Evasion vs Armor : some feedback

Hi !

The game is great and I know it's in beta state, that's why I feel I should share my experiences :)

I'm a lvl 64 Ranger, currently farming at docks before I finish the quests of act 3.

In the first place, I wanted to try a dual wield evasion based ranger, with keystones related to evasion : Acrobatics, Phase acrobatics and Ondar's Guile.

I would say the build was running fine until this merciless act 3. The build was more defensive than offensive, and with the best items I could find (I play only with self found gear, no trade ^^) I managed to get around 60% of chance to evade. Coupled with 18% chance to block attacks, 30% chance to dodge attacks and 20% chance to dodge spells, monsters had difficulties to hit me.
Problem is, when I receive physical damage, I have no way to mitigate the damage...The worst are probably the physical spell because they hit more frequently...
My resistances are not bad (between 35 and 65), but I'll soon need more if I want to finish the act and get to maps.

Today, i decided to use the respec points in order to take away the evasion keystones and the nodes that lead to them. That gave me 10 points I have spent in the Iron Reflexes keystone and some damage nodes.
This change improved the overall survivability of my character (now 60% armor), except for some elemental mobs. And my damage improved quite a bit, granting more life leech.


That gives me this statement : if I want to use an evasion based character, I have to use more points than with an armor character in order to have the same survivability, and I have to give up some damage. :/

So, it's certainly better than before with the recent ranger and evasion buff, but it's still not enough. I fear that as long evasion works the way it is, evasion characters will be less good than armor based ones.
Plus, with Iron Reflexes, I can use all pieces of gear that use Evasion, Armor, or both. With evasion keystones, I have less choice resulting in hard time to get the sockets I want...


The build I'm using relies on attacks with Dual Strike, Melee Splash, Life Leech, Increased Attack Speed and Added Cold Damage for multi targets, and Dual Strike with Melee Physical Damage, Multistrike and Faster Attacks for single targets.
My auras are wrath, anger, hatred and grace. Thanks to Wurm's Molt and its mana leech I have no mana problems when attacking.
I also use Viper Strike for boss and rare monsters, and the Vulnerability / Enfeeble curses depending on the situation.

I'm mostly relying on physical damage but I also have some elemental damage.

Here is the passive tree setup : http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgIBAF4DhwR-CC4OrRR1FfAZhhmOGtsbrSLqI_YknSaVKaUyATSTNYY2eziWOlg6szrtPs9KfU4qUUdTNVVLVi1W-lpIW69h4mJaY3BnoG1sbXtuaXBycrt0QX1bfXWE2YcZh3aH24w2jX2Nv5AKlWabJpuNm7WdqqZ_qn-quKx_rs-xs7IZtUi2QbcXuc295r6nwA_DOsS4y0HN6s960k3TftX43Q3o1usU6yzrju1B7YPuDu967-Pv8Plj_MX-ug==

I'm planning to get the life nodes north to the Mana Geyser and up to the Shadow start area, as well as one handed and dual damage points next to it.

In the previous (evasion) version, I had 3 points for Ondar's Guile and 7 points for Acrobatics and Phase Acrobatics.


My current gear :




In short, I think evasion needs reworking in its functioning, because I feel that even if I could manage to get like 80% chance to evade and at least 5k life, I could get serious trouble when hard physical attacks touch me...



Thanks in advance for seeing this thread and contribute (and excuse me for the not good English too) :P

Yes, watch this player get hit for 500 from a white beetle in the city of sarn. He would never manage a strong map.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3V4r_QAPU0

Armor stacking goes a long way in helping you survive those 'wtf' happened spikes.

it's pretty well known that armor is the go-to and evasion is shit.

we've all been waiting for the situation to improve for a while, now.

probably one of the biggest problems is that there is no "base" armor. if characters were guaranteed a certain base level of it, it would go a long way.

instead, unless you specifically go out of your way to get a lot of armor, you're hosed. thus making pure-evasion gear fucking garbage unless you pair it with iron reflex

That video doesn't prove much - the player got way too few life for an evasion based character. Way too few for an armour based one as well.
S+B evasion characters do a lot better since the recent monster accuracy rework. You can hit 60% chance to evade with mediocre gear, a decent dexterity value (which an evasion character will probably have anyway) and some +evasion nodes - the stuff in the Ranger area should do it (which will also add +% life), maybe add another 50% from Elusiveness/Reflexes.
Coupled with some chance to block (40%+) and blind you can become quite tanky.

