Defenses

Hey guys & gals.

I’m struggling to get a handle on what defenses to build. Having played a variety of chars i’m not trying to push my sentinel. Now, sentinel defenses are one thing, but then i see an elementalist build with ZerO elemental protection, but a million dodge, full GH/CA and i’m all confused.

What are we looking for defense wise for viable 200+ arena builds? I know that “get as much as you can” is a pretty neat mantra, but i would like some actual benchmarks to work with (if anything to know if i’m pushing in the right direction).

Regards,

I’m not an expert but i can give you some basic points i learned.

In this game it’s important to multilayer alot of different protections and not just focus on one, some defences that can be aplied to every character pretty much are glancing blow and critical strike avoidance, those basicly half your damage taken and prevent you from being crit, you can get glancing blow pretty easly with a set glancing blow prefix (the one that gives you glancing blow for every other item with this affix), you either need 4 T5 or 5 T4 to cap it, for critical strike avoidance use the suffix until you 100% it.

After that it depends on your build, it can either be ward (that kinda blows right now), alot of health if you have leech, normal protections, dodge or multiple of those. If you don’t really know what you’re doing i would recommend just getting protections to 40% and either extra dodge or extra health (also for dodge you wanna aim to get 10x your level in dodge to get 50%, after that it’s diminishing returns and you have to really focus on it).

Hope it helps, i don’t really push arena but these things should aply.

Thanks for your answer!

I’ve noticed that on my sent, CA is good, but getting 100% isn’t a must vs. GB (which is the only stat i’m completly sure about), mostly because i can get nearly 60% CA (?) with gear alone on my pala, and spec into more if I feel like that’s problem.

But then there’s dodge, ele protections and poison/necro/void. Dodge i can push to about 60-65% with my build without going out of my way more than i would have to, so that seems pretty good as anything above 60% really hits that decline. But then that also leaves HP. What’s a good amount? and afaik and can tell, stacking a ton of hp isn’t that good cus it knocks the prots down and then that becomes a bigger problem.

I actually think it’s a very good system, since there’s always an affix you have to comprimise to get something else, but I really would like to hear from some of the guys that have been pushing high levels of arena. I’m not running an optimal setup atm and go to about 80-85 which includes that i’m simply not that good a player right now.

You’re also comparing different defences that don’t necessarily synergise. For example, protections aren’t too useful for a ward build since if you have lots of ward you need (unattainably) massive amounts of protections for the protection to be useful.

Dodge synergises well with ward and protections but not block since if you’re going block on a Sentinel you probably want to take the passive on the right of Forge Guard that gives you protections on block (can’t remember what it’s called, but it’s awesome & low down & you can take a load of block chance to mostly get to it) and if you dodge a hit, you’ve not blocked.

I’m slightly ahead of that. I’m not running a shield for x amount of reasons, so i’m assuming that Protections, GH (again - guessing that goes for everyone), dodge & CA (maybe). Obviously you don’t want them all and the ward+dodge > protections does actually make a ton of sense, and so does block vs. dodge on sentinels. I didn’t mention block for the above reason.

And again, even if the above is correct, I still wish I had some benchmarks to compare whatever build i am going for up against. And that brings us to where we are now :slight_smile:

Fair enough. There’s a pretty simple benchmark, if you die, you need more defences…

Helpful.

I understand you want benchmarks but it’s kinda hard to say since it depends on what character or mastery you’re going for (for example i got to 1k health on my werebear build really easly but for a mage getting there would require alot of investment).

The only benchmarks that are universal are %, so GB 100%, CA 100%, if you go for dodge 70%, everything else is get as much as you can, if you go for health go for as much health as possible, if you go for protections get some health and as much protections as possible, if you go for ward get as much ward as possible.

The best answer i can give you is either find a youtube video of a similar build and look at their values or ask directly about your build what values are recomended.

You also seem to underestimate critical strike avoidance, if you wanna push arena you need 100%, since even having 90% still leaves you with 10% chance to take FULL damage from a crit, at high waves that will probably be a one shoot.

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You might def. be right about crit avoidance, hands down. I can spec into the missing amount, so that’s why i havn’t been paying too much attention to it (and if what you say is correct, i’ve misread what it does).

Maybe I need to more specific, if anything to avoid Llama-type comments; Maxing everything out is obviously doable, but previously acquired experience in ARPGs dictate that there’s often (i’m trying remember an excecption) where there’s a limit to the amount of defense that makes sense vs. offense. Dodge is good example of this where there’s very soft “cap” if you may, due to the underlying mathematics that dictate how dodge is calculated. I noticed that past 60-65%, the investment in dodge vs other protections stopped seeming adequate.

At the same time, my prots are fairly high and i can withstand somewhat of a beating. In fact, surpassing 80% was fairly easy with my setup, but then it might make sense to spec into the remaining CA vs that last 5%.

Now, testing stuff is something I do no matter what, however there’s clearly some players that have a lot more experience than I do, and I find myself doubting if it’s a stat problem or me not being all that good of a player yet. So finding that chrisp balance requires time, that i’m currently investing, but whilst I’m doing that, there might be someone who can help point out that maybe going for 80% vs. 75% elemental protectins is negligable if you havn’t got 100% CA yet. Or - that the remaining 5% aren’t worth it, which could mean ekstra ignite change on an amulet for me.

