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

The real problem is the focus on one-shots as a way of measuring the balance between monster damage vs player defences. The devs need to take the focus towards more insidious threats to player survival, such as stunning, slow movement speed (so you can't run away when a fight is going badly), a debuff that prevents life/ES regain, and so on. If you design them correctly, mobs can be as dangerous as you like even if they only take of 10-20% of the player's life/ES per hit. Even heavy-hitters like Brutus could be made more interesting if they did less raw damage, but inflicted nasty debuffs on the player when they hit.


As for dealing with swarms of weak mobs: If you're getting hit by melee attacks several times per second with a pure Evasion build, you're doing it wrong. Vulnerability to swarms of melee mobs is a deliberate weakness of Evasion (projectile attacks can be shrugged off with Ondar's Guile), just like Armour has the deliberate weaknesses of being poor at dealing with heavy hits (if people are able to stack armour to the point where it blunts even really heavy hits, that's a balance issue rather than a fundamental design issue) and incapable of dealing with non-physical damage.

That said, maybe there should be some better options to deal specifically with stuns that aren't biased too much towards high-Armour characters. One radical solution would be to give Evasion a special 'stun avoidance roll' versus attacks that works the same as the anti-crit roll: if the defender succeeds, they still get hit, but can't be stunned by the hit. If that's OP to have as default, it could be made into a keystone that has some suitable drawback (e.g. you lose the anti-crit aspect of Evasion).

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

The same principles apply even when dealing with a non-50% chance to evade; it's just that the results become less straigtforward and one has to be mathematically inclined to interpret them. Imagine me trying to explain how the next step above a 1.33-shot is a 2.66-shot, for example.

It's more than that - because in PoE a '5-shot' where you evade none of them is much better than a 5-shot where you (on average) evade 4 of them.

Also, the reason everyone goes on about '1-shots' on high level characters is because, even though they are super-rare, they only need to occur once for your character to die. This is the same reason everyone gets those '15% extra crit dmg reduction' nodes, even though they do absolutely nothing most of the time.

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Incompetent wrote:

The real problem is the focus on one-shots as a way of measuring the balance between monster damage vs player defences. The devs need to take the focus towards more insidious threats to player survival, such as stunning, slow movement speed (so you can't run away when a fight is going badly), a debuff that prevents life/ES regain, and so on. If you design them correctly, mobs can be as dangerous as you like even if they only take of 10-20% of the player's life/ES per hit. Even heavy-hitters like Brutus could be made more interesting if they did less raw damage, but inflicted nasty debuffs on the player when they hit.

I can definitely agree there. My all-time favorite monster design in any RPG is actually a simple classic: Final Fantasy's Marlboro. If that isn't the epitome of what you're talking about, I don't know what is.

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Incompetent wrote:

That said, maybe there should be some better options to deal specifically with stuns that aren't biased too much towards high-Armour characters. One radical solution would be to give Evasion a special 'stun avoidance roll' versus attacks that works the same as the anti-crit roll: if the defender succeeds, they still get hit, but can't be stunned by the hit. If that's OP to have as default, it could be made into a keystone that has some suitable drawback (e.g. you lose the anti-crit aspect of Evasion).

In my opinion, the design of Unwavering Stance is essentially fucked up. Armour is already the defense best equipped to mitigate stuns with existing mechanics; giving Armour a keystone to transform that heavy resistance into an outright immunity is kind of redundant. What I'd like to see is a redesign of that keystone which provides the same benefit but with a drawback designed to be used by an Evasion build, perhaps accompanied by a move to some other part of the tree. Something as simple as "Removes all Armour" instead of (essentially) removing all Evasion would be a great step in the right direction, hampering the character as much as possible against swarm-type attacks in terms of damage mitigation, but giving them the tools to get the fuck away when they find themselves in the midst of same. Best of all, since Granite Flasks exist, the drawback would always be actually relevant. Something like this would be a far better Evasion keystone than Suckrobatics.

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dudiobugtron wrote:

Also, the reason everyone goes on about '1-shots' on high level characters is because, even though they are super-rare, they only need to occur once for your character to die. This is the same reason everyone gets those '15% extra crit dmg reduction' nodes, even though they do absolutely nothing most of the time.

It's not just that they are super-rare, it's that (unless you're experiencing some truly nasty desync in Lunaris 2) they're always very predictable. Kole isn't particularly adept at hiding in the shadows.

