How much armor is "good enough"?

[Connie Lingus]

I've recently returned to this game after forever and I am now progressing through act 5. Its my first run and I'm playing a lvl 44 witch with loads of summons and some aoe spells. My build plan is essentially to wear just enough armor, equip a shield with tempest shield spell on and run in to drop some fat novas while my mooks clean up. Up until now things have gone pretty well, except that act 5 is starting to hurt and I've noticed that I'm losing more hp than I'm comfortable with.

How much armor should I have in by act 5 if I want to be able to take a punch? Currently I have 469 armor, 691 health, and 495 energy shield. I understand the armor mitigation calculations but I've no idea how much damage enemies do at this stage.

[Yeti.^^]

Your health's the problem.Rule of thumb is roughly 300 hp per act.And don't ya even suggest energy shield.Without any means of regenerating it , it's.. pretty useless.

[Illumina]

Armor is borderline useless. It only works for physical and the game is full of elemental.
You need life and or energy shield and lots of it.

Also unless you're explicitly using the passive that lets Minion damage effect you, stop mixing minions and normal spells.

[Connie Lingus]

Originally posted by Illumina:

Armor is borderline useless. It only works for physical and the game is full of elemental.
You need life and or energy shield and lots of it.

Also unless you're explicitly using the passive that lets Minion damage effect you, stop mixing minions and normal spells.

What passive is that? I might get it if thats the case, I find that some boss fights that I don't have access to corpses might be a problem if I rely only on minions

[Yeti.^^]

Originally posted by Nick Gurr:

Originally posted by Illumina:

Armor is borderline useless. It only works for physical and the game is full of elemental.
You need life and or energy shield and lots of it.

Also unless you're explicitly using the passive that lets Minion damage effect you, stop mixing minions and normal spells.

What passive is that? I might get it if thats the case, I find that some boss fights that I don't have access to corpses might be a problem if I rely only on minions

Try desecrate.It spawns corpses.
(it's a skill gem)

[Connie Lingus]

Originally posted by Yeti.^^:

Your health's the problem.Rule of thumb is roughly 300 hp per act.And don't ya even suggest energy shield.Without any means of regenerating it , it's.. pretty useless.

So instead of energy shield I should focus health, armor and resist?

[Yeti.^^]

Originally posted by Nick Gurr:

Originally posted by Yeti.^^:

Your health's the problem.Rule of thumb is roughly 300 hp per act.And don't ya even suggest energy shield.Without any means of regenerating it , it's.. pretty useless.

So instead of energy shield I should focus health, armor and resist?

Resists are a necessity on every character , so that goes without saying.Armour.. armour is a funny little thing because even if you have crapton of it , it's still useless against big hits.
You should focus on health mainly , and resists.

[Drake]

You could also focus on energy shield instead of life, but for new players, stacking health is usually easier and cheaper.

[Scathe]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1751095053

the passive you asked about is spiritual aid, there are some good minion wheels over there. that is what my level 45 witch's passive tree looks like right now. I haven't had any trouble with any content lately (mid act 5) but I've mainly relied on fireball and summon zombie. my zombies arent dying, they're demolishing everything. but, my gear must be alot better than yours, no, I didnt buy any or trade at all but did have shared stash from a level 42 duelist I played back when there was only 3 acts in the game, so I have maybe wasted some orbs. my health is at 1300ish and my energy shield(with discipline) is above 850. my elemental resists are all in the 60%-65% range, and 30% chaos resist. I only have one piece of gear with any armor on it at all, a hat with like 80 and like 20 energy shield.

my tips for gearing up are to concentrate on gear that has energy shield or energy shield/evasion. concentrate on getting the normal ones that have the most linked sockets, 4 for hat, gloves, boots, shield, 6 for chest. concentrate on using essences on these items. ideally the item might still have room for a resist or health enchant at the crafting bench after the essence is used. level 1 enchants only, if you have the orbs for the level 2 enchant, they are better used directly on gear in place of an essence.

another tip, for golems, just use lightning, the lightning golem buffs your zombies for more damage. I'm also using spectres and unearth and flame dash.

[Illumina]

Having capped (75) resists is a bare minimum in PoE.
*not chaos

[Zelph]

Originally posted by Nick Gurr:

Originally posted by Yeti.^^:

Your health's the problem.Rule of thumb is roughly 300 hp per act.And don't ya even suggest energy shield.Without any means of regenerating it , it's.. pretty useless.

So instead of energy shield I should focus health, armor and resist?

