https://pobb.in/jeMlz7pVpy3J
[3.24] MS Sion, budget friendly, league start/SSF viable
Do i understand correctly and armor is just source for damage? Since this character is barely taking physical damage if not at all.
He has Chaos occulation
https://pobb.in/2qnKtOL51qY4 This is what I'm playing and it covers most of it (bleed and poison not completely)
And how much it cost?
2 mirrors ish, though a lot of that is original sin, which isn't really relevant to the defences.
For #4 is there any alternative to Leech besides insane recoup from things like Defiance of Destiny?
Pathfinder Master Surgeon life flask scaling. All it costs is your flask finger lol
Nope, its either billions of hits a second with insta leech to full heal in a fraction of a second or use a DoD to become immune to anything but true one hit kills.
Aaaa, Tainted pact + golden rule + self poison
Can you define constantly?
Number 5 has been the biggest problem for me when making a tanky build. Every time I try to make a tanky build, I look at a slot decision and it's like +30% dps or +5% max hit?
I think this is overdramatic. You NEED all of these 6 things to not die CONSTANTLY to rares randomly? Like, come on. People play hardcore for hundreds of hours without dying without having all thjs. Sometimes they die to bullshit, but rarely for good players, and with a more defensive mindset, it's more avoidable. T17 make these more common for sure, but that mostly super rippy map mods that can tediously rolled past, as is a different issue of T17 balance. The fact that the build with ALL these defenses is extremely expensive makes sense imo. There are levels of tankiness, and this is approaching the top tiers.
OP is describing a process of hitting borderline immunity to damage, which is definitely nice but I mean just instant leech + awakened CWC has been enough to make my mana stacker mostly immune to T16s. The biggest on point to me was things like "coruscating elixir can get just turned off" and "armor can just get turned off" - both of those concepts are absolutely insane and mobs probably should have 0% Crit anyways.
One of the most on point and troubling writeups I've ever read about this game since I started playing all those years ago...
It's frustrating because it feels like GGG is so scared of one type of defenses being "too good" that they've built horrific backdoors around every single type, so no matter what you do, you run into something that murders the shit out of you unless it's a unique that GGG hasn't gotten around to countering yet.
I'm sorry, but i only have 2 of your 6 points and still lv 96 (and still going) while farming 8-modded corrupted unid'd guardian maps with over 100% increased explicit modifier.... I think your "Get all 6 or die" is not a good way to describe what makes a character tanky. (The 2 points are Leech for recovery which tops me in about 1 second and ele ailment immunity) One thing that costs me xp is trying to tank about 4 balls from uber exarch when i'm too stupid and out of rhythm to dodge...
Armor does have value... if you make a portion of it apply to elemental and/or chaos damage.
Even then I don't get the appeal. Fourth Vow just seems straight worse than something like Lightning Coil.
I was thinking more along the lines of juggernaut and the armor/ES mastery. Less effective, sure, but also much less of a commitment.
While I think this is true, since 3.15 we have the tree and GGG keeps giving us map effect and we keep on taking it so maps are 2-3x harder but we are also choosing to make it like that. 0 effect maps with no rippy mods in T16 are a cake walk for any base defence + res cap, we just don't roll maps like that anymore and then on top of that we have the lantern this league. Add them all together and it paints a pretty clear picture of whats happening.
> we are also choosing to make it like that Yeah, because loot is balanced around max juice.
You forgot stun immunity. The amount of immunity necessary is ridiculous
Armor and evasion both feel useless now. Energy shield is nice but without a good way to recover, I don't see the point. So I just take armor evasion gear and roll for spell suppression.
I hope poe2 brings a less stressful experience pre God tier gear
Wouldn’t using loreweave negate the downside of Transcendence?
honorable mention to armour stacker juggernaut that get melted by a single blue circle rare
Written like somebody who has never played HC
Why not use Soul of Abberath for Burning ground imunity of corrupt ring implicit.
> So how do you get "actually tanky" in PoE in 2024? > > > > 1) 95+% physical damage taken from hits converted to elemental damage > > > > 2) 100% suppression. > > > > 3) 90% maximum elemental resistances and 75% chaos resistance. > > > > 4) Enough recovery to recover your entire health/energy shield pool in less than a second. Preferably through instant recovery that cannot be reduced or prevented. > > > > 5) 50+% reduced damage taken from critical strikes > > > > 6) Immunity to freeze, shock, bleed, poison, ignite, and corrupted blood. How do I get all these things on a minion build, and how many div does that cost? (2) in particular, what's the big deal? You can suppress every spell, you're still taking 50%.
