Definitive Solution for Evasion vs One-Shots - Keystone: Uncanny

I have posted this once as a response to someone's suggestion.
However, I think this deserves its own thread.

WARNING: See the NOTES at the end before you spout nonsense.

One of the big problems with Evasion is when that big hit gets past your evasion, and suddenly you're dead.

My suggestion for this is a Keystone:
Uncanny

"

Evadable attacks that deal more than 70% of your max Health plus Energy Shield in one hit have their physical damage reduced by up to 60% of your chance to Evade (at 100% damage and above).

Whenever this effect is triggered, you get 10% Less Evasion for 3 seconds, which can stack up to 10 times (up to 100% Less Evasion).

This Mitigation would be based on two factors:
a) the % of your combined Health + Energy Shield that attack would deal
b) your chance to Evade

Mitigation Formula:
(IncomingDamage/(maxHP + maxES)-0.7)*2*chanceToEvade

Examples - Assuming 60% Chance to Evade:
- An evadable attack that would deal 70% of your max HP+ES or less in 1 hit, is not mitigated at all.
- An evadable attack that would deal 80% of your max HP+ES in 1 hit, has its physical damage reduced by 12% (80-70=10% of 2*60%).
- An evadable attack that would deal 90% of your max HP+ES in 1 hit, has its physical damage reduced by 24% (90-70=20% of 2*60%).
- An evadable attack that would deal 100% of your max HP+ES in 1 hit, has its physical damage reduced by 36% (100-70=30% of 2*60%).
- An evadable attack that would deal more than 100% of your max HP+ES in 1 hit, only has its physical damage reduced by 36% because it cannot exceed 60% of your chance to Evade (which in this case is also 60%).
- How to still one-shot you at 60% Evasion? 156.25% of your max HP+ES (36% mitigation).
- How to still one-shot you at 90% Evasion? 217.39% of your max HP+ES (54% mitigation).

OLD FORMULA


NOTES:
1 - This makes Evasion the opposite of Armor.
1.1 - Armor is strongest against weak attacks.
1.2 - Evasion will become reliable against dangerously high attacks, which are one of the big culprits for surprise deaths, which is specially nasty for Hardcore characters.
2 - Armor+Evasion balances itself out since you will have less Evasion AND you also have armor, it's both less likely you will suffer an attack that deals more than 70% of your HP in one hit, AND if you do, you'll mitigate it by alot less than a pure Evasion build would.
3 - Evasion+ES also balances itself out since you will mitigate less than a pure Evasion build, and your HP+ES will usually be bigger than most pure HP builds, even if you are a CI user, thus making it less likely a blow will deal 70% of your combined pools in one hit.
4 - Before you say "that would make low life builds op", remember this only affects physical attack damage.
Chaos and Elemental damage are not mitigated even if it comes from an attack.
Non-attack physical damage (ethereal knives) is not mitigated.

+1

I like the thought here because evasion isn't simply a hit or miss in real life either. Numbers would obviously be on GGG, but +1 for the idea.

Is this just a straight buff to evasion, with no reduction of normal evasion chance?

This thread is predicated on stupid.

Let's look at the current system and see how it really operates. Let's say that level 72 monsters have 452 Accuracy Rating (on average, they do), you can have either 8337 Evasion or 8337 Armour, and you have 3200 Life. This means if you go Evasion your chance to evade will be 50%. Damage in this case will be variable, scaling from 1 to beyond 3200.

Because there is randomness involved with chance to evade, Evasion doesn't truly get one-shot; by this I mean that a lethal hit (4000 damage) might kill an Evasion character in one attack (no evade) or in two attacks (one evade). This means they withstand, on average, 1.5 attacks. Thus I'm going to use the term "x.5 shot" a lot below.

Anyway, here are the results.

