Get ready for another new league as Path of Exile 3.24 Necropolis League release approaches. In this guide, we will explore defensive mechanics for the league start that will fortify your build and hasten your advancement.

At the start of the Necropolis League, there are several mechanics that can be used, which are usually strong in the early stages and provide significant assistance, particularly as you progress through the campaign and face increasingly challenging monsters.

Spell Suppression

Starting with spell suppression, the chance of Mastery to suppress spell damage is lucky. As soon as you allocate your first spell suppression wheel during leveling, you're going to want to immediately take this Mastery. What this Mastery does is that whenever you are hit by a spell, your chance to suppress spell damage will be rolled twice, choosing the favorable outcome.

• With the Entrench wheel taken, with just the notable and the small node allocated, you have a 177% chance to suppress spell damage, and with the Mastery taken, you have an effective chance of 31%.
• With the Full Instinct wheel taken near the top of the tree, you'll have a 22% chance to suppress damage, and with this Mastery taken, you'll have an effective chance of 39%.
• With the Full Inveterate wheel taken, which is the one that most Ranger builds will take, you'll have a 39% chance to suppress spell damage, and with the lucky Mastery allocated, this will improve to an effective chance of 63%.

You will find how much effective spell suppression chance is being gained by spending a single point on this Mastery, and this makes it such a powerful tool for early progression, especially at League start when your gear is typically lacking and you don't have access to leveling gear.

Elevore Helmet

Next, let's talk about a common unique POE Item - the Elevore helmet. This helmet also grants a large chunk of spell suppression chance and some Elemental ailment avoidance chance there. But most importantly, when you suppress spell damage, it can restore 100 to 200 points of life.

This is an incredibly powerful stat, especially if you can get a good roll on the amount of life recovered every time you successfully roll a chance to suppress an incoming spell hit. You'll recover life after taking the hit. This is instant recovery, so it's not prevented by map modifiers.

While this is not a very powerful tool against large spell hits, its effectiveness greatly improves in the leveling environment through early maps, where you often encounter packs of mobs that send a flurry of spells your way. It's dangerous to have too many spells hitting a character at once, and this is usually how you die in early maps.

This mod is going to save you a lot of the time as long as you have a decently high chance to suppress spell damage. This one pairs very well with the spell suppression Mastery. You can also continue to use it deep into progression if you have no interest in bossing.

Also Read: Path Of Exile 3.24: Some Significant QoL Improvements Are Coming To Necropolis League

Endurance Charge

Next is endurance charge generation. This isn't specific to any position in the tree or any type of build, but having stamina charges in your build will enhance your physical mitigation, which is usually one of the weakest parts of the league start build defensively.

You can get endurance charge generation into a build, especially early on, is to be on the lookout for Betrayal rings and amulets, which you can unveil for the minimum endurance charge modifier. When this mod is unveiled, it also has a slight chance to gain an endurance charge on kill, making it very useful while mapping.

Dread Banner Skill

Dread Banner is a reservation skill which provides an offensive aura that will lessen the accuracy of monsters near your character, improving the effectiveness of your evasion rating. This can be very useful early on, especially at the relatively low cost of 10% reservation.

Most of the builds that will be using Dread Banner defensively are unlikely to benefit from the impale chance portion of the skill. Because Dread Banner is an aura skill that affects you and your allies, you can actually support it with Generosity Support.

Generosity will prevent Dread Banner from applying its impale portion of the skill to you, but in return, it will grant a very substantial amount of aura effect to the defensive, less accuracy portion of the skill. Even better still is that Generosity has no cost and reservation multiplier.

With Dread Banner being a strength skill gem, it's often the case that you won't have the stats to level this gem up early on. But Dread Banner's less accuracy aura doesn't scale a huge amount with gem levels and is powerful even at Level 1, applying 15% less accuracy to nearby enemies.

A source of inflicting blind on monsters is also a great addition. Blind will also lessen a monster's accuracy, whilst having the bonus of also lessening a monster's evasion rating. So if you're an attack build, you gain the extra benefit. If you're not capped on hit chance, the Blind will lessen accuracy and evasion rating by 20%.

Armor And Energy Shield Mastery

The armor and energy shield Mastery is underrated. This one does have a prerequisite of having to use armor and energy shield gear pieces in your helmet, gloves, and boot slots. But this Mastery will provide 100% increased armor and energy shield from your equipped body armor.

This Mastery will vary based on the status of your body armor and any other increases to armor or energy shield that you have in your build. But defensively, this large increase early on can mean a lot more mitigation against physical hits, and also potentially a lot more guard from Molten Shell as well.

While Mastery requires you to equip armor and energy shields on your helmet, gloves, and boots, that doesn't mean you have to use hybrid armor and energy shield body armor. You can actually make use of a pure armor chest piece to gain a lot of armor from this Mastery, or a pure energy shield body armor to gain a large chunk of energy shield instead.

Flasks

Lastly, let's discuss flasks. This one is not really specific to League start, but making use of the defensive flasks like a Granite Flask or Jade flask as soon as you get it in the campaign is going to make you feel so much tankier.

The amount of armor or evasion it's granting at that stage of progression is just enormous compared to not just what you would normally have on your character at that point, but also against the average monster damage and accuracy rating. Make sure you upgrade your life flasks routinely too and grab a bleed removal mod as soon as possible.

I recommend making sure you have a bleed removal life flask by the midway point of Act 4, where some monsters in zones like the Grand Arena and the Belly of the Beast begin to regularly inflict dangerous bleeds with their attacks.