Defensive Stat Breakdowns

Mon Jun 22

Defensive Stat Breakdowns are all about understanding why your character works the way it does, and figuring out characters you are looking at when you are not sure how they are built or where they get their stats. Path of Exile is a complicated game, so this is the first in a series of features meant to be educational: to visualize these numbers better, and ultimately to make comparing characters easier so you do not have to do it all by hand. It works on both Path of Exile 1 and Path of Exile 2, whether you are studying someone else's build or one of your own characters.

Video Walkthrough

How It Works

On any character, hover a value in the stats panel and a tooltip opens showing where that number actually comes from. Pick any defensive stat, from Life to a single resistance, and you can trace it back to the exact items, passives and other sources feeding into it instead of guessing.

Breakdown tooltip on a defensive stat showing its base value, sources, increases and more multipliers

Every stat reads the same way: a base value with the list of sources behind it, then a list of increased modifiers, and a list of more multipliers.

Visualizing Defences with Graphs

Some values are not a single number, and that is part of what makes armour and evasion hard to understand. Armour scales with the size of the enemy hit, so Damage Reduction is drawn as a graph using the same default enemy values Path of Building uses, with markers for that enemy hit and for the largest hit you can survive.

Damage reduction curve plotting reduction against hit size with enemy and max hit markers

It also explains odd-looking numbers, like why a small amount of armour barely reduces a big hit. Evade chance gets the same treatment, plotted against enemy accuracy so you can see how it holds up against weaker and stronger attackers.

The graph also splits the reduction that scales with armour (the grey curve) from base physical damage reduction that applies flat regardless of hit size (the green line on top), like the reduction from endurance charges or the Soul of Lunaris pantheon. This shows up in both games, but it is especially visible in Path of Exile 1 where endurance charges are everywhere.

Damage reduction graph with the grey armour curve and the green base physical reduction line flat on top

Resistances

Resistance tooltips show the resistance itself, and at the bottom any modifiers that change your maximum resistance, so it is easy to see when something is pushing your max fire resistance up rather than just your current value.

Fire Resistance breakdown stacked with the modifiers that raise its maximum

Learn More

If you want to go deeper on the order of operations behind these numbers, these are great places to start:

Try It Out

This is just the start, with more educational and comparison features to come. Open any character and start hovering: browse Path of Exile 1 builds or Path of Exile 2 builds to find one to dig into, and let us know what you think on our Discord.