Evasion is cancer

That's not "glass cannon," though, unless you have really high end items. I was referring to people who don't take any defensive nodes. Even beyond that, I did qualify it as "most," and not "all." Someone will always find a way to make something work if that way exists, but exceptions don't define the rules.

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Albinosaurus wrote:

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caboom wrote:

i will take a wild guess and say that eva works better in other games becouse chars dont get 1 shooted on the first hit they fail to evade.

hard counters like phys spells dont help either.

This. There's too much one-shotty nonsense in the game, so 90% of builds can't do it. When you play enough, you eventually figure out that it doesn't matter what kind of damage you want to do, but what kind of defense you're going to use. Once you pick that, there are a good 50 levels worth of nodes that are required for your build to work. In some cases there are also certain uniques.

It's just bad balancing, really, but they have this gimmicky sh** in the game because some builds are legitimately OP, so GGG feels they have to counter-design for those. Hell, even the concept of chaos damage as it relates to ES builds and 'all resist' gear is evidence of this. It's just a cheesy mechanic to stretch out your stat budget and force you into counter-gimmicks to survive. They don't like the idea of pure "glass cannons" being viable, so in the vast majority of cases, they aren't. In most cases, it's not even enough to take some defense. You often need so much that you're hard pressed to fit offensive nodes into your tree.

What was the last thing that one-shot you? I'm just wondering, because I rarely run into them outside of a few areas that I know about (Colossal Bonestalkers, Colossal Vaal Fallen, uber Izaro, Volatile rares, the Orchard map boss). If there's something else I need to watch out for and I've just been getting lucky and not running into those things, I want to hear about it.

If you do want to play pure glass-cannon, you could try running Uber Lab. I saw a 2.5k hp build labelled as a lab clearer, it only stacked damage and move speed, and maybe Temp Chains to make things a little less sketchy.

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suszterpatt wrote:

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maLcious wrote:

Here's what I want you to try. Go to poe.trade and buy an Enduring Cry with 15+ quality or whatever you can afford. Use it. Get a basalt. If you're a melee champion, link a Fortify Support to one of the movement skills listed. Use them and tell me you don't see the benefits of dodge/evasion.

This is exactly what I'm saying. To see the benefit of evasion, you first have to have mitigation.

In order to be as good a char with armour has to also have either block or evasion and a char with energy shield must also have either armour + block or evasion.

armour without additional layers is terrible, I would never play energy shield without any other layers either. Evasion is roughly as strong as armour or energy shield.

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Albinosaurus wrote:

That's not "glass cannon," though

hes talking about a char with 3,800 life. Any char with less than 5k life is very glass cannon, thats a minimum figure to even be safe for mapping on 99% of builds. First line of defense on any build is the life pool, a char without 5k+ is fundamentally compromised from the ground up. If you can survive the mapping system and the big boss encounters like uber with less than 5k life you either have a grossly op setup in other areas or you have insane playing skills.

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suszterpatt wrote:

I'm not saying evasion is bad, only that it requires mitigation to be effective due to the prevalence of oneshots and spike damage. Whereas mitigation doesn't require evasion to be effective. Thus the focus of every build is to get mitigation first, and then some evasion/block/dodge with whatever resources are left.

I dont think these statements are always true. I can see why you would think that, its probably true within the scope of the builds youve been playing but these things are not constants right across the board.

Its the same thing with the 1 shot ideas, games too full of 1 shots? Maybe if you are coming from a perspective of having played specific builds this is true and from that perspective evasion is the worst option. 4.3k life with 10% increased physical damage taken is a death trap for example, the other other example of 5k life + some armour and block sounds like a more hardy character on paper. But that doesnt really speak to evasion vs other defenses, theres nothing that can be extracted from that other than 1 build is a lot better defensively than the other. Even the 5k life 12k armour thing, Im looking at that on paper and thinking its defenses are borderline questionable for yellow tier maps+.


