Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Considering the majority of malware we have to deal with nowadays, your best defenses are:

• A firewall that blocks everything by default. I use SimpleFirewall and give trust on a per executable basis.
• uBlockOrigin, because dear lord navigating some sites is almost impossible without blocking all that shit
• Avoid anything that asks for admin access
• Keep an eye on resource usage and be on the lookout for any weird looking processes.

There was one time I downloaded a piece of shit that started to encrypt my drive. Since the CPU fan started spinning loud, I immediately checked task manager, figured what was going on and ended the malicious root process. Next, it was time to scour my folders, especially inside %appdata%, for any possible leftover executables. All clean, restart PC, everything was fine. I lost a couple of files, but nothing personal, just other downloads.

I think if it was enough, we wouldn't have viruses, as Microsoft Defender is enabled by default. I wouldn't rely much trust on it.

Pirated apps are one of the top source for botnet operators to infect new machines and add them to their network. Try not to run any pirated app or game if you can, but if you can't avoid it, get it from trusted sources (e.g. directly from the cracker's homepage), not from random sources like TPB where anyone can upload anything.

I've had great coverage a d low resource utilization with eset

Isn't CPG repacks in the megathread? It has visual novels

To be honest, common sense is the best form of security. If you don't trust something, either run it in a VM, or don't run it at all.

To answer your question, Microsoft defender should be plenty.