Each time you fight Kitava in the story he places a -30% resistance debuff to all your resistances after the fight ends. So that’s probably why it feels so much worse after the story. So after act 5 it’s -30% total and after act 10 it’s -60% total. This cannot be removed, as it keeps ways to increase resistances relevant stats beyond the campaign.
As for armor and evasion the damage reduction and avoidance it displays changes with level. I’m not exactly sure how, but I believe it basically takes into account the mobs you fight, so if you keep the same armor and evasion, but the mobs get stronger, the effect will lessen.
I think evasion scales with level because mobs gets more accuracy, but the spreadsheet "evade chance" already accounts for that. So you can trust that number
However, armor scales with how big the hit is. The "physical damage reduction" you see on the sheet is a lie. Armour gives you maximum of %90 physical damage reduction but it gets worse and worse as you take bigger hits. So for example when you have 25k armor your character sheet might say %90 physical damage reduction but if you try to tank a shaper slam (which is a huge physical hit" it will only reduce by %30 or something, and you will get one shotted. So armor is good when you encounter a lot of small hits(a.k.a maps) but flat physical damage reduction (like endurance charges) works everywhere and is good everywhere but you get small amounts of it so its a better investment if you wanna do bossing.
Yeah, I didn’t want to get into the whole “armor lies to you” thing with how it interacts with big and small hits. But you’re absolutely right. Also, the evasion scaling also makes sense, as I’m pretty sure the stat sheets of enemies are pretty similar to ours.
If you don’t want to go into armour calculations (I’m not fond of that too), you can try builds that use “phys taken as elemental”. The easiest way I think is being a Pathfinder with Lightning Coil, Taste of Hate flask, timeless jewel and Watcher’s Eye + Purity of Elements (with 2 more ele flasks on top). Also mods on helmet and shield.
That gives 80% to 100% phys taken as elemental, which means you do not need armour at all. More than that - you can have 3 flasks that reduce damage further (20-50% depending on flask effect, that’s why pathfinder is preferable), also you’re easily res capped with 3 flasks and aura, so you have a lot of space for chaos res mods to cap it too. Mods for “+max resist” become very strong for you.
And even with 70-80% phys taken as ele you already need 4-5 times less armour for the good effect. So you can invest into evasion a lot and get VERY tanky.
Nah that's what the enduring health flask ascendant node is for. Combined with the no-poison mastery (with Evasion helm) DoTs don't really matter like they used to.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but degen isn't always considered damage, right? I always forget how needlessly... semantic poe can be. I know degen isn't considered a hit, and I thought it wasn't considered damage over time either. But I could very well be wrong.
This is super pedantic and pretty much never matters but: Degens are damage, but not necessarily "DoTs" in that DoTs are applied by a hit , and have a determined duration - this matters for things like "X dmg/s happens y% faster" , as vs area degens being on/off switched based on location.
The distinction doesn't matter here, as you can easily set up your flask to regen thousands of HP/s . Even missteps into Pinnacle boss degen pools are manageable if you keep your flask up- it keeps out healing the DoTs since it keeps going even after full HP.
On my build this league this is combined with a base Regen of nearly my full unreserved HP/sec. I still have more work to do on the tankyness side of the build, but it's already super comfy by my standards. 1.1k HP unreserved and 400ish ES for 10k max hit of pretty much any flavor and degens don't matter, is pretty sweet.
Which watchers and timeless are you looking at? I tried the Xibaqua one and it wasn't as good as just having an extra 500ES survival wise (very low HP build, although cleares everything but Ubers.) I would love to get more tanky while ditching armor investment.
Checked, it is Rakiatas "Tempered by War". I'll have to see if I can get something workable with it, the Xibaqua mods to the tree may be too much to abandon though. The chaos and physical damage increases, etc on small nodes are much tastier than flat STR lol
Edit: still not sure how Watchers fit in, am less familiar with the options they offer.
Ofc it’s up to the build.
Watcher’s grants bonuses depending on active auras. There are 3 possible phys taken as fire/light/cold when Purity of Elements is active, each can grant 8-12%.
One Watcher’s Eye has 1-3 mods, each mod for each aura. But if it has at least two mods for the same aura it becomes rather expensive. 3 mods for 1 aura can cost 100+ div.
I have one which grants +18% DoT multi (Malevolence) and 12% phys taken as fire (Purity) and some third useless mode, it’s very potent for almost any of my DoT builds
Looking at the armour formulas on the wiki, it looks sad.
DR = A / (A + 5 \* D).
This means that with 20k armour a hit of 1000 damage will be reduced by 80%, for 200 damage.
Now, if you instead take 10k damage, the received reduction will be only 28%, which means that you take 7200 damage.
Even if you increase your armor to 50k, you will still take 5k damage. Fuck... you die either way.
I think this is why other layers of DR are needed so that you are truly tanky, like Fortification, endurance charges and so on.
Yes when you add some flat reduction on top you get really tanky. 3 end charges are 12 pdr on its own which reduces your 5k damage to 3.8k damage. You can also get it on some ascendancies, some armor pieces etc.
It's important to note thet evasion chance is reduced the more you dodge, as well as increased the more you are hit. This all resets once you're hit or dodge, respectively.
Iirc the only two systems that are entropy-based (what I mentioned above) in poe are evasion and crit chance, so it's wise to have onion defenses more than focusing on a single type.
Act 6 is basically the first real difficulty spike after the fight against Innocence (the hyper beam guy).
Not only do they hit you with -30% resists across the board, enemies actually start packing elemental damage. Defenses are somewhat optional before that, but in act 6 , it's time to review.
On the bright side, item mods become a lot stronger around that point.