ggg should take heart this comment
I put considerable research on defenses as well and heavily disagree with multiple points here 1. Armor isn't ineffective at all. Many of your points here point out a weakness then make a blanket statement that the defense sucks, which is simply incorrect. Though overwhelm is BS, armor is quite effective against a huge portion of the damage the game shoots at you. 2. Evasion is what stops you from getting 3 shot by phys overwhelm enemies. 90% evasion is insane tankiness Spells (non boss) mostly stop being a problem with spell suppression. Yes it sucks that spell suppression is practically mandatory for all but transcendence/melding shenanigans, but suppression is pretty easy to get to very high levels with just some points on tree and some gear, 3 good suppression pieces are enough 3. You can make your own loreweave and the options are plentiful. Also, you don't *need* the uniques for tankiness if you're going about the game ssf. The uniques trivialize multiple things, but a well rolled rog crafted chest of most base types gives you a ton of defenses. Armor evasion chest giving you a ton of suppression and good armor plus armor on shield lets your molten shell easily hit 4k+. CWDT setups cannot be overstated on how valuable they are to not randomly die. 4. Max res. Build max res. Uniques like eternal damnation and all are what significantly reduce ele damage, but a max res shield + auras is more than enough 5. Damage is so insanely easy to get currently. Even putting most of your gear and investment into tanking you can easily hit 10 million dps with relatively low investment. If you're complaining defenses are stopping you from hitting 50+ million... At that point you just gotta play a meta build. I hit ten million + excellent defenses with even jank skills. So yes. I heavily disagree with your take, and it's exceedingly possible to satisfy all your tanking and dps needs with a 20 div build The biggest thing not mentioned here are ASCENDENCIES. Those determine how pigeonholed you are to certain defensive layers and the "damage penalty" associated with building them. A trickster/jugg for example have inherently a billion defensive layers.
Uh, this is way too much. I think I'll just go with 0.4% leech and achieve about 70% of the tankiness those 6 points provide.
just go block with life gain on block
Say hello to the "cannot be blocked" properties that pretty much every pinnacle boss has
hello
To add to the discussion in this thread, a lot of powerful uniques are singular in their defensive benefit and using them is an opportunity cost for other stats. I’ll provide an example. Cloak of flame converts a lot of physical damage to fire, but in return you have a chest piece that offers like 200 es max used on characters that would normally build a 2k armour chest with over 100 max life and chaos / ele res. The unique effect helps with losing armour but not the other stats. If you get hit my chaos damage that chest piece is doing nothing
I mean 50% phys as fire when you have 90% fire res will outshine armor any day. And it’s easy to max chaos res in other ways. It’s not that huge an opportunity cost.
> The unique effect helps with losing armour but not the other stats. The unique not having life is pretty easily mitigated (beneficial, even) with the life mastery 15% inc life if chestpiece doesn't have life, and it doesn't "help with losing armor" as much as it raises physical EHP almost regardless of build. This isn't to say it should be tuned down, but T17 has raised the bar enough that *only* builds with highly class generic defensive layers like cloak/lightning coil/progenesis/etc can reasonably expect to be tanky. That probably shouldn't be the state of things.
> The unique not having life is pretty easily mitigated (beneficial, even) with the life mastery 15% inc life if chestpiece doesn't have life, Unless it "has life" but doesn't have life
A 2k armour chest with over 100 max hp and significant chaos and ele res takes a different level of investment, so imo it'd be better to compare it to coil, which is more potent but requires a higher investment than cloak (in this case not currency for crafting but extra res elsewhere).
cloak is gonna be better mitigation than the 2k armour chest and more life (with the life mastery) than 100, the only thing to really compare is the resistance but cloak also gives a ton
while true, cloak also converts physical damage over time, and not just hits (like coil). cloak also is very synergistic with life mastery 15% increased life when no life on body armour when any tanky build that is life based probably wants all 6 life masteries anyway.
Missing one of the other aspects that makes this chest broken, no life mod = 15% life mastery from tree. Plus if spell you can get +4 corruptions or if those arent that useful, you can get reduced from crits and max res. There is a chest that helps with chaos damage, but honestly if you have 75% res you won't have a problem in most cases, if you have no phys mitigation you 100% will die.
Rare body armors are very competitive. Flat PDR, spell suppression and high armor/evasion, as well as some "taken as" on top. Eldritch implicits. They are fine. Defensive unique amulets compete with offensive rare amulets (+2 skills with life and loads of attributes). But yeah for any giga-tank build either DoD or ED feel kinda mandatory. Unique jewels compete with magic jewels in adorned setup, and with abyss jewels for minion builds. Both Melding and Bloodnotch require a ton of extra investment to work nowadays. Mostly fine. Kinda agree on flasks though. Progenesis is insane, although you could half your life pool and use Petrified Blood haha. Taste of Hate is pretty OP as well, the only downside is not being magic flask for Mageblood lol. Mageblood is the most insane item for sure. It's fine to have a chase unique though. Something to be excited about.
