Acrobatics or Life and Armor
I am just getting to maps with a ballista tactician and mainly running all evasion. I still need to get chaos rez capped, but I am at a point where I think I need more defense. Should I go all in and chase evasion or start pathing towards armor and life for a hybrid build. I had a lot of success with armor and life regen on my warrior last season, but I had block. Level 72 following Kalltoraks build.
Comments
Armor/life is okay. Acro is okay.
You need layers. Acro plus energy shield works. Or armor/life and some block/evasion. Defense in the game is all about layers.
I'm an 88 Tactician and even at 7k armor, T15 maps feel quite a bit better than when I was solely evasion-based. I also run a companion for 10% DR.
Avoidance, Mitigation, Recovery.
POE 2 makes it challenging to invest heavily in all 3, but typically there are ways to go heavy into 2 and good enough into 1.
Your hit pool (ES, Life, Guard, Darkness?, Mana MOMs) is scaled by mitigation (Resists, Armour, Damage reduction, Damage conversion) and your avoidance (Block, Evasion, Invulnerability Pulses) allows your recovery (Regen, recoup, Flasks) to keep up. If your pool can handle very big hits and you can recover before the next one you are invulnerable.
POB was my friend in many ways to solve some of the defensive problems I was running into. Ultimately, picking a strategy for defenses that match my play style was the simplest thing to keep things moving without playing POB...
I.e. just do so much more damage than everything and never get hit...
What about using a high block shield on second weapon load out? I just tried it with witch feels decent.
Previously just had a shield without the increased block chance, with it feels night and day.
Since you're using ballista, your tree is mostly on the left. You'll lose so many points just to go to the right to get Acrobatic, so stacking life and armour is a better choice.
If you get the Stay cover get light or something node, your best body armour is either Cloak of flame, or Perfidy (with 40% roll on physics or more). Also, find a good pure armour pair of gloves with 350+ armour, and pick the node that also grant equal amount of evasion per armour on glove. You'll be surprisingly tanky. Try to get around 3k life also.
Pretty sure the main value in acro is for Sekhemas trap rooms and shit. In my experience, you're just gonna get randomly clapped everytime you don't dodge. Eva/ES generally better imo. 70% Eva and 1.5k es (as a minimum) is fairly easy to get.
Edit to say: armor/life stacking without a shield, or being an ascendancy that wants to stack life, also feels very lacking to me.