Fixing the fundamental issue with Evasion

The problem that people have with evasion is a result of the current design philosophy behind a whole lot of things; evasion is pushed as a standalone defensive stat on both gear and a lot of passives, and of course dexterity.

It's fairly obvious that any form of avoidance is only good if you can soak up a few hits without falling over when you're not avoiding them. And because of this, diminishing returns and the fact that evasion is usually available only on its own in any large quantity, people are trying to find convoluted ways of 'fixing' evasion, as opposed to simply supplementing it with mitigation sources where it makes sense.

Dexterity providing a percentile armor bonus, evasion passives providing some flat armor, or Iron Reflexes giving you a part of your evasion as armor are all ways of making sure that Dex oriented builds aren't shafted for mitigation. There are probably better ways of doing it, but to me this kind of thing seems preferable to messing with evasion itself.

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Charan wrote:

I am almost certain the painful diminishing returns on evasion-->chance to evade% at higher levels will be reviewed. They weren't bad before the last few patches, then we suddenly lost a good 5-8% chance to evade on the spot. It stung like a bitch.

When this happened the actual evasion rating has gone up but the estimated chance to evade has gone down. I think evasion modifiers have gone up on items but they also raised roughly 50+ monster accuracy across the board. The problem is that even a slight increase in accuracy needs much more evasion to offset it and the accuracy increase might have been overdone. Even with the added crit evasion you simply get hit more which hurts more in the end.

Currently with ~150% increased evasion I got I feel like there is no way to break 55% estimated evasion after level 60 without a shield.

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vankeris wrote:

Currently with ~150% increased evasion I got I feel like there is no way to break 55% estimated evasion after level 60 without a shield.

Pretty close, ceiling at 70 with best possible level 70 gear seems to be about 53%. Flasking brings it to a paltry 59%, ugh. This is with +150%/+320 on each slot, all top-level gear, level 17 grace, no dodge, 168% incr. evasion rating. So basically nobody will ever get that high. That's against monsters with 600 acc, which is about right at level 68.

You need dodge and blind to get any higher, and only ranger has really good tools for mass-applying blind. LA with pierce should work wonders for mass-application of blind, since each target in the path can potentially take ~4 hits per arrow. Nobody else has anything like that. EK might be passable, but you'd still have to spam it for blind to really start spreading.

It's kind of silly that the evasion/accuracy "tweak" - was this to balance the crit change? Now favors IR even more than ever x.x

It's pretty shocking to me that a 100% incr. evasion bonus is only worth 6% evasion. Sure, in context, that's 13% relative reduction (6%/47%), so it's more worthwhile than it looks. But still, 13% reduction, for a 100% increased evasion bonus? Armour diminishes pretty badly too, but at least armour classes have endurance to offset that. Blind can't be pre-applied the way endurance can, so the two don't correlate.

and I would also like to add one more thing...

I wonder... what do I need my evasion for against a players (talking bout PVP here) with Resolute Technique ? Such Templar/Marauder/Duelist (or maybe even other classes who would like to get there) will proly eat my Shadow for breakfast ;)

I personally think the problem stems from the lack of armor on pure evasion gear and the lack of evasion on pure armor gear. There should be no such thing as "pure stat armor". To me, it would make a whole lot of sense if all pieces of gear provided at least some physical DR and some evasion potential.

The changes I would suggest go along the following lines:

- All gear would have a minimum 10% armor and 10% evasion from item EP value.
- The remaining 80% would be split according to the type of armor.
- Very "heavy" armor would get full 80% armor.
- Very "light" armor would get full 80% evasion.
- Very "cloth" armor would get full 80% shield.
- Hybrid gear wouldn't have to be 40%/40%. 40%/30%/10% could be a possibility.

Given the following fictitious values:

1 armor = 1 EP
1 evasion = 1 EP
1 shield = 2 EP

An item with 100 EP (equivalence point) value could have the following stats:

90 armor, 10 evasion
10 armor, 90 evasion
10 armor, 10 evasion, 40 shield
50 armor, 20 evasion, 15 shield
40 armor, 40 evasion, 10 shield
60 armor, 40 evasion

The idea is to always get at least a bit of armor and evasion from any piece of armor. Obviously the values wouldn't have to be exactly as I put them.

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Zakaluka wrote:

Pretty close, ceiling at 70 with best possible level 70 gear seems to be about 53%. Flasking brings it to a paltry 59%, ugh. This is with +150%/+320 on each slot, all top-level gear, level 17 grace, no dodge, 168% incr. evasion rating. So basically nobody will ever get that high. That's against monsters with 600 acc, which is about right at level 68.
[..]
It's pretty shocking to me that a 100% incr. evasion bonus is only worth 6% evasion. Sure, in context, that's 13% relative reduction (6%/47%), so it's more worthwhile than it looks. But still, 13% reduction, for a 100% increased evasion bonus? [..]

That is exactly my point: Evasion by itself is fine. As is. But the Chance to Evade you gain from a single point of Evasion Rate is too small.

