Armour Stacking For Dummies! Part 1 Concepts, Skills, Ascendancy! - Path of Exile

hey guys so in this video we are going to go over some of the armor stacker Basics it's going to be sort of a series where we go over uh you know just some of the uh basic um Concepts about the armor stacker you know what uh what is an armor stacker or what skills can you use what ascendency do you uh Choose Or you know what kind of builds are there or what are your stat priorities how do you skill damage and all these kind of things and um rather than um putting all this info in a build guide every League I think it it was better to just make a separate little um video series about these kind of things where we go over all of those you know uh Concepts and all that kind of stuff so we don't have to put it in the build guides every single league so this first video is going to be very basic so a lot of you guys might already know all this stuff but this is meant for you know new players and there are quite a few uh new players this league uh that have uh that do want to try out armor stacking but you know don't really understand understand uh how to scale the damage or you know all this kind of stuff and maybe this this uh series will help you out give you understanding of what kind of uh you know build you're actually playing and um how to do uh skill damage and all that kind of stuff okay so let's get into it so first of all you know what is an armor stacker right so in my opinion a very biased opinion right best melee build in Path of Exile right or possibly even one of the best bu builds in the game really depends on what you like but it is uh once we kind of get into um you know what kind of stats you can achieve in this build um a lot of other melee builds will start to sort of um Fade Away in comparison to what you can achieve with an armor stacker right so build revolves around using the replica dream feather unique sword to skill our attack damage by a percent of our Armor All right so here's the a sword you can see it on the Wei so 1% increased attack damage per 450 armor and armor stacker can you know on the low end will have about 500k armor and really really U you know top end mirror to your gear you're going to be looking at around 9 million uh plus armor right so you can imagine that is quite a lot of uh increased damage right and if you look at my current character in 3.23 League you see um this character has about 8,000% increased attack damage from our armor right so getting all this increased 8,000% increased uh attack damage from this sword now if I use two swords then it would be basically just be doubled right so 16,000 per increased uh attack damage it's pretty insane right so the replica dream feather basically gives us all of the percent damage scaling that we need right all right so we get our armor in a few ways right so how do we get all this armor to scale with this replica dream feather right so we get uh the armor mainly from our Grace and determination auras we get it from uh evasion conversion with iron reflexes Keystone we'll get into that a little bit later uh I think uh after this and then uh stacking Aura effect to boost our auras right so we're running Grace which gives us flat evasion and also more evasion and determination which gives flat armor and more armor right so we're uh stacking Aura effect uh to the Moon to boost up these auras right right so we get some more armor and evasion uh from our flasks right so there's the site BT flasks Jade flasks um and all these things that give you flat and more uh armor and evasion right so we have uh some of that coming from the flasks uh and then there is some rare uh body armor modifiers uh from the grasping male right so this is a uh rare chest that can drop in breach so let's check it out right so this is the grasping Mill right and it uh it I think you can drop from um breach a Flawless breach Stone can drop it right or you get it by turning in a full inventory of breach rings so it is very very uh rare like it's it's not like very easy to come by right and it when you um actually identify the item it can roll a certain amount a certain number of breach specific mods right so you see there's these Chula mods for like Global defense uh you know grants level 15 Envy skill there's a lot of other uh mods you can get but the one that we are looking for is there is the armor is increased by overcap fire resistance and evasion rating is increased by overcap Cold resistance so these are the main uh mods that armor stackers are looking for and another uh bonus one is This Global defense right so that's kind of basically an overview where all the armor sources come from for uh armor stacker okay so uh we kind of went over this a little bit but there is this uh Keystone iron reflexes that converts all of our evasion rating to armor so if we look into the stats over here well you can see that over 90% or pretty much all of our armor is coming from this conversion right so why is that um well basically you can see actually the more or less is actually 1337 on my character which is pretty insane right um pretty cool I actually just realized that what is what is going on here all right okay so basically um all of your armor is going to be coming from this evasion conversion because of the way that this uh evasion conversion to armor works right so if you're really uh interested into like the actual formulas and all that kind of stuff go check out the wikii for iron reflexes but um if you want to put it in layman's terms you know explain it simply uh basically flat evasion is going to be scaled by your evasion modifiers before it gets converted right then it gets converted and then it gets scaled by armor so it's kind of like double dipping this kind of stuff that's very