Monster Projectile attacks vs Spells: Phase Acrobatics or Arrow Dodging?

It's possible I'm absolutely 100% completely wrong on the following, so take it with a grain of salt.

I believe I once read that your evasion is checked against the enemy's accuracy. So while you might have 77% evasion, archer enemies who use projectiles probably have a much higher dex then any other enemy and will reduce that 77% greatly. Their accuracy won't decrease dodge(acrobatics) though because it's a flat %.

So while it may seem like there's no point in taking acrobatics when your evasion is extremely high, it might not be as high as the character screen leads you to believe. Arrow Dodging and Acrobatics are things you probably want to take together, rather then just one of them.

If the above is wrong I'm sorry. It's been a while.

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Malice wrote:

There's no such thing as projectile dodge. There is:

Acrobatics: lets you dodge attacks
Phase Acrobatics: lets you dodge spells

You're wrong, just look at Arrow Dodging keystone:
Doubles chance to evade Projectile Attacks

Notice how the words DOGE and EVADE are both used on the same keystone?

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stephendbrown wrote:

"

Malice wrote:

There's no such thing as projectile dodge. There is:

Acrobatics: lets you dodge attacks
Phase Acrobatics: lets you dodge spells

You're wrong, just look at Arrow Dodging keystone:
Doubles chance to evade Projectile Attacks

Notice how the words DOGE and EVADE are both used on the same keystone?

That's just bad naming on the part of the Arrow Dodging keystone. You'll notice that the word 'evade' in there is the important one, it's the word that shows up in the description of the Keystone's mechanics.

And since Dodging and Evasion are separate mechanics, he's right, there is no Projectile Dodge.

Looking at the mechanics thread it says this:

1) Avoiding the hit:
- At this stage there is a chance to evade attacks (accuracy vs evasion)
- Any chance to dodge from acrobatics or phase acrobatics is also checked here

Which says that evasion AND dodge are used to calculate whether or not you get hit... i.e., both are rolled at once, this doesn't tell me that they're different, and nothing in the skill tree suggests that either.

If I have 75% evasion, and 20% dodge on melee/spells and double evasion on projectiles, what really does this mean?

I have 4 options:
1. 75% melee / 95% projectile; then 20% melee/spell
2. 75% melee/spell / 95% projectile; then 20% melee/spell
3. 95% melee/projectile / 20% spell
4. 95% melee/projectile/spell

If people can reply with what they think it is and why then perhaps we can use this to get GGG to add some clarification to the mechanics thread or something.

Personally I would expect it to be the last option.

It's none of your 4 options.

The mechanics thread and the posts in response to yours have all been the truth. I'll attempt one last explanation for you.

Skills in this game are either spells or attacks (melee or ranged). Skeleton mages use spells, skeleton archers use attacks, melee skeletons use attacks.

Spells do not check for evasion or dodge and "auto-hit" with the one exception of Phase Acrobatics.

Attacks check for both dodge and evasion as separate stats. If you have 75% evasion and 20% dodge, the enemy has a (.25*.8)=20% chance to hit you. If they stacked additively the enemy would only have a (1-(.75+.2))=5% chance to hit you, which is not the case.


Note: I didn't bother talking about blocking or spell blocking here since it's not relevant to dodge and/or evade.

A bit OT, but while Acrobatics is a good keystone for pure evasion characters, getting to Phase Acrobatics is not worth all those passives.

It should be changed to:
1. Have only 2 additional acrobatics passives, each giving +2%
2. Have only 3 additional acrobatics passives, each giving +2% (for a total of 6%).

As it is, better to spend those 5 passives for +%life. Works better against attacks that get through and spells.

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Torin wrote:

A bit OT, but while Acrobatics is a good keystone for pure evasion characters, getting to Phase Acrobatics is not worth all those passives.

It should be changed to:
1. Have only 2 additional acrobatics passives, each giving +2%
2. Have only 3 additional acrobatics passives, each giving +2% (for a total of 6%).

As it is, better to spend those 5 passives for +%life. Works better against attacks that get through and spells.

Still a bit off topic, but the point of those passives being there is more so that you have to spend 5 passive points to get Phase Acrobatics, which gives a bonus defense against one of the things evasion / dodge does not work against and as such is a very powerful complement to an Acrobatics build.

You can see a similar idea with Whispers of Doom, which is preceded by a few "Curse Cast Speed" nodes which are generally not worth that much, but help balance the power of having two curses on an opponent.

