Why Hybrid Eva/Arm isn't viable - Prefixes!

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hmcg020 wrote:

Hey everyone

Back Story

Spoiler

Recently I've been getting very excited about the Unique belt ZiggyD's been working on with the community. Because of this, I'm currently working on a Reave-Raider who's currently at level 75. I'm leveling as CI, currently sitting at 1.2mil Peak dps and 7k es.

The challenge hybrid (or even pure eva/armor) builds face, CI builds don't.

With CI, all you need is ES. You can get some eva or armor or both, but realistically all you need is moar ES. The great thing about this is that ES%, Hybrid ES% and Flat ES takes up 3 prefix slots. There's no requirement for life, or anything else.

With Hybrid, you need 5 prefix slots!

Flat eva/arm, %, Hybrid % and Life. Even with a pure armor or evasion build, you idealistically require 4. I suppose you could say that CI is like stacking purely life without any armor or evasion (build depending of course). This would be off-set by the fact that it's about as easy to get 5k life, as it is to get about 10K ES.

I'm desperate to play Hybrid, though I'm finding it a juggling at of choosing either DPS or life. I cannot get both to a standard I would consider acceptable. Maybe I'm just a perfectionist?

It would be interesting to see Life become a suffix, though this would destroy the game's balancing.

Dude this was discussed long ago, like CB and its well known bad mechanic that GGG forgot removed and some players still think its feature or thing.

Well its better than pure armour or pure evasion, so I guess only es is viable?

I feel like maybe youve written it off because its heavily weighted towards non crit builds and that means even if you pop vaal haste, toh, atziri flask and onslaught flask with bloodrage running and all your charges up you still cant get a screenshot of 1 million dps with a mirrored weapon. Thats just a reality for most non crit melee, but they do have strong defense options.







thats a hybrid armour evasion build, it has 1/10 of the dps of a 1 mill dps ci build and probably takes about 1/10 of the damage... its a trade off and these 2 builds sit at different ends of the spectrum. Its where you define whats viable for you, for instance that build I linked is just how I run the uber lab atm, for me cyclone alone is not a viable mapping skill full stop because its just too slow, no aoe, doesnt even have great single target any more since they ruined it (looking at you whoever nerfed cyclone and called for it to be nerfed, told you it was fine, didnt listen). If I switched this to a reave/vaal reave setup I could clear maps just fine. But maybe not by your standards when looking at the damage, everyones got a different set of criteria I guess.

Its not how Id make a reave char, my reave char is ci and has a dagger, no surprise there. I read ci isnt viable now and then on the forums, Ive been playing ci dagger melee for 3 years now and Im fairly sure its been insane for that entire time. But theres more to the game than crit reave, hybrid is one way of defending a non crit melee build and I feel like its probably the best way. Maybe not exactly as I have done it above, stack a bit more life and a bit less armour is likely to be a step closer to 'perfect', if youre into that kind of thing.

You dont need to actually use hybrid gear, you just need a collection of ar and ev overall, but you do usually limit yourself to the bottom half of the tree which comes with damage limitations.

There's been some great replies so far!

The one thing that's kept me away from evasion is what's been spoken about already - evasion will avoid hits, though not reduce their damage. This means without armor, you will take the full amount of damage when a hit gets through.

As my intention is to only play T13+ maps where things hit hard, I'm anxious about what's going to happen.

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hmcg020 wrote:

There's been some great replies so far!

The one thing that's kept me away from evasion is what's been spoken about already - evasion will avoid hits, though not reduce their damage. This means without armor, you will take the full amount of damage when a hit gets through.

As my intention is to only play T13+ maps where things hit hard, I'm anxious about what's going to happen.

yeah evasion has major flaws on its own. You usually need armour, lightning coil, kintsugi, some way of reducing physical damage to get around this problem. Alternatively you can just stack life pool, 12k es + 10-20k evasion, nothing you should be getting hit by is going to 1 shot you with 12,000 hit points.


thing is once you are doing that, combining it with another defense, evasion is absolutely insane. I have an old vid here ill link of that hybrid marauder, this is way before ascendancy etc. At this point we had 19k armour and 10k evasion, were going to go into merciless kaom and just stand there taunting him with enduring cry to keep up charges.

http://plays.tv/video/55b185e20fcb07836e/-pathofexile?from=user

you can see hes struggling to even land 1 in 4 attacks, and evasion has an entropy system that forces hits and misses into patterns, its not pure rng. If he has a 25% chance to hit, once he has hit he will miss 3 times in a row, guaranteed. Armour and life are fine, but if you keep getting hit again and again without space to fully recover via regen, pots, leech etc you will die.

