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Creating the ultimate character inLast Epochcan be an arduous task, especially if you plan to push the Monolith of Fate’s Corruption system. Making a character that can survive even the toughest of boss attacks is not only possible, but it’s surprisingly intuitive.
For as many mechanics as Last Epoch has, each defensive layer is fairly easy to grasp. But putting everything together to create a build can prove challenging. This guide will explain what makes a tanky character in Last Epoch, what defensive breakpoints you should hit by the endgame, and give a brief overview of each defensive layer you can use to survive the monsters of Eterra and beyond.
How To Scale Your Defenses
Increasing your survivability in Last Epoch boils down to three things:
Youreffective health pool (EHP)consists of your Health, Ward, and any damage mitigation sources that reduce incoming damage. For many builds, Health serves as the main damage sponge for your character. Scaling your HP is paramount to surviving difficult dungeons and the Monoliths of Fate endgame activity.Generally, you want about 2-3K HP, Ward, or a mix of the two by the time you unlock Empowered Monoliths.
But scaling your HP won’t be enough to facetank boss attacks or swarms of enemies. To do that, you’ll need to build forms of damage mitigation—resistances, armor, dodge, block, and other forms of damage reduction.Your total HP and Ward, combined with your sources of damage mitigation, make up your effective health pool.This is how much damage you may take from a single instance of damage.
EHP Example
A character with 1,000 HP can absorb up to that much damage before dying. If you scaled your HP to 2,000, you could take 100% more damage before dying. Going from 2,000 to 3,000 HP would be a 50% EHP increase, giving you diminishing returns for the same investment.
Let’s say the attack deals physical damage. If you obtained 50% DR through armor, you could take 100% more physical damage before dying, regardless of HP.
1,000 x (1-50%) = 500 damage
If you scale your HP to 2,000 and have 50% DR, you effectively quadruple your EHP. Finding the right balance between HP and DR scaling is key to making a durable character.
Once you absorb that hit, you’ll want to recover that lost HP/Ward as fast as possible.Forms of HP recovery include potions, passive HP regeneration, life leech, and heal-on-kill modifiers.The same principle applies to Ward as well. Build up your HP or Ward, add multiple defenses to your build, and find a way to recover any lost HP/Ward quickly. Fulfill all three criteria, and you’ll have an incredibly tanky character.
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What Does An Endgame Build Need To Be Tanky?
This answer can vary wildly based on your current goals and resources, but there is a general checklist you want to fill out as you reach Empowered Monoliths and T4 dungeons.To comfortably farm endgame content, you want to achieve the following, listed in order of importance:
By far the deadliest source of damage in endgame content is critical hits.Monoliths of Fate and T4 dungeons have modifiers that make enemies critically hit far more often.Becoming immune to crits is mandatory to safely clear endgame content.You’ll also want 2K or 3K HP by the time you hit Empowered Monoliths.Ward builds should aim for 4-5K Ward.
If you’ve played other ARPGs, you might be surprised to see resistances so low on our priority list. That’s becauseLast Epoch’s resistances have linear scaling.In games likePath of Exileor Grim Dawn, each percent of damage resistance becomes more effective as you reach 100%. Going from 0 → 1% gives less DR than going from 74 →75%, for example. Last Epoch’s resistances are truly linear, so reaching the resistance cap for all damage types isn’t nearly as important.
Increasing Your Health
Scaling your health is the easiest way to increase your survivability in Last Epoch. Most armor slots can roll withflat life, percent life, or a hybrid of the two.The hybrid modifier offers the most bang for your buck, but the affix type is quite rare and seldom drops at Exalted tiers (T6 and T7). We highly recommendflagging all three affix types on your loot filterif you play an HP-focused build.
Ideally,you want at least 2K HP by the time you reach Empowered Monoliths.A build that can reach 3K HP is even better, but that is overkill if you have multiple layers of damage mitigation. As for scaling your HP, your best sources include:
Endurance
Endurance is a damage mitigation mechanic that’s exclusive to HP; Ward doesnotbenefit from Endurance.While your HP is lower than your Endurance Threshold, your character will receive less damage equal to your Endurance rating(20% by default, shown by the glowing portion of your health globe). you’re able to scale both your Endurance and Endurance Threshold through item affixes and passive nodes.
Unlike most mitigation mechanics, Endurance works against hitsanddamage-over-time sources (DoTs).
Enduranceitself refers to the damage mitigation you’ll receive once your HP is below your Endurance Threshold. This value can be scaled through item affixes, with each affix increasing your Endurance rating additively. For example, getting 7% Endurance on an item would increase your Endurance DR from 20% to 27%.Your Endurance cannot exceed 60%.