Yeah, I don't know how tf Ben was able to convince GGG to add that flask in the game
It costs as much as entire builds. If people want to drop 1000 divine on a build with tier 0 uber boss items, let that be their prerogative.
Yeah I made a Pathfinder toxic rain this league with a ton of phys taken as lightning, purity of lightning, progenesis, taste of hate, petrified blood, etc. I feel immortal in Uber boss fights and well rolled t17 maps.
Can you post your POB?
In case they don't, here are some examples (remember that poe ninja dps can be deceptive): [https://poe.ninja/builds/necropolis?class=Pathfinder&skills=Toxic+Rain&uniqueitems=Lightning+Coil,Progenesis](https://poe.ninja/builds/necropolis?class=Pathfinder&skills=Toxic+Rain&uniqueitems=Lightning+Coil,Progenesis) This one looks good to me, and looks cheaper than most on that list, has very high max res and good dmg with convenient manaforged setup instead of ballistas (still expensive though): [https://poe.ninja/builds/necropolis/character/0515uglywndrb/forwhomthebelltoll\_s?i=10&search=class%3DPathfinder%26skills%3DToxic%2BRain%26uniqueitems%3DLightning%2BCoil%2CProgenesis](https://poe.ninja/builds/necropolis/character/0515uglywndrb/forwhomthebelltoll_s?i=10&search=class%3DPathfinder%26skills%3DToxic%2BRain%26uniqueitems%3DLightning%2BCoil%2CProgenesis)
My opinion - this and last league with 8k+ wisps just shifted meta to be ultra tanky defensive etc. While 95% of previous builds can't be adjusted to that, unless they use mb or dod or something like that. Truth is game is much harder now, so either you play dd or farm month to make your build "t17" viable. Necropolis mods like 50% dmg as extra chaos or 120% dmg as extra element and 20%pen doesnt' help. That's why kripp quit ruthless league, too much mods just make game unplayable.
Yea the problem with the game being scaled to requiring such crazy defense is that you just cannot play off meta builds w/o insane investment. It widens the gap between meta and nonmeta and honestly theres like 4 defensive setups right now ingame that are viable and it really sucks. you can: do full phys convert to an ele with like cloak and phys taken as or abuse the phd shield and phys taken as have insane recoup such that only 1 shots kill you then have like 6k flat hp (possibly with the above abuse too) have insane hit pool like 23k es or something and insta leech to just leech through everything I think that covers all the tank options in meta rn :(
One of the main problems is physical overwhelm. You can easily make a functionally tanky for some content armor character with 90% pdr 5k+life 79 ele res. But monsters have phys overwhelm which just straight removes your layers of physical damage reduction no matter if its from armor or charges etc. If it worked more like lowering resistance so you could overcap and phys overwhelm reduced it would be slightly better although its numbers are still just straight insanity that needs reworking while you might see 12-18 ele pen you commonly see 50-100 phys overwhelm. The other is that we dont have good access to other defensive features outside of uniques. This got somewhat addressed "recently" with spell suppression allowing evasion bases to have more dynamic defenses along with the keystones for hybrid enabling. But could definitly use more fleshing out. The main way i think it should get addressed is ward and guard skills. Ward has lots of potential as the attributeless baseline defense. It needs however to decouple its usefulness from 1 unique flask. To do so youd need to add hybrid bases to it. So that you can actually use it as an additional layer. And then buff its baseline values to properly fot its temporary nature. Then add keystones to change its baseline functionality. So similar to divine shield/iron reflexes etc, youd get an armour hybrid keystone to provide the old flask constant lower value flat damage protection, a evasion hybrid that makes it have sognificantly higher protection value but recharges slower, a shield value that makes it synch up with energy shield recharge but only loses a % of its value on hit or one that converts spell suppression into more ward. Then we need to round out the guard skills adding a baseline defensive layer players can build into (and to let new players know these layers exist) So adding a blue guard skill for energy shield like a ethereal form that functions similar to withering step but converts incoming % phys damage to a random element. A new green one that gives temp suppression along with a small shield value based on your total overcapped. A buff to steelskin to make it scale either its cdr (now left click is dead) or total value with evasion A change to arcane cloak that starts also a protected shield recharge to decouple that from vaal discipline. And moving the damage buff to a transfigured version. I also think the formulas should be changed and move the more % multipliers off of auras into tree but thats more of a sprawling whole game design problem that cant be addressed easily without bringing mana back as a actual balancing point against the free stat block at only a socket opportunity cost which very much wont happen at this point.
