Can someone explain armor & evasion to me like I'm an idiot?

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Autocthon wrote:

Dodge and block being totally random is actually a pretty huge buff in mitigation for EV characters since they aren't operating on a true random system.

Primarily because Dodge/Block is calculated "after" EV IIRC, which means that you can fail to evade but still dodge/block.

Unless that's changed.

Yes, I'm pretty sure blocking applies after Evasion, because defensively, evading an attack is better than blocking it (no animation for evasion), and increased block chance is never supposed to be a disadvantage. Don't know about Dodge but it doesn't matter too much, since dodging and evading are effectively independent of one another and both prevent all consequences of the attack.

Hey moron! Armour makes you armoured and evasion makes you evasive! Idiot!

Is that what you wanted? Ok how about this.

Armour: Reduces physical damage you take. Reduces more against weak attacks, so you'll be able to stand in the middle of a horde of bandits, but it won't protect you much against strong attacks like Brutus's unless you're using a Granite Flask. The Damage reduction percentage on your character window is just an estimate based on your level, so don't trust it if you're up against a powerful opponent. Also doesn't protect you from elemental or chaos damage, which can be very prevalent in end-game maps.

Evasion: Gives you a chance to not take any damage from a hit. Stops all types of damage and prevents any debuffs from affecting you. Only works against weapon attacks, not on spells or damage over time. A key point is that it's not actually random. It spreads out the hits and misses perfectly evenly. If you have a 75% chance to evade, you will always get hit exactly every fourth attack.

IMPORTANT CONSIDERATIONS:

Endurnace charges: These each add 5% physical damage reduction to your armour. So if your armour has 40% damage reduction, one endurance charge will boost that to 45%. They also aren't reduced by high damage like armour is, so a handful of endurance charges can make a big difference against strong attacks. From a practical standpoint, for anyone using armour, each one of these is worth a metric crapton of extra armour, and the more you have, the more the next one is worth. If you're using armour, you NEED endurance charges. Get them from the Enduring Cry skill and keep them up at all times. They even give you +5% all resists to boot.

Arrow Dodging: This keystone doubles your chance to evade ranged attacks and is unbelievably powerful. Note that's CHANCE to evade, not evasion rating. That means if you have a 47.5% evade chance, you have a 95% chance to evade ranged attacks. This makes you practically immune to ranged enemies, which are among the most dangerous since they often deal elemental and chaos damage that armour doesn't protect against.

Acrobatics: Gives you an extra chance to not take damage. It's random, so it's not reliable, but it does work against spells via Phase Acrobatics. Overall it's like having a shield's worth of block chance, but with a few extra perks.

Iron Reflexes: Converts your evasion to armour. Converted evasion benefits from both +evasion% and +armour%. The most ideal gear for this build is pure evasion so that it all benefits from all your evasion passives, armour passives, and your bonus evasion from DEX.

More indepth explanation of Iron Reflexes:

You have 100 evasion, 100 armour, +100% evasion, +100% armour, and +100% Armour/Evasion (Leather and Steel).

Your evasion gets all three bonuses, since it falls into all three categories on account of being converted.
400 converted evasion

Your armour gets the armour bonus, and the Leather & Steel bonus, since they both apply to armour.
300 Armour

Total: 400 + 300 = 700 Armour.

Anyone who mentions "Double Dipping" is probably confused. They're referring to a bug a while back where Leather and Steel gave twice its bonus to converted evasion, but they probably misunderstood the explanation or were misinformed.