Resists and health(including energy shield)should be prioritized early on. You can't kill thingsi f you are dead.

[phadin]

So here is the thing about PoE Defenses.

Two major ways to prevent physical damage.
Armor: Great against mobs of little guys, won't do crap to save you from that one big hit.
Dodge/Evasion: Better chance at avoiding that one big hit, not so useful when you are getting mobbed as some hits are bound to get through.

Elemental Damage is almost entirely from Resistances. Max those as best you can, no other advice.

Health/Energy shield, you want as much as you can get and still get what you need for your build. Even as a minion build you need to have a good bank. Being a witch, if you are not running auras, you might also consider getting the Mind Over Matter passive, which takes 30% of damage to your health from Mana instead. that lets your mana add as additional health pool. No matter what defenses you are using, you're going to take plenty of damage.

Energy Shield requires time after you get hit to recharge. without any bonuses, it takes 2 seconds without taking damage before the recharge starts. As a minion witch, you should stay away from danger as much as possible. Your minions are not just offense, but should be taunting the enemy to protect you as well by becoming targets. Still, without some form of ES Leech or Life Leech from direct damage, ES is mostly there to keep you from dying from the big hits that get you before you can get out of the way and let your minions tank.

Also take care about Chaos damage, that completely bypasses Energy Shield. Another reason to still build a good life pool.

I just started running another minion build the other day, currently at chapter 9 with 1900 life, 600 mana (with mind over matter), and 500 ES. Even i still think it's a bit low, but I have lots of minions to keep the enemy busy (10 zombies, 8 skeletons, 8 wraiths, 3 specters) I was also struggling to get enough health and eventually picked up MoM to make up the difference. It was needed.

[phadin]

I should also note, Act 5 is where things really start getting tested. By then you should have most of the gems you need for yoru build (either quest rewards or from vendor). Both the midboss and chapter boss of Act 5 can be serious wakeup calls for first timers. Thats when the difficulty really starts to ramp up. After Act 5, you'll also get hit with a 30% penalty to all your resistances as well. Bad builds will really start getting exposed at this point.

[Reifam]

Originally posted by phadin:

So here is the thing about PoE Defenses.

Two major ways to prevent physical damage.
Armor: Great against mobs of little guys, won't do crap to save you from that one big hit.
Dodge/Evasion: Better chance at avoiding that one big hit, not so useful when you are getting mobbed as some hits are bound to get through.

Elemental Damage is almost entirely from Resistances. Max those as best you can, no other advice.

Health/Energy shield, you want as much as you can get and still get what you need for your build. Even as a minion build you need to have a good bank. Being a witch, if you are not running auras, you might also consider getting the Mind Over Matter passive, which takes 30% of damage to your health from Mana instead. that lets your mana add as additional health pool. No matter what defenses you are using, you're going to take plenty of damage.

Energy Shield requires time after you get hit to recharge. without any bonuses, it takes 2 seconds without taking damage before the recharge starts. As a minion witch, you should stay away from danger as much as possible. Your minions are not just offense, but should be taunting the enemy to protect you as well by becoming targets. Still, without some form of ES Leech or Life Leech from direct damage, ES is mostly there to keep you from dying from the big hits that get you before you can get out of the way and let your minions tank.

Also take care about Chaos damage, that completely bypasses Energy Shield. Another reason to still build a good life pool.

I just started running another minion build the other day, currently at chapter 9 with 1900 life, 600 mana (with mind over matter), and 500 ES. Even i still think it's a bit low, but I have lots of minions to keep the enemy busy (10 zombies, 8 skeletons, 8 wraiths, 3 specters) I was also struggling to get enough health and eventually picked up MoM to make up the difference. It was needed.

Yeah there's a lot of stuff the game sadly doesn't tell you that you need, and there's plenty of noob traps. That's why people say in this game "everyone's first character always sucks". People coming from other games might be inclined to make a 'glass cannon' character and just put points into damage, thinking that POE will give you the bare minimum HP to stay alive and that actually speccing into it is just for 'tanks'. I know this because that's what I did when I started playing. Even other ARPGs like Torchlight 2 will let you get away with just dropping your skill points into your main damage stat.

However, POE is so much different, and you don't really realize that until you're four acts deep into the plot and you have to start all over again. There's a lot of unspoken requirements that you just have to get in order to have a good time in the later acts. Around 200% life or ES from the tree is a good start, plus capped resists on your items, and then from there whatever damage and crit you can get with the leftover points.