I do also concur, that having "archtypes" other than ranged fighters (Ranger) to depend solely on Evasion as defensive mechanism is a miss-concept. I think that the passive Skill Tree requires some rework here (as well as for minions, but that is another discussion)....

I have to commit that i have only 30'ish characters yet, so i dont know how this scales in endgame, BUT:
- Minion Witch is easy going... way too easy
- Life\Regen Marauder... quite easy, only low resistances are an issue
- Tank Templar... still easy, but getting tricky to actually KILL something
- Tank Duelist (Iron Reflexes)... quite "demanding", was nearly unplayable before picking Iron Reflexes; low lifepool and missing resistances being a severe issue.

Having a small ("teenager") Claw Shadow, i have to confess that i have no idea how this will scale into late game. Lifeleech is nice, but i expect the life pool to be the doom for this type of character because of the low survivability because of Evasion issue.
Also a teenager Bow-Ranger looks promising as she has sufficient ways to keep the enemies away....

Nordstern

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Arkatar wrote:

I personally think the problem stems from the lack of armor on pure evasion gear and the lack of evasion on pure armor gear. There should be no such thing as "pure stat armor". To me, it would make a whole lot of sense if all pieces of gear provided at least some physical DR and some evasion potential.

The changes I would suggest go along the following lines:

- All gear would have a minimum 10% armor and 10% evasion from item EP value.
- The remaining 80% would be split according to the type of armor.
- Very "heavy" armor would get full 80% armor.
- Very "light" armor would get full 80% evasion.
- Very "cloth" armor would get full 80% shield.
- Hybrid gear wouldn't have to be 40%/40%. 40%/30%/10% could be a possibility.

Given the following fictitious values:

1 armor = 1 EP
1 evasion = 1 EP
1 shield = 2 EP

An item with 100 EP (equivalence point) value could have the following stats:

90 armor, 10 evasion
10 armor, 90 evasion
10 armor, 10 evasion, 40 shield
50 armor, 20 evasion, 15 shield
40 armor, 40 evasion, 10 shield
60 armor, 40 evasion

The idea is to always get at least a bit of armor and evasion from any piece of armor. Obviously the values wouldn't have to be exactly as I put them.

Nice idea, though i would do other changes as yours if the mechanism would be reworked completly (like you suggest).

My changes would look like this:
The "heavier" the armor (so having higher armor rating), it would actually reduce Evasion. A naked character would have a substential amount of Evasion (making up for 10-25% Chance to Evade).
Instead of a flat/plain 0 damage for evaded attacks, it would as addition also reduce damage from hitting attacks by this amount as well. To compensate, Chance to Evade would have a diminishing returns starting with 40-50 Chance to Evade. A hardcap (only reachable by gimping the equipment) would be somewhere at 60%.

So all in all it would come down to a damage reduction of:
60% 0 damage
40% get reduced by 60% => 24% of the physical damage

So it comes quite to the 75% physical damage reduction i *think* that armor is capped to....

Nordstern

[EDIT] Adding as feedback, Arkatar: You obviously expect Evasion to be a competative defensive mechanism for tank built characters. Currently, it is not. So your suggestion might still lack of consistency over all tank builds (making Iron Reflexes still mandatory for Duelist Tanks)

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Njordstar wrote:

[EDIT] Adding as feedback, Arkatar: You obviously expect Evasion to be a competative defensive mechanism for tank built characters. Currently, it is not. So your suggestion might still lack of consistency over all tank builds (making Iron Reflexes still mandatory for Duelist Tanks)

I never discarded the idea that evasion might need a buff. All I pointed to is the problem where you simply don't have any practical amount of armor if you focus mainly on evasion, and that doesn't really make sense since you are wearing armor afterall.

Duelist tanks can still make use of granite flasks and enduring cry to complement their build. Marauders do. All they really need is a little extra armor and a buff to evasion, whatever form it takes.

That being said, your idea of negative evasion on heavy armor definitely has some merit. I like.

I am actually convinced that armor is less valuable than evasion, from my experience with using it. I think the main issue with evasion is LIFE and the total lack of it outside of the Marauder's side of the tree.

I mean, I bet you that if you switched 50-75% of the Marauder's +life with +evasion, you'd see people saying the Marauder is severally underpowered. If you were to switch 50-75% of his +armor nodes with +evasion, you'd see Marauder players doing MUCH better with end game content.

Evasion as a whole is very strong, you'll know this if you've played Warcraft 3 or Dota much. The Demon Hunter's 30% evasion made him an extremely good hero. Evasion can result in a greater than 1:1 damage reduction - as in, 1% evasion often results in more than 1% damage reduced a specified period of time.

I think some classes need more access or easier to +life and that armor actually needs a buff, evasion being fine where it currently sits.

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anubite wrote:

[..]If you were to switch 50-75% of his +armor nodes with +evasion, you'd see Marauder players doing MUCH better with end game content.[..]

Sure they would. Because they would still have a nice amount of armor PLUS having decent evasion. So it would stack up. I *think* so because it seems to me that armor does have a diminishing return in damage reduction just like Evasion Rating has for Chance to Evade. But it is by far less, and i think this is one of the key points of all Evasion-discussions....

Nordstern