Wind dancer with Iron reflex ?

Hi, I am playing a bleed bow gladiator, where I essentially have double more armour than evasion ratings.

I am using wind dancers at the moment but I am pretty sure I will go with iron reflexes later on.

Should I keep wind dancers when I'll take iron reflex ?

I heard that they stack, if they do it's great and I get more evasion rating/armour if I got hit recently, everything is fine.

The part where I'm not sure is with the 40% less evasion rating if I'm not hit recently. Does the 20% less damage taken makes up for the loss of armour ?

I really don't know on this one.

Not questioning your choices. You follow the build guides you want to follow and decide which keystones to allocate yourself. But imma just highlight what I understand about Wind Dancer and defenses in general.

Wind Dancer works best if you rarely get hit. I believe most of the players that take this keystone is looking at the 20% less damage taken mod specifically rather than the other mod that gives more evasion rating (which also equals more armour to you because of IR).

Armour doesn't help against big hits but is very good against small hits. Bosses with big hits are usually alone and they hit slow, so even with build that has zero evasion, it is not entirely wrong to allocate Wind Dancer too, as long as the player is fully aware that they don't have 20% less damage taken in crowded areas where lots of enemies are hurling poop at you. But when that happens, they can still rely on the increased armour (converted from evasion) because they are receiving multiple smaller hits.

Certain monsters use Damage-over-Time skills. Against them, Wind Dancer also can shine despite your character having zero evasion. Since DoT doesn't ever hit, you are also taking 20% less DoT damage. In this situation, it is even better than Fortify which doesn't help against DoTs.

wind dancer is actually OP and is imo a no brainer even with iron reflexes
if you havent been hit recently, 20% less dmg is gonna beat 40% less evasion for any hit you really care about mitigating, unless you have absolutely bonkers evasion. This initial hit protection covers elemental dmg as well, where your armour is useless.
after taking a hit, you get 20% more evasion for free for 4s unless you get hit again.
also helps with ground degens as mentioned


If you wanna be completely informed on your decision, import your character in pob and play around with different size hits to see your real mitigation (you can change the size of incoming hit in the top of config to see how much you actually mitigate), but im fairly certain wind dancer is gonna win for most realistic situations

Wind dancer doesn't have a downside and is just a major juicer for your evasion gear using Iron Reflexes, I always take both I can't see any reason not to if your getting think skin anyway.