Finally caved and took Iron Reflexes

"

Mark_GGG wrote:

"

Islidox wrote:

I was originally going to leave off getting Iron Reflexes for later in Cruel, but after fighting Vaal OPlord, I decided that it's the next thing I'm going to get over damage passives or mana or evasion passives on my SwordnBoard Ranger.

It does way too much damage to be ignored without having some form of damage. Literally, Vaal OPlord will single-handedly crush evasion-based builds whether it be that laser or his strike. (Only died twice)

Armour only reduces physical damage, which in the case of the Oversoul is only the falling rocks from the ceiling (and some of the damage done by his minions). The laser does lightning damage and the slam explosion does fire damage, neither of which are affected by armour.

I guess that explains why the laser still one shotted me. It'd be nice if it were somehow a little more clear as to which attacks were being affected by armor and which ones weren't.
I know these games sorta insist on looking up information on forums and such, but it'd still be nice. Someone might run into the Oversoul, get owned by their attacks and think they needed more armor and waste points raising it to no affect.

"

zriL wrote:

"

Charan wrote:

...Whether it's Iron Reflexes to convert the evasion rating to armour rather than a pathetic chance to evade, or stacking the crap out of life and not really caring about evasion (even without the nodes I have an acceptable 40% just from any gear that gives life! -- from what, 65% if I focus entirely on it? Boo!), there are so many reasons to dismiss evasion as a primary concern right now.

From 40% to 60% evade chance, you take 33% less damage, it's basically the same as having 50% more life. Still boo ?

Considering the fact that an evasion specced char will have zero armour, um...yes. 50% more life when you haven't stacked life and have no armour is diddly squat.

So I have 40% chance to evade on a character who HAS stacked life and decent incidental armour, and barely 65% chance to evade on one who hasn't either, but instead focused on what seemed to be his primary defence type.

This is either not functioning as intended or the evasion nodes and pure evasion armour are red herrings.

Right now, I am very satisfied with armour/evasion gear with stacked life.

But that is not how I envisioned a high end melee shadow.

So how did you envision a high end shadow? I've been wanting to make 1, but in the end I always come up with a male witch. GGG never really defined the hybrids.

If you go look at the classes section we have, the hybrids are defined by the stats they use. As a result their section in the pst is very vague.

On topic
I finally tried out IR too (on a 2H ranger). She's only 40 but she already has more reduction than my 60-ish mara T_T

"

c2games wrote:

So how did you envision a high end shadow? I've been wanting to make 1, but in the end I always come up with a male witch. GGG never really defined the hybrids.

If you go look at the classes section we have, the hybrids are defined by the stats they use. As a result their section in the pst is very vague.

On topic
I finally tried out IR too (on a 2H ranger). She's only 40 but she already has more reduction than my 60-ish mara T_T

High end melee shadow, to be clear.

How? Well, let's remember I'm talking high end here. Say, 60-70+ for now. Godlike inasmuch as such can exist at this point.

I'd imagine a dex/int hybrid class specced for melee as some sort of graceful, mobile deliverer of swift death. He is not designed to be hit very often and even when it happens, he should have some sort of agility- or arcane-based means to avoid an instant killing blow. His attack speed would be extremely high, as would the critical damage, but damage output per blow, nowhere near as impressive as others'. His health should not be comparable to a true tank's, but he's not *precisely* a glass cannon either. The ideal is 'strike before being hit, get out of there if you are.'

Whirling Blades and Flicker Strike go a long way in realising this concept, for which I'm extremely grateful.

But there are some misleading signs early on that make this high-end vision very unlikely.

The melee Shadow is handed some excellent dual wield passives quite early, but right now, to achieve that aforementioned pinnacle of evasion, he has to equip a buckler -- on my not-yet-godly level 54 shadow, the buckler counts for almost 2500 evasion after passives. With the way evasion chance is calculated right now, that's impossible to do without and survive. Also, the dual-wielding block chance, while not bad, is nothing compared to a buckler's with some block nodes.

I considered mixing the dex/int defences to achieve this vision, as in, extremely (for now) high evasion/block chance coupled with decent energy shield with good recovery delay reduction -- such that the shield has time to recharge between evaded blows. The ultimate version of this is of course using Chaos Innoculation -- but in my experience the evasion/block combination isn't quite good enough to make that work, and you're better off just going pure energy shield if you're looking at CI.