Having 12,500 evasion with an enfeeble cwdt is going to give you about 3 misses in a row for every hit you take in day to day mapping. Thats multiplying the amount you can leech and regen back between hits and multiplying how much time between damage spikes you have to react and pot, run away, reposition. Presuming you have taken care of per hit damage via armour/es/coil then evasion becomes absolutely berserk, esp for melee characters who have to facetank hard hitting monsters who can potentially 2 or 3 shot you before you can react.

Mods on maps like "monsters deal 100% extra damage as lightning" only apply to physical damage, which means 99% of the monsters it effects are physical attack monsters. Armours doing nothing against that extra elemental, good ev rating + cwdt enfeeble is essentially avoiding 75% of that damage, breaking down fast bursts of attack damage and rerolling incoming crit strikes. If you already have 20-30k armour, whats getting an extra 12,500 armour doing for you compared to that? Something like 10% physical damage reduction vs 75% physical and elemental attack damage reduction, 75% less critical strikes received and triple the effectiveness of your regen, leech and reaction times.



but ya, on its own I would never play evasion, its suicidal.

I feel like evasion is an anti-noob-trap. People who don't understand it think it's much worse than it is.

Evasion is crazy good at low investment, and there are ways to scale that low investment to make it even better. Just 8k evasion gives a roughly 38% chance to evade, that means one in three attacks is guaranteed to miss due to entropy (assuming a constant accuracy of 700). It also means that one in three crits will roll as not a crit. Combine the two, and you're taking less than 2 out of 5 crits.

Then you tack on Enfeeble, which every evasion build should run. At 20/20, enfeeble takes that 700 accuracy down to 370. Now 8k evasion is giving you 54% chance to evade. By the same logic as above, that means you're only taking 1 in 4 crits, not even counting Enfeeble's 35% reduced crit chance at 20/20, AND its subtractive -30% crit multiplier (so at max level, crits do the same damage as noncrits).

Then if you want to really go crazy, you use a smoke pot on top of it, and your chance to be hit is cut in half, while you're annulling 93% of crits (4x as many as before, since chance to hit applies twice to crits). Again, this is all entropy-based, so if you get hit once, the next 3 attacks WILL miss (again for constant accuracy).

For reference, 8k evasion is like... one piece of gear, Grace, and starting as Ranger. Not hard to get.

Evasion + Enfeeble is about all the defense any build needs, but since it's such a low investment, you can keep stacking more mitigation on top, such as Fortify, Basalt flask, Lightning Coil, freeze/chill, etc.

As I said, it's one of the more underrated mechanics in the game. Very easy to layer, and very impactful at low amounts.

- hybrid scaling is poorly supported by the skill tree; defense/HP/ES gain spreads required investments to various and thematically unrelated to each other node clusters

- hybrid gear is a nightmare to craft and obtain (prefixes related), expensive

- hybrid gear provides few of this and that, not focused

- hybrid builds require complex solutions for effective eHP replenishment, both regen and leech

- more prone to status ailment effects than pure HP builds, CI related items are often a downside (chayula for ex.)

- hybrid builds are hard to level


What's the point to go hybrid, instead of a focused non-hybrid build? There are no benefits, besides the ability to use life flasks at times.

P.S.
Talking about ES/EVA & ES/AR. EVA/AR is well supported by the tree and the node locations, and is very effective, especially if the preferred class can pick the cherries out of the duelist/mara related nodes.

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ThatsSoGoodman wrote:

I feel like evasion is an anti-noob-trap. People who don't understand it think it's much worse than it is.

Evasion is crazy good at low investment, and there are ways to scale that low investment to make it even better. Just 8k evasion gives a roughly 38% chance to evade, that means one in three attacks is guaranteed to miss due to entropy (assuming a constant accuracy of 700). It also means that one in three crits will roll as not a crit. Combine the two, and you're taking less than 2 out of 5 crits.

Then you tack on Enfeeble, which every evasion build should run. At 20/20, enfeeble takes that 700 accuracy down to 370. Now 8k evasion is giving you 54% chance to evade. By the same logic as above, that means you're only taking 1 in 4 crits, not even counting Enfeeble's 35% reduced crit chance at 20/20, AND its subtractive -30% crit multiplier (so at max level, crits do the same damage as noncrits).

Then if you want to really go crazy, you use a smoke pot on top of it, and your chance to be hit is cut in half, while you're annulling 93% of crits (4x as many as before, since chance to hit applies twice to crits). Again, this is all entropy-based, so if you get hit once, the next 3 attacks WILL miss (again for constant accuracy).

For reference, 8k evasion is like... one piece of gear, Grace, and starting as Ranger. Not hard to get.