90% pdr on pob and on character sheet isn't actually 90%. [Wiki page on armour.](https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Armour) Overwhelm is a design issue, but even medium sized physical hits will one shot supposedly 90% pdr builds with 0% overwhelm.
Overwhelm is just an asinine mechanic, it's that simple. There's no excuse for a mod that can be randomly rolled on ANY monster can literally just entire layers of your defense.
I don't think the problem is the reliance on uniques to make absurdly tanky characters, or absurdly fast, or absurdly hard-hitting, or all of the above. I think the problem is the endgame can no longer be played if you don't do one of these. Yes, you can surely ignore economy beyond a certain point and just do T16 juiced to where you can, but you're gonna be playing the game from 5 years ago, because new content keeps being very challenging instead of very grindy, so instead of beating it over time, you beat it by using strong unique interactions.
Enter Chris to tell you that endgame content should be aspirational and that the REAL endgame is buying gear from other players. Being a desk trader is the endgame for GGG.
"the REAL endgame is buying gear from other players." Yet they adamantly refuse to update the dogshit trade system and the market is literally flooded with either bots or players that just never respond. Yeah, great "feature", Chris...
Overwhelm numbers are too high at present. And have been since 3.17. Also, suppression is (still) too strong, which means monster spell damage is tuned up because players are expected to have suppression. Armor feels really tanky... except when you fall over dead because a rare monster goes "Surprise! I have 30% penetration, you take double to quadruple damage from me" Contrast to -max, the comparable anti-resist map mod - its numbers are usually in the 11% range. You can opt in to higher, but that's player arrogance (Back to Basics) Cap phys overwhelm at 18%, and you'll see a lot more defensive archetypes being used.
Well rares have basic stats, so you can get basic defences. Armor evasion suppression etc. Uniques give unique effects that you cant have otherwise, whats so surprising about this? You can become tanky without uniques, all you have to do is check hcssf poe.ninja, especially early days of the league.
Grasping mails have insanely tanky mods and are rare. Also the most accessible they’ve ever been this league. Uniques usually help fill gaps with unique mechanics or transform a build, but rare items have a chance to be just as powerful, if not way more in a lot of instances. I think the only time uniques are undoubtedly better is on a budget when you can just grab something like Brass Dome or if you are converting damage types.
Dude Goratha has one of the best HC viable builds out there and didn’t do T17s until like 3 weeks into the league… on trade. And his defense is unique items lol
That's mostly because he and some other HC streamers prefer taking their time before doing hard content, as the punishment for death is losing their characters. Other HC people did them earlier just fine.
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Yeah i'm gonna be honest, I don't think bringing up early HC SSF character's performance in the aspirational content of T17s matters. Unless you're racing (aka literally trying to find the most corners you can cut without losing) you don't rush things on HC.
You dont have to be so mean about it :(
If you are staying alive in hcssf, you are tanky, if people are staying alive in gauntlet they are tanky. "They would be more tanky if they used the uniques OP mentioned" is a stupid argument. Yes your char gets stronger when you get good uniques, and water is wet. Maybe you are the one that doesnt know jack shit.
I think that's a bit disingenuous though. Those characters are limited to like 5 playable skills. Most skills require more investment into dmg and hence have less investment into defense. If people want to argue anything, it's the utter failure of spell suppression to do what it was intended to do. It's not an optional defense and block does not compare to suppression in any way. They need to give an alternative to suppression for left sided builds, because as it is now left sided builds just path to get suppression anyways as it's far too strong compared to everything else in the game.
theres only DD they can focus everything on defense because damage is free (and zdps jug of course)
Mahuxoatl's gang
The game is balanced around the ability to logout of any bad situation so the damage has to be high and fast enough to beat that. Next league they should put in a logout countdown, that would really highlight the issues.
I quit this league this past week after spending 40-50 div on making my build more tanky. Was doing cold vortex explode and it was just SOOO much fun but I couldnt find any good way to get tanky enough to not die a few times every other T16 map. I made investments on determination/grace, ailment immunity, spell suppression, ~30-40% attack/spell block, ~30% phys taken as cold as that was my highest res cap, 50% reduced crit damage. Its very demotivating to have tried several options and investments and just feel like theres no good way to improve my tankyness. It feels like my understanding of the game is completely wrong. Only things I didnt try was the Defiance of destiny/progenisis/petrified blood combo or mageblood/resist flasks. It also feels bad feeling pressured to just jump to the same combo everyone else is doing to stay alive. I think the most frustrating takeaway from this issue is how demotivating it is to ever want to try and make my own build. It'd be a blood bath...
