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Scaling defenses effectively in Last Epoch is crucial for surviving the game’s challenging content and pushing your build to higher levels. The game offers multiple layered defensive mechanics that work together to reduce damage taken, increase survivability, and sustain your character in combat.

1. Health (HP)  
Health is the most fundamental defense. When your HP reaches zero, your character dies. Scaling health involves increasing your maximum HP through gear, passives, blessings, and skills. Added and increased health stats stack to give you a larger life pool, which is essential for soaking damage from hits and damage over time (DoT) Last Epoch Gold.

2. Ward  
Ward acts like a secondary health pool that absorbs damage before your HP is affected. However, it decays over time if not refreshed, so maintaining Ward requires sustain mechanics. Ward is particularly useful for mitigating burst damage and can be scaled through gear and skills.

3. Resistances  
Resistances reduce damage taken from specific damage types such as Fire, Cold, Lightning, Physical, Poison, Necrotic, and Void. Resistances cap at 75%, and while exceeding the cap doesn’t provide extra mitigation, it helps prevent resistance reduction effects from enemies. Capping resistances early in the game is recommended to reduce incoming elemental and status damage.

4. Armor  
Armor provides damage mitigation against hit damage, especially physical damage. It does not reduce DoT damage. Armor effectiveness depends on your armor value and the level of the area. It can mitigate up to 85% of physical damage and about 59.5% for other damage types. Armor is a key layer for reducing incoming hit damage.

5. Endurance  
Endurance is a unique damage reduction mechanic that activates when your health falls below a threshold (baseline 20% of total HP). It provides damage reduction to all damage types, including DoTs, up to a maximum of 60%. Scaling Endurance involves increasing both the damage reduction amount and the threshold through gear, skills, and passives, making it a powerful “last stand” defense.

6. Block 
Block gives a chance to reduce damage from hits by a percentage. It has two components: Block Chance (chance to block an attack) and Block Effectiveness (amount of damage reduced when blocking). Block does not apply to DoTs. Using a shield increases block effectiveness significantly, but block can be used without one as well.

7. Dodge and Glancing Blow  
Dodge provides a chance to completely avoid hits but does not affect DoT damage. Glancing Blow reduces damage from hits that are not dodged or blocked. Both are important for reducing the frequency and severity of damage taken Last Epoch Gold for sale.