Remove IR add new keystone, ideas welcome

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tmaciak wrote:

I never assume, that I find proper gear and tend to build passives gear independently. IMO in my build there is no wasted points and "chassis" of the build is need to take most interesting life and life regen nodes.

Armour is certainly less gearchecky. But that's one of the reasons my build has a 200% defense modifier. Don;t have to worry about finding good rolls, I just put it on and go. Admittedly my build is possibly less damaging, but really I'm fine with that.

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So, I'm still glad from IR even after it was nerfed (although I don't like it nerfed) because it widens my gear criteria. With IR I can use ar/eva gear, which would be unusable for me and as I tend to be self found (all items I showed in this topic are self found) it is quite important for me.

The nerf only really normalized armour across builds. Intended to stop people abusing EV gear + IR to ghet 50-100% more AR than actual AR gear gets. Since most builds don;t take much in the way of Ar passives it means that EV gear with even the +30 to +50% EV from dex had a MASSIVE lead in armour rating.

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So, IR is still for me good way to convert eva to ar and be able to focus on ar. I even proposed in other topic to create another keystone, which converts armor to evasion (can be named Flexible Steel or smth like it).

But why you just don't use it and forget about it if you don't like it?

I play computer games for almost 30 years and never liked or trusted evasion. My characters trends always to be heavily armored battlemages. But I don't writing on forums, that evasion should be removed ;)

I've always like IR conceptually, I've hated the balance, It's in a better spot, though I don;t much like it in builds it's a nice option for a different dex playstyle.

Point of interest, my Duelist Build stacked ahgaisnt your templar build would have better AR, better block, better HP. And a good chunk of EV. that's why I like EV/AR hybrid gear, and taht's why its pretty much best in the game defensively. I spent a trivial amount of points on non-HP non-Damage and managed to get a 200% bonus to both my defensive stats, and most armour builds stop well before 100% (meaning I closed the gap).

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Autocthon wrote:

would have better AR

I used to have more AR passives, but I respeced them, as even after nerf of IR and IF, combo of Grace+Determination gives me 5,5K AR.

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Autocthon wrote:

better block

I have 20% block from uniqes for which your build will be not efficient.

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Autocthon wrote:

better HP

I have more base life from passives and 2 times more regen.

Summarizing, let's wait and see, how your theorycrafting will be proved on high level maps. My build was created with trials and errors way and had to endure path of nerfs but still proved to be viable. I hope, that maybe it will buff time, at least :)

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tmaciak wrote:

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Autocthon wrote:

would have better AR

I used to have more AR passives, but I respeced them, as even after nerf of IR and IF, combo of Grace+Determination gives me 5,5K AR.

How many more passives did you have? I'm interested.

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Autocthon wrote:

better block

I have 20% block from uniqes for which your build will be not efficient.

I see 15% from BoR (which would be preety efficient on a duelist build with high multipliers to both defenses). The shield would be mildly inefficient but that 5% is already included in the tooltip, and there are plenty of uniques with block in that range (or non-uniques for that matter).

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Autocthon wrote:

better HP

I have more base life from passives and 2 times more regen.

Summarizing, let's wait and see, how your theorycrafting will be proved on high level maps. My build was created with trials and errors way and had to endure path of nerfs but still proved to be viable. I hope, that maybe it will buff time, at least :)

Not really saying the build is better, yo udo indeed have more regen. Though I must have missed some flat life passives, I could have sworn they were roughly equal. I meant scaling anyway (not that 2% is much lol). the result really is that my build cannot be less tanky, mathematically speaking I *have* to have nearly equivalent AR, and I'll scale with EV.

I don't remember exact numbers, but I kept to left side on the tree and took both Body and Soul circles and those armor passives around marauder, but I struggled to get 9-10K AR and had not enough life. It was long before TBoR was introduced anyway, but I gone to IR also long before TBoR and it gave me needed buff to armor.

High regen helps me fight chaos, with such regen, I virtually can no care about chaos (except of course no regen/half regen maps) having -60% chaos res.

As I wrote, I'm still not in position to trust evasion in this game, although I discussed recently with melee Cleave ranger and he was quite glad doing Lunaris at the moment. From my ranged chars experience, till merc Vaal evasion is quite viable but in A3 it is quite visible that you need high life pool/regen/leech to sustain occasion when you misevade hit.