So basically, i’m trying to weed out very minute details that can help me push a little further whilst I improve my own gameplay.

Ofc, it’s class and build specific, but I am asking to acquire some clarity as to if there’s a consensus around certain things. If anything because it might reduce some amount of trial and error.

:smiley:
Someone, I can’t remember who, did some maths & in general, protections are more useful that health in remaining alive, notwithstanding the fact that protection affixes do nothing for you if the damage you’re taking is for a different element.

Last Epoch is more about not dieing than maxing your dps in contrast to a game like PoE or D3. Taking one or two affixes as damage rather than defence is unlikely to mean you are able to progress further in the arena/monolith.

Edit: I’m curious as to your reasons for not using a shield though.

I see what you mean, i think pushing arena after a certain point is also more of a wave managment and not getting hit game, it’s important to know what enemies will destroy you and how to kite them properly (for this i would recommend watching some of the high arena pushers either on twitch or youtube, i think Lizardirl is really good, try asking in discord which people to watch for arena).

I deleted what i said about hp/protections formula, i’m not smart enough to talk about it lol.

See, that’s exactly why I’m asking! So thank you for that.

This is what it feels like right now: unique items + certain specific nodes push a build, yellow gear should primarily be maxing out defenses to push arena. Now, back in early d3 days, a lot of people did that on, as an example, the WD (shield and rain of toads build, anyone?) until someone made a glasscannon bear-spamming build that was 50 times better.

Okay, super thanks. That does make sense and I was actually wondering about the stacking, because it didn’t seem intuitive. Maybe this will be clarified in the future.

I wish I could see other peoples gear on the leaderboard, but ofc that has a some other problems. I’ll keep testing and make sure i have both CA/GH at 100% ^^ (it was literally 1 affix change in my build that i felt wonky about anyway, so that’s something).

That’s a simplification of what’s happening. One way to imagine what’s happening with protections & ward/hp is that the damage you take is spreads evenly over your hp/ward & your protection, but where you loose hp when you take damage, you don’t loose protection, so the protection you have soaks a certain amount of damage & that amount is based on the ratio of hp/ward to protection - damage taken = damage dealt * (health / (health + protection)). So if you have 100 health & 200 protection, you’ll only take 1/3 of the damage dealt.

The reason why protections are more useful than health in a high recovery build is that if you have a total of 1,000 health + protection & recover health at 100 per second (be it leech, health on hit or regen doesn’t matter), if have 1,000 health & take a hit for 999 it’ll take you nearly 10 seconds to recover back to full hp putting you at risk of a second hit big enough to kill you.

If you have 500 hp & 500 protection & take that same 999 damage hit (before protections), it’ll then take you ~5 seconds to recover back to full health.

If you had 100 hp & 900 protection & took the same hit, you’d be back up to full in a second. You can see why protections are therefore more useful than hp in keeping your character alive & that high recovery synergises very well with that.

Though most of this is for Audr3y.

So basically avoid stacking health unless there’s a very specific reason to (there might not even be one right now). Ofc it increases slightly as some protection-specific talent (?) points add both, but generally speaking.

I actually just saw a breakdown of prots vs health where it’s clear that protections give more effective health per point, so as long as you are out of “1 hit range”, protections are atleast superior to hp, again unless there’s a build specific reason to hp. Which there isn’t for me.

However, I notive that you mention ward here, so isn’t there an argument for protections + ward vs. dodge + ward somewhere in that calculation? (i really havn’t much experience with ward right now)

Yes you are right, i got it wrong that’s why i deleted that part of my comment after reading more about it, protections will almost always be better, good explanation though thanks :+1:

Yeah, it’s a bit counter-intuitive.

The thing with ward & protections is that it’s possible to stack a lot more ward than hp on certain classes/builds, therefore if you wanted to get the same level of % benefit from protection you need to have that much more. For example, if you have 800 hp & you want to get 80% damage reduction from protections you need a bit over 3,000 protection. If you have 2,000 ward, you would need a bit over 7,500 protection to get 80% damage reduction from protections. That’s why it’s not practical for a ward build to stack protections. Dodge, however, is entirely separate from health/ward & you can therefore stack enough of it to get a useful amount of benefit from it on a ward build (presumably, I’ve never actually tried it).

The formula for % damage reduction from protection does add ward to hp, but due to the above, it’s not practical for a ward-stacking build to use protections effectively, plus it’s a lot easier to just say health.

It’s not THAT counterintuitive, since the amount of ward that can be stacked would put a character out of any comparable hp range, if i’m not mistaken? Like, my current lich build on my very low lvl char is already stacking a lot of it with very little ward retention.

This is really helping, and thank you so much for clarifying.

That’s not what I think is counter-intuitive. If you want more survivability as a hp/protection character, you can get that by reducing your hp…

Arh ye, you’r right about that, but I do think there’s some sense to it.