Evasion + Enfeeble is about all the defense any build needs, but since it's such a low investment, you can keep stacking more mitigation on top, such as Fortify, Basalt flask, Lightning Coil, freeze/chill, etc.

As I said, it's one of the more underrated mechanics in the game. Very easy to layer, and very impactful at low amounts.

Hey

I've learned lots from posting this. I made a provocative title in the hopes this would happen =)

What I had no concept of was this entropy system. I need to look into it further.

What I want is hybrid. I think it's possible now with things like legacy lightning coil.

Thanks for your feedback!

Evasion + Armour hybrid is really strong when paired with some %regen i experienced 2 leagues ago in Perandus when i played a Guardian low life Incinerator.

I wanted to experience the feeling of armour + evasion + high life pool + %regen on a standing still/channaling character while casting.

In the end i reached 10k armour + 10k evasion on my character at lvl 88 and 24k tooltip on Incinerate which was decent i felt but wiht a lot more potential if i would have gone further.
The charcter felt very tanky against physical damage of all sources, only big hits would bother me a little bit (which means i could not facetank any more and had to step aside and evade manualy for ~1sec in between attacking). High damage physical/chaos spells, which can't be evaded and blocked in rapid succession are one of the only things you had to keep your eyes open.
Elemental damage wasn't a problem at all on this character due to triple purtiy auras having 82% max resist. Elemental attacks you could ignore, map mods like x% added damage as element wern't even noticable if you were facing attackers.
Elemental spells wern't all that scary in 2.2 (they have been buffed significantly in 2.3 in maps, like spark skeletons) except obvious the ones like Megaera's Firestorm with damage mods and onslaught etc.

Elemental spell damage could be a big problem for hybrid AR/EV characters if they arn't able to run puritys or fortify i asume. And of course there is the current problem of volatiles, detonate dead and bearers where only a raw huge life pool can safe you.


Personal observations and some thoughts on hybrid:
- against any typ of attacks it is a godly defensive strategy
- against elemental spell damage and secondary damage it feels squishy (without puritys/fortify)
- against very big physical hits which actually hit you, you have barly any mitigation
- utilizing hybrid gear only makes sense for EV/ES gear on an ES character
- other hybrid bases are always worse against a mix of there pure counterparts

- if you pair block or dodge with hybrid it gets pretty absurd against attacks
- to compensate for big hits you should consider some phys to ele conversion on top of armour
- Endurance charges are really good with armour on big hits


Armour + Evasion hybrid is definitly very strong right now, it just is much harder to achieve and you usually have to make some sacrifices on most builds to make it good. The problem is that currently high life pools and curses are enough to be completly save against all situations you face - AR/EV isn't efficiant enough to compete with other options like:
- pure evasion/max dodge/Kintsugi or Coil
- pure armour/max endurance charges
- max block/endurance charges/Aegis
- high ES pool/Basphemy Curses (best option new for clear speed because you don't sacrifice much)
- high ES pool/Wicked Ward/faster start of ES recovery
- high life/high strength/Kaom's Heart
- MoM builds

All those mentioned options have either a higher life pool or higher effective mitigation against the current content or even both. There are little reasons to go hybrid AR/EV unless you figure out a way to do it efficiantly without too much sacrifices.


Finaly i wanna to finish with a fact, which we have to think about for the future of PoE:

A character with 6.5k life, hybrid armour/evasion has a lower effective life pool than a 13k ES character without any defenses against big hits and about the same effective life pool againt moderate hits.
A hypothetical character with ~20k ES, ~10k EV and Blasphemy Enfeeble/Temp Chains is the tankiest approach you currently can go for in this game against all damage typs.

Having a absurdly high life pool paired with fast recovery and avoidance is far superior in 98% of situations you face in PoE right now compared with a high mitigation character with a moderate life pool.

I have a 93 Duelist for the moment, and I have to say it's the best melee build I've had in a long time. Four levels of defense: Armor + Evasion, "max" block and heavy use of Vaal Grace for some dodge. And we're not even talking about high Ar or Ev rolls on gear, still it stomps through 12+ maps.

And I'm even running Wings of Entropy, and rocking 100k on a tanky, non-crit melee build. I say that is OK. I say as Jax in League of Legends: "Imagine if I had a real weapon..."

Of course, nothing below 500k is defined as "viable" these days, so...

I guess the main reason I felt compelled to post this was because every time I roll a new character - ascendant, raider, elementalist - nothing compares to the tank/dps of my shadow.

I'm thinking that my raider would now need to be ranged to take full advantage of evasion. This would work considering GGG has said "ranged archers should now get mirrored gear for 30 ex".

too much to think about. I've spent 5 hours today thinking about this.