That said, they do slightly boost the power of the relevant tactic (Casting 2 curses, using Dodge) and being thematically appropriate.

So basically if you have 95% evasion and 24% dodge (caps I believe) you would have 96.2% avoidance (if this isn't re-capped at 95%)

Also, after some quick calculations, it appears that dodge is only really useful with a low evasion.

At 95% evasion you only get 1.2% additional avoidance through dodge with all the passives, but with only 10% evasion those passives will give you 21.6% dodge and the full 24% if you have 0 evasion.

So the keystones are pretty useless I would say unless your evasion rate is at 35% or lower, this will give you 16%+ if you have all the passives, any less than that and you're pretty much getting half or less of what the skill tree says, I think this means that those keystones are good if you avoid all the evasion skills and go for health instead, this way for only 6 passive points you can achieve 24% melee dodge with 20% spell dodge (something that you can't get anywhere else on the skill tree).

And then projectile dodging is great if you have 48% evasion or less and are a ranged attacker, anything more than 48% and you've wasted passives in evasion, but then you wouldn't be going for the acrobatic keystones at the same time.

You're on the right track now stephendbrown, that is one way of looking at it.

But there are other ways of looking at it. For instance, regardless of how much evasion you have, acrobatics will always cause you to take 20% less hits than you would have otherwise. Dodging also can't be countered by high accuracy.
Evasion on the other hand, at any point you might turn the corner and run into a pack of monsters with the Unwavering affix (increased accuracy), which are standing in the Increased Accuracy and Criticals aura, which could severely weaken the effect of your evasion defence.
On the other hand with evasion you might run into some monsters with very low accuracy, and almost never get hit by them.
So acrobatics is more consistent in that regard.


Another thing to consider is that it is difficult or impossible to reach the the 95% chance to evade cap, except perhaps versus ranged enemies while using the arrow dodging keystone. Archwizard is right when he says that keystone has an unfortunate name, it actually has nothing to do with the game mechanic of dodging.

50% chance to evade is a more reasonable goal, and in the later stages of the game you're going to need some pretty good gear to achieve that. Typically each +% evasion node you take on the passive tree will only end up increasing your chance to evade by 1% or so, so the those 1% improved acrobatics nodes are actually fairly on par with most evasion nodes, even if they don't look very attractive.

Huh, I've had threads of mine necro'd before but not in such a way that they come back far better than when they went into the ground. Interesting.

I'm actually at peace with A/PA/AD now, as I am with evasion for the most part.

It is impossible to reach the evasion cap, btw. I've devoted a character to all the evasion nodes, pure evasion gear and barely scratched 65%. Diminishing returns ensure you'll probably never crack 80%.

Also, stephendbrown, GGG uses 'dodging' precisely because spells cannot interact with evasion. Spells do not rely on accuracy, therefore they do not figure into the chance to hit/evade equation of accuracy vs evasion rating. To have a similar effect, they had to employ a rather sloppy 'as well as' mechanic. This is the base 20% of Phase Acrobatics.

As far as this game is concerned, evasion and dodging are two separate things even if they are synonyms.

Elaborating on pneuma's statement, the easiest (maybe not, but it's easy enough for me to understand) way to see your chance to avoid melee damage via evasion, dodge and block is to multiply your chances to be hit together, and then subtract that total from 1, then multiply that by 100.

Thus my current Shadow, who has 24% chance to dodge, 55% chance to evade and 31% chance to block has:

0.76x0.45x0.69=0.236 (rounded)
1-0.236=0.764
0.764x100=76.4

So, if that's right, my Shadow with his measly 55% chance to evade, 31% chance to block shield and 24% chance to dodge has a 76.4% chance to avoid melee damage altogether.

That's not bad, given how I play.

Let's assume I sacrifice my life nodes and put it all in evasion. I'm going from 1800 or so life to 1000, if that, to gain roughly +130% evasion rating. This will increase my chance to evade by about 10%.

By the above, that increases my total chance to avoid damage to 81.6%.

But now I'm truly a one-hit wonder, and no amount of evasion in the world can save you if you go down with one hit.

As it stands, with 1800 life and 76% chance to avoid damage, I can take a few hits, and it only takes one to tell me to get the hell out of there.

It's not hard to see why I currently choose life nodes over evasion.

I'm not saying the evasion+ nodes are entirely worthless, but I think it'd take a much better build than mine to justify them.