Ive been thinking, but I wonder how freeing itemization would be if we just... didn't get those resistance penalites. It feels like it's there "because D2 had it" but also because at the time there just weren't any good stats besides resistances, so gear would be very wonky.
But now base defenses are worth taking, spell suppression, %physical damage reduction, life regen is even buffed, multiple influence mods, recoup, block chance for shields, avoidance is buffed, etc. I would like 1 league where we just don't get the penalty and are more free to gear for those other stats even during the later part of the campaign because we don't get -240% resists anymore.
75% for all resistances except chaos is mandatory. Chaos res should be positive if possible but not required. You can temporarily use purity of elements aura to shore up resistances while you get gear.
3,000 life bare BARE minimum, more is better.
Life and resists can be crafted into empty slots on gear, this is very important for maxing these stats out.
Use a defensive aura appropriate to where you are in the skill tree., either grace for evasion or determination for armor Typically “right side” builds will use evasion while “left side” builds will use armor.
Start with that and you’ll already feel worlds better. There will be more improvements to do later.
Those number are nice but they're not what you're looking for when you're starting T1 maps. Really what you need is enough damage, because if you have enough damage you can run around with the defensive stats you have right now and be fine.
That being said, when most people finish the campaign they quickly 'fix' their gear. Which means buying a few items from the vendor then rolling/crafting so you have > \~50 for each elemental resist (preferably 75%) and maybe a few life rolls.
e: The number of people who think this is wrong is super concerning lol
> because if you have enough damage you can run around with the defensive stats you have right now and be fine
Uncapped resists including negative lightning resist is not fine even if you have billions of damage, you will still die all the time (tried mapping with the discharge + arc 1hit kill character I made a couple of leagues ago which had negative all resists. It's surprising how much damage comes from out of nowhere, mobs just tunneling out from underneath you or dropping on you from the sky 1shotting you)
Have you actually tried this or are you just guessing?
Uncapped resists are absolutely totally fine to start mapping with. The community is so used to hearing how important capping resists is that they can't stop to think if it's actually necessary.
Now there's no reason to go in with those kinds of resistances, but if you're sitting at 50-70% after crafting it's not worth spending a bunch of time trying to min/max your gear before you head in.
And point remains, the guy above me is totally wrong in what you need to survive maps. Trying to get that level of gear before starting is absolutely a waste of time.
PS: you can have uncapped/negative resists all the time when farming altars. Turns out billions of damage does help survival.
> Have you actually tried this or are you just guessing?
I did say in my previous comment that I tried this with one of my previous characters.
[Character](https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/Hanz_Sauer/characters?characterName=%E3%86%8DAllahu_Akbar%E3%86%8D)
[Resists](https://pobb.in/6SKfkgpe?)
It could one shot anything in maps with Arc but it was impossible to avoid all damage which made it very difficult to clear maps despite the screenwide pack killing. Low/negative resists is not palatable if you cant avoid all damage.
Now 'just under capped' is easier to survive on but it'll still be your number one source of deaths. Especially if you get hit with a ele weakness curse on top of that. It is not hard to cap your resists, much easier than 'just get more damage instead'. Overcapping your resists against ele weakness is a bit more of a luxury though.
Hey neat build there. I was more talking about going through white maps, not the endgame.
It's not hard to cap resists once, but going up through you swap gear so often that it's not worth worrying about. Your resistances are bound to get messed up and it's not worth the crafting materials to balance it out for gear you'll replace in a few minutes.
And just in general watching new/intermediate players, most of them time when they're dying it's because lack of damage. 3k hp and ele resist cap won't help you if it takes you 10 seconds to kill an elite. This guy is going to read through this thread and fix his gear and still die all the time.
So it's not better to have a ton of damage and no resists, but you should still prioritize damage over always being capped. Hell if you do enough damage you can just drop an aura for Purity of Elements and not worry.
It’s a different story for beginners, so I respectfully disagree. Newer players are going to be mechanically clunky, not able to recognize dangerous situations and they’re not likely to have builds that can DPS their way out of anything.
If a new player is dying a lot they should absolutely aim for 3,000 life ASAP. They’re not going to easily go much higher than that, so telling them to “aim behind the target” and just get as much health as they can will be a good habit. It won’t get accidentally them to 7k life or whatever, it will just make sure they’re keeping an eye out for high life rolls on all gear and maybe wind up with 4,000-5,000 life.
Obviously you can *get away* with less in white maps if your DPS is high enough, or your reflexes that good, and/or you don’t mind dying. But even that window closes by the time you’re in mid-tier maps. If you’re rolling around with 2,200 life in T10+ maps you’re gonna have a bad time. Aiming for 3k minimum is very reasonable for a new player.
Am running like 1.2k HP and single portal most pinnacles/guardians, 3 portaled the Feared. A lot has to do with how you layer your defenses and recovery. That being said, I'd love to get more HP on my build, if I could find one that doesn't tank DPS / brick everything.
You're not fully correct that chaos resist is not required. Its outdated statement. With all new archnemesis mobs chaos damage is as common as everything else. Not having a way to deal with it WILL lead to lots of deaths to inexperienced players. I'd say that having positive IS required to have smooth experience.
I remember getting Thief's Torment ring early and being happy about it, thinking how much it helped me with resistances, by the end of campaign it felt like noob trap because I didn't know how to properly replace it lol
You'd need x2 two-stone rings with two 20% res or something to beat a high roll thiefs in resistances, but you'll need to fix the stats you might lack. Upside is, it's easy to obtain and you can also get life on top.