The Acrobatics - Phase Acrobatics cluster could use a bit of polishing though.

"

Delirii wrote:

That video doesn't prove much - the player got way too few life for an evasion based character. Way too few for an armour based one as well.
S+B evasion characters do a lot better since the recent monster accuracy rework. You can hit 60% chance to evade with mediocre gear, a decent dexterity value (which an evasion character will probably have anyway) and some +evasion nodes - the stuff in the Ranger area should do it (which will also add +% life), maybe add another 50% from Elusiveness/Reflexes.
Coupled with some chance to block (40%+) and blind you can become quite tanky.

The Acrobatics - Phase Acrobatics cluster could use a bit of polishing though.

His hp pool is irrelevant. My point is a white beetle, a normal low level slow attacking monster, hit him for 500 damage .... O_O

An evasion character sacrifices much more than armor in nodes, to reach that 95% cap, and ends up with less life than a comparable armor character in the end. And less armor as well, because of phase acrobatics giving 50% less overall.

Avoiding a hit and taking a hit and reducing it significantly are not the same thing. They can mean the difference between 1 shot or not on the hardest maps.

If an evasion character can get some good degree of block, there is no reason to go evasion anyways. Block is superior against reflect, allows you to never get stunned because you can take US, it is very reliable because it is a fixed percentage unlike evasion, and it can also apply to spells up to a whopping 75% chance (20% spell dodge is the most you can get, very inferior)

OP Are you using Enfeeble? Endurance Charges?

And there are two mob used physical spells in the game. The miniboss is optional. So I don't see anything to complain about physical spells for.

As for a difference in getting one shot: The difference an AR character has from an EV character is (AR Character HP - EV Character HP)-(AR Character Armour- EV character armour)/12

For two 4k HP characters it's going to be a 1000HP buffer per 12k armour. With granites up that's about 4k HP worth of soak.

Basically it means certain map bosses will one shot the Ev and the AR will live. In practical application as long as you have equivalent HP and Enfeeble/Blind/Echarges (four or five) one or all the EV character isn't any squishier than the AR character.

It's getting to that point where the EV character struggles.

Unless there are blue or yellow enemies in maps that commonly deal in excess of 4k damage I don't know about. Spellcasters don't count.

"

Autocthon wrote:

OP Are you using Enfeeble? Endurance Charges?

Yes I'm using Enfeeble for some hars hitting monsters. But most of the time I use Vulnerability which grants more life leeched.
As for Endurance Charges, I might try them, but since Acrobatics reduce Armor by 50% I would only get 4% X 3 / 2 = 6% armor...

Endurance Charges give pure damage reduction not armor. so 3x5 = 15% damage reduction 15% all res. with merciless bandits + duelist node you can easily get 25% DR. thats pretty huge.

edit. oh its 4% dr so only 20% damage reduction.

Using Emndurance Charges should help you. I prefer 5 (though 4 if you can get Darkray Vectors). 16-20% DR is a big deal. And they do in fact ignore the armour malus from Acrobatics (they give additive DR with other DR stats)

Using Blind should be another consideration, it won't stop big hits from doing a lot of damage, but it will signifcantly reduce damage taken overall. And by significantly I mean by 75%.

My opinion is,that pure melee eva/dodge life based builds were killed after 0.11 patch,where HP was lowered.Stacking HP was used by such builds not just it's necessary,lol,but because it worked straight as a buffer,when lack of armor leads to absorbing the full dmg dealt,and dmg spikes,ofc.When hits are rare,but unpredictable and hard, pure eva build meant literally "path of life nodes" to be viable.
So 0.11 killed it.And,of course,one mistake followed another.They changed the nodes to complex ones (eva/hp),successfully lowering HP percentage.Smart move.Like more chance to evade will improve your survivability when being hit.
IMO at this point only pure eva bow users benefit from current situation.HP melee eva builds are worse than trash now(especially shadows/rangers) and suck bad lategame.That's from my personal experience,I already used latest respec to free one of my shadows from this pain.I prepare it for CI/eva crit ranger,to be lame as fuck and hand in hand with what ggg requires from me.