Ondar's Guile nerf

I didn't see a thread in Gameplay Discussion that put in any time talking about it yet.

I'll be honest, I fully admit that Ondar's Guile needed a nerf. With a normal amount of end-game evasion stacked up, it would instantly cut a third off of your reflect damage. With a bit more evasion investment, the node would basically be accounting for half of your reflect damage gone. And, yes, in the case where you absolutely obsessively stack evasion and nothing else, you cut your reflect damage to 1/10 of what it would be without Ondar's.

But do people actually agree with the extent of the nerf? It's a 60% nerf to the "more evasion chance against projectiles" modifier, along with a 20% hit to evasion against melee. All things considered, it's comparable to the blink/mirror arrow explosion nerf. Like, despite what a lot of people seem to believe based on the values available in your character sheet, at accuracy values of 1600, which is the minimum I've seen recommended anywhere for a ranged build, you needed 36000 evasion rating pre-Ondar's to cap evasion chance post-Ondar's against your own reflect (assuming the wiki's evasion chance calculation is still correct). Most people... aren't getting even close to that. Getting that requires sacrificing so much DPS from uniques and the tree, to the point that you'd be dealing so little you wouldn't need to get near capping evasion anymore. The only reason people can survive reflect without Vaal Pact or Acuity is because of a combination of Ondar's and the Acrobatics cluster.

I'll be honest, I think that changing it to 80% more evasion against projectiles but adding "cannot evade melee attacks" (relying only on Dodge/Block for that) would've been a lot more balanced. It would make you play a lot more carefully around mobs that rush into melee range, but not totally destroy your ability to mitigate reflect damage. At this point, armor just seems better for ranged to me than taking Ondar's.

I know Chris said to please play the beta as a whole etc before speculating about these changes, but (a) most of us are not going to get in the beta particularly soon, and (b) I saw no mention of changes to reflect mechanics, accuracy, or evasion (aside from Ondar's) in that post. So whatever changes to monsters GGG have made actually don't affect what I'm talking about at all, because the biggest thing about Ondar's is that it's one of the necessary components to ranged builds surviving reflect maps without vaal pact or a fucking acuity. Unless there are new uniques for instant leech, or Chris left out some very pertinent information about changes to accuracy/evasion, I don't see how the beta's contents could possibly change these observations about the Ondar's nerf. Especially after he explicitly said that armor scales better now due to more monster damage, armor just seems all-around better now.

Thoughts? Are rangers stacking far more evasion than I imagine they are? Is there some other better reason for the extent of this nerf?

I don't think it's as bad as you think and for some builds like tornado shot, it helps to balance them out because they're now less capable of evading reflect mobs that could very easily destroy them.

In order to take advantage of 95% projectile evasion like before, you just need to maintain 68% evasion which means you might need to cut out a damage aura to fit in grace at higher levels. To avoid the melee mobs, you build for movement speed.

These two items might become incredibly valuable in the future.

Well, my melee evasion Shadow will have to be rebuilt. But it's not about me, :)

I think that it was just too strong. Getting 95% projectile evasion was very easy and Ondars used to be 100% mandatory for evasion builds.

Its probably part of "important return to earlier difficulty of Path of Exile" which I personally very appreciate (as they add content over time, core game tends to be easier and easier). And now with such huge PoE revamp its ideal time for complete re-balance without pissing off ignorant people that much

GGG has proven in the past that they know what they are doing, and their original idea about making complex and challenging game stays true. We have to wait to see the whole picture, perhaps they add something else that with clever build making can compensate for this "nerf". Adapt or die has always been one of PoE main rules:)

"

Ludvator wrote:

Adapt or die has always been one of PoE main rules:)

I'll drink to that. Cheers.

Also, self-cast immortal call, enfeeble, swapping hatred for grace in reflect maps etc all become viable ways to play the game again, rather then just rushing true content you don't even notice anymore.

Peace,

-Boem-

I am worried about this keystone now for melee builds.

Playing melee, obviously you are always with in melee range of monsters. I do not want my evasion to avoid those attacks weakened. And there are very few projectile monsters that I am worried about being able to one shot me unlike there are many melee monsters I worry about that with, mostly bosses but some colossal rares too. There are devoures, but they spawn in melee range usually and then half the time do melee attack, if you are away from them their attack pretty easy to manually dodge. But considering an Eva melee character needs to avoid stun, I think general evasion more important than projectile evasion.

