Act 4: evasion sucks

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AxxiusEQ wrote:

3k life is perfectly fine in combination with other defenses, for almost all of PoE content...

And pls don't say that you are supposed to wait until you are in mid-80s and well geared before finishing the main story on Merciless. I've killed A4M Malachai without dying at lv 67 with a 2.5k life SRS summoner that was not even twinked other than max resist gear.

Agreed (with emphasis above), but as many have pointed out, Act 4 from Piety onward is grossly overtuned with one-shot spike damage. IMO, any character that can survive Malachai one-shots is going to faceroll most everything else in the game. And I don't dispute that it's possible to take out Merciless Malachai with an under-leveled character, but the builds that can are few in number. The first time I did it, my Facebreaker Scion was level-72.

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Gordyne wrote:

Let's say you are in a high level area fighting in a small environment so you can't dodge everything, you get shocked and you get unlucky even having 50% chance to evade + 40% dodge. Shocked + evasion failed + 1 crit from a "powerful crits" monster = Dead.

OK, but that is not what the opening post was talking about. That one was talking about ground effects like the Maligaro fight. How are things different there than with armour?

Besides, evasion works differently than armour, that has always been like that. Both has upsides, both has downsides. Would be boring if it was the same.

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AxxiusEQ wrote:

The character was reasonably twinked: lv 68, 4.5k evasion, 3k hp, 44% chance to evade, 40% chance to dodge, 30% chance to dodge spells (Phase Acrobatics), max elemental resists, no chaos resist. You cannot really expect much more by the time you get to A4M.

With a solo evasion character, you should expect to start mapping before you clear The Harvest. Were you melee or ranged? With melee, Arctic Armour and Leap Slam/Whirling Blades + Fortify are essential. Also, that evasion amount seems quite low. Were you using Grace?

Pure evasion can be great for melee (ranged can do well with whatever if the damage is high enough and reflect doesn't kill you) in the upper levels once you hit around 4.5k life, maybe 25k evasion (at least), and have enough dps to clear maps at a steady pace. Getting to that point can be nasty, though. As one example, I have a Dreamfeather + Queen of the Forest melee character that's pure evasion (34k rating with Grace and before other buffs) and quite effective (it can reach over 80k dps between auras, Frenzy Charges, and Blood Rage, and over 130k dps with flasks), but if your gear's not great, it feels weak until you get well into the 80s and can safely pick up more attack speed on the tree. I know you said something about thinking it's crap that you have to wait until the 80s for a character to come into its own, but it's the case with a lot of evasion builds. Does that mean evasion is poorly balanced? It's hard to say. It's really powerful when combined with armour or block, and it's very powerful when you have a crap ton of it on its own.

What is terribly balanced is the Scion evasion wheel. Why would anyone take non-pathing evasion nodes there? I wouldn't even do that with Dreamfeather! There's also zero reason to take Path of the Hunter or waste points on the 2% increased movement speed nodes. ZERO REASON, and I don't say that lightly.

Other suggestions: Atziri's Promise + Taste of Hate (or a Granite Flask if you can't afford it) help most any character significantly, as does Life Gain on Hit if you're melee and have lots of attack speed. Manual dodging and movement speed are really important too, which is why I like Queen of the Forest with pure evasion.

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AxxiusEQ wrote:

3k life is perfectly fine in combination with other defenses, for almost all of PoE content.

All except Malachai...
Even a character with GG gear risks when fighting him.

2 OP:
Evasion char requires large HP pool to be effective. Armour character are usually associated with larger HP pools, but it's evasion chars who need HP pool more. And evasion char can dodge spells too, actually, due to Phase Acrobatics, but still, you need large HP pool to use it effectively.

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AxxiusEQ wrote:

1. Torchoak Grove. It bombards the ground with a huge amount of splash damage. Good luck dodging that. I ran around it avoiding the magma balls for a while, but there was almost no time to dps it! You get bombarded off screen. The range and speed of its attacks is ridiculous. And you can't dodge them all. Eventually I ran out of flasks, said FUCK THAT and ran past it. Yes, you can maybe hit it a few times, port to town to refresh the flasks, come back to hit it a few more times, etc. But this is just stupid.

This is not problem with evasion but with boss. I skip him on my armour build lol.

