Manabond Trickster: is evasion enough defense on its own?

I'm thinking of trying a Trickster with Manabond as a starter, but I'm concerned about defense. It seems like it would take passives and gear similar to an Archmage build, but MoM and EB aren't valuable because I'll always be OOM.

I was considering a block, but in the final build, I'll probably want to use Voltaxic Rift for chaos conversion.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Is Acrobatics/Phase Acrobatics and Ghost Dance/Escape Artist enough defense without an extra layer of damage reduction?

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dauphic wrote:

is evasion enough defense on its own?

No.

Evasion only protects against Attack DPS. It does nothing to damage from Spells, Attack one-shots, nor Damage over Time.

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dauphic wrote:

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Is Acrobatics/Phase Acrobatics and Ghost Dance/Escape Artist enough defense without an extra layer of damage reduction?

Ghost Dance/Escape Artist were really good last time I played it, which was a couple years back, so not sure about power creep/nerf manifesto's effect on the relative defensive powers there.

To utilise Ghost Dance/Escape Artist to its fullest, you probably shouldn't take the Acrobatics keystone, because it carries a rather substantial ES penalty, and Ghost Dance/Escape Artist makes rather heavy usage of ES.

The defensive approach I took with Trickster was hybrid Life/ES, Block, Dodge, and Evasion. I used The Perfect Form Zodiac Leather to get access to Phase Acrobatics without having to take the penalty from Acrobatics (plus get some nice base ES from the chest's solid base Evasion Rating). Nowadays, the optimal choice is likely to use a Harvest-crafted (Defence/defence more common) or Fossil-crafted (Dense Fossil) Rare chest, and use the Unique Jewel "Thread of Hope" to grab Phase Acrobatics without taking the Acrobatics penalty. Without Acrobatics penalty, I was also free to take some Spell Block chance (a good chunk from Rathpith Globe) to shore up my defence against Spell DPS as well. I wanted to go really defensive on this particular character, so I even used an Advancing Fortress in my main hand (Scorching Ray was a bit OP at this point in the game on Trickster).

EDIT: If you're curious what my build from few years back looked like, it's my character BlazingBlazes (I just logged onto him to double check how I built him, so the website should also default to showing you that character for a while, until I log onto my other characters).

i'm also really curious how the new Ward mechanic is going to work

evasion needs to be paired with dodge, and most importantly, with movement speed (!!!)

you ALWAYS want a multi layer defense, so that you aren't f*cked up if the first line fails.

What I could imagine what could become interesting is a mix of evasion, dodge and ward. The idea would be that you avoid alot of hits via dodge and evasion and if you get a hit, the ward makes sure that you don't get oneshot.

The big problems with ward is, at least from what I got until now, that you a) always lose you total ward to one hit, even if there would be ward left and b) it has a 5 sec cooldown until its up again.

/edit: here is what the patchnotes tell us about the new ward mechanic:

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Introduced a new defence type, Ward, found on Expedition items. Ward protects you from all damage types, taking damage from a hit before your life or energy shield up to the amount of Ward you have. Ward is broken when any damage is taken from it, even if the damage taken was lower than the amount of Ward you have. Ward is instantly restored after 5 seconds.

/edit2: found another interesting bit of information:

"

Introduced a new Utility Flask - Iron Flask: Grants additional Ward and restores Ward on use.

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Judaspriester wrote:

you ALWAYS want a multi layer defense, so that you aren't f*cked up if the first line fails.

What I could imagine what could become interesting is a mix of evasion, dodge and ward. The idea would be that you avoid alot of hits via dodge and evasion and if you get a hit, the ward makes sure that you don't get oneshot.

The big problems with ward is, at least from what I got until now, that you a) always lose you total ward to one hit, even if there would be ward left and b) it has a 5 sec cooldown until its up again.

/edit: here is what the patchnotes tell us about the new ward mechanic:

"

Introduced a new defence type, Ward, found on Expedition items. Ward protects you from all damage types, taking damage from a hit before your life or energy shield up to the amount of Ward you have. Ward is broken when any damage is taken from it, even if the damage taken was lower than the amount of Ward you have. Ward is instantly restored after 5 seconds.

There's also new utility flask that instantly restores Ward, and some uniques and maybe even rare item modifiers reducing the regen timer.