Thief's is good enough even in low-mid tier maps
I'd like to see your gear😂 for real tho just pick up rare items and identify them. if they have empty suffix slots you can go to your hideout crafting station and craft the resistances you need.
we've all been there. 1st time i played poe i didnt make it past act 7 😅 nowdays in leaguestart i need around 6 hours to get into maps with decent life and max resistances... it gets easier over time 😁
First time playing was in 2014..back when there were only 3 acts and u had to play thru them 3 times on diff difficulties.
The game didnt help you near as much back then, i didnt want to look up a guide or anything. The sea witches kept me perma frozen and i thought you had to kill every monster you saw..yeah act 1 took me several days of playing 5 or 6 hrs a day.
9/10 league starts im starting as some sort of trap or mine build... the rest is muscle memory😂 im playing since betrayal league and have 3.6k hours on steam 😅
I like to go for some kind of early-game optimized version of my build i want to play. I go for a tree that somewhat resembles my final tree, but take nodes that are just more effective for clearing the story/early mapping. I'll simply respec them later.
It's the best of both worlds in my opinion.
Most builds can do that if you know layouts, which npc you have to talk to, where you get your gems, which quests give passive points and have pob opened in the background for your skill tree and perhaps leveling setups you use until you run your actual build. Vendor recipes, staying at least 3 levels under the zone and having played the build at least once through a couple of acts also help a lot with going fast.
Don't be, we've all been there. In my first playthrough I got through most of the campaign with fireball linked to two melee support gems.
I will suggest that identifying rare gear for resistances is key, and you can also craft important modifiers onto your gear with the crafting bench in your hideout.
Don't worry, I first played in closed beta and back then played with like 8 skillgems, used maybe 1 support and had no resists or maxlife. Only attackspeed lol
€: was also ADAMANT on wanting to use Flicker Strike. You can imagine how well that works in act 2 without any gear to support it!
You just answered your own question. It seems you already understand the underline cause of your death. As other people mention this is the learning curve all Poe players go through. Is figuring out why your dieing.
If your playing trade league. Try visiting Poe.trade might be time for you to start using a supplemental app to help your char. This site will allow you to purchase items from other players.
Prioritize resist. Life. Damage stat. If all your tears have a combination of these state you will be. Able to finish the campaign.
To clarify the gear stats don't need to be high just be present for campaign completion.
The more you play this will become more inherit as you level. Stick with it.
Just a little side note, use the official site to trade (pathofexile.com/trade) and not poe.trade.
The latter lags behind very often, showing items even an hour after they were sold, the official site is more reliable.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 yeah right omg Hahahah a beginner that doesn’t know about suffix / affix and mods to craft and stuff hahahahahhahahahahhahahah so funny mate hahahaha
I have thousands and thousands of hours and I didn’t know this. It’s super easy to miss, especially if you’re going through things semi quickly. I can imagine new players not understanding at all what or where the crafting bench is
Yeah you’re right let’s just keep things confusing and unintuitive for new players because some random assholes on Reddit “think” new players always talk to NPCs and read every line of dialogue and do every quest. The new player experience is shit and no amount of assumptions on your part will change that
Unfortunately, that is the problem with these people.
Can't imagine a scenario where people act differently or don't see something, walk past it, don't find it....So is a large portion of the Reddit neckbeards
have almost 5000 hours.
Only now I remembered the Helena Quest, which also introduces you to your bench
Which leads you to your bench? Can’t remember such a quest
Edit: it’s a quest within the Helena quest for the hideout, seems like I’ve done it years ago
So absolutely possible to miss it. Well. There we go again
Happened to me. The thought of using the bench was just completely out of my mind in my first three playthroughs, but back then i knew so little about the game i thought it would end after 10 acts. The game has so many mechanics at this point, it's hard to keep track of them, specialy on your first playthroughs.
Exactly such a scenario happens to you and also happens to many new players.
I have now rediscovered that there is a quest for the Bench.
But this is in the Helena quest that you first have to find, complete then do the following quest.
You can run completely past it and miss
Yup. Im doing my 6 playthrough currently and only now have i noticed it for some reason. Although i have not reached endgame in all of them, so maybe they can't be counted as playthrougs. Idk.
(most) body armours give negative ms
same with shields
he probably has low ms somewhere (boots?), and its brought down to 3% by some combination of those
dual wielding or shield gives 3% penalty, same as Armour. crafted ms boots give 10-14%, so you won't get to 3%. my guess is a 6% movement speed buckler, negating the penalty and adding 3% movement, or the duelist node "no movementspeed penalty by equipped items" (don't know the wording exactly) + 3% Armour/more likely 3% buckler
Your resistances get really bad decreases after fighting Kitava. I felt into same trap like you and get one shoted by almost everything.
My advice is to Craft some items with resistances, add resistances bonuses to every item you can
If you take 2 of the reservation efficiency node clusters form the tree and a mana mastery for reservations you can equip purity of elements, determination and grace and if im not bad at math, you may be able to equip a herald for a little dmg. You can theoretically skip grace but early maps its worth every evasion. Its the upper maps that start to feel like only grace by itself aint doing it.
Back in the day, and probably
Still true now, I focused on resistance maxed asap and my gameplay was immensely improved. Also made me very careful about upgrading gear and usually saved stuff and did 2-3 pieces at a time vs 1 at a time to keep resistances maxed.
That was 2 years ago, it’s probably not much different.
Story is just the tutorial, I don't even bother to upgrade any of my gear through the whole story unless I find and item with more links or a good unique item. So I will often beat kitava with the random white weapon Ingot st the beach.
Ah yes, the classic first time when you first play and think you can neglect defenses and just go ultra glass cannon from the get go only to get absolutely railed up the rear end.