If I try and compare daggers vs swords, I put up 2 builds, first is crit sword lacerate and the second is RT puncture with a dagger. The crit sword clears maps literally 20x as fast as the dagger so from this we can tell daggers are shit and swords are great? It doesnt really mean anything, what happens when you do crit dagger reave vs crit sword reave? Thats what is going to give you a basis to judge the actual variables.

Where does the effectiveness of the tree and gear stop and the mechanic start? I sat through 2 years on this forum of people saying armour was shit, armour was the bad mechqanic out of ar, ev and es. I tried to explain to them that armour was fine, that it was roughly as good as ev and es and they just wouldnt listen. Nothing significant has really changed and now apparently evasion is the odd one out. Personally I think armour is still slightly worse than the other 2, takes more investment to scale it, more # to be effective and its the easiest of the bunch to simply replace with something like coil. But its a small issue, theyre all roughly balanced imo.

But those people were coming from this perspective: my 4k life 10k armour unwavering stance + iron reflexes 2h marauder dies all the time in lvl70 maps but my 4k life 10k evasion acrobatics bow ranger is clearing lvl75 maps with ease. So yes, from the perspective of playing these sort of builds evasion comes out better, because their evasion builds were better built than their death trap unwavering armour builds. Id show them how to make proper armour characters, 18k armour with 7 endurance charges and block and evasion and regen on top and they would say see, you have to stack armour with endurance, block, regen and evaison to be good where evasion you just grab acro and its done. Not true, its just Im showing them well defended builds and that almost always involves layering many things, their bow builds wernt well protected either, just more appropriately defended for their chars playstyles. If i showed them my evasion bow builds they would also have a ton of layering beyond what they were doing with their bows.

CI + evasion for example is awesome, CI + armour? Its shit unless you are also stacking block, regen, other things on top. Thats a perspective where evasion is lightyears ahead of armour, but its a limited perspective. If you have an excessive life pool evasion is almost always better, if you have an inadequate life pool armour is probably better. If you have a balanced amount of life you would expect to see on an appropriately defended endgame build, 5.5k to 7k hit points, armour and evasion are fairly balanced, theres examples where youd go either way on it and which ever you chose if you dont also have the other one you probably need to replace it with something functionally similar in order to have a good defensive setup.

I play evasion character though I dont really stack much of HP nor evasion to be honest. Some armor pieces, few passives and acrobatic nodes only. Flasks in this game are one of the best lines of defense if you are able to keep them up all the time.

Stibnite flask provide you with 100% evasion rating +100% bonus evasion from affix + smoke cloud that give tons of indirect evasion.
Granite with 3000 armor + 100% armor buff on it is giving me (while I use acrobatic so i get penalty) ~25% mitigation.
Additionaly to that take basalt for another 20% mitigation.

I am not even talking about the potency of taste of hate if you can get it. Those two above are cheap to get and can provide you with already 50% physical damage mitigation on level 90 character (45% with acrobatic) where you invest nothing in armor.

Though I still find PoE to be badly designed if it comes to defense. Systems in this game are not similar to other games, they are not instinctive.

In other game you stack moderate armor pieces = moderate defense. Can already survive well.
You stack gear that is specified to be tanky = you turn into a tank, real tank that cant be squashed in instant.
You stack to that additional layers like specialized skills and utility items (like flasks here) and you turn into a invicible hulk.

In PoE on the other hand, you do all of this and you turn to the moderate defense comparing to other games. At best with some specific build you might be good tank.

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hes talking about a char with 3,800 life. Any char with less than 5k life is very glass cannon, thats a minimum figure to even be safe for mapping on 99% of builds. First line of defense on any build is the life pool, a char without 5k+ is fundamentally compromised from the ground up. If you can survive the mapping system and the big boss encounters like uber with less than 5k life you either have a grossly op setup in other areas or you have insane playing skills.

Maybe if you're talking about Uber Labs, Atziri, or T12+ Maps (the top side of end game), this could maybe be true. However, the equipment and nodes needed to achieve a minimum 5k hp and layered defenses is exactly the point I was making. If that's what you consider "minimum" (and GGG's balance sort of confirms this), there's very little room for offensive nodes in the tree. That would all be good and fine, except that players generally find offensive nodes to be more fun than boring defensive ones. Blame it on the WOW generation if you want, but people like to see big numbers more than "Oh, now I can surive 0.87% more damage. Woop-de-doo! Beyond the subjective "What's fun or not?" side of it, there is the "What actually works?" side, and both of these arguments make the same point that I just described.