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AxxiusEQ wrote:

2. Maligaro. He pops chaos degeneration ground under your feet and throws chaos bombs all over the floor. Evasion is useless. Can't dodge, just run around, but there are too many bombs eventually. This is where I actually died. Switching gear to buff chaos resist just for 1 boss sounds unreasonable. Flasks have only so many charges, there are no adds to recharge on. And the char was already a twink. What's a normal char supposed to do - suicide zerg it and die 50 times? I don't even want to think about trying this on a HC evasion based char. Meanwhile, when I did this on a CI char, I laughed in Maligaro's face and rolfstomped him. Such disparity between otherwise viable builds is not right.

This is not problem with evasion but with your chaos ressist.

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3. Malachai. Again, he attacks the ground, not you! Evasion does NOTHING. Your main defense stat is completely useless. You run around like a chicken, popping flasks when you can't avoid the ground damage and hoping to recharge on the adds when Malachai is busy moving or doing his tentacle thing. Oh wait, that's when you are supposed to dps him! Good luck with that! This 1 encounter takes forever because, again, your evasion is meaningless and the char is greatly underpowered without its main defense.

This is not problem with evasion but with how you handle boss.
- tentacle attack: just move away, you cant tank him as melee, Ci or evasion character
- slam: just move away, you cant tank him as melee, Ci or evasion character
- teleport: just move away, you cant tank him as melee, Ci or evasion character

There is only hp and armor evasion doesn't exist in this game it's a illusion.

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Gordyne wrote:

Well, evasion is hard to balance in any game. Evasion is a CHANCE and CHANCE will always be a bad choice in games that 1-shots are frequent.

The problem with the encounters I mentioned is that they give you no chance to actually EVADE. They attack the ground instead of you. You can try to avoid that ground, but then you have no time to attack because avoiding the ground attacks is all you do. Dominus tries to hit you. You evade and hit him. Evasion is great against Dominus. You have your life + evasion working. Malachai hits the ground under your feet. Evasion does nothing against Malachai. All you have is your life pool. Evasion is supposed to be one of the 3 main build-forming stats in PoE. But against Malachai (and Torchoak, and Maligaro) evasion based builds are at a great disadvantage compared to ES based (for example).

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Char1983 wrote:

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AxxiusEQ wrote:

3k life is perfectly fine in combination with other defenses, for almost all of PoE content. The cases I highlighted are the exceptions because they attack the ground, not you, making evasion useless. Then of course you are naked other than your raw life pool. This is the problem! Evasion should not be negated like this.

So how exactly is evasion worse than armour here? Last time I checked, armour does not help at all against elemental damage, or chaos like the Maligaro fight. Why is it specifically bad for evasion? Am I missing something here?

I didn't say anything about armor. I haven't played armor based builds in 2.0 yet (I played ES based first). Quite possible that armor has the same issues as evasion.

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Tempada wrote:

With a solo evasion character, you should expect to start mapping before you clear The Harvest.

That's news to me. I was under the assumption that you should be able to finish the solo campaign before hitting maps, regardless of your class/build. They even moved the maps 2 levels up to accomodate for the addition of Act 4.

Outgearing/outleveling Malachai to the point where you can kill him with just your hp and dps doesn't sound like a good solution. The core of the build is evasion, yet no matter how much evasion you have, 4k or 34k, Malachai will still ignore it. I wouldn't be too upset if it was just some optional map boss, one of many, that you can skip because he's bad for your build. But Malachai is not optional, he's the final encounter of the story line.

This just takes the fun out of an otherwise very fun to play character type. ES builds don't have this problem, that's why I'm so bummed about evasion after playing ES (I had a total blast with LL/EK, SRS and CI/Incinerate).

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AxxiusEQ wrote:

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Tempada wrote:

With a solo evasion character, you should expect to start mapping before you clear The Harvest.

That's news to me.

Umm, before 2.0 Dialla rewarded us with a yellow map after first beating merci Dom. Did they change it in 2.0?

Why isn't there another chance to take reduced damage due to evading an attack? If your evasion is extremely high and a hit still lands on you, there should be another final check to see if the hit grazed you or not. This could either be another roll or it can be a % variance of the mobs roll vs your evasion. IE. If the mob only beat your evasion by say 10%, the hit would graze you for 50% reduced damage.

GRAZING.