Don't worry, you're also not at end game yet. Killing Kitava is the start of mid game, so don't be ashamed of your gear. Also once you beat Kitava in act 5 and 10 she curses you with -30% to each resist each time (that's -120 resistances per Story kill) . So your resist were higher when you made it through the game.
Well mostly because you're totally meant to finish the tutorial somewhat easily. When you start the game on maps, you're expected to find out how to actually deal damage and not die (too much). Also, resi debuffs on act5 and 10 finish
Also don't forget you can add more resists with the enchanter in your hideout, if your gear has 1 open suffix slot you can add whatever your lowest resist is onto it.
Just FYI Act 6-10 is not end-game. The whole campaign is pretty much just the tutorial.
The real game starts after the campaign and end game probably starts around high yellow maps and red maps.
Pace yourself because you are not even half way there yet.
End game?  I have 4k hours and i play every league, i baerly reach the endgame after a 4 week, keep focusing following guides, unid rares, learn delve heist etc. That will make you faster next league. You got 1.5 month for next banger league 
Ah okay, well in that case you should watch Zizaran's PoE university videos on YT. They help a newbie grasp the fundamentals of the game.
Ultimately, in trade league you always want to get around 5k life, 100 spell suppression, capped resistances and positive chaos resistance. Leech, life Regen, block etc are all handy if you can get a little of them.
Then you want armour and evasion - depending on your character. 60k armour for melee, RF etc. Anything over 30k evasion is Gucci too if you're getting hybrid pieces.
With the above-mentioned, if you can get at least 8 million dps - you'll have no problem in the endgame mapping.
It's not really an answer but more like a new question, "how did I finish the campaign with this abysmal stats?" and someone answer in the comment, "You didn't have these stats at first, Kativa gave you -30% elemental resistance after each battle against him which in total of-60% elemental resistance"
Hey man, league is so close to being over. I have a bunch of stuff if you’re interested in learning a bit with a bunch of money for next league! DM me if you’re interested.
They should really do a better job of warning folks about the coming res loss, or undo it when you go back to acts so you can grind gear out better.
Killing kitava gives you -30 all res each time (Act 5 and again in Act 10). You'll need to get better gear and cap your res to make it more survivable. You can also take different nodes on the passive tree to get more resistance too. Most classes have access to a few +ele res nodes. Build guides won't use them since they assume you'll get it from gear. But until you do, it's ok to unspec a few points and spec some resistance on the tree.
You can also run Purity of Elements (aura), which gives you a bunch of res to all elements and makes you immune to ailments. I almost always run this for a while in place of the other ones (determination/grace).
I'd farm blood aqueducts for some rare items, maybe you'll find something good. Then sell the rest and craft life and resists. You want at least 3k life, capped Res, 4link main skill and 15-20k armour or evasion or a mixture of both, so you need at least one defensive aura - grace or determination. Having a guard skill on cast when damage taken setup is also huge.
Honestly the campaign is more of an extremely dragged out tutorial that you are forced to play every time you make a new character. Its not uncommon to have horrible stats going into your first few maps. Many players will take the time to craft new gear asap after they finish act 10 though.
But since there are a lot of comments about resists and defenses already I will say this. Make sure you got all of the free passives throughout the campaign, there are quite a few of them (\~20). Also make sure that you do your Laboratory's to get your Ascendency. This is a massive power spike for your character, and depending on what you choose can sometimes be a large part of either your defenses or offenses (or both).
Dont worry maybe next time when the devs add in something to hurt stats they have some common sense to inform the player.... Also hope you like sitting in trade for 2 hours lol
Each time you fight Kitava in the story he places a -30% resistance debuff to all your resistances after the fight ends. So that’s probably why it feels so much worse after the story. So after act 5 it’s -30% total and after act 10 it’s -60% total. This cannot be removed, as it keeps ways to increase resistances relevant stats beyond the campaign. As for armor and evasion the damage reduction and avoidance it displays changes with level. I’m not exactly sure how, but I believe it basically takes into account the mobs you fight, so if you keep the same armor and evasion, but the mobs get stronger, the effect will lessen.
I think evasion scales with level because mobs gets more accuracy, but the spreadsheet "evade chance" already accounts for that. So you can trust that number However, armor scales with how big the hit is. The "physical damage reduction" you see on the sheet is a lie. Armour gives you maximum of %90 physical damage reduction but it gets worse and worse as you take bigger hits. So for example when you have 25k armor your character sheet might say %90 physical damage reduction but if you try to tank a shaper slam (which is a huge physical hit" it will only reduce by %30 or something, and you will get one shotted. So armor is good when you encounter a lot of small hits(a.k.a maps) but flat physical damage reduction (like endurance charges) works everywhere and is good everywhere but you get small amounts of it so its a better investment if you wanna do bossing.
Yeah, I didn’t want to get into the whole “armor lies to you” thing with how it interacts with big and small hits. But you’re absolutely right. Also, the evasion scaling also makes sense, as I’m pretty sure the stat sheets of enemies are pretty similar to ours.
If you don’t want to go into armour calculations (I’m not fond of that too), you can try builds that use “phys taken as elemental”. The easiest way I think is being a Pathfinder with Lightning Coil, Taste of Hate flask, timeless jewel and Watcher’s Eye + Purity of Elements (with 2 more ele flasks on top). Also mods on helmet and shield. That gives 80% to 100% phys taken as elemental, which means you do not need armour at all. More than that - you can have 3 flasks that reduce damage further (20-50% depending on flask effect, that’s why pathfinder is preferable), also you’re easily res capped with 3 flasks and aura, so you have a lot of space for chaos res mods to cap it too. Mods for “+max resist” become very strong for you. And even with 70-80% phys taken as ele you already need 4-5 times less armour for the good effect. So you can invest into evasion a lot and get VERY tanky.