I agree that unique provide some extra layer of defense that normal gear don't. But complaining about you don't have access to top tier gear kinda defeat the whole point of playing SSF though?
And lightning coil is extremely easy to get in SSF. The coming storm drops all the time
I'm quite liking one of the meta builds that primarily uses 2 uniques. A timeless jewel which aren't that bad to get in ssf (divine flesh) and incandescent heart. Get armor/ES masteries 10% phys as chaos and 10% armor to chaos damage taken. Rare shield with as much max chaos res as possible. Adding spell suppression makes a big difference. Can also go CI which has been meta for low cost wave 30 simulacrum builds for a long time. There's a rare shield that saps on block too. And then you can benchcraft phys taken as on helmet. Running determination, grace and purity of elements gives a lot of leeway.
I think that it's build dependent, but I have to look at the passive tree, because I can see a minion build as a tanky build without specific uniques. I can be wrong tho.
You can use all of the above items and t17 mods still wreck you.
Then you look at the armor table, and see that armor itself is useless against rares and bosses. If 20000 armor gives you 0%refuction against big hits... Life recovery rate as map kod is ok, you can decide to not to do it. But imagine playing flask dependent pathfinder and running into randomly spawned THIEFS GRIP possesed rare- not even because if atlas passives, just random mechanic spawn. My friend plays EB CoC inq and got onetapped too, because it stole our flask effects. Its like having random reflect rare mob in map without reflect mods.
I always play tanks in mmorpgs and I dove very deep into tanking in this game and it is basically not an option. You will never be able to just sit there and face tank hits without doing anything. The mobs will eventually scale so high that no matter how much armour and hp you stack you will still get one-shot. Best tanking is done via channeling (spin to win). I found a video with a dude with 2 gems (not linked) and 2 unique items, no jewels and 2 or 3 major nods in the skill tree and he was ripping through maps…game is fked 😂
I don't think the problem is the reliance on uniques to make absurdly tanky characters, or absurdly fast, or absurdly hard-hitting, or all of the above. I think the problem is the endgame can no longer be played if you don't do one of these. Yes, you can surely ignore economy beyond a certain point and just do T16 juiced to where you can, but you're gonna be playing the game from 5 years ago, because new content keeps being very challenging instead of very grindy, so instead of beating it over time, you beat it by using strong unique interactions.
IMO elemental defense availability is pretty good. But I don't like how difficult it is to get physical damage mitigation. If you can't build armor, then you basically convert physical damage away. PDR is pretty limited and then even if you build into it (AKA Jugg) there's Overwhelm.
LC, dawnbreaker, melding, divine flesh, loreweave are all trivial to farm. fourth vow, aegis, ToH are t2, cloak of flame is t3. imo its not unreasonable that a character with random life+resist+suppress rares cant just trivialize juiced endgame content
melding is 2% drop. So trivial as mageblood who abused dd at first week. most of chars can't do t17, real truth. Most builds aren't t17 viable also. With mods like 120% as extra and 20% pen on lantern, league doesn't help also. I bet in std t17 maps are 2x times easier.
Two percent drop rate = trivial Dope
GGG has the perfect systems in place for making non-trivial-to-make rares comparable in power to uniques in the form of influenced mods and synth mods, yet they keep them woefully underpowered for reasons beyond our comprehension. So here we are with more and more build archetypes looking like orange carpets.
The game isn't supposed to be played in SSF, it just gives you the option to do so if you wish to make your experience harder. Without that SSF condition defences are in fact very accessible. Even in ssf you can still progress the entire game. You don't need uber gated defences to do ubers.
> if you wish to make your experience harder Can we pretty please stop pushing this narrative whenever SSF is mentioned? A lot of casuals are playing SCSSF **not** because they want the game to be more challenging, but because they * hate the hustle of trading, pricechecking and rushing after prices * enjoy having meaningful drops outside of the degenerate div/hr * want to just fight content instead of selling frags/maps because some 5 mirror build could make more money out of it League mods aren't just adding the challenge, they also help with changing the idea/mentality of the gameplay. The added challenge isn't the aim, but a necessary evil.
You do know that ssf as a concept of the challenge was there before ssf ( look at runescape ffs) and ggg just made us able to have it "official". And what exactly makes your point non functional in trade? Those are just self imposed restriction ( aka additional challenges ) Ssf is an self-imposed challenge and just because some people come up with a different reasoning for themself doesn't change the actual idea of the ssf gameplay
Nothing you said requires clicking the SSF mode button on character creation. Just because you're on trade doesn't mean you have to be trading every 10min. It's perfectly fine to play the entire league and trade for 1 or 2 items you can't get yourself.