The only slight imbalance I see is that Kole and Brutus can be very, very difficult to take out on a "full avoidance" pattern if you're melee. While these bosses don't really provide gear checks for ranged, they provide an intense gear check for those who like to deal death up close and personal... which is why I never actually man-mode those guys, instead I switch to some ranged skill like Lightning Strike or Bear Trap (leveled on weapon switch) and go easy-mode with it. I'm pretty pumped about Spectral Throw as a new alternative that I think would work very well. It's a little sad that this is what melee has to do for those guys, but it's damn effective.

But assuming a ranged character perspective, I have absolutely no issue with the likes of Brutus, Kole, or Vaal having one-shot capability (and Vaal telegraphs so hard melee has no issues). And having a ranged plan B isn't that hard. So I don't see what the big freaking deal is with these "one shots."

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

What would be nice is a balanced keystone which mitigates the small-damage, swarm, stunlock issue. Nothing in the "big hits" department is necessary.

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Brigs wrote:

Spoiler

Nodes that have a flat damage reduction similar to the damage reduction provided by arctic armor. "-X physical damage taken per hit," "-X elemental damage taken per hit."

There could also be hybrid evasion+dmgReduce nodes such as, "8% increased evasion melee, -6 physical damage taken per hit."

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

It's not just that they are super-rare, it's that (unless you're experiencing some truly nasty desync in Lunaris 2) they're always very predictable. Kole isn't particularly adept at hiding in the shadows.

....

But assuming a ranged character perspective, I have absolutely no issue with the likes of Brutus, Kole, or Vaal having one-shot capability (and Vaal telegraphs so hard melee has no issues). And having a ranged plan B isn't that hard. So I don't see what the big freaking deal is with these "one shots."

I don't think any evasion character is complaining about the Vaal Oversoul's smash. Also, with 3k health and almost no armour you can survive a hit from Kole's ground slam.

I got the impression that when people talked about '1 shots' making evasion pointless, they were talking about high-level map enemies.

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dudiobugtron wrote:

I don't think any evasion character is complaining about the Vaal Oversoul's smash. Also, with 3k health and almost no armour you can survive a hit from Kole's ground slam.

I got the impression that when people talked about '1 shots' making evasion pointless, they were talking about high-level map enemies.

I apologize for the confusion. Although I did intend to mean the non-map versions, I didn't mean to exclude the map versions of the same. There is a map version of Vaal, after all.

Evasion needs the most life, it would make sense if the life gets buffed on the right side to make it more accessible. With this system there should be a means to recover those big chunks of life fairly quickly.

Life (str area) needs mitigation . There is +max resist, some good elemental resist, endurance charges and armour for the life/ str section. Issue here is how armour works and despite the extra 30% reduced critical damage, critical damage pretty much negates the armour system.

Issues:
There are 5 means to regain health:
Life on kill
Life on hit
Life Leech
Life regen
Health Flasks

The best method to regain life "fast" is through leech or life on hit against big packs. Due to very little difference in the lifepool between the evasion and mitigation side and no real big lifepool for evasion builds leech is automatically limited. Not only that but the only nodes in the evasion sector to work with leech are for claws and otheroptions are lacking.

Life on hit grows with ATS, but is still too low to be meaningful with 1 target, which often is that 1 most deadly target.

Life on kill is pretty much terrible within PoE, small numbers not enough to make it interesting.

Life regen, nice works for armour, but doesn't cut it for evasion purposes (design).

Flasks have some nice nodes within the evasion section, but flasks haven't been updated since CB and I feel a new higher tier is needed to make it a design choice. It won;t fulfill the needs of evasion on its own.

Stuns:

As noticed by others stuns and small hits are an issue. This kind of is also the 1 hit issue in my book, things simply hit too hard and thus stuns get easily triggered. A bigger lifepool would help, but tbh the hits are just too big and a complete rework of this mechnic vs players is needed. Despite the avoid stun nodes in the evasion section, which is another issue.

Avoid:
While evasion needs strong methods to regain hp and have a strong HP pool it lacks in other department too. Vulnerable to elemental (magic damage) elemental resists are needed and beyond that there are the almost necessary "avoid" nodes. There are far too many "avoid" too allow for nice builds. Grab the evasion you need, the avoid you need and the hp you need and with traveling between these nodes you find not a lot left to do.

With liferegen alongside health nodes and just two crit dmg nodes the mitigation side is far more efficiently constructed. The whole tree layout in fact favours the marauder/ templar routes.

Dodge:
Dodge seems mandatory for the pure evasion builds, with little difference in needs compared to mitigation evasion needs a lot of extra's to work.