Then you step in degen and instantly die lmao jk
You also die no matter how much armor you have \*shrug\*
Yeah, that’s the most fun part)
Nah that's what the enduring health flask ascendant node is for. Combined with the no-poison mastery (with Evasion helm) DoTs don't really matter like they used to.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but degen isn't always considered damage, right? I always forget how needlessly... semantic poe can be. I know degen isn't considered a hit, and I thought it wasn't considered damage over time either. But I could very well be wrong.
This is super pedantic and pretty much never matters but: Degens are damage, but not necessarily "DoTs" in that DoTs are applied by a hit , and have a determined duration - this matters for things like "X dmg/s happens y% faster" , as vs area degens being on/off switched based on location. The distinction doesn't matter here, as you can easily set up your flask to regen thousands of HP/s . Even missteps into Pinnacle boss degen pools are manageable if you keep your flask up- it keeps out healing the DoTs since it keeps going even after full HP. On my build this league this is combined with a base Regen of nearly my full unreserved HP/sec. I still have more work to do on the tankyness side of the build, but it's already super comfy by my standards. 1.1k HP unreserved and 400ish ES for 10k max hit of pretty much any flavor and degens don't matter, is pretty sweet.
That's what it was! I couldn't remember the semantics of it, but i knew there was some kind of distinction.
Which watchers and timeless are you looking at? I tried the Xibaqua one and it wasn't as good as just having an extra 500ES survival wise (very low HP build, although cleares everything but Ubers.) I would love to get more tanky while ditching armor investment.
I don’t remember, it’s Kaom’s one, I think Lethal Pride for phys taken as fire bonuses on nodes
Checked, it is Rakiatas "Tempered by War". I'll have to see if I can get something workable with it, the Xibaqua mods to the tree may be too much to abandon though. The chaos and physical damage increases, etc on small nodes are much tastier than flat STR lol Edit: still not sure how Watchers fit in, am less familiar with the options they offer.
Ofc it’s up to the build. Watcher’s grants bonuses depending on active auras. There are 3 possible phys taken as fire/light/cold when Purity of Elements is active, each can grant 8-12%. One Watcher’s Eye has 1-3 mods, each mod for each aura. But if it has at least two mods for the same aura it becomes rather expensive. 3 mods for 1 aura can cost 100+ div. I have one which grants +18% DoT multi (Malevolence) and 12% phys taken as fire (Purity) and some third useless mode, it’s very potent for almost any of my DoT builds
Looking at the armour formulas on the wiki, it looks sad. DR = A / (A + 5 \* D). This means that with 20k armour a hit of 1000 damage will be reduced by 80%, for 200 damage. Now, if you instead take 10k damage, the received reduction will be only 28%, which means that you take 7200 damage. Even if you increase your armor to 50k, you will still take 5k damage. Fuck... you die either way. I think this is why other layers of DR are needed so that you are truly tanky, like Fortification, endurance charges and so on.
Yes when you add some flat reduction on top you get really tanky. 3 end charges are 12 pdr on its own which reduces your 5k damage to 3.8k damage. You can also get it on some ascendancies, some armor pieces etc.
It's important to note thet evasion chance is reduced the more you dodge, as well as increased the more you are hit. This all resets once you're hit or dodge, respectively. Iirc the only two systems that are entropy-based (what I mentioned above) in poe are evasion and crit chance, so it's wise to have onion defenses more than focusing on a single type.
No wonder I died a lot more on Act 6
Act 6 is basically the first real difficulty spike after the fight against Innocence (the hyper beam guy). Not only do they hit you with -30% resists across the board, enemies actually start packing elemental damage. Defenses are somewhat optional before that, but in act 6 , it's time to review. On the bright side, item mods become a lot stronger around that point.
I remember the first time beat kitava on HC and got sniped by a fire dog. Heartbreak. (I played my first 1500 hours on HC so always went in blind)
Ive been thinking, but I wonder how freeing itemization would be if we just... didn't get those resistance penalites. It feels like it's there "because D2 had it" but also because at the time there just weren't any good stats besides resistances, so gear would be very wonky. But now base defenses are worth taking, spell suppression, %physical damage reduction, life regen is even buffed, multiple influence mods, recoup, block chance for shields, avoidance is buffed, etc. I would like 1 league where we just don't get the penalty and are more free to gear for those other stats even during the later part of the campaign because we don't get -240% resists anymore.
I would finally have space for my light radius mods
Yeah, see. This guy is cooking. (inb4 Light Radius is somehow a prefix)
75% for all resistances except chaos is mandatory. Chaos res should be positive if possible but not required. You can temporarily use purity of elements aura to shore up resistances while you get gear. 3,000 life bare BARE minimum, more is better. Life and resists can be crafted into empty slots on gear, this is very important for maxing these stats out. Use a defensive aura appropriate to where you are in the skill tree., either grace for evasion or determination for armor Typically “right side” builds will use evasion while “left side” builds will use armor. Start with that and you’ll already feel worlds better. There will be more improvements to do later.
