Evasion and Armour - useless vs endgame bosses?

to avoid missinterpretaion: bosses, endgame = Sirus level opponents, Kosis in Delirium, Hasted Abaxoth in -max, evertyhing as extra. not some T10 white map boss

can you recall a moment during recent endgame fights when AR or EV saved you? (AR/EV DIRECTLY, not derived mechanics like Transcendence, Molten Shell etc). When was the last time you really could feel the 'weight' of that 21k unbuffed AR when tanking Die Beam or Aul's crystal riders..

i know the answer - 'never, becase AR fares poorly vs endgame'

and i wonder if im the only one who think both AR and EV are totally useless in current endgame (again - DIRECT AR/EV, not derived effects like Molten Shell's buffer is good because of AR).



What led us to a place where the defences you pick along the way FAIL YOU badly in the endgame. Why Armour and Evasion both suck so much vs bosses nowadays?

Why pretty much ALL new bosses deal spell + degen damage. attack phys is VERY rare (and in most cases limited to auto-attacks like Shaper or easily avoidable like Hydra).


AR in general is flawed, does not scale with monster power creep and even desperate bandaids (Imbalanced guard) wont make people use it. It is a noob trap, a stat difficult to stack (yada yada dual nebuloch, yada yada 5k AR chest, yada yada 2k from ascendancy) from gear, that works fine trough entire game to fail you when you need it the most

Similar story with Evasion. It is easier to stack (thx DEX bonus) and during leveling and in mapping you can really feel it.. until you realise that Blind == Evasion, but better and cheaper and you no longer care. Again, face Sirus - your AR/EV defences are worthless.


What works vs endgame bosses (aka works ALL THE TIME, flasks excluded):

- life pool. ES has it much easier to scale, mostly due to stuff like Split Personality, +100 ES from jewels and in general INT being an amazing stat. reaching 8k is very, very easy.

- MOM - esp with agnostic and how easy it is to get 5k mana without even trying

- %reduction: endurance charges, +max res, fortify/fortify effect, less damage taken from ascendancies etc

- %reduction: damage split (elemental as chaos, phys as elemental etc)

- %reduction: Wind Dancer, Kintsugi, soon-to-be-abused Gale Wind bonus on a Deadeye

- DoT effect %reductions (pantheon, rare crafts)

- dodge (mostly spell dodge) and block (mostly spell block). max block characters are tanky because of SPELL block, not attack block. you can drop all attack block and be just as safe in endgame

- slowing the f.. out of opponents (chilling ground, temp chains - even Sirus can be slowed down a lot)

- and ofc being ranged, preferably not on the same screen or covered with proximity shields from your minions :)


Sirus deals no attack damage - everything is either ground hazard, phys spell or elemental spell. Aul is spells only, Shaper - spells + melee autoattack (but that is more of a dps check fight anyway, you can avoid all his moves, including attack slam), Guardians - Hydra (enviromental hazards is what kills you), Phoenix (flames from phoenixes + -fire res). Chimera and Minotaur are two that actually can be countered with AR/EV.
same ratio with conquerors (baran you sidestep 100%, veritania you have to dps down before arena gets tiny and she hides somewhere, Drox can be tanked with AR - but you better dodge the big fist anyway, Hunter you sidestep 100%).
Elder same story - you either run like chicken (Lightning guy.. im scared of him even with 12k ES max block, ES recovery on block..) or sidestep it all (chaos). you can MAYBE facetank the phys guy with high enough AR (but not EV, because it is all spells)

point is - excluding chimera/minotaur - you can have 0 AR/EV and be more or less the same. and my problem with that is - why is that? why all new bosses actively ignore the 'basic' defences? why these two are nothing more than noob traps or stuff it is good to have if you can get it for free (dual nebuloch, Memory Vault, ascendancies etc)

why everything dangerous in endgame is a) spell b) area denial degen? side question - have you actually considered Kitava fight and checked what his moves are? it seems that there is just ONE attack - 'debris throw'. everything else is fire spell, phys/fire spell or phys degen. why is that? what stops GGG from making mobs actually attacking you? it sucks to have one entire mechanic (evasion) being not only negated but straight IGNORED in the endgame..

