Capping Defenses and Resists for Willpower?

[Extor Prime]

Right, so I've been very much unsuccessful devising a slotting strategy for my Elec/WP Sentinel. The characters does well enough in the open world, but crumbles very quickly against massed attacks (i.e. fire farm). Does anyone have a slotting strategy for WP that would allow me to cap defenses and resists?

 

Thanks in advance.

[Seroster01]

I will preface the following by saying I'm not SUPER familiar with the i24 IO balancing that took place late when the servers were still live, or much of the "i25" changes in general.

That being said, what I say about typed defense seems to still be an issue cause I've heard other folks on these forums discuss it. 

 

To the actual question: WP was in a tough spot for something like this last I played, because it's built around having multiple/redundant types of protection, but all of them are all  individually low-impact.  This works well in most content because having multiple layers of mitigation generally increases the value of each.  Theres a couple of problems with trying to cap both resistance & defense for WP. The first is that it has uneven resistance levels depending on the type. WPs resistance abilities are primarily concentrated on high-ish levels for S/L (not super useful for Fire Farms) w/ relatively low levels of resistance for all the other types.  On the other hand, it has higher levels of defense for the more "exotic" damage types, but due to this concept the WPs defenses are type-based defense instead of positional.  The first makes it hard to get high levels of fire resistance like you'd want, and the latter makes it hard to efficiently maximize your defenses with IOs because typed-defense bonus values are relatively low AND relatively scarce compare to positional bonuses, in addition to being much narrower in what's affected by them.

 

My suggestion, if your primary concern is Fire Farms (due to the combination of the issues listed above & WP having low resistance to Defense Debuffs) would probably be to hyper-focus boosting resistance & defense specifically for fire/cold (these typea are always paired in set bonuses AFAIK).  Slot both the 3% def to all enh, and if it's convenient I'd probably suggest trying to get solid S/L resistance too, cause those still seem to be hugely impactful for the more common mob types & there seems to be a lot of set bonuses for it anyway. Take whatever max health bonuses that you can along the way, as a lot of WPs survivability comes from its regeneration abilities & having higher max HP will increase the effectiveness of those regenerative abilities because they're based on % of max HP. In addition to higher HP pools make it easier to survive spike damage & both factors again contribute to the "multiple layers" reinforcement. 

 

If you're looking to build for a more generalized build than just farming fire maps I'd drop the focus on building most typed defenses & just focus on boosting your various resistances & S/L defense if it's convenient. Resistance set bonuses got a large boost in the later periods of the game, and being focused on Resistance means you'd be less impacted by the old issue of Cascading Defense Failure.  AFAIK WP has little to no Defense Debuff Resistance, and as such gets its defenses stripped very easily if you're fighting  the wrong mob types.  CDFs wouldn't be any real concern on Fire Farm maps, but it's a very common issue vs a lot of normal end-game mob types. 

 

The little bit of playing around in Pines that I had time for made it seem like it'd still be really hard to boost ALL of these values to cap on a WP toon, but if you focus on the more impactful ones you can probably boost those high-impact values to levels that would make you exceptionally hard to kill.