Endurance Ratingis how low your HP must hit before your Endurance rating applies to incoming damage.By default, this is set to 20% of your max HP, but you can scale this with item affixes. However, beware that Endurance Rating is usually increased in set increments, not through percentages. Getting your Endurance Threshold to match your max HP is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible.\
Ward And Ward Retention
Ward is a secondary health pool that covers your main HP. All incoming damage is dealt to your Ward first. You can increase your Ward through certain armor base types, “Ward Per Second” affixes, and certain passive nodes that grant a flat amount of Ward.
However, unlike HP,your Ward will continuously decay over timeuntil it reaches zero. The more Ward you have, the more extreme this decay becomes. You have two ways to counter this:
Calculating Ward Loss
The above formula is how Last Epoch calculates your Ward lost per second. As you’re able to see, Ward Retention is a crucial stat to minimizing Ward decay, more so than Ward Retention.
This formula also has linear scaling, so Ward Retention and Ward Decay Threshold are always useful stats.
Ward Decay Thresholdsets a hard floor to your Ward value. Your Ward value will never decay below this value, regardless of your Ward Retention value. For example, if you have 500 Ward Decay Threshold, your Ward will never decay below 500 on its own. Any Ward above 500 will also decay slower, further influenced by your War Retention. This stat is generally found on certain item bases and affixes.
Ward Retentiondetermines how quickly your Ward will decay. A higher Ward Retention means your Ward won’t decay as quickly. When paired with Ward Decay Threshold or HP → Ward conversion items, you can have a permanent 4-5K Ward protecting your character at all times. Ward Retention can be increased through the Intelligence stat, certain item bases, and item affixes.
Why Do Most Endgame Builds Use Ward?
Last Epoch has better tools for scaling Ward than it does for HP.Most characters that invest heavily in Health can get upwards of 3K HP, assuming they have multiple hybrid HP affixes, good Idols, and ample Vitality—an attribute with no damage scaling. HP characters can use the Endurance stat to scale their EHP even further, but this comes with a huge opportunity cost on their gear. You’re sacrificing important affix slots to scale your Endurance.
Let’s contrast that with Ward. Most Ward builds get 1.5-2K HP and convert all of it to Ward through certain items—Exsanguinous, Last Steps of the Living, and experimental gloves.These items drain nearly all of your HP and turn it into Ward per second.With all three conversion items equipped, that 1.5K HP pool gets turned into 750 Ward gained per second.
But we’re not done.you’re able to take this further by scaling Ward Retention and Ward Decay Threshold.Ward Decay Threshold can be found on item implicits, while Ward Retention can be scaled with Intelligence, a stat that doubles as a damage scalar for certain caster builds (notably Mages). Both stats incur little to no opportunity cost when compared to scaling HP and Endurance.
When you combine all of these elements, you can turn that 750 passive Ward/second into a permanent shield of over 5,000 Ward, all the while scaling a stat (Intelligence) that also buffs your damage. And if your character doesn’t use Intelligence, you can use items like Cleaver Solution to gain Strength equal to your Intelligence.Simply put, scaling Ward is easier than scaling HP, offers additional benefits like damage scaling, and can be done on most builds.
Armor
Armor is a defensive layer that functions similarly to most ARPGs.All incoming hits will be mitigated by your armor rating, listed as a percentage on your character sheet (“C” on PC). Emphasis on hits in this case, asdamage-over-time (DoT) isnotaffected by Armor.If you’re frequently dying from burn damage or poison, you’ll need to scale your Resistances or a different defensive layer.
Armor Mitigation Formula
This is the formula for calculating Armor damage reduction in Last Epoch, where"x"is the amount of armor you have and “a"is the area level.
Unlike most ARPGs,Armor does apply to elemental damage with 70% efficiency.For example, if your Armor rating is 50%, then all incoming elemental damage would be reduced by 35%. Once again, this does not apply to DoTs.Your Armor rating cannot mitigate more than 85% of incoming damage.
Armor Shred
Certain monsters in Last Epoch can inflict Armor Shred on your character, reducing their Armor value for a short duration.By default, you lose 100 Armor for each stack of Armor Shred, lasting four seconds. There’s no limit to how many stacks of Armor Shred you or an enemy can be afflicted with.
Armor Shred is also an affix you can find on amulets, gloves, and certain weapons.All monsters have zero base Armor, so applying Armor Shred increases all incoming hit damage they receive.This makes Armor Shred a potent damage scalar for most hit-based builds in Last Epoch, particularly those with high attack or cast speed.Remember: Armor only affects hits, not DoTs.This goes for Armor Shred as well.