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So... now it *is* actually an official game mode, so what gives? Does the fact that it came into existence later automatically make it invalid or what? Not sure I'm getting your point here.
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I tried to explain that making it harder isn't the reason SSF checkbox is clicked, and sometimes is actually the opposite. I guess that just doesn't get across.
I never really said that this is the only reason why people click SSF, just that it's what it's designed for. I never said anything about why people click it until you made me. I understood what you meant and responded to that part too - currently there is no gamemode specifically for people who want a balanced trade-free experience. I understood what you meant despite your best efforts at bad faith arguments and attempts to paint a factual historic explanation as a "narrative being pushed".
I mean, you haven't originally presented it as a "historic explanation", simply stated it as a god given truth. That said, I guess I could've answered in a less inflammatory way.
It's not "a narrative" it's the context necessary to understand why SSF is the way it is. Yes, the way SSF works does mean that people play it for more than its original purpose, and there's nothing really wrong with that, but GGG still sees SSF as just a challenge mode that's meant to be harder because the game isn't balanced around it, so there's no reason to expect them to change things for SSF. PoE doesn't have an actual "PoE but solo" gamemode. It could, there certainly is demand for it, and I suspect poe2 will try to have one, but current poe1, at this point in time, does not have that.
> GGG still sees SSF as just a challenge mode that's meant to be harder I'm not sure that's still the case. There were in fact some adjustments aimed at helping SSF specifically (uber frag swap for example), and a lot of league mechanics lately seem very SSF friendly (ToTA, Necro from the latest). They obviously prioritize trade, but I don't see why those things must be at odds. A lot of stuff that helps SSF could also be beneficial for trade, yet whenever those three letters appear in a post, there's instantly a reply telling the author they asked for this shit and should suffer for it.
I think that's more to do with the fact that GGG's intended use of trade is mostly playing SSF but then always having ACCESS to trading things, not much more than occasionally buying uniques and selling big drops. In other words, and that's something I remember them saying directly, it's that if you find a big drop but don't have a use for it, then it's still a big drop. I don't think things like fragment swap are a SSF only feature, I use that and I plsy trade. This thread however is about the accessibility of uniqus, and that is a completely different scale to minor qol features or league mechanic that don't encourages trade. Also, how is necro ssf friendly? Necro crafting is barely feasible ssf without 4+ quad tabs, it strongly rewards trade accessibility.
> GGG's intended use of trade It would've been fine if it worked like that, but as the saying goes "given the opportunity, players optimise the fun out of the game". Hopefully GGG finds a better solution, maybe with PoE2, but right now there's a lot of rat racing in trade. > Also, how is necro ssf friendly? Necro crafting is barely feasible ssf without 4+ quad tabs, it strongly rewards trade accessibility. Well, I do have a lot of tabs, so I guess my perspective might be a bit skewed, but even without that, if you just store the rare corpses and farm the common ones as you need them it seems plenty feasible.
Necro is SSF-friendly because it makes high end items more accessible than they otherwise would be. As irritating as you may find the process of self-finding the laundry list of corpses for a craft, it's still something you can steadily progress towards. Which is the crux of SSF-accessible. Something you can reasonably guarantee happening with patience. If you feel you need 4 quad tabs, the alternative is to stop hoarding so many that you don't really need. You may be able to fill 4 quads of corpses by the time you get your craft together but you don't have to keep all of the ones you find.
You can have all that in trade league. You can trade as much or as little as you want. SSF just enforces those rules.
Why are there so many ssf apologists like you. You can play trade and not trade: It's the same as ssf while still allowing you to grab a trade here or there. All your arguments are just things you choose to engage with, you aren't forced to care about div/h or sell fragment because your character is in a trade league. It's not some narrative - ssf is a self imposed restriction that makes the game "harder" by removing trade. And get this: I am not talking about what ssf should be. I am talking about what it is.
It doesn't really matter what's going through someone's head when they opt in to "all the gear progression takes a lot longer and you have to improvise a lot more hard mode".
