Act 4: evasion sucks

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

Does that mean you feel EV/ES can work? Would love to see your working, young man.

of course it can work, why wouldnt it be able to work? Zeno had a ci evasion build last league, it was fine.

I had an iron reflex es/life hybrid shadow, cast on crit wand barrage. It had 5k life, 4k es, 10k armour with an aegis shield, iron reflexes and ghost reaver. I was scaling evasion, using grace, a lot of ev gear, if I dropped IR I had 10k evasion, 5k life, 4k es, if I swapped my aegis shield for a life, es, ev hybrid shield I could have had over 5k life, 5k+ es with over 10k evasion, while still being a very effective offensive build that could just roll through packs of mobs like a tidal wave of instant obliteration.

I have a ci armour/es hybrid character, using an aegis again. Aegis being a 117 es shield, I have 10,500 es and Im a full crit dagger melee damage dealer. I could swap to a 420 es shield, drop the 303 es from discipline, run grace instead, still have 10,500 es and have 10,000 evasion with it, still have the same horrific damage levels, why wouldnt that work? It would be stronger than having 10k evasion and 5k life, a lot stronger as ur not going to get 1 shot with over 10k energy shield.

I see a lot of people saying es/armour or es/evasion hybrids dont work cause of investment. Been running ci hybrid like that for over 2 years and its always worked, not just worked but been absolutely ridiculous power wise. People say u cant do hybrid life + es + (ev or ar), again, Ive played those characters and they work just fine. Ci and hybrid are expensive builds, not saying its going to work on a shoe string but it does work if u have the right items.

I dont agree with any of that

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

Does that mean you feel EV/ES can work? Would love to see your working, young man.

Read at least to paragraph 3 before responding:

EV/ES totally "works;" my strongest toon uses it (check out Denooki in my profile - should be public). You need a relatively large es/life pool and, counterintuitively, vaal pact/leech gems in order to quickly heal your life pool. The ES just acts as a 1-shot preventer, while your life is your main defense - the only reason not to go full life is because it's easier to get a high ES total from discipline and other means than get high life on the Ranger side of the tree.

In order for this to work, you must be a ranged character, you must have a golem as a decoy and a lot of mobility, and you must have a lot of DPS. It goes without saying that you must also have really good gear. Having armor flasks/rumi's helps a lot too. Basically, it's viable for a somewhat glassy ranged build.

Now, does it work WELL? Especially compared to a lot of other defensive options? No, not really. My description above exposes a lot of limitations and stipulations. I stuck with it for conceptual/role-play reasons and really pushed this strategy to its limits upon reaching level 95. I died a LOT, although most of that was my own ineptness.

I would never actually recommend this build to anyone, although I do have a certain amount of pride that I basically made it work and this character is relatively strong compared to many of my friends' builds.

I never really understood what GGG's threshold for viability is. If I can barely squeak this build to 95, I guess that makes EV/ES viable in their eyes. But it's pretty crappy compared to many other options, and could really use a buff (I'm not just saying that because I'd happen to benefit). EV/ES is definitely not at all viable for HC right now.

A lot of things are "viable" in this game, doesn't mean they make sense doing. FFS you should trying playing naked (no items) Witch sometime with vanilla fisting autoattack - it works, so I guess it's viable.

Didn't read all of this, can't be bothered currently to be honest.

-Evasion has counter-plays

1) resolute technique
2) spells(like 1, but can be discarded since this apply's to all defensive forms)
3) Damage over time sources

On-top of this evasion is an all or nothing scenario when it comes down to avoidance.
(second critical hit roll could be opted as an argument to counter this stance and i am fine with that)

On-wards to the crux of my point. With the introduction of act 4 GGG opted to introduce a new defensive form, namely fortify.

Fortify has one down-side, similar to MoM as a defensive form it does absolutely nothing against weakness 3) of evasion layered builds.(= Damage over time sources)

And what damage source is found almost everywhere in act4?

1) viper strikes everywhere
2) bleed
3) burn
4) chaos degeneration
5) boss unique DoT effects

Fortify on a left sided tree character automatically covers this downside by virtue of life regeneration%, which naturally down-plays the DoT effects to reasonable thresholds.

On the right side of the tree this used to be covered by life leech respectively. with that gone(effective levels of life leech) the right side was offered a new defensive mechanic that does indeed benefit them, but doesn't "naturally" cover the weaknesses of the design.

Note : fortify is in fact stronger on a right sided tree character, by virtue of offering higher% of reduction in total to damage sources.

But that realization is quite useless when your total amount of defensive forms has such a glaring hole in it.(DoT)

Further more, life totals have been stagnant which is flawed since an evasion character naturally requires a higher total buffer for when a hit does pass.
(most likely culprit for this is ranged prevalence in that side of the passive tree)

Peace,

-Boem-

Keystone : Damage from spells does not interrupt/delay ES recharge.

I initially was thinking it needed a downside, but then, does it need one? Is it too strong?

The damage is still going to knock back ES and any non-spell damage will trigger the delay.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

You cannot block

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

How about that?

Lol, I love it.


Perfic.

Well, melee EV ES Shadow always was your thing.

Even though it was never really a thing.

I think you should go a and make it the thing.

:D

Evasion is hard to balance is that once you stack it high enough (dodge 95% of everything) it's imbalanced.

It's similar to resistances if we could stack them near to 100 or at 100% (like we could do before)

Unless we overhaul evasion mechanics it'll be always in a weird state of balance.

Evasion works only when coupled with endurance charges and fortify. Keeping it up all the time is tiresome and you know if you don't, you're more than likely to get instagibbed by something ridiculous. Couple this with the fact that the most rewards come from the most risk (ie map mods that hit around 100+), you have little reason to run evasion at all compared to armour.

Is this right? GGG seems to believe so, but i am not so sure.

The other issue is Shadow's ES and EVA. I love this to death, i really do. The image of a stealthy quick assassin who uses ES to ward off the odd hit while he whips around the battlefield for tactical advantage and letting his ES recharge is a dream of mine. I've tried it every-which-way and it just isn't possible.

99% of the time you're running around with 0 ES and you are a sitting duck with sub-par evasion. No ES regen because its at templars disposal and no fancy unique to help alleviate like MoM cloaks for builds who can't afford to travel.

GGG, why'd you even give us ES/EVA when its so absolutely broken-useless as a combo?


Solution?

Spell dodge should be added with all of the ES eva clusters like block so stop this from happening. Getting all of them should add up to 30% or more. Phase acrobatics should then cease to exist. In my world, we now can dodge spells while keeping our meager ES values in the shadow area. Those evangelists don't completely murder your ass in every other map i run (i must be unlucky as hell) and i can finally be cool.