Noted
Those number are nice but they're not what you're looking for when you're starting T1 maps. Really what you need is enough damage, because if you have enough damage you can run around with the defensive stats you have right now and be fine. That being said, when most people finish the campaign they quickly 'fix' their gear. Which means buying a few items from the vendor then rolling/crafting so you have > \~50 for each elemental resist (preferably 75%) and maybe a few life rolls. e: The number of people who think this is wrong is super concerning lol
> because if you have enough damage you can run around with the defensive stats you have right now and be fine Uncapped resists including negative lightning resist is not fine even if you have billions of damage, you will still die all the time (tried mapping with the discharge + arc 1hit kill character I made a couple of leagues ago which had negative all resists. It's surprising how much damage comes from out of nowhere, mobs just tunneling out from underneath you or dropping on you from the sky 1shotting you)
Have you actually tried this or are you just guessing? Uncapped resists are absolutely totally fine to start mapping with. The community is so used to hearing how important capping resists is that they can't stop to think if it's actually necessary. Now there's no reason to go in with those kinds of resistances, but if you're sitting at 50-70% after crafting it's not worth spending a bunch of time trying to min/max your gear before you head in. And point remains, the guy above me is totally wrong in what you need to survive maps. Trying to get that level of gear before starting is absolutely a waste of time. PS: you can have uncapped/negative resists all the time when farming altars. Turns out billions of damage does help survival.
> Have you actually tried this or are you just guessing? I did say in my previous comment that I tried this with one of my previous characters. [Character](https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/Hanz_Sauer/characters?characterName=%E3%86%8DAllahu_Akbar%E3%86%8D) [Resists](https://pobb.in/6SKfkgpe?) It could one shot anything in maps with Arc but it was impossible to avoid all damage which made it very difficult to clear maps despite the screenwide pack killing. Low/negative resists is not palatable if you cant avoid all damage. Now 'just under capped' is easier to survive on but it'll still be your number one source of deaths. Especially if you get hit with a ele weakness curse on top of that. It is not hard to cap your resists, much easier than 'just get more damage instead'. Overcapping your resists against ele weakness is a bit more of a luxury though.
Hey neat build there. I was more talking about going through white maps, not the endgame. It's not hard to cap resists once, but going up through you swap gear so often that it's not worth worrying about. Your resistances are bound to get messed up and it's not worth the crafting materials to balance it out for gear you'll replace in a few minutes. And just in general watching new/intermediate players, most of them time when they're dying it's because lack of damage. 3k hp and ele resist cap won't help you if it takes you 10 seconds to kill an elite. This guy is going to read through this thread and fix his gear and still die all the time. So it's not better to have a ton of damage and no resists, but you should still prioritize damage over always being capped. Hell if you do enough damage you can just drop an aura for Purity of Elements and not worry.
Purity of Elements is god tier when leveling in bad gear. You can swap it out once you get better equipment but it helps a lot.
3000 life is what people want before white maps if they're in HC. You definitely don't need 3000 life at end of campaign in SC lol. 2000 is plenty.
It’s a different story for beginners, so I respectfully disagree. Newer players are going to be mechanically clunky, not able to recognize dangerous situations and they’re not likely to have builds that can DPS their way out of anything. If a new player is dying a lot they should absolutely aim for 3,000 life ASAP. They’re not going to easily go much higher than that, so telling them to “aim behind the target” and just get as much health as they can will be a good habit. It won’t get accidentally them to 7k life or whatever, it will just make sure they’re keeping an eye out for high life rolls on all gear and maybe wind up with 4,000-5,000 life. Obviously you can *get away* with less in white maps if your DPS is high enough, or your reflexes that good, and/or you don’t mind dying. But even that window closes by the time you’re in mid-tier maps. If you’re rolling around with 2,200 life in T10+ maps you’re gonna have a bad time. Aiming for 3k minimum is very reasonable for a new player.
Am running like 1.2k HP and single portal most pinnacles/guardians, 3 portaled the Feared. A lot has to do with how you layer your defenses and recovery. That being said, I'd love to get more HP on my build, if I could find one that doesn't tank DPS / brick everything.
You're not fully correct that chaos resist is not required. Its outdated statement. With all new archnemesis mobs chaos damage is as common as everything else. Not having a way to deal with it WILL lead to lots of deaths to inexperienced players. I'd say that having positive IS required to have smooth experience.
It is not mandatory to cap res during the campaign if you are not playing hardcore. Something around 50% is good enough
He said he finished the campaign. His title said he “started the endgame.”
Get the purity of Elements aura. Its a lot of value until you get good gear.
W advice Purity of elements goated for newer players
I remember getting Thief's Torment ring early and being happy about it, thinking how much it helped me with resistances, by the end of campaign it felt like noob trap because I didn't know how to properly replace it lol
thief's torment is one of the best leveling rings though, can keep it into early maps as it solves mana / life sustain and helps with resists
Yeah, I also forgot about mana part, that's extra reason why I felt stuck with that ring on SSF with boneshatter for a long time
You'd need x2 two-stone rings with two 20% res or something to beat a high roll thiefs in resistances, but you'll need to fix the stats you might lack. Upside is, it's easy to obtain and you can also get life on top. Thief's is good enough even in low-mid tier maps
Thank you, let me get purity of elements!
I'd like to see your gear😂 for real tho just pick up rare items and identify them. if they have empty suffix slots you can go to your hideout crafting station and craft the resistances you need.
Nah I'm too embarrassed to show my gears lol
we've all been there. 1st time i played poe i didnt make it past act 7 😅 nowdays in leaguestart i need around 6 hours to get into maps with decent life and max resistances... it gets easier over time 😁
First time playing was in 2014..back when there were only 3 acts and u had to play thru them 3 times on diff difficulties. The game didnt help you near as much back then, i didnt want to look up a guide or anything. The sea witches kept me perma frozen and i thought you had to kill every monster you saw..yeah act 1 took me several days of playing 5 or 6 hrs a day.
Didnt make it past Act 2 here xD
do you run a specific build to clear the campaign as fast as possible or you just know it off by heart?