3788+ damage: 1-shot AR, 1.5-shot EV. Advantage: EV.
3200-3787: 2-shot AR, 1.5-shot EV. Advantage: AR.
2124-3199: 2-shot AR, 3.5-shot EV. Advantage: EV.
1600-2123: 3-shot AR, 3.5-shot EV. Advantage: EV.
1547-1599: 3-shot AR, 5.5-shot EV. Advantage: EV.
1247-1546: 4-shot AR, 5.5-shot EV. Advantage: EV.
1067-1246: 5-shot AR, 5.5-shot EV. Advantage: EV.
1060-1066: 5-shot AR, 7.5-shot EV. Advantage: EV.
932-1059: 6-shot AR, 7.5-shot EV. Advantage: EV.
837-931: 7-shot AR, 7.5-shot EV. Advantage: EV.
800-836: 8-shot AR, 7.5-shot EV. Advantage: AR.
764-799: 8-shot AR, 9.5-shot EV. Advantage: EV.
706-763: 9-shot AR, 9.5-shot EV. Advantage: EV.
658-705: 10-shot AR, 9.5-shot EV. Advantage: AR.
640-657: 11-shot AR, 9.5-shot EV. Advantage: AR.
618-639: 11-shot AR, 11.5-shot EV. Advantage: EV.
584-617: 12-shot AR, 11.5-shot EV. Advantage: AR

Below that point, EV never regains that advantage.

The point being, Evasion is already the defense which is better at taking big hits, with the sole exception of this relatively minor band of damage just over max Life which everyone makes far too big of a deal about because that stuff never happens anyway. The thing that makes evasion sucks in reality is not these big damage hits, but instead being surrounded by a mob of whites doing about 15% of your max Life per hit (not per attack) and getting stunlocked to death, an embarassing death at the hands of a white mob, and based off that people conclude "how could it withstand big hits if this little shit can take them down." That, of course, is a logical fallacy, especially considering the armour formula is specifically reduced in effectiveness by higher damage while the evasion formula is not, which makes me wonder how all the evasion QQers can seriously be that bad at math.

Scrotie, you assume a specific Health maximum vs a specific incoming damage, and base all your math on it.

That's fine.
However, I am not debating whether the "average" mathematical results are in favor of armor or evasion.

I am defending that Evasion has a game-breaking flaw that forces players to value Health even more than Armor users would - the fact that alot of the blows you don't evade are a potential one-shot - something that only happens to Armor users if the stars (read: shock stacks) align.

Furthermore, armor based characters tend to have more Strength, and thus obtain even more Health naturally.

---
In my suggestion, the more Health you have, the smaller the percentage of health loss per hit is, and thus the smaller the mitigation would be.

Furthermore, it's also less likely you will be dealt damage exceeding the required treshold.

I think I undertuned it by requiring a blow to deal a mere 30% of your health in one hit.
It should be over 50% or even higher.
My suggestion is merely meant to prevent 0.5 shots or worse.

That being said - what I suggested was a Keystone.
Something you must go out of your way to obtain.

Not that different from players that grab armor+evasion and then Iron Reflexes.

If there is a dire flaw in Armor, then suggest something to fix it.
Or suggest 2 keystones: one favoring armor and one favoring energy shield, in order to compensate the existence of this suggested Keystone of mine.

I'm not requesting a buff to Evasion.

"

Nurvus wrote:

I am not debating whether the "average" mathematical results are in favor of armor or evasion.

I am talking about the big flaw in Evasion, that is essentially the fact you are likely to eventually face an enemy that one-shots you with a physical attack - alot more likely than you would with an Armor based character.

Scrotie just showed you that his 'average mathematical results' point to your 'flaw' in evasion not actually being a flaw in evasion. The 'flaw' in evasion you talk about it that there are things which can 1-shot you. But that is the same for everyone, not just evasion.

If you wanted to argue against Scrotie's point, you would say that the problem doesn't come at 50% chance to evade, it comes at (for eg) 75% chance to evade, or even a 90% chance to evade, where you can score 3.5 or 9.5 on Scrotie's system, and still have no chance to heal in between connecting hits, whereas even if the armour player scores a 2, they can still heal in between.

You could also argue that the numbers he chose for evasion and armour were pretty low for high-end characters. Especially armour - since it's very easy to get armour a lot higher than evasion. (for eg, you'd probably be running a granite flask if you're tanking something that could 1-hit you without it!)

