Is truly melee (not ranged area) tanks viable, or do even true melee tanks exist in PoE?

Title basicly says it...

I am thinking outside of costly builds with uniques required, just plain passive tree + skills + rares.

Are there any true melee skill viable and reasonable viable in Hardcore?

It looks to me most 'melee' skills are more like spells then melee attacks, like Reave and Earthquake, which are more like close area spells then melee attack (hitting with a melee weapon).

I am asking since it look to me in PoE hard content does not seem to be viable for melee/tanks outside of builds abusing CoC or some uniques, which if so is kinda sad...

Can a char actually TANK end game content and bosses without a high chance of dying?

You'd have to try something like max-block Aegis with at least 7k life on a juggernaut with all three purities. I.E, the do no damage build.

Sure but it won't be cheap, since builds like that will be slow, which means you take more hits to the face before you kill monsters, which means even more tankiness is required with less flask uptime. But builds like tanky Jugger, Aegis Aurora block, 10k+ hp leech tanks or high ES regen tanks still exist.

with max block-spell block and a nice life pool you can certenly survive end game i could tank merc izaro for days and atziri has a hard time hitting you as wel (double flameblast stil dangerous if 1 does not get blocked) for this i choose the duelist gladiator path for its 100% spell block and went with the bleed explosions this melts elites if they are in a pack

as skill i used eq for its nice damage and clear potenial but it could just as wel be done with any other melee skill

near 7K hp, DPS 25-50k with weight of the empire, clearspeed is ok because of bleeding exploding for 10% og their hp.

I facetank T15 map boss& (including -min max + added damage) and atziri, for uber it's doable but need to tweak the build and wear a kaom i thing, as well as gelligs trick to pass healing phase (Detonate dead dual doryani + totem chance to flee).

It can work with only 4L and without soul taker, just crown (10c), anvil (1c-1ex depend on roll), and thousand teemu (1c) required.

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uffert escribió:

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snakesolidx escribió:

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I have looked into the Gladiator already, but was unsure how it would work in facetanking.
And a dual wield Gladiator would be far worse?.. Block chance too low?

Edit: Also how/why can they facetank so long, what are the reasons for this? And what about reflect?

You can gain immortality vs large packs of (less-powerful-than-Map-boss) enemies by having a high amount of buffer Recovery on Block. snakesolidx's setup uses Crown of the Pale King + Thousand Teeth Temu + The Anvil for that. If you add together the reflect values on those three items, you get 241-1300 against general Attackers, and 341-1450 against Melee Attackers. Averaging all those values and taking 30% of that gives an average of about 250 Life on Block, plus 38 on the Anvil. Roughly 3 in 4 Attacks will be healing you for that much, while the 4th attack Hits (on average). So, on average, you'll survive any crowd of enemies that deal 750 damage per Hit or fewer, which would be most white enemies.

Aegis Aurora also allows this, but requires you to stack a lot of Armour:



Necromancer (Witch) Ascendancy class will allow you to gain an insane amount of Life on Block for very, very little investment in anything else, but limits you quite a bit in terms of damage output: (consistent 528 Life on Block from the blue gem Bone Offering; Necro asc class allows your Offering skills to also affect You)

There's a duelist claw build with 78% block, that seems to work pretty well. got with it to 72 face tanking everything, till i got conceited and got 1shotted by merci malachai (playing hc).
Search for it in the duelist forum.

Downside of the build is that it uses molten strike, so clearing white mobs is relatively slow.