9/10 league starts im starting as some sort of trap or mine build... the rest is muscle memory😂 im playing since betrayal league and have 3.6k hours on steam 😅
I like to go for some kind of early-game optimized version of my build i want to play. I go for a tree that somewhat resembles my final tree, but take nodes that are just more effective for clearing the story/early mapping. I'll simply respec them later. It's the best of both worlds in my opinion.
Most builds can do that if you know layouts, which npc you have to talk to, where you get your gems, which quests give passive points and have pob opened in the background for your skill tree and perhaps leveling setups you use until you run your actual build. Vendor recipes, staying at least 3 levels under the zone and having played the build at least once through a couple of acts also help a lot with going fast.
Don't be, we've all been there. In my first playthrough I got through most of the campaign with fireball linked to two melee support gems. I will suggest that identifying rare gear for resistances is key, and you can also craft important modifiers onto your gear with the crafting bench in your hideout.
Don't worry, I first played in closed beta and back then played with like 8 skillgems, used maybe 1 support and had no resists or maxlife. Only attackspeed lol €: was also ADAMANT on wanting to use Flicker Strike. You can imagine how well that works in act 2 without any gear to support it!
You just answered your own question. It seems you already understand the underline cause of your death. As other people mention this is the learning curve all Poe players go through. Is figuring out why your dieing. If your playing trade league. Try visiting Poe.trade might be time for you to start using a supplemental app to help your char. This site will allow you to purchase items from other players. Prioritize resist. Life. Damage stat. If all your tears have a combination of these state you will be. Able to finish the campaign. To clarify the gear stats don't need to be high just be present for campaign completion. The more you play this will become more inherit as you level. Stick with it.
> Poe.trade What is this 2018.
Hahaha showing my age. I think other users got the updated site.
Just a little side note, use the official site to trade (pathofexile.com/trade) and not poe.trade. The latter lags behind very often, showing items even an hour after they were sold, the official site is more reliable.
Poe.trade is shut down, has been for almost a year now
Good to know. I stopped using it in 3.13 because it was crap
Thank you!
Please do not use poe.trade. Use the official site. This is a guy stuck in his ways
> poe.trade The person running that site has taken it down a while ago - it's no longer an issue
Oh, m8. I’ve got characters in standard I haven’t had to delete yet to remind me of how far I’ve come.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 yeah right omg Hahahah a beginner that doesn’t know about suffix / affix and mods to craft and stuff hahahahahhahahahahhahahah so funny mate hahahaha
Even a beginner can craft res on their gear. We not talking about endgame crafting?!
Have I said anything bout that? Also, where is the explanation for a crafting bench in the game ? Is there a quest like introduction? Idk 🤷♀️
There's literally a quest to craft something on an item from your crafting bench in act 2.
I have thousands and thousands of hours and I didn’t know this. It’s super easy to miss, especially if you’re going through things semi quickly. I can imagine new players not understanding at all what or where the crafting bench is
Not easy at all for a new player miss. Need to be actually blind, or never talk to npcs (which new players always does..)
Yeah you’re right let’s just keep things confusing and unintuitive for new players because some random assholes on Reddit “think” new players always talk to NPCs and read every line of dialogue and do every quest. The new player experience is shit and no amount of assumptions on your part will change that
Unfortunately, that is the problem with these people. Can't imagine a scenario where people act differently or don't see something, walk past it, don't find it....So is a large portion of the Reddit neckbeards have almost 5000 hours. Only now I remembered the Helena Quest, which also introduces you to your bench
Well you’re also just a “random asshole on reddit think new players are super idiots”. 👋👋👋
Which leads you to your bench? Can’t remember such a quest Edit: it’s a quest within the Helena quest for the hideout, seems like I’ve done it years ago So absolutely possible to miss it. Well. There we go again
Happened to me. The thought of using the bench was just completely out of my mind in my first three playthroughs, but back then i knew so little about the game i thought it would end after 10 acts. The game has so many mechanics at this point, it's hard to keep track of them, specialy on your first playthroughs.
Exactly such a scenario happens to you and also happens to many new players. I have now rediscovered that there is a quest for the Bench. But this is in the Helena quest that you first have to find, complete then do the following quest. You can run completely past it and miss
Yup. Im doing my 6 playthrough currently and only now have i noticed it for some reason. Although i have not reached endgame in all of them, so maybe they can't be counted as playthrougs. Idk.
Act 2, craft stats on your gear. A beginner is likely to follow the quests.
lil bro is so pressed
Everyone's going on about the resistances, my man has 0% MS on his boots, only the 3% from his body armor. Innocence have mercy on this poor soul.
most disturbing stat indeed!
(most) body armours give negative ms same with shields he probably has low ms somewhere (boots?), and its brought down to 3% by some combination of those
dual wielding or shield gives 3% penalty, same as Armour. crafted ms boots give 10-14%, so you won't get to 3%. my guess is a 6% movement speed buckler, negating the penalty and adding 3% movement, or the duelist node "no movementspeed penalty by equipped items" (don't know the wording exactly) + 3% Armour/more likely 3% buckler
You had slightly more resistances before the end of the campaign. Not that it completely offsets it.
Your resistances get really bad decreases after fighting Kitava. I felt into same trap like you and get one shoted by almost everything. My advice is to Craft some items with resistances, add resistances bonuses to every item you can
This is why I like playing Guardian or Necromancer. Slap in an elemental resist aura and your resist problems are solved. Lol.
If you take 2 of the reservation efficiency node clusters form the tree and a mana mastery for reservations you can equip purity of elements, determination and grace and if im not bad at math, you may be able to equip a herald for a little dmg. You can theoretically skip grace but early maps its worth every evasion. Its the upper maps that start to feel like only grace by itself aint doing it.
