Hey everybody, as I approach 100 and start engaging with Nightmare Dungeons regularly, I wanted to note some things about the defensive aspects in D4.
Vid: HC Diablo 4 - Experience + Perspective So Far - YouTube
Please let me know what you think or how you feel about this yourself.
Very informative. Agree with you that the current meta builds are catered to softcore with little to no emphasis on survivability. As a necromancer in HC I’m forced to run blood mist as a skill regardless of what build I’m going, which is incompatible with a lot of the current meta builds.
I find the chain crowd control potential in nightmare dungeons forces me to completely avoid affixes such as cold enchanted, after losing a few 50+ characters. The current state of resistances, as far as I’ve been told, makes playing int primary stat classes a little more difficult, forcing us to put more emphasis on armor enchantments and gems.
Also glad to see another CE shadow build in endgame.
I’m doing ok with Necro. Blood Mist is just a good common sense skill to use until you get geared up. Don’t be over-reliant on build guides for now, I bet that all of them were made before the necro buffs anyway.
Yea, I imagine softocre will always prioritize high-dmg builds, which is understandable.
For example: Armor loses value for every monster that is higher level than you. Around 17 levels above your current level, your current armor value begins to plummet in effectiveness. And there’s no way to combat that, it just simply exists. Everyone becomes a glass cannon. You can’t gem/enchant resistances because they are either bugged or don’t provide the inherit bonus the affix claims. Best bet is to stack life/DR affixes, but those have set rolls on set ilvl gear that doesn’t scale with the nightmare dungeon system.
Diablo 4 currently offers nothing to assist your with scaled endgame content in this regard. D3 used the infinite paragon system/leveling gems/augments/higher tiers of gear, Path of Exile uses chase uniques, complex defensive mechanics, higher ilvl of gear with influenced mods/implicits, etc.
Diablo 4 offers nothing, as of yet. 
There are plenty of ways to boost your overall ehp, you just have to prioritize more of those in HC.
If you can list ways to scale defense at level 100 beyond max ilvl gear and rolls and paragon board, please do so. Because numerically those will not make you tanky enough to survive high nightmare dungeons.