Defensive Playstyles Lack Incentives and Need Meaningful Rewards, NEED CHANGES.

As is defensive playstyles will always fall behind fast, high-DPS builds because of the inherent snowball effect tied to kill speed. The faster you kill enemies, the faster you acquire loot. This leads to quicker gear upgrades, more currency, and even more efficient clearing — reinforcing a loop that rewards raw damage output.

Combat becomes significantly easier when bosses and enemies die before they have a chance to attack. No amount of defense can outperform the simplicity of killing threats before they act. In short, the best way to mitigate damage is to eliminate the source immediately in all game content currently available.

I think that the only solution is to have some (NOT ALL, NOT MAJORITY) end-game content in POE2 specifically designed so only defensive tuned builds will be able to succeed consistently, and also have worth-while loot/chase items. For example bosses/content have Auras that dampen strikes above a certain % of their health. Defences on some bosses/mobs that can reflect a certain % of the damage back to the player above a certain threshold, etc, have phases that take longer with more AOE.

otherwise there will never be any reason what so ever to choose a defensively specced character. Why am I going to play a character than does content 5x slower in mapping and also is worse at end game gets worse loot etc etc.

i meant to post thing in poe2 forums whoops

I'm currently a heavy parry user after finding a unique one that gives me a lot of crit chance after a parry so its very rewarding on retaliation.

All I can think of right now is that they just need to provide a bit more player choice, I'd say at the very least more uniques and "short window of parry/block" support gem that rewards the player with offensive bonuses.

But shielding/parrying is still incredibly strong now for the specific job it does, I don't get crit while parrying thanks to a passive selection and I can keep up parrying against absolutely everything because stun threshold is so high and evasion sinks the stun bar too much.

The main problem of course is things like Huntress skills such as LS being way too overtuned to the point of eradicating any decent and involved gameplay.
This game is far better when offense isn't spammed nonsense.