Armour needs a serious rework. the formula has to change to accomodate HUGE increase in mob damage. and it might be the time to make it affect degens.
Evasion - same story but even harder because of Blind. Right now pretty much every caster is at 50% evasion (Disorienting Display). casters get the same defences melee/attacks get but.. not the vice versa. I cannot get working MOM on my melee build for 1 passive point (keystone is one point, getting 4k mana is not)

if the boss design for endgame is 'just dont get hit' (Shaper fight) then fights like Sirus (chaotic, random BS) should not exist. if the defences are to matter - you just cannot make everything deal Spell Elemental damage and expect people to care about AR/EV (if alternatives are just better) and it is pretty weird (and abusive on new players) to know that AR/EV is always the suboptimal choice because in the end they wont help you

Evasion works against most attack based bosses. This includes most Shaper and Elder Guardians as well as some moves of Shaper and Elder. I am not 100% sure on which attacks from the Conquerors count as attacks or spells but i am fairly positive that at least drox slams are attacks.

Armor works against any physical damage hits so it pretty much always pulls it's weight. Pretty much all the Shaper and Elder Guardians do at least partially physical damage, some for the Conquerors where even Baran and Sirus don't have full elemental conversion on their attacks.

So is it useless? Obviously not. Can they be utilized by themselves to provide decent defenses? No, it makes sense to incorporate them into your defensive layers to some degree but they can only be a part of your defense, not the entire defense.

Recently I found a guy that made a 0 AR/EV build. He was doing Sirus, etc very fine with little trouble, even tanking some beams, deliriums, etc.

AR/EV feels more like a good to have, but they fall behind every other defense layer.

Im successfully playing zero (or close to) armour/evasion builds for pretty long time now as armour/evasion tend to be useless against end game bosses.

There are a few exceptions for armour like Aura Stacking/Armour/Iron Reflexes/Dreamfeather/Transcendence.

But i think those abusive cases which were all based on Aura Effect Stacking and to some degree flasks will be fixed in 3.13

Without the above mentioned cases Evasion needs a complete rework since most dangerous attacks from endgame bosses are spell based and evasion just dont work against spells plus Blind covers basically for all needed Evasion investment.

Armour used to be a one trick pony for Vaal/Molten Shell and its still kind of good for that.

The usual armour rule still applies. If you get loads of armour out of the blue for example from aura stacking you take it. But dont gimp your character by investing armour gear or nodes into it.

This is an old topic, i think i heard this a year ago or so.

yes, i wish ar and ev alone would have more impact and it would be sensible. Yet this game doesn't do that. When you look to some random builds no one is talking about how much they have armor or evasion, well not until something is tied to ar/ev, first always comes "look how much dps my build does and destroys everything", whats left goes to hp and then ar/ev is an extra icing on cake. I hate it.

Why is this the case, i believe that ggg can't predict or control what ar/ev values players will get. On other hand smth like fortify barely vary and it is rather easy to balance.

Molten shell was kind of attempt to buff armor, but is inconsistent (cooldowns). Transcendence kinda works too with some end charges, but it is not naked armor (needs keystone). Maybe work could be done on this end, idk.

edit. In poe 2 they mentioned that evasion will be able to work against spells, well at least that is smth.

It's been a long time since EV/AR are almost non-efficient vs endgame content, and it doesn't only concern just bosses.
Block and dodge fall in the same shit tier category when used as a main defense. These are just a substitute of "real" defenses, build falls apart when they fail. But work well as secondary defenses to an extent, though.

Percentage based reductions, high eHP - HP/ES/MoM, etc., high regen. Or altogether. That works.

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torturo wrote:

Percentage based static reductions, high eHP - HP/ES/MoM, etc., high regen. Or altogether. That works.

Yeah this always worked and always will work since its simply reliable.