I'm still learning it as I go, but my current character is doing very well now, and much better than my previous builds. Ball lightning ES-leech witch with pure ES and (eventually) Chaos Inoculation. It absolutely destroys blue packs and even most boss fights, plus I stay alive fairly well.

[Katsuni]

There's a few weird things I've discovered that don't work nearly as you'd expect.

First, is that armour is far less useful than it appears. Even 90% damage reduction is almost meaningless because armour has a variable scaling based on damage taken per hit. Sure, 90% damage reduction sounds great, but it's only affecting physical hits, and it only counts a -90% damage to hits for maybe about 100 damage per hit roughly (scales similarly as you level) but against a 1,000 damage hit it only is worth about -10% damage, so you may as well not have any armour at all on if you eat a hit from a boss that you're supposed to dodge.

Second is that energy shield sounds amazing! ...But it has such a long delay between when you get hit and when it starts recharging, and you can't use potions to heal it, so it's pretty close to useless in most cases unless you have ways around that. Even with a lot of summons you're going to eat a lot of stray hits here and there which will prevent it from regenerating. It's not nearly as bad with the witch's occult tree since once it starts regenerating you're basically fine until it's full. If you're not using rare/unique gear that lets you restore your shields regularly though, it's basically junk. If you're using energy shield at all, you pretty much absolutely need chaos inoculation in the top right-ish area of the passive tree because enemies will start spamming absurd amounts of chaos damage which bypasses your shields and they're balanced to assume they're hitting only your life, so... yeah. Immunity or you're screwed, there's no real in between that I've found.

Third, you are expected to have 75% resistances at all times after about act 4. You will have a huuuuge -30% resist all dip after act 5, and after act 10 again for -60 total. The game still assumes you have 75% resist all in the very next area despite that you probably aren't prepared for such, so start grabbing extra resist gear now. In particular, the first bit of act 6 reaaaaaaaaally throws a ton of fire damage at you and it WILL one-shot kill you if you're not ready for it.

Fourth, life is just generally the best defensive stat all around most of the time because more life means more regeneration and more lifesteal maximum since they're based on a % of your max life. More than that, a lot of the enemies in the game do a ton of burst damage and you're expected to just have enough bulk in max life to survive the initial hit. Potions only affect life, and you will need some way to survive getting hit as act 6 onward they start introducing more and more aspects of the game which need you do deal tons of damage to tons of enemies in a very short order while they spam attacks at you, and you won't be given time to rest because you'll essentially be on a timer, so you need to be able to survive those bursts of damage and to wade through a huge amount of enemies.

There's a ton of extra little stuff beyond that, but in general just assume you want as much max life as possible, and to get 75%+ resist all. A triple-resist aura build with one of each of the three resistance auras up at the same time is popular because it can get you a few extra % resist to everything. +6% resistance doesn't sound like a lot, but it's the difference from taking 2500 damage in one shot or taking only 1900 in that one shot, and that can be the difference between eating 2 or 3 shots later on, which can be life and death in a lot of cases, especially if you can regen/lifesteal about 2000 life per second. One of those dies horribly in a few seconds, the other is quite comfortable and not in any risk of death at all.

In any case, the point is what you're seeing right now in act 5 isn't really representative of what shows up later on. Stacking any kind of defense at all is fine at this stage in the game, as long as you have 75% resist all. Enemies still do sane damage right now. The bosses are going to start doing overwhelmingly powerful hits that no amount of armour will ever matter; normal enemy hits won't really get all that high to the point of armour being useless, but anything you'd ever care about hitting you will make armour irrelevant. Having enough life to survive a single hit is more important than anything else, with elemental resist coming a close second.

You'll see what I mean when you run face first into tukohama in act 6. Either you have 75% fire resist and he's a bit tough but a pretty fun fight, or you straight up die 20 times in a row. There's basically no middle ground in between those two extremes.

[AllYourToothbrushAreBelongToUs]

I recommend another approach. Go full dps from until you reach maps. Some enemies will be annoying oneshots sure. But your leveling experience should also include you being able to dodge obvious things. When you hit maps you can start looking for better gear, but until then you dont´really have to bother. This goes for witch and ranger at least.

As for passive skills, if you are following a build, of course follow it, but from my recent character I just leveled a basic skeleton of a build because I hadn´t decided what I was going for. Had about 30 skills left to place when I hit 50. Mostly went for health actually.

Most of your dmg comes from your 4/5/6-linked main skill. Passives on tree wont matter too much until lategame.