What Is The Best Defense Option In PoE

In Path of Exile, suppose you have been trying to make a build that relies on obviously defensive mechanics such as forms of mitigation and incoming conversion. Though you was finding it hard to sustain your life pool without investing way too much into life regen, or investing basically nothing into life leech. What other options are there?

In fact, technically, you can stack enough conversion and max res to not need any EHP above 1. There's a guy who showcased 2 variants of this working, but it relies to some extent on Legacy poe items or at the very least full uptime on flasks, alongside which is Divination Distillate. I guess this isn't really what you're asking though.



ES recharge is one of the most underappreciated defensive mechanics currently imo. Strongest with Occultist and maybe a Soul Strike. Splitting investments into ES regen + recharge or recharge + leech is also pretty damn good. Especially Trickster is in a good place to play around with this. You might even get some decent evasion going there. You get really little advantage damage-wise from the ascendancies if you want that stuff on an attack build or non-fitting spell though.

For the bottom side of the tree, there's always block and evasion paired with leech/life on hit and uniques which help you recover. Also the Ascendancy parts which weren't really relevant in the meta previously are worth a second look nowadays. Such as Inquisitor's Consecrated Ground and Berserker's warcry stuff which were already pretty good during instant leech times are viable and worth considering for more builds nowadays.

If you want to tank anything you need leech or a ton of life flasks. However slowing the enemies (temp chains/chill) works wonders. Miners and summoners for example have no life leech and those work just fine, you simply walk away from enemies and don't try to tank anything.

My best experience with defence would be an aura support. 24k armour, 60% Dodge with Vaal grace, block cap, high regen, 82% max res, immortal call and 8k es. That's the very best but definitely not efficient as you neglect damage. Given I'm a support i don't deal damage myself but I'd agree that leech is the most efficient one, meanwhile, buy poe currency when you lack of them.