simple um explanation but you can see in the breakdown down here that yeah pretty much all of our evasion is coming from this conversion right so one important thing right so flat evasion gets skilled by both the modifiers to evasion and armor right so that's for increased and more but only flat armor is only scaled by your armor modifiers well what does this mean basically it means that um flat evasion good right so you want to prioritize flat evasion sources wherever you can instead of armor so that's why um armor sackers are uh trying to boost up your grace uh Aura right so that's why Grace Aura effect modifiers or Grace gem levels are pretty much your top priority when you're playing an armor stacker because Grace gives you flat evasion right so flat evasion good right remember and it also gives you more evasion so probably pretty much the most important Aura for an armor stacker is going to be the grace Aura and it's the one you're going to be focusing on to just like you know um max out the gem levels uh with you know certain gear items we'll get into uh later I guess and then also with aura effect all right so ARA stacking right so armor stackers are pretty much just ARA stackers right so it's armor stacker but we are um pretty much just ARA stackers right AA stackers gives all of the flat damage we need from wrath and smite auras right so um it also takes care of defenses right because we can use we're stacking so much AA effect that we can use um you know purity of Ice uh with melding of the flesh to actually just get 90 ales and take care of our defenses pretty nicely right and also you know getting your accuracy you get all your ACC accuracy you need just from one Precision gem uh and um you know life regen or ES regen if you're CI based uh just from Your vitality you can get up to like 600 700 just flat um es regen just from that so it takes care of um you know some uh regen for most for the most part right so pretty much all our offense and defense taken care of by ARA stacking right so let's take a look at some of this flat damage we can get so this is a breakdown of um a breakdown of my character you can see that we're getting a th000 flat added light uh lightning damage from this wrath um skill gem right and another uh basically 1,300 from the Smite so this is looking at the V Smite but Smite is actually probably like a 1K too so all the flat damage you need is coming from your auras right so don't have to worry about flat damage on your weapon I mean you can't even get it anyways because we're using a unique sword but this is pretty much where you get your flat damage right and I I guess you know in Path of Exile the way you scale damage for most builds I think is it's like the the Holy Trinity right you get your flat damage you get your increased damage and you get your more damage right so that's pretty much how you scale your damage so for armor stacker you get your your flat damage from your arrows right so your wrath and smite that's why Smite is pretty much you're going to see Smite in every single armor stacker build even if they're not using Smite as a main skill because of this flat damage it gives right so uh flat damage comes from Smite and wrath and then the increased damage comes from the replica dream feather and then the more damage comes from uh I guess the skill gems right your skill uh support gems or um maybe from Ascend Andy notables right so basically all of your damage scaling is taken care of pretty uh pretty easily right all right so defenses are easy right um this is a um image of my character in 3.23 you see uh let's take a look at the effective hit pull is infinite right all s cuz this build is using Aegis Aurora and if you have Aegis Aurora in pob and enough armor your your effective hit pull is going to be infinite because if we look down here es on block um we have so much armor that I'm recovering 73,000 energy Shield every time I block um pretty insane right 90 Alvarez pretty easy to achieve and if we look at the max hit taken which is probably the most important stat to look at when you're looking for um survivability right it doesn't really matter what the effective hit pull is if the guy if the build has a effective hit pull of 2 million but your max hit is only 10K then you know it's going to be a build right um max hit take Max uh hit is the probably the most important stat to look at when you're looking at build defenses right so uh in this uh patch 3.23 um we have um quite a lot of HP uh do to charms and all this kind of cool stuff right so you can get even but I mean even in other patches if you play there are versions of armor stacker that can get well well over this this uh number here like easily the Fig fsmax can go all the way up to like 800k uh and yeah pretty insane but anyways defenses are I guess you could say easy because you know all you have to do is skill ARA effect right and you get your defense get your offense all right so what kind of skills can you use right so basically you can use any attack skill that can be used with the sword right because obviously we need to use the replica dream feather sword so any kind of skill that can be used with the sword can be used right so Smite is the most common right because like we mentioned before you want to benefit from the Smite uh Aura for the flat added lightning damage so other skills like so for example if you use molten strike or lightning strike then you're going to need to use Smite as a buff tool because it's pretty much like 50% of your damage right this Smite or U so not all that bad it just means you have one more button push but um pretty much you know you can do Smite uh you can do lightning strike is pretty common molten strike is very common for delvers most of the top delvers pretty much