is pure evasion melee viable?

Well.. resistances can be obtained from the tree. +40% is not reasonable. There are shield nodes with resists etc. So resist are not an issue.

Abyssus is. Get BoR for block and flat phys.

I have a lightning strike build (the melee variant) with crit dagger and daresso shield and chest plus both acrobatics, ondar and few ev nodes and grace.

And it is pretty damn safe (i can see how often i get hit by the end/onsl conversion on hit.

However it is still more block/dodge build than eva. I can safely get my eva to zero and survivability drop would be neglible.

Secondary defences overtook primary ones (ar/eva) long ago and in brutal terms these are not really needed. These help but are not needed.

Get that block flask. Anyone who designed and approved it should get removed from balance team but as harm is done - use it. BiS flask for pretty much any build..

I'm playing an abyssus dual wielding evasion based character in rampage and I only rarely die, level 89. You can even kill Atziri. As you are playing in standard, you can afford a death from time to time.

evasive characters are very defensively powerful, but you can overdo the physical mitigation, where you're invested so heavily but the returns are diminishing.
the best investment is into block first, so you can capitalize on spell block because with an evasive build you will be dying to spell dmg almost exclusively, if you die. physical dmg basically won't be an issue

ty all for you answers

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Better utilize the "more melee damage on full hp" gem since it will be active 90% of the times.

I never thought about that for evasion builds! cool!

Try Dreamfeather for your weapon.

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Sovyn wrote:

As with any build, must have high life or es to soak what does get through.

I killed Atziri with 3200 HP. "Must have" is a bit extreme. With all things, it's EASIER if you've got a ton of life or ES, but it's not necessary to succeed.

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RediusMaximus wrote:

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Sovyn wrote:

As with any build, must have high life or es to soak what does get through.

I killed Atziri with 3200 HP. "Must have" is a bit extreme. With all things, it's EASIER if you've got a ton of life or ES, but it's not necessary to succeed.

You can dodge mos of Atziri attacks or block it (and flask when you do), it's a question of if you can live if she hits you ;v

High life or ES is just a big buffer when you do get hit, being 3k the bare min.

Pure evasion gear, with Iron Reflexes and Acrobatics is a pretty strong option too. IR is only 7 points from Ondars, not too far, and opens that nice life node section. The benefit is you don't get hit by the Acrobatics penalty on armour.

Using this got me 30% physical damage reduction with the rest of the normal gear for a bow ranger. I think that's without Grace.




Then you can use something like this to get you close to 50% physical damage reduction, for a melee build. Waiting on the next free respec to fully test it.

I've done a claw (Bloodseeker off-hand) reaver using a very similar concept. I stacked dodge, block, spell block and evasion for avoidance. I reached about 4k hit points by level 90, which was enough to do lvl77 maps. I sort of got bored at that point, so I have no experience form lvl78 maps. The build isn't/wasn't Atziri viable due to the low HP. Please note that the Bloodseeker claw in my off-hand was a large part of the build: instant leech is very powerful and kept the squishy shadow alive even with so-so hp. If you plan on something else than claws, then I'd warmly recommend Vaal pact + stacking leech.

tl;dr It sounds viable, but you're likely to need a fast and reliable sustain (or mitigation, as many others mentioned) to top it all off.

Edit: My post seemed messy to me somehow, so I felt like just re-running the meta-idea. Core idea for me was to stack a high enough avoidance to allow for not picking up two big hits in a row, thus allowing for quick leech (or sustain of your choice) to restore hp. Result is, you survive pretty much anything not trumping your effective HP against the damage/hit type in question. Sort of good vs attacks (roughly 40% evade chance, 40% dodge chance, 40% block chance for a total of ~80% avoidance) and a tad less against spells (46% spell dodge, 20% spell block for a total of ~50% avoidance. Could use a rathpith globe to up the spell block here). That said, if anything hit for more than your EHP (just HP for phys, (1-res)*HP for ele), you're toast.