So CI is denied, the life is retained and the chaos damage slips through. Without stacked life, viper strikes are bloody murder against the current evasion character. Sure, only 2 in 10 such strikes might get through, but it only takes a few to really put the hurt on.

Right now, my planned high end melee shadow is resembling a Marauder, stat-wise. he's ignored almost everything in his starting area and is planning to just skate around the south-west, picking up life and damage nodes. That's fine and it works, but other than aesthetics, I've no reason to pick Shadow if I want to go melee. I think that's the heart of the issue.

The flashy start is soon let down by poor options from there.

Dex/int hybrid seems to promote two main paths: spell-casting (the entire top half of the Shadow's branches are spells and elemental damage) and melee damage (look at the bottom half, with things like Repartee and Blinding Speed). I think the int part is working wonderfully, and a Shadow wishing to be a caster has a great start before heading north and into Witch territory.

The dex part, however, is where things get confusing. After you've grabbed some early damage, you're looking for the next step, and what's offered? Energy shield/evasion nodes, or critical strike chance. It's very likely that if you've chosen the melee nodes so far, you won't need the critical strike chance that much, so a little defence is encouraged. I cannot stress how useless that ring of nodes highlighted by Nullification really is. I just can't.

You can dip south for the dual wielding nodes under Blinding Speed (seems logical), but you're still left baffled by what you can choose next: bows or claws. When we have pure dex swords and dex/int daggers in play, that seems pretty restrictive.

So you're out of the 'starting area', probably around level 20, and take stock of other nearby options:

a node cluster of shield block chance (?!)

a few dagger nodes and a bunch of accuracy nodes (...), after which there are even more claw and critical strike chance nodes...

Around the corner to the south, there's a sword cluster and a dagger cluster, which isn't bad but I can almost guarantee that if you haven't bumped some life or defence by this point (level 25ish by then), your melee experience is going to be unpleasant, and probably short.

To cap it all off, the terribly misleading Acrobatics/Phase Acrobatics keystones are now within reach. They advertise themselves as the ultimate 'evasion' nodes and yet strip a character of all armour (raw damage reduction) and energy shield (which, as we noted, was buffed by that node cluster on the way here).

The ideal of the high end evasion melee shadow seems to have no real origin in the shadow's early days. You can get a whole 38% increase to evasion rating following the Shadow's standard path, or zip down to the west and grab the more enticing 50% and then 70% in that huge 'I'm evasion, pick me, pick me!' double cluster.

I concede that the dex/int hybrid might not be designed to function at a melee range, but if that's the case, why throw so many IAS and one-handed damage nodes at him so early?

Oh, there are a few 'bow/projectile' damage nodes straight off as well, but after choosing those, what's next? One handed damage, dual wield block/speed, or...traps. Take the traps route and you're back-tracking into elemental damage; or you can take 4 nodes of dex on a 'highway' to reach the bow cluster to the south of Blinding Speed.

The whole point is, I have NO idea what a high end melee Shadow is meant to look like based on the first 20 or so levels. So I've had to wing it, repeatedly. Many failures occur around level 30, a few others around 50.

And in the end, what I figured a high end melee shadow might be has turned out to be a high end marauder/duelist.

I don't mind, after all I'm breaking the class by going sword rather than claws -- even if there are pictures of swords on his class page and the first set of nodes is a bunch of extremely enticing one-handed nodes depicting a hand holding a sword (or some other non-claw melee weapon).

Here's my last point, and maybe a small challenge to Chris:

We've had 8 builds of the week so far. Here's the class count:

2 Templar
2 Marauder
2 Witch
1 Duelist
1 Ranger

Let's see what GGG considers a high end (preferably melee) Shadow. Not saying it can't be done. Of course not. Just curious to see if it takes advantage of the Shadow's inclinations or if it zips off to other class areas instead, as mine has.

Blind gems and granite flasks let you take full advantage of mixed defenses (AR/EV or EV/ES). IR prevents you from taking advantage of blind and enfeeble. I think in the long run blending defenses is the way to go and even AR/EV/ES is not out of the question with ES leech in the works.

one of the big detractors for melee shadow right now is the lack of a GREEN multi-target spammable attack.

