Recommended defenses for Empowered Monoliths?

[ppaladin123]

I recently unlocked empowered monoliths (at level 84)..had no trouble with any of the regular monoliths but the EMs seem to be a huge difficulty spike and my poor mage is regularly getting one shot.

Obviously you need all resistances capped and a bit of padding beyond that for shred and I already have that. But what other defenses should I be shooting for? e.g. How much effective health (health + ward), endurance, armor, etc.? Are there any rules of thumb on this?

Thanks!

[TyresTyco]

1,5 k hp minimum. Crit avoidance is a must have up to 100%. Other than that.. you could work on a low life ward setup and get 10 k ward easily by stacking more hp, ward retention and int.

[Ayk-]

All you need is ward because it has no cap, which is a bad design, considering how every other defense option in the game requires serious gear investment.

The second best would be low life endurance setup capped at %60 damage reduction, but you would need a lot of high value specific gear to set it up and I can't really recommend this to a mage when ward is much easier to setup and gives higher EHP than endurance.

The best would be to just move out of bad like devs intended but that would not be a good advice, yeah?

Slap a few ward uniques and you are good to go.

[Alekthos]

What I have found to work is around 2k hp/ward standing still >= Capped crit avoidance/mit > capped resistances.
This all depends on your build but crit negation outweighs blanket resistance capping in my experience, especially considering how easy it is to adjust resistance gaps for specific encounters with idols.

[Ravenkid9266]

The tier of defenses is: DR/ward everything else is lumped together because everything else is too porous to rely on and requires much more investment.

30k+ ward is a very real outcome for a little work, everything else just stretches that ward longer.

[Thorba]

was getting one hit today with 2500hp and max resis on a corruption 150 mini boss.
I have not much crit avoidance but i think i quit this game now because this is just no fun for me anymore. I was struggling the last few days if i should keep on playing or not but my motivation is nearly zero atm.

[ppaladin123]

Originally posted by Ayk-:

All you need is ward because it has no cap, which is a bad design, considering how every other defense option in the game requires serious gear investment.

The second best would be low life endurance setup capped at %60 damage reduction, but you would need a lot of high value specific gear to set it up and I can't really recommend this to a mage when ward is much easier to setup and gives higher EHP than endurance.

The best would be to just move out of bad like devs intended but that would not be a good advice, yeah?

Slap a few ward uniques and you are good to go.

yeah I am seeing Exsanginous and Last Steps all over the place on builds so it seems like low life/high ward is a common way of handling things.

[Skaarphy]

For Paladin and Primalist 60%-ish endurance and a as high as possible endurance threshold should be the goal. It's fairly easy to achieve that with them.
The thing is, the damage reduction kicks in dynamically, meaning once the damage threshold is being crossed the damage reduction kicks in.

I cannot count the times where some attack left me at about 1/3 health but there was never any damage high enough to finish me off. With life on hit I went up to full health very quickly and basically could just face-tank whatever boss.

It's not ideal - because one-shots still exist despite of that - but it's a thing to keep in mind.