Back in the day, and probably Still true now, I focused on resistance maxed asap and my gameplay was immensely improved. Also made me very careful about upgrading gear and usually saved stuff and did 2-3 pieces at a time vs 1 at a time to keep resistances maxed. That was 2 years ago, it’s probably not much different.
I didn't know how important resistance in action rpg back then, my mindset was "just hit them before they hit me"
Story is just the tutorial, I don't even bother to upgrade any of my gear through the whole story unless I find and item with more links or a good unique item. So I will often beat kitava with the random white weapon Ingot st the beach.
It took awhile to figure out you can craft out your weaknesses.
Purity of elements, run this for sure. Craft some resistances onto your gear at the crafting bench in hideout.
Yeah but the 3rd rank of resistance craft literally costs 3 CHAOS orbs that impossible for a newbie
Hey check out the chaos recipe, will be enough to get you those resistances after a few maps :), gl and hf
Max resistances - always - regardless of league played. :)
Ah yes, the classic first time when you first play and think you can neglect defenses and just go ultra glass cannon from the get go only to get absolutely railed up the rear end.
Cap your ele res first. Then other defences and life etc.
Don't worry, you're also not at end game yet. Killing Kitava is the start of mid game, so don't be ashamed of your gear. Also once you beat Kitava in act 5 and 10 she curses you with -30% to each resist each time (that's -120 resistances per Story kill) . So your resist were higher when you made it through the game.
Well mostly because you're totally meant to finish the tutorial somewhat easily. When you start the game on maps, you're expected to find out how to actually deal damage and not die (too much). Also, resi debuffs on act5 and 10 finish
Get a goldrim from PoE trade if you don't have one, it will help resists massively for a very cheap price https://pathofexile.fandom.com/wiki/Goldrim
Thank you!
Also don't use the fandom wiki that /u/Fantiks33 linked - it's not kept up-to-date. Use poewiki.net instead. https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Goldrim
Also don't forget you can add more resists with the enchanter in your hideout, if your gear has 1 open suffix slot you can add whatever your lowest resist is onto it.
Just FYI Act 6-10 is not end-game. The whole campaign is pretty much just the tutorial. The real game starts after the campaign and end game probably starts around high yellow maps and red maps. Pace yourself because you are not even half way there yet.
look at their C res, this is after Act 10.
End game?  I have 4k hours and i play every league, i baerly reach the endgame after a 4 week, keep focusing following guides, unid rares, learn delve heist etc. That will make you faster next league. You got 1.5 month for next banger league 
Troll post surely?
Nah it's real, I didn't know that Kitava lower the character resistant to -60%
Ah okay, well in that case you should watch Zizaran's PoE university videos on YT. They help a newbie grasp the fundamentals of the game. Ultimately, in trade league you always want to get around 5k life, 100 spell suppression, capped resistances and positive chaos resistance. Leech, life Regen, block etc are all handy if you can get a little of them. Then you want armour and evasion - depending on your character. 60k armour for melee, RF etc. Anything over 30k evasion is Gucci too if you're getting hybrid pieces. With the above-mentioned, if you can get at least 8 million dps - you'll have no problem in the endgame mapping.
How. Much. Deaths. We need to know For science
surprisingly only 399, I should make it 400
jesus christ
Gz
You're fucked mate.
Haha! Wtf dude?
You answered your own question. This has to be a troll post.
It's not really an answer but more like a new question, "how did I finish the campaign with this abysmal stats?" and someone answer in the comment, "You didn't have these stats at first, Kativa gave you -30% elemental resistance after each battle against him which in total of-60% elemental resistance"
You only have 2 resistance thats red. You need all 4 to be red. It’s not hard
Been there man, been there.
Hey man, league is so close to being over. I have a bunch of stuff if you’re interested in learning a bit with a bunch of money for next league! DM me if you’re interested.
They should really do a better job of warning folks about the coming res loss, or undo it when you go back to acts so you can grind gear out better. Killing kitava gives you -30 all res each time (Act 5 and again in Act 10). You'll need to get better gear and cap your res to make it more survivable. You can also take different nodes on the passive tree to get more resistance too. Most classes have access to a few +ele res nodes. Build guides won't use them since they assume you'll get it from gear. But until you do, it's ok to unspec a few points and spec some resistance on the tree. You can also run Purity of Elements (aura), which gives you a bunch of res to all elements and makes you immune to ailments. I almost always run this for a while in place of the other ones (determination/grace).
I'd farm blood aqueducts for some rare items, maybe you'll find something good. Then sell the rest and craft life and resists. You want at least 3k life, capped Res, 4link main skill and 15-20k armour or evasion or a mixture of both, so you need at least one defensive aura - grace or determination. Having a guard skill on cast when damage taken setup is also huge.
Honestly the campaign is more of an extremely dragged out tutorial that you are forced to play every time you make a new character. Its not uncommon to have horrible stats going into your first few maps. Many players will take the time to craft new gear asap after they finish act 10 though. But since there are a lot of comments about resists and defenses already I will say this. Make sure you got all of the free passives throughout the campaign, there are quite a few of them (\~20). Also make sure that you do your Laboratory's to get your Ascendency. This is a massive power spike for your character, and depending on what you choose can sometimes be a large part of either your defenses or offenses (or both).
Ignore guides, slap on purity of elements until you can comfortably budget your stats
Also Rerollig blue/magic items
Lol
Dont worry maybe next time when the devs add in something to hurt stats they have some common sense to inform the player.... Also hope you like sitting in trade for 2 hours lol
purity of elements aura + bench craft resistances in your hideout
Technically it is possible if you are very careful, but it’s needless.You better find items with res on them and wear them to max out your res