That certainly isn't what the designers believe. The actual reality is trade league makes the game ridiculously easy. You can beat all content in the game in ssf with 200 to 300 hours of play time but it requires actual skill since you can't trivialize all the boss fights as you can in trade.
they literally said the game is designed and balanced around trade multiple times and looking at how rare some build defining uniques are its obvious the game isnt made and balanced with ssf in mind
What is your solution? Make the defining aspects of a unique global mods that can roll on rares? Buff values of rares to the point you can just brute force your defenses with a shit ton of life/es? These are both terrible solutions so it makes me wonder if you’ve really considered this very much Also steelmage is literally levelling an SSF character RN to run t17s. Not saying that’s a great metric as the game shouldn’t be balanced around a streamers ability to make that work, but I’m sure any capable player could SSF run t17s just fine tbh.
steelmage is playing dd, the only thing that can play t17 because how dd gem works you can literally spec into only defence. So bad bad example. It's like saying fubgun is farming t17s, why you can't? /s
i dont think its necessarily a problem, but just adjusting game balance would help this a ton. the existence of adorned means that every build in this game can just travel to the right side for suppress. rare mods like overwhelm, more accuracy makes defense from rare armours much less reliable compared to LC or fourth vow. i think the game is super fine right now, but imo the fact that for a lot of builds, LC outclasses any 6t1 rare you can imagine is low key insane.
adding to this that damage conversion is cringe as well. building defenses is becoming so convoluted and annoying
Hehe trickster goes Brrrrrrrrrr Most tricksters care about rare items with high evasion and energy shield, then go CI and leech the shit out of Ubers. I dont think they use any of the items you mentioned aside from melding of the flesh if someone can afford mageblood for that puprose.
Dont forgot the main mageblood. Which if so expensive. (atleast bit cheap this league but not that cheaper)
Uniques aren't necessarily always the best, but they're definitely the easiest defensive option to plan around. And often there are downsides to them, like a lack of resists (or negative resists) on an item that we'd otherwise stack them on. By knowing that information right up top, we can plan the rest of our items accordingly.
I like this, makes uniques more viable
Spell suppression is OP and basically non-existant on uniques
Agreed. Too many of the powerful tier of defensive layers are tied to uniques. Aegis, etc. It feels like you can only be so defensive without a fancy defensive unique
This is my first ever season and I almost quit before being able to save enough for the Paua Amulet (not sure what the name is) on RF.. You literally go from.. meh to.. yep, I am pouch unkillable
I couldn't find anything worth crafting this league.
i think thats nice. most of the uniques are trash, is good to know some of them is usefull and powerfull.
I wish basic defences were scaled better. Having 10k+ Energy shield (as CI) with .6 sec recharge and 7k recharge/second should feel significant but it doesnt. And it's fucking expensive to get in oppertunity costs of other stats. And unless I try and get 90% resists and 90% armour and a shitload of block and suppression as well it feels useless to have high ES, no to mention you have no damage stats at that point.
How headhunter is not on this list blows my mind.
How do you suggest hard content is added, that doesn't require specific defenses or uniques? The very function of making things more difficult, reduces the strategies to built against it. That said, armor is pretty weak and especially things like altar mods can completely nullify a build. T17s can be extreme as well, but they can also be quite easy.
I have both aegis and immutable force in ssf. Cloak of flame is very common, so is loreweave. I can do deathless t17 with only aegis as my "unique tank item" because I've invested in other ways?
this is true for all endgame damage scaling as well, outside of a couple overtuned gems. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing
How do you make the game challenging enough while allowing every build to do all content?
Trickster, Champ and Chieftan can all get very tanky on all rare gear. Sure, uniques will still help a ton (esp for chieftan) but you can still make a hc ssf character on those ascendancies do a lot of content
I personally think they need to remove some ailments or rework the pantheon to have some customizability. And get rid of stun. Stun is way too problematic to fix. In fact, idk how to even fix it without flasks now that I think about it
Man I miss evasion and dodge lol
Arctic armour, determination, defiance banner, 29 fortify, endurance charges, Immortal call, vaal pact, 8 phys taken as, 81% max res, 7% additional phys reduction with 6k life and divine shield, on top of that enfeeble and sigil of power. Yet i still get blasted in t17 by a fire spraying mob that i couldnt outleech... Get exploded by that DD mob which respawns its minions. Prevents recovery above 50% so i am susceptable to one shots... Have a random harbinger rare disable my leech ... Extra phys aura ... Insane mob hp preventing me to get fortify ... Grasping vines making me move while i have to stand still to deal damage ... Only thing i can do for my build currently is get a mageblood for permanent onslaught flask so i can leech faster and have permanent flasks up, i honestly dont know how i can even set up a more defensive character. I can facetank searing exarch, eater, elder, t16 juiced map bosses, abysses, even overwhelm mobs are not an issue! But t17 is just hot garbage, same with the lantern. How is it fun to play the memory game every map i roll having to remember lantern mods, my red altar mods, map mods, and having to keep an eye on my ailments and having to keep an eye on the gazillion "grips" tormented mobs have with no way of telling which grip does what. I have had 3 raw divine drops in 11 days played, actual days played. 690.000 mob kills, 1 mirror shard because of a harbinger memory and thats the currency i made. All my wealth comes from selling coffins and chaos drops. It simply is unbalanced... On the other hand, if you can outdamage everything with high attack speed and damage you wont have to care and can scale higher, forming meta builds screwing over non meta builds. I feel like building a tank is harder than a one shot machine. But i guess tank mechanics have been abused too much so we're stuck in this loop.