all the top delvers are molten strike armor stackers all right and there's also some you know spectal uh spectral uh Shield throw variants or you know quite a lot of other skills that you can use and play around with but basically in general any skill any attack skill that can be used with a sword can be used I mean it's not going to be um you know might not be ideal but um it'll work right okay so damage conversion this is something that a lot of new players kind of get mixed up on is where do we get our damage conversion right because I think for most builds you gen they generally want to try to convert all of their your damage into the element of choice right so for example on cold blade Vortex you want to convert 100% of Fizz to cold right cuz that's um and that's like a very important part of the build and like got got to make sure you have your 100% Fizz conversion right it's like emphasized right and then for other builds too it's like make sure you have 100% convert to lightning or fire or whatever right well for armor stacker not really all that important right because like we mentioned before the flat damage all of our flat damage is coming from our wrath Aura and smite Aura so we don't really even care about the little bit of Fizz damage that we have on the sword right converting is not important you don't need to do it and that's why you can use a skill like molten strike which is basically a you know has fire conversion but we're doing lightning damage right so it's because yeah the flat damage all of our flat damage is just wrath and smite so it doesn't really matter if it's a cold skill or a fire skill right so it doesn't really matter because um of how we scale our damage right okay so what ascendant seat to choose so um my opinion I think you can make it work on any ascendancy last League I saw a build doing it on Necromancer there was a necromancer armor stacker I even found a hierophant armor stacker I don't really know how good those kind of builds will be um but my opinion you can pretty much do it on any ascendence you want might not be the best but probably make it work right so what are the most common ascendancies right there are some um we'll go over four in this video here you can see on the screen there are a couple of reasons why people choose these ascendancies right so we'll get into those reasons all right so uh Scion so I'm very biased right I like Scion I just like the class right so this the the class of choice for me um so Scion gets a very nice um place on the passive tree right you start out in the middle it's easy to Branch out and pick up a lot of the aura effect nodes on the tree and also some keystones right uh you can also start off from other classes uh starting place right with your ascendency so that's pretty nice too so you know since you can actually reach all of the aura effect nodes on the tree pretty much um Scion pretty much has the potential to have the highest amount of Aura effect right so s also does get more passive points right so your ascendancy actually just gives you passive skills right so you have more passives than um the other classes which is very big for an endgame where every single passive point is you know going to cost a mirror right I mean that's why one passive voices are so expensive because they give you that one extra passive Point uh so yeah passive points is um premium for Arma sackers okay so we get a free 15% ARA effect from our ascendency we get free fortify intimidate and taunt and basically it's more damage right because you're um you do more damage to intimidated targets right so let's just see on the ascendancy it's from the champion ascendancy enemies taunted bar you take 10% increased damage right and also intimidate um enemies to also take 10% increased damage so basically it's just like 20% more damage on Sion right not to mention free fortify which is very very big defensive layer right okay so Necromancer aurura provides a lot of attack and cast speed so a lot of people ask why do you guys go Necromancer on Scion right and Necromancer gives you um this stat it's like it's an aura right so it's um Aura from your skills Grant 2% increased attack and cast speed so this is actually attached to each Aura you have right and and as such right it scales with aura effect so yeah 300% increased ARA effect that 2% is going to go up to like what six right so it it does add uh a lot of increased attack and cast speed um that other classes just don't get right so it also has very good forbidden Jewels I guess every single um class does have very good forbidden Jewels but one thing um for Sion that you can get is you can get the Dead Eye Jewels which are pretty much uh pretty amazing for projectile based skills right because you get plus one PGE you get Mark effect which is pretty big because you know P um snipers Mark pretty good for increased damage right uh and then you also get Tailwind so you're not going to get Tailwind on any other um ascendency unless you actually go play dead eyee or Pathfinder which a lot of people don't do um there's just no way to get Tailwind on the armor stcker except from this Jewel which is pretty cool cuz Tailwind is awesome right um there's also some cool ones you can get from like Guardian which give you your AAS Grant increased um life mana and energy Shield recovery rate so get some insane es recovery on Scion if you decide to go for the guardian route right there's also Berserker Berserker has uh access to rage I guess access to rage is is pretty much pretty easy for a lot of other classes right but it is also another 20% more damage multiplier right so there's a lot of Cool Jewels uh on Scion mainly notable is I think the one is uh going to be the dead eyee forbidden flame Jewel and the guardian one right so