About evasion

The general consensus about evasion in PoE seems to be that it sucks and you should just get Iron Reflexes. I personally like the idea of three stats and distinct defences aligned with them (HP+armor for str, ES for int and Eva for dex), and I generally like playing light armor characters, so I was thinking - how to make Evasion viable?

For my background, I'm rather a fresh player, lurking on the forums from about the time of the second stress test and just got the beta key recently during the third one. I mostly play a dual dagger Shadow, concentrated on crits and cold damage for CC, and combining ES&Eva for defence (no CI). I'm in my 40's, finishing Act II on Cruel (a bit overleveled because my laptop occasionally heats up and turns off while I play). I have no clue how my defence will hold in higher difficulty or end game. But I just want to discuss an idea I had for the evasion mechanics.

As it is now, each of the defenses has it's own strengths and weaknesses. For example, the ES is weak against Chaos damage, because it just breaks through it, but it protects from anything else, even elemental damage, as long as you don't take it for extended periods of time. Armor protects well against normal hits, but is weak against high damage critical strikes, because the reduction is scaled down with damage (which is a really great mechanics IMO). Now Evasion. AFAIK it doesn't differentiate between normal hits and critical strikes - so you have the same defence against normal hits and critical strikes. That's the main difference between Armor and Evasion (apart from the randomness) - normal hits hurt you more, while critical strikes hurt the same.

That's what makes Evasion sub par to Armor - it has it's weakness (crits), but not it's strength. But we can't just make it even - it has to be distinct. So what will happen if we go the other way and emphasize on the difference between the two? Let Evasion be weak against normal strikes as it is - but strong against criticals, where the Armor fails!

How do we do it? The easiest way would be to add passives that increase the Evasion rating against the critical strikes. Now I'm not sure if critical strikes are calculated before or after accuracy/evasion, but it doesn't matter (they are both percentage chances, so their order can be switched). It would still make Evasion high risk - if the crit still gets through, it still devastates you if you don't have much HP/ES. But now it's also high reward, because in the long run you can mitigate more damage than Armor, especially against hard critting enemies.

What do you think about this? Have it already been brought up and dismissed?

TL;DR: Add passives that increase Evasion Rating against critical strikes. It will make Evasion strong in the area, where Armor is weak, thus making both very distinct and viable.

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Chris wrote:

Evasion is getting a strict upgrade pretty soon. I think you'll like it.

You know, this is this kind of post that make me love GGG.
<3

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Chris wrote:

Evasion is getting a strict upgrade pretty soon. I think you'll like it.

That's very reassuring. Thanks!

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Chris wrote:

Evasion is getting a strict upgrade pretty soon. I think you'll like it.

Listening to the Q&A a couple days ago, it sounded like Chris was suggestion Evasion would have an additional property added. I haven't deduced what that is, but can only think perhaps some hits will dodge completely like now and others might deflect partial damage.

He also mentioned mobs getting more effective at attacking and avoiding ranged characters. Your projectiles will no longer be lock target cast. Enemies will be able to move out of the way after the projectile is launched like you currently can with their attacks.

I think Evasion has the opposite problem. It's too good, thanks to Iron Reflexes. It does the same thing as armor, but it benefits from the +%armor nodes, as well as the +%evasion nodes. Thanks to Iron Reflexes, Evasion is strictly better than Armor. Iron Reflexes isn't very far from anyone, either. It's on a highway near other cool things (Thick Skin, Blade Master, Ambidexterity, Celerity, Fencing).

Marauders can cry themselves to sleep, when my Ranger gets double the armor from Leather and Steel, and additional armor from both, Steel Skin and Reflexes. Then, I can mix Grace in, for quick 1k boost to Armor as well. EDIT: did I say 1k? I meant 1k times the heaps for evasion bonuses around the ranger.

It pains me to say it, because I love that passive skill, but maybe we should consider taking Iron Reflexes out. With it in play, there really isn't 3 types of defenses; there's only 2, and 2 paths for one of them. I know there's Acrobatics, but should we take a poll on how many people are taking Acrobatics vs. how many people are taking Iron Reflexes?