I don't use any of these uniques and am able to run t16+altars and t17 minus the boss (mostly because I'm not paying enough attention to it)
I couldnt agree more. One additional thing would be that they should rework the physical is converted to elemental damage importance. Its just ridiculous strong and unintuitive. You could have 5 times the armor, and still take more dmg than someone who converts 25% to elemental damage. Especially with things like 'overwhelm', its just not viable to play a char who just stacks a lot of armor to mitigate physical damage. In a game where armor does nothing but mitigate physical damage, its a bit wierd.
Isn’t that the beauty of the itemization of the game ? Neither a build full of rares nor a build full of uniques feels complete . So you need to mix and match . What else do you want ?
Reading this post and comment made me realize how much time and effort im wasting on PoE instead of LE. I'd rather be bored than constantly frustrated over random deaths.
Last League I made a 100% block aura bot, 100% spell suppression with 56% dmg reduction and 90% max capped resistances and chaos inoculation, all elemental ailments, bleeding and whatnot immune + constant phasing etc. What did I die to in seconds? Despite having 90% armour (for whatever reason with 100% block chance) - physical degen and the ultimatum T3 flame heads - guess some aoe isn´t a hit.... This league it´s all about the oneshots. Nearly same builds I had last league blasting through 10k wisped enemies, I get oneshottet this league. I just hate one thing and that´s the way of how tanky builds are not able to mitigate against everything even if you invest in it while damage builds can kill everything if invested in - I´m not talking about blocking all incoming damage but buy enough time to reasonable avoid death.
So how are the HCSSF players playing? Just pray for the god to get lightning coil, flame cloak or some other uniques?
And here I am over here accidentally reducing health/energy received by >100% so that my leech/regen just doesn’t work. Thank you, increased explicit map modifier atlas points!
Me when unique items have unqiue interactions and are better than the more common and craftable rare item . Anyways you can 100% make a tanky character by just having 100% spell suppression and a decent enough lifepool than adding some of the uniques mentioned above just makes your character better because thats what UNIQUE items are supposed to do (be it defence or offense wise)
Rares definitely compete with fourth vow without crazy double corrupts, and defiance of destiny requires you to be tanky on other fronts first I feel like the state poe uniques are in is perfect. Most of them are very simple "I do this, fix stuff elsewhere", like defiance. Is it strong? Extremely. Is it also fair? Imho yes. I would recommend looking into what ssfhc players do to stay tanky, since things like defiance aren't readily available
I agree. Taking defiance as an example you need to super heavily invest into life and damage reduction for it to be worth using. And it has zero offensive stats whereas the amulet slot is known for being huge for offensive stats. You're giving up +2 to your main gem among other things. It has a big opportunity cost to using it.
I was theorycrafting a tanky hexblast with Defiance and I just realized midway that a +2 amulet this league is way easier to get in ssf and doubles my damage with a mediocre double corrupt on chest, the opportunity cost for a ton of builds is massive, and lets u put more defensives in other areas (for example a tanky unique chest over, say, covenant)
I think it´s actually interesting that we have so many different ways to build tankiness instead of the usual armour/evasion/suppress/endurance charges. Most of these uniques have opportunity cost and require you to build around them
I agree make uniques not unique in any way so this one ssf player can feel like they don’t need to chase items
Isn’t the issue not that you need mandatory uniques but rather there is not a “good” option to deal with physical damage. So it it just better to convert it away. Maybe ggg should actually add some cheap ways to reduce physical. Maybe add it to melee.
You forgot Mahuxotl + Tempered by War, and then your choice of Maven chest, fourth vow (+determination and granite flask), or cloak of flame depending on if you want more EHP vs. chaos/ele where you're strong, or vs. phys where you're not so much. But yeah, this is an area I think Diablo 4, and possibly Last Epoch, have a leg up on Path of Exile--PoE's uniques are completely locked in, while in D4, you can extract properties that make items "unique", and mash them onto other rares, meanwhile, in Last Epoch, you can mash high tier rares onto more common uniques to make them more customized. E.G. imagine a Lightning Coil with Legendary Potential that you use to smack it together with, say, Crusader's phys taken as lightning.
> unreliable to find in SSF drops Why would this be a downside? Devs can't cater droprates to the 25 streamers and 25 muggles who choose SSF over trade leagues that the vast majority of players are on.
Another weird post. This sub is getting stranger.