(Another) Evasion Suggestion

I've previously made an arguably overcomplicated suggestion regarding Balance, to handle Evasion in an Energy Shield style.

I have a new approach to this, alot more Developer friendly, which also makes Evasion more about skill and tactics, instead of pure luck.

1 - It's not a buff or a nerf.
2 - It gives players control over their survivability.
3 - It still uses Entropy, but with a few twists (renamed Balance):
3a) It always starts at 100 (instead of 0 or random)
This means the first attack always misses since accuracy never goes above 95%
3b) Attacks reduce (instead of increasing) Balance by X where X is the chance to hit
3c) A hit is scored when it brings Balance to or below 0 (instead of 100), and then Balance is increased by 100 (instead of reduced).
Example: If an attack brings Balance to -20, it's a Hit, and Balance goes back to 80 (-20+100).
3d) While Entropy becomes random after X seconds without attacking, Balance simply starts slowly filling at a set value (like 20) every 0.5 seconds without being attacked.
This means if you attack several different enemies once, you miss the first attack on each of them, and if enough time passes, by the time you return to attack the first enemy, his Balance is back to 100 and you miss again.
3d) This would use a visible indicator - a golden, version of Energy Shield on the left side of Mana.
3f) It's called Balance because it makes more sense from a UI & logical point of view.
It starts full and depletes much like Energy Shield.
If Skivverus is correct, then the section within the spoiler is incorrect.

4 - Resolute Technique counts as a 100% Accuracy attack, thus reducing 100 balance. I choose this instead of simply ignoring Balance altogether, because of Dodge (Acrobatics). See why below.
5 - Dodge (Acrobatics), would no longer be random, instead reducing the amount of Balance you lose per attack.
Assuming 30% Dodge...
A Resolute Technique attack, since it counts as 100% accuracy, would reduce 100*0.7 = 70 Balance.
An attack with 80% accuracy, would reduce 80*0.7 = 56 Balance.
6 - Extra Idea - There might be Item Properties, Supports, Skills and/or Notables/Keystones that increase your Balance upon a hit/crit/etc.
Kind of like Life Gain on Hit, but for Balance.

Examples of how Balance would work out:
Enemy A has 20% hit chance.
Enemy B has 30% hit chance.
My Balance (reverse Entropy) starts at 100.
1 - Enemy A attacks (-20), my entropy is 80. Miss.
2 - Enemy B attacks (-30), my entropy is 50. Miss.
3 - Enemy A attacks (-20), my entropy is 30. Miss.
4 - Enemy B attacks (-30), my entropy is 0. Hit. Now it's 100.
5 - Back to 1.

Enemy A has 30% hit chance.
My Balance (reverse Entropy) starts at 100.
1 - Enemy A attacks (-30), my entropy is 70. Miss.
2 - Enemy A attacks (-30), my entropy is 40. Miss.
3 - Enemy A attacks (-30), my entropy is 10. Miss.
4 - I move out of his attack range for 1.5 seconds (+30). Now it's 40.
5 - Back to 3.
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What do you think about this?

Before you say this is unfair, consider the following:
- Armour and Energy Shield-based builds have the guarantee of a certain survivability.
- Non-Resolute builds randomly miss important attacks in the middle of combat, because they don't know how high the random Entropy value was. This is alot more frustrating than knowing you'll miss the first attack.
- Evasion builds randomly get hit (potentially one-shot) by the first attack, wich is, in all fairness, stupid.

*knock knock* Oops, wrong room.

If you are correctly describing the way that entropy works presently (attacker based), then I agree that this would be a better way of implementing entropy (defender based).

As a side note... and I am not recommending this, just observing... once such a mechanism was in place you could do interesting things like have the dodge keystone reset your entropy on a successful dodge.

One might also always reset entropy after a S number of seconds has gone by and there is no combat.

That is what I suggest already.
Except you don't reset instantly - it "fills up" at a rate of X per second.

I had similar thoughts on how to adjust evasion, although my comparison point was Energy Shield rather than Reverse entropy ("Balance" is essentially energy shield, except that it works on the basis of attack counts instead of on the basis of damage).

Seems a lot easier to justify as Reverse Entropy than as an Energy Shield swap, so that fixes the main issue I had with this idea (which was an issue I had before reading your post). Sounds good now!

