Fixing evade

There was a lively discussion in game today about the viability of evade. Essentially it boiled down to a group of us concluding that evade was broken because it was not a viable replacement for HP/armor in melee situations.

Evade is typical the alternative route to armor that allows otherwise squishy characters to have durability but in PoE evade (in HC terms at least) means there is simply a timer until your luck runs out and then you will, without a doubt, die.

The easiest fix I can see is providing nodes on the evade side to reduce critical damage. This alone will dramatically improve the survivability of a "dex monkey".

Another potential fix is a keystone that eliminates armor and does some sort of damage reduction based on evade BUT ONLY applies to high damage hits. This could potentially come with a HP penalty to balance it more effectively?

Essentially the goal would be: I don't get hit frequently and I can't afford to but I know I'll always survive getting hit infrequently.

Thoughts?

armour - you take all hits, with the same reduction for crits, heavy hits, and light hits.
evade - you take just a part of all hits, part of crits, heavy hits and light hits.
20% chance to don't get dmg and 20% reduction dmg is in the long term the same thing.

For example: [ignore my math skills % works their way even if number don't]
-3 hits that would do 100% of hp dmg.
With 20% dmg reduction you die after 5 hits
With 20% evade you die after 3-7* hits
-1 hit that woudl do 100% of hp dmg.
With >50% reduction you die in 2 hits
With 50% evade you die in 1-6* hits
*estimated number of reasonable evasions, there can be more of them ofcourse.

So evade is more luck based, but it can give even more protection then armour.

Only thing unbalnced is resolute technique that reduces evade to 0% while there is nothing against armour or ES like this. What is totally unbalancing the game for evade builds.

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Bakubylozajete wrote:

Only thing unbalnced is resolute technique that reduces evade to 0% while there is nothing against armour or ES like this. What is totally unbalancing the game for evade builds.

Elemental damage for armor (including the infamous AoF), and chaos damage for ES.

Slity maby good point but I don't know this things:

a) do you evade chaos and elemental?
b) do armour protects against chaos, and how it protects agains elemental?
c) in what way ES don't protect against chaos and how it protects agains elemental?

You writed one sentece its hard to work with that.

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Bakubylozajete wrote:

Slity maby good point but I don't know this things:

a) do you evade chaos and elemental?

i believe so

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b) do armour protects against chaos, and how it protects agains elemental?

i believe it protects against neither

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c) in what way ES don't protect against chaos and how it protects agains elemental?

chaos bypasses energy shield, and elemental damage is taken by energy shield

Ignored by elemental damage? Dont you mean chaos?

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Evasion works on all attack damage, regardless of type, but is useless against spells (again, regardless of damage type).

Armour protects only against physical damage.

Energy Shield protects against Physical and Elemental damage, but is ignored by elemental damage.

Great summing it up Mark - thanks.
In the ES you probably meant "ignored by the elemental damage".

Rest of the defences are from the pasives like "Phase acrobatics" that allows you do ignore spells, and item options like life leach. And more versitile you are its harder to hit you, same with the more versitile your atacks are its easier to hit everything, but harder to kill specific type of eniemies. Great system.

Question - is there a way to have something like "Phase acrobatics" [in item or other part of the tree] without "acrobatics"? For example for armour/evade duelist?

I had not considered the lack of elemental protection with armor vs. evade. I guess with that in mind going evade/HP could be comparable to an armor/HP build. I'd be interested to see what sort of hp and evade % chance you can reasonable attain.