Armor, Energy Shield, or Evasion?

Which do you prefer? As for me, I'm digging on Armor. Energy shield is basically more life, and that's not a bad thing. Evasion is a CHANCE to avoid a melee attack. Armor absorbs damage. There is no "chance to absorb x amount of damage". It's a done deal. Written in stone. Armor #1 or at least for now for me. You?

Happy Hunting

I personally like Energy Shield because of its general nature. Armour isn't exactly "absorbs damage." It's "absorbs physical damage." So it doesn't provide any protection vs Chaos or the elements. That said, because we already have Resistances for elements and Chaos, Armour is likely going to be pretty popular as the only reliable common physical damage mitigation option.

If we use some crude and very practically wrong assumptions, such as all damage types appear equally often and defense of other types does not matter:

50% chance of Attack vs Spell - Evasion is 50% as effective as its displayed number
20% chance of an element, chaos, or physical - Armour is 20% as effective as its displayed number
80% chance of non-Chaos damage - Energy Shield is 80% as effective as its displayed number

Of course, in practical reality, the defense mechanisms are much more balanced than those figures would imply due to reasons. But it's the reason I personally prefer ES.

The advantage of Evasion is that you can avoid large damage spikes.
As armour has the resistance falloff for large amounts of damage, (e.g. Vaal Smash crit extra phys roa charge) these are highly likely to kill you, but if you can get 60% evade + 40% dodge, you have a pretty decent chance of surviving. The only downside to evasion is PHYS spells, which absolutely wreck you.

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Deadpeng wrote:

ES of course.

Both evasion and armor does not work against elemental damage lol.

I agree with the sentiment but I'm going to be my usual nitpicky douchebag self and point out that yes, Evasion does work against Elemental Damage - so long as that Elemental Damage is coming from an Attack. Evasion works on all Attacks, but not Spells. So Elemental Attacks are easily evadable (usually more so as they tend to be Projectile Attacks and you have Ondar's Guile at your disposal), but Spells are not.

People are gonna tell you evasion is the best stat but honestly I hate eva. The way eva works in this game goes against your survival instincts. If you have high eva and you get chunked, it's actually safe to stick around and lifesteal back up, but in the heat of the moment it makes you think "I need to get the hell out of here".

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jebroni wrote:

People are gonna tell you evasion is the best stat but honestly I hate eva. The way eva works in this game goes against your survival instincts. If you have high eva and you get chunked, it's actually safe to stick around and lifesteal back up, but in the heat of the moment it makes you think "I need to get the hell out of here".

And that's part of the beauty of evasion, it's not completely random and you can't get slapped with nine hits in a row if you have decent evasion.

Really though, the answer to the best defence is a layered defence. If you use evasion, then having dodge and spell dodge helps. If you go armour then endurance charges and block make it stronger etc

ES can be used as life, but the leech nerfs make it much harder to fuel such high life pools now. With the improved recharge mechanic, I hope we will be able to use ES more like mitigation.

Armor is looking more appealing after the CwDT-IC nerf and massive physical spikes in the beta. On the other hand, armor (especially with a 2h weapon) does absolutely nothing vs elemental damage, and now it's possible to have double %ele damage rolls on our maps, with -max resists... I'm a bit worried that 2H armor won't be able to run many map mods even with very high life.

My money right now is on evasion/acro or block/spell block with massive life pools. That and the usual glass cannon offscreening style in softcore.

Armour absorbs physical damage, but it has diminishing returns depending on the size of the hit. For really large hits it may only "absorb" 10%, for tiny hits it may absorb 100%. So it is most useful against groups. Armour plays really well with endurance charges.

Evasion gives a chance to avoid every Xth attack, where X is based on your evasion. At 50% avoidance it means X=2, you will avoid every 2nd attack. This is useful when fighting a single melee boss. Evasion plays really well with the "blind" mechanic. Also the character needs to have some way to recover lost life during the series of strikes that is being evaded, before the next attack lands. This can be through flask nodes, or life regen, life/ES leech, faster energy shield recharge.

Energy shield is an increase in effective life for everything except for chaos damage.

All of the above work well with blocking.

Blocking + armour compensates for armours inherent weakness against single hard hitting mobs, by giving a chance to mitigate their hits.

Blocking + evasion adds a cumulative effect. 50% block and 50% evade means only a 25% to take physical damage. Also it resets the entropy timer, which is invaluable for really high evade chance. Without block, if you have 80% chance to evade, you will get hit once every 5th strike. With block your chance to get hit is 80% if you block at least one of the attacks, meaning you could go on extended runs without ever getting hit. (in this example a 64% chance of avoiding a strike out of 10 hits, as a opposed to a guaranteed 2 hits)

Disclaimer: the above is a gross simplification in order to illustrate general principles

TL:DNR
All defenses have merit, but show strengths in certain situations.

I personally prefer hybrids over focusing on a single defense.

There is no such thing as one of theese 3 types.

Btw if you want to look at it from the maths side, let's calculate with effective health.
If u have 10% mitigation and 5k hp then u have 5500 effective health.

ES gives u a lot of "health" but then u have no phys mitigation.
SO your effective HP is your max ES+HP pool *1.05 (if the minimal phys mitigation is 5% and 5% eva, but that is really not likely to be triggered)
Of course vs elemental dmg everyone has almost the same mitigation (75%, or more but lets calc with this) and vs ele dmg you will possibly have more effective health, because it is far easier to get high ammount of ES than health.

Eva is an other RNG abuse I don't really like it, because u have the chance of being immortal and the chance of getting rekt every time u take 2 hit in a row, no thanks.

So i would stay with armor of this 3, since u have a good effective health with it, you can just use a potion if u take too much dmg and don't have to live constant fear like eva players.

Or course block is an awesome mechanism in the game, and can be mixed with all above, making them even better, it is like getting an evasion stat on top of your existing stat.

But if i could pick an order of all the def types, then it would be this.

health > armor > (spell)block >energy shield>...>the 5% minimal phys mitigation>...>evasion

Of course this is only a thing when something comes in melee range, so all of theese have their uses and are really balanced.

But still i would rather go for iron reflexes with a phys ranged char.