The only tweak I can offer is that Entropy (non-Reverse) should still be used for player attacks. In other words, all the Entropy should be stored on PCs rather than NPCs. It is good for something like Multistrike on a 67% accuracy character to still always have 2 guaranteed hits. So entropy does not work to minimize streaks from the perspective of attacker or the perspective of defender, but always works to minimize streaks from the perspective of the player.

If I understood your "tweak" right, you want there to be both Entropy (attacker) and Balance (defender).

That kind of defeats the purpose of my suggestion, because it nullifies the benefit of Balance by providing streaks.

My suggestion removes Entropy from the attacker and replaces it with Balance on the defender.

Since Balance always starts at 100, this makes the first attack against a creature always miss, but it also means you somewhat know when you'll hit.

As the Defender, you know your own Balance, so you have a decent idea of how fast you're losing Balance, and how often you'll get hit.
As the Attacker, you don't know your enemy's Balance, so you must estimate when you will hit or miss.

What this helps above all, is in the examples I provided - where there is more than one attacker - wich is what happens 99% of the time.

Entropy on the side of the attacker, works well only if there is only 1 attacker.
Since 99% of Path of Exile is fighting multiple enemies, if you get unlucky with the intial (random) Entropy of each attacker, you may end up getting hit by all attackers simultaneously at some point.
This often means you die.
It is also one of the reasons Evasion is so unreliable.

By shifting "Entropy" to the Defender, no matter how many enemies are attacking you, you will always Evade or get Hit in a non-bursty fashion.

If you have 60% evasion, you'll get miss-miss-hit-miss-hit
If you have 50% evasion, you'll get miss-hit-miss-hit-miss
If you have 40% evasion, you'll get miss-hit-miss-hit-hit

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Extra Idea: there might be Item Properties, Supports, Skills and/or Notables/Keystones that increase your Balance upon a hit.

Kind of like Life Gain on Hit, but for Balance.

"

Nurvus wrote:

If I understood your "tweak" right, you want there to be both Entropy (attacker) and Balance (defender).

I was saying Reverse-entropy should only be used monsters attacking players, which is the usage case you are describing.

The difference I was highlighting is that players attacking monsters should continue to work the same way it works now.

In other words, there would be two separate entropies, both stored on the player. The one which is used depends on whether the player is attacking or defending. For defense, players use reverse-entropy. For offense, players continue using tried and true entropy. This way there are no streaky results for the player.

For PVP I would probably stick with entropy, but that could go either way.

Well, then in PvP you will still get randomly insta-gibbed just because the game rolled high Entropy for all the players attacking you.

This doesn't give you any merit for your victory or defeat.

I think there's no harm in having reverse-Entropy (Balance) in all situations.
But there is harm - in my opinion - in the current implementation of Entropy.

Current Entropy:
You don't know when you're going to hit, until after around 5 attacks.
You can still miss your first attack.
You can get insta-gibbed when fighting against multiple enemies, because they can all roll high entropy at the start, and all hitting you simultaneously.

My suggestion:
You know your enemy will avoid your first attack, so you can strategize around that
You have a decent idea of when you're going to hit right from the start
You cannot get hit by loads of attacks simultaneously unless you have nearly no Evasion, in wich case you have high ES and/or Armor, or simply deserve to die xD
You can tactically decide when to move into or out of combat to maximize the effectiveness of your Evasion.

bump

My understanding is that evasion is already per-defender, not per-attacker: that is, that this section of your post -

"

Currently, assuming 0 Entropy on 5 attackers, each attacker will miss-miss-hit-miss-hit, independently, meaning if they all attack at the same time with the same speed, you'll evade 5 attacks, then evade another 5 attacks, then get hit by 5 attacks, then evade 5 attacks, and finally get hit by 5 attacks.

- is wrong.

The reason one dies as an evasion user to swarms of enemies isn't because of some hypothetical damage spike on the Nth round of attacks, but because of stun lock - if you're sacrificing damage reduction for evasion chance, each hit that gets through has a higher chance of stunning you, and thanks to the way evasion works these potentially stunning hits are relatively evenly spaced. As the space between hits decreases, so therefore does the space between stuns.