Defenses

Anyone tested to see if one defense is currently better than another? I'm hoping by release they will be balanced, but just curious if anyone has found energy shield to be better than evasion, or armor to be better than both etc. Also, anyone confirmed if it's better to just pump one stat, like, full armor or full evasion items rather than items that give a bit of both?

Armor reduces overall damage you take and evasion/block have a chance at negating damage completely. I BELIEVE both evasion and block have an internal cooldown on how often you can do them (once every .x seconds) so they are better for negating high damage from single targets, where AC is better for fighting hordes of mobs as it reduces all damage.

The way the formula is written, the more damage the mob does the less you will negate with armor.

Energy shield is useful because you can not be stunned while it is active. Other than that, consider it another hit point pool.

I believe high AC with a smaller amount of evasion would be the best choice. There are a lot of swarming mobs/ranged packs and the ability to reduce their damage is more important (to me) than the ability to completely negate a random amount of damage.

Someone correct me if i'm wrong on my idea of how evasion/block works?

Yeah if that's the case about having internal cooldowns on block and evasion, sounds like armor is slightly more useful overall if it is always taken into effect. At the same time, if armor isn't a % damage reduction then I could see evasion and block being better than armor against single targets, namely, hard hitting bosses.

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Ixath wrote:

Armor reduces overall damage you take and evasion/block have a chance at negating damage completely. I BELIEVE both evasion and block have an internal cooldown on how often you can do them (once every .x seconds) so they are better for negating high damage from single targets, where AC is better for fighting hordes of mobs as it reduces all damage.

I've never heard this before, where did you get that idea? As far as I'm aware there is no cooldown, both blocking and evasion are always checked for incoming attacks. Blocking is checked first, and if the attack is not blocked, evasion is checked. If not evaded, then armour/DR is applied and finally damage subtracted from energy shield, then life.

It was previously stated that evasion was better for high damage mobs like bosses and not as good at dealing with groups of mobs.

The only way I could see evasion not being completely OP and used in place of an armor build is by having some sort of internal cooldown on it, or a pure evasion build could evade constantly. This is also the only way (that I can see) where it would be better for bosses and less effective on swarms. A boss is one attack every second or two and you'll have more of a chance to avoid his attacks since there is nothing setting off the cooldown?

If I was given the option of 40% reduced damage (from AC) or 40% chance to dodge an attack completely every time I would go for the evasion. This way, you're avoiding stuns and on-hit effects too.

Again, I could be completely wrong here and probably am. That's why I put BELIEVE in all caps =)

Cool thing they did in Ragnarök Online, was your evasion % went down as more and more mobs attacked you at once. It made a lot of sense, and balanced defense builds between armor and dodge.

Yeah. That could be the case here too. That would make just as much sense as my version. I just figured that your character could only move out of the way so many times so fast, so it had an ICD.

The armour system is little more confusing than the previous one. I will try to explain.

Firstly, this:

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It was previously stated that evasion was better for high damage mobs like bosses and not as good at dealing with groups of mobs.

The reason this statement was made is that the damage reduction from armour is now dependent of the amount of incoming damage. So with a given amount of armour, you might find that it negates 80% of the damage from a small hit, and only 20% of the damage from a large hit.

So imagine an armour-focused character, and an evasion-based character, who both on average negate about 50% of damage across the range of enemies.

Versus weak enemies, the armour character might be negating 80% of that damage, while the evasion character only dodges about 50% of the hits. So the armour is more effective in this case.

Versus Strong enemies, the armour character might only be negating 20% of the damage from each hit, while the evasion character is still dodging 50% of the attacks, and so is more effective over time.

The part about groups and and single enemies is just because weak mobs tend to come in larger groups than stronger enemies - there is no inherent advantage for armour when facing large groups. So forget the part about large groups/small groups, it's all about weak versus strong damage.


Of course it's more complicated than that because some enemies do elemental damage, which isn't affected by armour, and also enemies have varying amounts of accuracy, which can affect the performance of evasion.

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If I was given the option of 40% reduced damage (from AC) or 40% chance to dodge an attack completely every time I would go for the evasion. This way, you're avoiding stuns and on-hit effects too.

This is true, but also remember that since armour reduces the amount of damage you take, it also reduces the chance you will be stunned, since the chance of being stunned is related to how much damage you take. Also, armour is a bit more consistent, since it will always have an effect - whereas a string of bad evasion rolls might mean you take full damage from a quick series of hits and land you in big trouble.

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Malice wrote:

Versus Strong enemies, the armour character might only be negating 15% of the damage from each hit, while the evasion character is still dodging 50% of the attacks, and so is more effective over time.

But remember that you can still get bursted if you are unlucky and get 2-3 consecutive hits and/or crits if your only defense is high evasion. But pretty accurate and thorough post :)

Made a good point about evasion being affected by a monsters chance to hit. So really, both defenses can be rendered less useful based on the situation.
Evasion effectiveness decreases if the monster is highly accurate
Armor effectiveness decreases if the monster is a really hard hitter.
Yes HP / Energy Shield can be considered a defense of its own, but realize the longer you stay in combat between periods of health regen, the less useful it is. You can basically imagine the damage mitigated from a monster's attack as "temporary hitpoints." Once you take damage, those bonus hitpoints are gone until you recover them, whereas damage mitigation is continuously taken into effect.