Minor point of disagreement here, but I don't think you can define glass cannon by hp/es pool alone. The other defenses matter a lot too. First line of defense? Sure, we can agree on that. The only viable "pure" glass cannon builds I've seen work are those designed to off-screen everything and never properly engage it, but this leads to GGG trying to counter-design for this with bad balance rather than just nerfing the range to approximate screen size for your average player.

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Back to the topic at hand...

One of the big criticisms I see of EVA is that Dex doesn't actually give any base survival compared to Str (base hp) or Int (% es). Dex gives some EVA rating, but that doesn't help you to survive the hits that actually go through, there's very little hp on the EVA side of the tree, and those builds are forced into an inefficient path to access the hp wheel near Scion (or go ES/CI through Scion/Witch fields)--at minimum--which brings me back to the original issue: Most builds are basically forced into a set of "required" nodes to survive, leaving actual build diversity and freedom much more limited that how it appears upon first glance. Yeah, you have the freedom to build bad builds, but the balance of the game forces people into that meta if they want to participate in level 80+ content.

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Albinosaurus wrote:

One of the big criticisms I see of EVA is that Dex doesn't actually give any base survival compared to Str (base hp) or Int (% es).

I used to think dex was the worst attribute, but now I think it's pretty alright. What I don't like about it now is that it provides accuracy which is useless for spell builds. For eva builds, though, dex is pretty nice. Usually it's not important to get too much %inc eva from the tree since a lot of it is tied to life/ES nodes in addition to dex. Compare that to armour, where you always have to go out of your way to stack it to reasonable amounts. STR is probably still the best attribute, since it's hard to argue with base life and increased damage, but dex gives nice bonuses too.

I appreciate that GGG has tried to introduce some changes to help EV users like:
- quartz flask changes
- stibnite flask
- more dodge sources
- Kintsugi
- ele status immunity/avoidance (this is awesome for dealing with Alluring Abyss mobs, or for those who are tight on flasks and need to use VoV)
- moving Vaal Pact to dex area

There is also more emphasis in the game now on movement speed which is tied to the dex area/dex items.

Still, balancing EV is getting ridiculous now because many different builds are using it: ranged, spell, trappers, melee.

Ranged EV - is fine
Spell EV - usually just a max block Pathfinder/Raider that goes to Witch and gets 8K+ ES. Very strong/OP
Trapper EV - same, or hybrid, can be very strong.
Melee EV - weak, especially if you are trying to do 2H.

On top of that there is still not enough life on the dex side. It's fine for bow guys because they can use Kaoms and still have a great AOE and single target skill with Tornado Shot. The spell Raiders/Pathfinders are all going low-life/CI getting over 10K ES with max blocks, the EV melee guy at the end of the day is getting shafted which makes little sense because he is struggling to get decent life while still being forced to take the most damage by virtue of being melee.

The "glass cannon" term and "5k HP minimum" stuff gets tossed around so much it's hilarious. My bow scion has 4k after investing heavily into HP nodes (all the nodes I can possibly pick plus many jewels with % HP on them) and gear (even using Southbound with its 15% HP).

So my question is, if evasion is cancer, how is it that so many people are able to use it perfectly fine and still do all content?

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Raudram wrote:

The "glass cannon" term and "5k HP minimum" stuff gets tossed around so much it's hilarious. My bow scion has 4k after investing heavily into HP nodes (all the nodes I can possibly pick plus many jewels with % HP on them) and gear (even using Southbound with its 15% HP).

Numbers like that are typically tossed around in the context of hardcore play where one death is game over. From your profile, it appears your scion is in standard. You don't need to build to the same level of survivability as a hardcore character in standard. Deaths are an inconvenience in non-HC leagues, not the end.