you get the it's really good for projectiles based skills or if you want to tank up uh Guardian is pretty amazing okay so Chieftain after the chieftain rework um Chieftain is one of the best ascendancies for armor stacking so now why is that well chiefton does get a free ancestral call from uh sendy right so that's one more damage support so it's pretty much like a 40% more damage or maybe a little bit more right pretty insane right you get a free melding of the flesh so you don't have to use melding of Flesh which gives you um minus four Max res or- 7D to all res so you get a you know basically free melding In the Flesh which pretty insane right uh you get easy resistances and very good Synergy with a double overcap grasping male so before we went over some of the um ways you can get armor and we did go over the graspy male which had armor is increased by overcap fire resistance resistance uh and evasion rating is increased by overcap Cold resistance right so these mods both of these mods can roll on the same armor piece of armor right so you can have both the cold and fire over cap and since Chieftain gets this uh notable where it's like if you you get additional I think cold and lightning resistance based on your how much uh fire resistance you have at a reduced rate or value right so basically that means you can just stack fire resistance and gain tons of cold resistance for this uh evasion so you can pretty much just like um you know get insane armor values just by playing Chieftain and stacking fire resistance because that's going to give you inter cold resistance and then that's going to you know uh work out really nicely with this double cap grasping mail uh obviously this is very expensive right um these grasping males are extremely rare but is something that's very um unique that Chieftain does the best best I mean obviously you could just stack cold res and Fire Res on any ascendancy but it is uh going to be a little bit harder you're not going to get as much bang for your buck you could say on other ascendancies Chief then can also use unbreakable from Juggernaut to get a Min Transcendence with no downsides so uh what is this right so I think uh if you know um Juggernaut gets this node unbreakable that says like 8% of armor applies to Elemental damage taken from hits so it's kind of like trans Transcendence uh Transcendence basically is the same thing but it's 100% of your armor but then it reduces your max res by 15 and also makes your armor not applied to Fizz damage taken from hits but uh Chief then can just grab this unbreakable from jug um so you don't you get basically get Transcendence with no downsides it just makes you incredibly tanky and you know like your your max hit taken is going to be similar to like what we saw in this um screenshot here 300 to like 400k Max it taken just from just using that Jewel right so um it also you can also use the Berserker one aspect of Carnage for you know like insane damage right uh so Chieftain does have some really really cool jewels to use as well um but most notable one is probably going to be this unbreakable one because it's going to make you incredibly tanky so let's go over to Champion so Champion is also very popular choice Champion gets free uh for y we get it gets intimidate which is 10% increased damage taken gets taunt uh stun immunity stun immunity while fortified right basically get free banner and 30% AA effect so this does sound pretty good and all but at the end of the day I think um uh Sion is going to end up getting more Aura effect so even though Champion does get this 30% Aura effect from its ascendency since it's in not really in a a spot where you can go grab all of the aura effect nodes on the passive tree you end up not really having as much as uh Aion does right so but it is nice right a nice 30% AA effect boost um there is a lot of good forbidden Jewels for Champion right I'm not really sure exactly I don't really play uh Champion or know too much about it but uh set you know there is some Cool Jewels right you can get like um the Gladiator one that gets increased attack speed or or you can go for like SL player and all those kind of cool things right so okay so not really much too much to say about Champion sorry guys maybe there are some other cool um points uh you know like things that to mention about Champion but this is sort of what I came up with okay so um jug right um so Juggernaut basically like we went over before on chiefin Juggernaut just has this manyi Transcendence with no downsides right so insanely tanky from the get-go you don't really need the Forbidden flaming Jewels uh flaming flesh jewels to actually get going and then you can go grab the chieftain forbidden Jewels for a free melding of the flesh right or the 90 all res or you know or the um Fire Res cold res is increased by your Fire Res or whatever you want right it gets easy accuracy so accuracy is not a problem you're stun and freeze immune and you get lots of life or ES regen from untiring right so jug um very very tanky um right off the get you know right off the start so um you don't really have to worry about getting forbidden flame Jewels or um accuracy or stun freeze immunity you know so maybe it is a good ascendency to start off with maybe you play this first and then swap over the chieftain once you have more gear or I'm not really sure right but uh Juggernaut is another very popular ascendency due to the um tankiness of the build all right and you also get increased attack speed from your accur accuracy so you do get um a little bit more damage that okay so um when when you're choosing your ascendancy like those those are some of the things you should be considering right I'm not really going to tell you which one is best because I think they all are very