How to get tankier in Path of Exile: Defensive stats explained

Using Path of Exile defensive stats to get tankier is one of the most best ways to create a well-rounded character. Unlike many games, defensive stats are vital in POE, and if you do not use them properly, you'll find yourself dying frequently. It's also important that you never rely on a single type of defense as you may face specific enemies that can penetrate it.

There are many methods to improve how well you can take a hit in POE. These include getting extra block, evasion, or armor for your build and building Endurance Charges, specific resistances, or even getting immunities to damage types. Putting these different things together is what players refer to as layering defenses.

This guide explains how you can make your league character tankier in Path of Exile.

Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective and reflect the writer's opinion

Path of Exile. How to get tankier

Knowing how these categories synergize will help your build better defenses (Image via Grinding Gear Games)

To get tankier in Path of Exile Settlers of Kalguur, it's helpful to understand the four main defensive categories. These are avoidance, mitigation, life pool, and recovery. All of these combined will decide how well your character can survive the different encounters they'll face. Putting these together effectively, often referred to as layering, will enable you to safely engage in many types of combat.

If you haven't layered your build, it's very possible you may encounter an enemy that can pierce whatever defenses you have built. For example, a build with near infinite armor is rendered useless against an enemy that pierces physical defenses.

With an understanding of the foundations of Path of Exile defense, you'll be able to make a character that can survive maps, bossing, and anything else.

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Life Pool

Raw HP and Energy Shield are the main components of this category (Image via Grinding Gear Games)

The Life Pool category of your defensive setup is the most basic. Anything that has to do with your raw ability to survive a hit falls under this category. Things such as your maximum HP and Energy Shield are the main components.

Ensuring that you have the right amount of total Life Pool to not die to an attack can be important with regen heavy builds. For example, something like a Path of Exile Boneshatter Juggernaut has enough health regen to recover from anything quickly. If this build doesn't have enough Life Pool to survive the initial blow however, the potent regen is useless.

Avoidance

The main components of Avoidance are things like Block, Evasion, or Chance to Avoid Damage. In general any stat, passive, or ability that can entirely negate the damage you take from an attack will fall uner this category.

How well you can utilize these stats and which of them to utilize will largely depend on your build.

For example, a character that fights up close with melee will probably do better with Block and Chance to Avoid Damage stats. These types of builds will have much more trouble moving out of the way of attacks especially when smaller blue and white enemies swarm them. As such, it is best to assume you will be taking hits and work to negate them as much as possible.

However, a build that has extremely high mobility or ranged attacks may want to buff up their movement abilities or invulnerability skills. A Path of Exile 3.25 toxic rain setup, for example, can more easily kite enemies around while spamming its main ability. This means it may be a waste to put your points into block or evasion when you focus on movement to avoid the attacks entirely.

Mitigation

The Mitigation defensive category in Path of Exile consists of anything that reduces the amount of damage you take when you're hit. Things such as Armor, Physical Damage Reduction, or Elemental Resistances are all included in this category.

The most important thing to understand about Mitigation is that its purpose is to keep you at 1hp (at minimum).

When figuring out how much Mitigation you need, you first need to know how much Life Pool you have. From here, you can begin to do the math and find out how much reduction is required for large attacks to not be able to one-hit you.

So long as your Mitigation can reduce the total damage of an attack to less than your Life Pool, you can rely on life regen to bring you back up.

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If, for example, an enemy is one-hitting you with a fire based melee attack, you can use this information to better mitigate. By upping your armor, physical damage reduction, and fire resistance in tandem, you will lower the damage taken from this attack. By continuing to tweak these numbers as well as your Life Pool, you can ensure that you will no longer die to this before you can regen your health.

Recovery

Surviving hits is useless if you can't heal up after (Image via Grinding Gear Games)

This part of your defensive layering covers anything to do with regenerating lost Life Pool. Different stats that contribute to this are Life Gain on Hit, Leech, and Regen Speed. Also included is any life you recover from Flasks or skills that provide direct healing.

Recovery largerly interacts with Mitigation and Life Pool in the way of making sure you can gain your life back before getting hit again. If you've properly set up your Mitigation to prevent one-hits from happening, it is useless if you're unable to heal back up before taking another big hit. In this way, Recovery options will be the final layer for increasing your tankiness.

Another important note about this category is that it is much more difficult to account for on bosses than when mapping. Frequent amounts of smaller enemies provide easy methods of HP regain through things like leech or Gain on Kill stats. You'll have to focus on Flasks, Life on Hit, and on-demand HP recovery when building for bosses or low enemy counts.

Edited by Rachel Syiemlieh