I think taking Iron Reflexes out will finally force 3 different forms of defenses, and force people to think and plan around them.

Honestly, straight evasion isn't that bad. You can avoid viper strike, so it's the only real defense against chaos, other than lots of HP. And as long as you have enough HP to avoid the occasional 1-hit death, you can survive quite well, using hit and run tactics. As you should be, being the dexterous character you are...

In conclusion:

Evasion is too OP with Iron Reflexes and not too good without it (according to player feedback). Therefore, the clear solution is to improve Evasion a little bit, and to remove Iron Reflexes.

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Chris wrote:

Evasion is getting a strict upgrade pretty soon. I think you'll like it.

Ant timeframe or hints of how its being changed?

Some of you may have seen my crazy rant against Iron Reflexes on this board. I think I even took a stab at the name itself, being a bit of a nitpicky English more-than-Major and all.

I've had the opportunity to discuss the issue of Evasion with Chris at some length, and I do have a fair idea of the proposed change. As I've said elsewhere, I think it'll be very interesting to see in practice and will not likely 'improve' Iron Reflex users. That's all I can say for now, though.

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ac429 wrote:

Evasion is too OP with Iron Reflexes and not too good without it (according to player feedback).

This is sadly true. Before Iron reflexes I was dying on single hit.
I'm playing ranger (67), and I can get easily 10k armor while shooting bow, while my friend playing marauder (63) can spend double passive skill points and get to 5-6k with shield.

Issue is that there is a lot more stuff with high evasion than there is high armor. If you ask in global chat if anyone has boots with 700 armor people reply "take this evasion boots and get iron reflexes".

My friend always played "tank", and was trying to get as much armor as he could, so he could be in front holding off mobs, while we shoot them from distance. I put 8 skill points to evasion skills and have almost double armor, which is quite depressing for him.

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ac429 wrote:

I think Evasion has the opposite problem. It's too good, thanks to Iron Reflexes. It does the same thing as armor, but it benefits from the +%armor nodes, as well as the +%evasion nodes. Thanks to Iron Reflexes, Evasion is strictly better than Armor. Iron Reflexes isn't very far from anyone, either. It's on a highway near other cool things (Thick Skin, Blade Master, Ambidexterity, Celerity, Fencing).

Marauders can cry themselves to sleep, when my Ranger gets double the armor from Leather and Steel, and additional armor from both, Steel Skin and Reflexes. Then, I can mix Grace in, for quick 1k boost to Armor as well. EDIT: did I say 1k? I meant 1k times the heaps for evasion bonuses around the ranger.

It pains me to say it, because I love that passive skill, but maybe we should consider taking Iron Reflexes out. With it in play, there really isn't 3 types of defenses; there's only 2, and 2 paths for one of them. I know there's Acrobatics, but should we take a poll on how many people are taking Acrobatics vs. how many people are taking Iron Reflexes?

I think taking Iron Reflexes out will finally force 3 different forms of defenses, and force people to think and plan around them.

Honestly, straight evasion isn't that bad. You can avoid viper strike, so it's the only real defense against chaos, other than lots of HP. And as long as you have enough HP to avoid the occasional 1-hit death, you can survive quite well, using hit and run tactics. As you should be, being the dexterous character you are...

In conclusion:

Evasion is too OP with Iron Reflexes and not too good without it (according to player feedback). Therefore, the clear solution is to improve Evasion a little bit, and to remove Iron Reflexes.

As you likely read, I tested IR on my evading melee Shadow and it just didn't work for me. I think you can probably, no, definitely build a pure armour build with IR in mind, but the transition from high evasion to high (extraordinarily high) armour really didn't work for me.

Which just reinforces what I've said a thousand times: Iron Reflexes is a very poor keystone that simultaneously misrepresents one of the angles of the defence trinity and makes a mockery of another. It's a cool idea and I'd love to see some way of keeping it, but a straight conversion to armour from evasion is ridiculous.