But returning to topic, for me, keystones like Iron Reflexes are what this game is great for - giving ppls unique possibility to decide what defense they can focus on and convert one to another. Did I mentioned, that my ranged chars on Anarchy use Eldritch Battery? It's another example of great keystone :)

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pneuma wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

What we need instead of IR is a keystone which actually synergizes with pure-armour gear

This is the purpose of Unwavering Stance.

Good point.

How about replacing IR with a keystone that converts all of your Evasion Rating into... Attack Rating? It could be an alternate to Resolute Technique for armour/eva (or ES/eva) hybrid that still synergizes very well with US.

If you have >4K HP and some stun recovery on gear, IMO it's no point in getting US anyway. I'm almost never get stunned and for sure never heavily, having 4,5K HP and something like ~50% stun recovery on gear and I don't loose Enfeeble and Blind effects.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Which I feel is the problem with IR. It's trying to be the "pure armour" equivalent to Acro and CI in a way, but it encourages very non-armour gear. If anything, the biggest problem with IR is actually that it makes pure-armour gear feel like a "you're doing it wrong" choice.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, the point of wearing pure Armour gear is to be able to have *some* Evasion to back up your Armour. If you're walking around in full plate, even just baseline Eva + Grace is probably a better deal than the equivalent amount of Armour added on top of what you already have. It all combines very nicely with Enfeeble (and possibly Blind if you are a fast hitter).

Also, Iron Reflexes is a significant investment for Templars and Marauders just because of how far away it is. If you want to boost your Armour, it's probably more cost-effective to just take some more Armour or Armour/ES passives.

So I wouldn't say wearing (mostly) pure Armour is "doing it wrong" - it's actually a pretty sensible approach for a typical Strength-heavy melee build.

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Incompetent wrote:

Somewhat counter-intuitively, the point of wearing pure Armour gear is to be able to have *some* Evasion to back up your Armour. If you're walking around in full plate, even just baseline Eva + Grace is probably a better deal than the equivalent amount of Armour added on top of what you already have. It all combines very nicely with Enfeeble (and possibly Blind if you are a fast hitter).

Also somewhat counter-intuitively, this strategy gives far less EHP than anticipated because the first few hundred points of Evasion Rating are essentially useless; chance to evade goes from 0%, min-capped upped to 5%, to a natural 5%, essentially having no effect. Thus even builds in this position would likely benefit more from Iron Reflexes than avoiding it.

There are always factors involved in travel distance to nodes, and I'll agree that there are many builds which, due to travel distance, aren't better off with IR. But it's damn close to an auto-include for all builds within range, and that's a huge problem.

Converting one defense to another is simply bad design. Eldritch Battery is a great example on how to properly do conversions: from defense to offense (or vice versa). That's why "Iron Reflexes" should convert Evasion to Accuracy Rating.

Grace alone provides 9% (displayed) Evasion before last patch at level 79. That's a 4% bump in EV, which is a 4.5% increase in eHP.

Depending on how much armour you have (and your armour multiplier, though I expect it to be low) that may or may not be possible to get from conversion. That's ignoring the EV gain from having the 100 dex required to use grace.

This patch I expect Grace alone is worth about 12% EV. Don;t have a level 79 to test on though, but would be consistent with accuracy changes at other levels.

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Autocthon wrote:

Grace alone provides 9% (displayed) Evasion before last patch at level 79. That's a 4% bump in EV, which is a 4.5% increase in eHP.

Depending on how much armour you have (and your armour multiplier, though I expect it to be low) that may or may not be possible to get from conversion. That's ignoring the EV gain from having the 100 dex required to use grace.

This patch I expect Grace alone is worth about 12% EV. Don;t have a level 79 to test on though, but would be consistent with accuracy changes at other levels.

There's also the fact that Armour only mitigates physical damage, whereas evading a hit negates all possible consequences of the hit, including elemental/chaos damage, knockback, on-hit curses and so on.


"Defence -> Offence" keystones are cool, but I think Eva -> Accuracy would be a bad trade for most builds. Stacking Accuracy suffers from severe diminishing returns in a way that stacking mana does not.