Resistances
Resistances reduce all incoming damage of the listed type, both for hits and damage over time.Unlike most ARPGs, Last Epoch’s resistances use linear scaling.For example, if you go from 0% to 10% resistance, you take 10% less damage. Going from 65 to 75% is still a 10% reduction in incoming damage. This differs from most ARPGs where resistances become more effective for each point you invest in the stat (explained below).
There are seven resistances in Last Epoch: Fire, Lightning, Cold, Physical, Poison, Necrotic, and Void.Each resistance caps out at 75%.Any excess resistance doesn’t inherently do anything, although monsters with penetration modifiers will need to bypass your excess resistances (called uncapped resistance) first. Conversely, if you have no resistance rating, penetration modifiers can push the target’s resistance into the negatives, increasing the damage they receive.
How Resistances Differ In Last Epoch
In most ARPGs, resistances are treated as a percent value that is multiplied against incoming damage. For example, if an attack is slated to deal 1,000 damage and you have 75% resistance, you would take:
Now let’s increase the character’s resistance to 76%:
1,000 x (1-76%) = 240 damage.
We receive roughly 4% less damage by increasing our resistance by a single point, not 1% as you’d expect.In most ARPGs, each point in a resistance value becomes stronger than the last.That’s why increasing your maximum resistance in games like Path of Exile is so powerful and downright mandatory.
Last Epoch doesn’t work this way.In Last Epoch, your enemies gain damage penetration as you level up.Each level equates to 1% penetration, up to a cap of 75% at Level 75.Resistances simply reduce this penetration value, which results in linear DR scaling. If you go from 0% → 1% resistance, that’s the same as going from 74% → 75% resistance.
That’s why hitting the resistance cap in Last Epoch isn’t nearly as important as in most ARPGs. You still want to scale your resistances whenever possible, but maxing all resistances is far from mandatory in this game. Bear in mind thatgoing above 75% resistance doesnotreduce damage further; it only mitigates added sources of penetration.
Dodge And Block
Both Dodge and Block donotwork against damage-over-time effects.
Dodge and Block are virtually identical defensive mechanics that mitigate incoming hits.
Dodge
Dodge gives your character a chance to avoid incoming hits entirely.When an enemy attacks, your Dodge Rating is compared to the enemy’s level to determine if you are hit, as shown in the formula above. The"a"refers to the zone’s level, and the"x"refers to your Dodge Rating. You can increase your Dodge Rating through item bases, Dodge Rating affixes, and certain class passives.Your Dodge chance cannot exceed 85%.
Block And Block Effectiveness
Every incoming hit has a chance to be blocked, determined by your character’s block chance. You can typically find this on shields and certain character passives.If you block a hit, a percentage of the incoming damage will be mitigated, partially determined by your Block Effectiveness.
you may calculate this percentage with the above formula, with"a"representing the zone’s level and"x"referring to your Block Effectiveness. Bear in mind thatincoming damage cannot be reduced beyond 85%, regardless of your Block Effectiveness.
Critical Mitigation
All monsters in Last Epoch have a small chance of critically striking, dealing increased damage to your character. As you push into the endgame, critical hit modifiers become commonplace and arguably the most dangerous Echo modifier. To counter this, you’ll need a form of critical mitigation.
You can either build forcritical hit avoidanceorcritical hit mitigation.Avoidance gives you a chance to avoid critical damage entirely, while mitigation will always reduce incoming critical damage by a specified amount.Both values can reach 100%, so building for either stat is valid. Generally, most builds spec for avoidance sincea certain Monolith Blessinggrants a substantial amount of critical hit avoidance, freeing up affix slots on your gear.
Critical mitigation mechanics only affect the critical portion of the attack. You will still take the base hit damage of the attack, regardless of whether you spec for critical hit avoidance or mitigation.
Health Leech
The most popular recovery mechanic for HP builds is Health Leech.A portion of all damage you deal, either hit or DoT, will be leeched as HP over the next three seconds.The more Health Leech you have on your character, the stronger this effect will be. Bear in mind that enemy resistances and DR values impact the damage you inflict, therefore affecting your Health Leech effectiveness.
Builds that attack quickly will especially want to use Health Leech, aseach instance of damage procs Health Leech.If you hit an enemy five times, you’ll have five independent instances of Health Leech active simultaneously.Overkill damage isnotleeched, but this stacking behavior makes Health Leech an absurdly powerful recovery stat for most builds. You can find both Health Leech and Leech Rate affixes on certain weapons and armor.