good but um I think either uh cion or Chieftain is preferable uh just due to the amount of good synergies that they have uh for armor stacking right if we look at Chieftain versus Juggernaut it's like well maybe when you're starting out jug might be a smarter option but once you have a lot of gear and money well you know chiefton is just doing everything better right um same thing with like Champion versus uh like say something like a Scion well you know maybe uh maybe starting out ch um Champion might seem a little bit better or maybe a little bit cheaper to get going but you know at the end uh in the end game Scion is going to do everything better uh in my opinion right so if uh I guess you know if I had to tell you which ascendency to play it would probably be either Scion Chieftain or Juggernaut U but don't you know just go I think you guys have to go you know choose this for yourself right it's kind of hard to say because all all these classes do have very good upsides and for me the reason I play Scion is just because I like the character model right I just like the way it looks um I also do like the Necromancer ARA because you know you get a lot of attack speed and cast speed and it feels really good but that's basically it right so um yeah so Cho so choose choose on your own guys um all right let's keep going so what kind of builds are there right um so right now as of making this video there are three sort of main type of um ways that people build their armor stackers um and um first one is going to be dorian's prototype dorian's prototype is uh very cheap damage scaling right it's very easy to get quite a lot of damage on doran's Prototype because you have access to um turning uh enemies uh lightning res into like negative -00 orus 150 um pretty easily right it's pretty easy to get uh enough minus uh lightning resistance to start doing insane amounts of damage uh with very little investment but you know doriani prototype does have its downsides I don't know if you guys have ever played with dorian's prototype but lightning D gen basically just One-Shots you and it's kind of like a lot of people don't like it so it does have some downsides but very cheap very cheap easy uh damage right it's also consistent damage right because um monsters resistances basically do nothing so if there's like a map mod where monsters have like 90 RZ or um and all that kind of stuff it doesn't really matter because doran's prototype just sets their resistance to what you have right so all your damage feels very consistent right okay so then we have the resistance stacker resistance stacker is um using this grasping maale and one thing we do a little bit differently is so we are still stacking um armor evasion and we're also stacking Aura effect but we're also then going to focus on um stacking a resistance either cold or fire like we we saw on the um graspy mail armors right there's the evasion rating is increased by your overcapped cold res or armor right or whichever one right so you focus on if you're going to use the cold mod you get a lot of cold res you can get up to like you know uh my build now is like Plus 600% or probably close about like 650 700 increased cold res which then increases my evasion and getes me a lot more armor right um so that's sort of the resistance stacker you know on top of your ARA stacking you also start stacking resistances okay so after this we have um a Transcendence build so basically the same idea of this resistance stacker but we use this Transcendence Keystone from the militant Faith right and Transcendence um and and true end game like um if you're talking about multiple mirrors and all this kind of stuff is probably the tankiest build in the game um my build I I've made a few of these Transcendence builds in previous leagues and uh you can tank every single Uber boss uh one shot ability like the maven brain explosion it's like piece of cake to tank that um you can go I've went down to like Del 6,000 plus with it 6,300 um basically it is like completely Immortal and even in standard these builds can get even crazier and it's pretty insane but a downside is Transcendence requires a lot of unique items that are extremely rare and with like the Watcher's eye costing like from one to like five mirrors plus just for that so um it's it's a very expensive but U very very powerful defensive wise all right so that is sort of um uh going to be it for this video I think we went over quite a few um like things to introduce you to armor stacking and then in the uh next video we'll go over um a little bit like gear um we'll kind of gear um what are some like key gear items that like what what what items do you need you know to get the build started what's the required items um how do you get them what stats on the item are important and for rare items how do you craft them and all that kind of stuff so we'll go over that in the next video but I hope you did enjoy this one and if you did like it um please like And subscribe guys took a long long time to make this video and um I'd appreciate that all right but anyway that's going be it for this one and I'll see you next time

Channel: Bigdaddy

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Keywords: path of exile, path of exile guide, path of exile builds, path of exile 2, path of exile best build, armor stacker, armor stacker poe, armor stacker scion, armor stacking smite, armor stacking ascendant, armor stack smite, poe armour stacker, poe armour stacker smite, poe armor stacker smite, path of exile armour stacking, poe armor stacking guide, Armour Stacker 3.23, Path of Exile 3.23, path of exile transcendence, poe transcendence, path of exile 2023

Id: dqovLB9RyJM

Length: 31min 0sec (1860 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 01 2024