Whirling blades is for mobility, not good DPS even if it weren't glitching. That doesn't count. So really you're left going true hybrid and using, say, EK for AoE. That'd work, but it has some flaws. The true-hybrid melee/spell shadow would be something like: reasonably fast melee attack speed, reasonable cast speed for AoE, high enough crit to make both viable DPS, under a quality crit weakness. I haven't really given it a solid try, but the passive planner doesn't make it look very promising. Pre-patch it seemed like an interesting idea.

We're pretty far off track, here, I think.

IR is overpowered from when you get it around 30 until end-game when it becomes more of a hindrance. Why? Pure armor, even at 75% dr, leaves you with glaring weaknesses to chaos damage. Also because there's some things you can do with "some evasion" that you could not do with "no evasion." Hybrid defenses are viable in the long run for synergies elsewhere. After a few more patches a defense with CI and just enough EV for blind, with granite flask and ES leech could be the best of all worlds.

"

Zakaluka wrote:

one of the big detractors for melee shadow right now is the lack of a GREEN multi-target spammable attack.

Whirling blades is for mobility, not good DPS even if it weren't glitching. That doesn't count. So really you're left going true hybrid and using, say, EK for AoE. That'd work, but it has some flaws. The true-hybrid melee/spell shadow would be something like: reasonably fast melee attack speed, reasonable cast speed for AoE, high enough crit to make both viable DPS, under a quality crit weakness. I haven't really given it a solid try, but the passive planner doesn't make it look very promising. Pre-patch it seemed like an interesting idea.

We're pretty far off track, here, I think.

We are, yes. But discussing IR sort of encourages that sort of off-track thinking, because it in itself is off track regarding the evasion dex build...heh. Look at what you've described there: it's pretty hard to envision, to me.

Anyway, you make a fair point. I apologise for my off-topic rant, and ask that we all get back on topic...which is...uhm...

Caving and taking IR: yes/no. I suppose.

"

Cabre wrote:

I think after a few more patches a CI shadow with granite flask and the rest of the synergies could be the best of all worlds.

Something about the flasks as part of a build still rubs me the wrong way, but I can't exactly say why. I probably just need to adjust my thinking and accept that flasks are more than just healing now.

I think you're right, though -- a few more tweaks to the Skilldrasil could result in the CI high evasion Shadow being the melee shadow ideal.

It's better than IR, at least, if we're sticking to the idea of a shadow being incredibly agile and difficult to hit, rather than...easy to hit and somehow stupidly durable...

Oh boy, iron reflexes, my least favorite skill in the game by a long shot. I'm not sure what the skill is even supposed to mean, it's effect is quite mundane for a giant node skill, and it's existence ought to be irrelevant since you could just get strength and wear strength armor instead if you really wanted armor. I don't know why everyone ignores the biggest problem with it though, which is that it allows you to multiply your armor and evasion bonuses against each other. I realize all the “conversion” effects in Path of Exile do this, and I realize that it's there to make the elemental attack skills not get short changed by different damage increases, but this type of effect gets out of hand really quickly, especially when you have a lone skill on the tree with a defensive conversion like iron reflexes, and give it a complete 100% conversion. By having a balance of percent evasion and armor increases, you get vastly better armor from evasion than from armor. They should at least change this aspect of the skill, although I'd rather see it gone altogether.

As for evasion in general being worse than armor, this seems mostly due to evasion's terrible diminishing returns compared to armor. If you had enough life to at least take several hits, it wouldn't matter if you had 50% evasion or 50% armor generally speaking, 50% of the damage doesn't happen. I realize that you can get unlucky and have a boss hit you while his less damaging minions miss, plus there are monsters strong enough to splatter you in one hit if you don't have a lot of life, but broadly speaking, they are equivalent at equal percentages. The critical hit dodging I would imagine was put in to make it much less likely for evasion characters to die to a single blow. I'm told the worse diminishing returns on evasion are to compensate for some attacks being armor piercing, but since armor already has the structural advantages of avoiding one hit kills and being less vulnerable to luck than evasion is, this seems an unnecessary attempt at balance. Besides, with dexterity giving evasion to match strength's life bonus, and with the strength side of the tree being generally full of life up nodes while the dexterity side is full of evasion nodes, I thought the entire point was that you could get better evasion than armor, but the way the diminishing returns work, you will probably have a lower percentage chance to evade than a strength character has percentage damage reduction AND the strength character has way more life.

What all this adds up to is that while evasion is a lot worse than armor at the moment, I think it could easily be made equal with simple changes to the diminishing returns on it.