Saw on another page someone talking about how removing of shotgunning made this change make sense. But there are no projectile monsters that shot gunned that I am worried about that didn't use spells (can't evade spells, so ondars didn't help that. ie. void bearers, FP monsters). So that doesn't make sense to me.

For ranged characters this change makes sense, maybe not the numbers, but that something maybe needed to be done. Even though I may not take it any longer with ranged chars as I am worried about one shot damage, not projectile damage that essentially happens over time with no big hits (exception maybe labyrinth boss). But for melee chars, with out playing it obviously, I think this change is an unneeded nerf. I don't know how to differentiate between two for passive skills. But my two cents.

"

Ludvator wrote:

I think that it was just too strong. Getting 95% projectile evasion was very easy and Ondars used to be 100% mandatory for evasion builds.

Can you please explain this? I had an entire paragraph on how it seems like everyone was mistaken about how easy it was to max their evasion against reflect. Your tooltip evasion is almost never going to be correct against your own reflect damage, because your accuracy rating will be much higher than a generic monster's of your level, if you are a ranged build. Are you calling it "very easy" to get 36000 evasion rating? Because that's the requirement if your accuracy is only 1600. I agree it's do-able, but I don't think it was ever easy. I highly doubt that anyone in softcore ever really maxed their evasion chance against their own projectiles, because investing in DPS is just more worth it after a certain point

"

Pizzarugi wrote:

I don't think it's as bad as you think and for some builds like tornado shot, it helps to balance them out because they're now less capable of evading reflect mobs that could very easily destroy them.

In order to take advantage of 95% projectile evasion like before, you just need to maintain 68% evasion which means you might need to cut out a damage aura to fit in grace at higher levels. To avoid the melee mobs, you build for movement speed.

_how are you going to get 68% evasion_? That requires over 100,000 evasion rating if you only have as low as 1600 accuracy rating! I literally do not think that is possible in this game.

"

flyingfish24 wrote:

I am worried about this keystone now for melee builds.

Evasion was never really meant for Melee. I'm sorry if you think GGG is killing build diversity with this. I don't think they are killing build diversity, I just think they're nerfing archers along an axis that they shouldn't be nerfed. Crit builds with acuities will be unchanged, and all other archer builds without vaal pact will be forced to reduce their DPS. That is basically the extent of this change.


Edit: Sorry, maybe I was unclear. As a ranged build, I have very little problem manually avoiding damage from every direction. So the only thing I am actually concerned about with this ondar's guile nerf is the implication it has on Reflect mobs. I could not give two shits about the effect it has on evading actual enemy projectiles. It feels to me like GGG's only goal here was to make it impossible for non-acuity/vaal pact builds to survive reflect maps anymore

"

"

Ludvator wrote:

I think that it was just too strong. Getting 95% projectile evasion was very easy and Ondars used to be 100% mandatory for evasion builds.

Can you please explain this? I had an entire paragraph on how it seems like everyone was mistaken about how easy it was to max their evasion against reflect. Your tooltip evasion is almost never going to be correct against your own reflect damage, because your accuracy rating will be much higher than a generic monster's of your level, if you are a ranged build. Are you calling it "very easy" to get 36000 evasion rating? Because that's the requirement if your accuracy is only 1600. I agree it's do-able, but I don't think it was ever easy. I highly doubt that anyone in softcore ever really maxed their evasion chance against their own projectiles, because investing in DPS is just more worth it after a certain point

I was talking about evading monster projectiles, not reflect. I has never been easy to get high reflect evasion without scarifying accuracy. you can see it in chart Ive made some time ago

Yeah, I figured out that I misunderstood you. See my last edit to my previous response.

And please note _how much harder_ it is after this nerf to survive reflect maps without Acuity :/ That is my primary concern. It feels impossible now. I have a lowly 10k tooltip GMP tornado shot with high leech quantity but standard leech "rate" that can barely survive reliably as it is, with Queen of the Forest and Rat's Nest as examples of my evasion investment. That is what this topic is about.

Then the only rational suggestion I can give you is avoid maps with reflection like the plague. Some high DPS builds are just not designed to combat reflect mobs without destroying yourself in the process.

Another suggestion is to get all the dodge passives, get atziri's step, and carry vaal grace with you.