But you really should be interested in the mathematics of it, because you don't really have a point if it's not backed up by the maths.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

Evasion is already the defense which is better at taking big hits, with the sole exception of this relatively minor band of damage just over max Life which everyone makes far too big of a deal about because that stuff never happens anyway.

This is wrong. Evasion and armour are both fine and balanced for normal gameplay, agreed. Also, the people complaining are the ones making high-end builds, and those people shouldn't get to disproportionately inform GGG's balance decisions; also agreed.

But with really high end characters, it's possible to get more armour than evasion, and also, you can have a better than 50% chance to evade. Also, you have missed the secondary point where a high armour character gets to pick up str nodes, so has higher life than a high evasion character has to pick up dex nodes. I agree that you are correct that EV is better than armour if you are just straight comparing the values at 50% chance to hit. But that isn't a good example to work from.

Again, I am not arguing whether Evasion or Armor are better.

Evasion might be better in the grand scope of things, and as such Armor might need a buff or Evasion might need a nerf - that's irrelevant to this thread.

This is about a fundamental PRACTICAL flaw in Evasion.
No matter how good Evasion is in average when compared to Armor - since you have no mitigation, even if you have 95% evasion, when you DO get hit, it deals full damage.

And at end game, it is not that hard for that full damage to one-shot you.

Stunlock is a real situation too, but is not what this thread addresses - and I'm not saying it needs to be addressed, since a good build can go and get nodes that reduce stun chance/duration.

This suggestion is for Physical hits that blow you up, or almost, as an Evasion user.

A physical hit that one-shots an Armor character, would kill an Evasion character twice over.

"

Nurvus wrote:

I am defending that Evasion has a game-breaking flaw that forces players to value Health even more than Armor users would - the fact that alot of the blows you don't evade are a potential one-shot - something that only happens to Armor users if the stars (read: shock stacks) align.

If you don't include the shock stack thing, then this really doesn't happen. The game is not crawling with physical one-shots, and the very few that exist (map versions of Kole and Brutus) are basically Life-checks; as soon as an evasion user gets their Life to the point that they aren't one-shot (or adds enough Armour in addition to Life, or just uses a Granite Flask), bam! they're more effective than Armour-centric characters at surviving the big hits. You're making a huge deal about this narrow band, when really Evasion is super strong against big hits and does not need to be buffed further. Things that do 25-99% of your max life in a single hit are far, far more common, and what you are suggesting would actually make Evasion utterly OP in regards to those threats... because it's already OP in regards to those threats, even if the majority of the community prefers to have blinders on.

In terms of the shock stack thing, that is something that Dexterity is better at avoiding anyway. Armour has no effect on elemental attacks, while Evasion does, allowing it to dodge some shocks that way; remember, Evasion rolls against criticals twice (once to evade, once to reduce a crit to a normal hit), so the defense against attack-based Shock is strong indeed. Furthermore, that part of the passive tree is the home to shock-evasion passive nodes which Armour-based characters simply do not have access to. Lastly, shock is being nerfed to 30% per stack in 1.0 anyway.

Evasion's biggest challenge is not big hits, but small ones. Unwavering Stance is utterly off-limits to Evasion characters, and the nature of Armour means that many hits that would deal more than 12.5% maximum life (the minimum size hit to stun) are reduced below the threshold, giving Armour excellent defense against stun even without Unwavering Stance. Thus an Evasion character swarmed by white mobs is very likely to experience a frustrating stunlock death. That is evasion's major weakness, and the fact that the conditions for that scenario are so, so much more common than the "one-shot" fantasy is what really makes Evasion characters struggle. If Evasion needs a buff or a keystone, it is to deal with that specific small-hit problem; not to make it even better at dealing with big hits.

In short, you have massive misconceptions about Evasion's strengths and weaknesses, and thus you have designed a "solution" which tackles no weaknesses and only boosts strengths.

What are you comparing evasion to, if not armour?

If you can be 1-shotted with evasion, you can be 1-shotted without evasion. The fact that you can be 1-shotted isn't a flaw in evasion. It has nothing to do with evasion.