Doing it different:
I tried out the following:
Evasion + bit of armour + AA. Here the bits of armour and AA should replace the needs of avoid and dodge. It partially works, but I found that it is hard to get high evasion and mana + manaregen. Definitely iron reflexes worked better until the dex nerf (300 dex becoming useless is a big loss).

I hope manashield will be the tipping point in making this truly viable (there also seem to come some mana buffs/ nodes along the route for the build that uses aforementioned system).

In short:

Both mitigation and evasion don;t quite work in their current setting. One system has a big flaw and shoddy mechanics to get it sufficiently working (high armour). The other system relies on far too many extra conditions for it too work (avoid, dodge etc. etc.) and has far too strong hard counters within the game. Beyond that both lack nodes to truly fulfill their roles or supporting mechanics got left behind in design (flasks).

I think a good look at mitigation and evasion is needed, it deserves some better balancing. I am also no fan of armour + +max resits + enduring cry + life + block etc. to make for a viable character. 3 mechanics should suffice, taking extra should result in a low dps tank like character, which currently only exists in extreme gear format. It would be interesting if you could truly choose somewhat between defensive mechanics, instead of stacking as many as you can.

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Ozgwald wrote:

In short:

Both mitigation and evasion don;t quite work in their current setting. One system has a big flaw and shoddy mechanics to get it sufficiently working (high armour). The other system relies on far too many extra conditions for it too work (avoid, dodge etc. etc.) and has far too strong hard counters within the game. Beyond that both lack nodes to truly fulfill their roles or supporting mechanics got left behind in design (flasks).

I think a good look at mitigation and evasion is needed, it deserves some better balancing. I am also no fan of armour + +max resits + enduring cry + life + block etc. to make for a viable character. 3 mechanics should suffice, taking extra should result in a low dps tank like character, which currently only exists in extreme gear format. It would be interesting if you could truly choose somewhat between defensive mechanics, instead of stacking as many as you can.

Good post and I agree with your conclusions. Requiring players to take advantage of many identical mitigation mechanics isn't fun, it's redundant, and it undermines meaningful choice between them. What is better is encouraging mechanic parity through strengths and weaknesses, although I gather that was GGGs original intent with AR/ES/EV. I too would like EV recalibrated to not depend so greatly on non-Dex derived stats. I am welcome to anything that further differentiates EV from other types of mitigation.

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Incompetent wrote:

That said, maybe there should be some better options to deal specifically with stuns that aren't biased too much towards high-Armour characters. One radical solution would be to give Evasion a special 'stun avoidance roll' versus attacks that works the same as the anti-crit roll: if the defender succeeds, they still get hit, but can't be stunned by the hit. If that's OP to have as default, it could be made into a keystone that has some suitable drawback (e.g. you lose the anti-crit aspect of Evasion).

That's probably the idea behind the avoid stun passives like Heart of the Oak and the other one near the Duelist. Also Crystal Skin, though that is for other debuffs than stun.

Could be room for improvement on the messaging of these passives as it seems the association with Dexterity part of tree is not as strong as a connection with Evasion.

Well I think it's kind of silly, from a lore, flavor and even logical point of view, that evasion characters would be expected to have more Life than a full armor character.
It makes no sense to me.
Maybe I'm kind of biased towards the archetypes of armor + high health vs evasion + frailty.

I think Armour should be competing with Evasion on more than just damage.
As Scrotie mentioned, Evasion allows virtual mitigation of elemental damage, and since it avoids the damage completely, it also avoids its ailments such as shock, burn and freeze/chill.

However, Armor users have access to alot more resist and even max resist nodes.

All taken into account, I think the following should be done:

• Baseline Change - Improve the "Armour curve" so that its effectiveness doesn't diminish SO much against bigger hits, with the purpose of making its average mitigation slightly higher than Evasion in most scenarios.
• Baseline Change - Add a percentage of your chance to Evade to your Stun Treshold when determining whether you are stunned.
• Keystone - Implement my anti-one-shot suggestion as a Keystone, possibly with a small penalty like less Evasion or reduced Evasion or less Health/ES.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Entropy ensures that the starting entropy value is the only luck involved. This is about as good as the system could possibly be at avoiding luck.

Actually it could get better - by showing you your Entropy as a gauge like Energy Shield.
I suggest this in my Balance thread (Another) Evasion Suggestion.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Despite entropy evening out the math significantly, at its core a chance to evade is exactly that: a chance. If you aren't down with RNGesus, then yeah, armour. But those of us who aren't scared of some dice rolls will play the laws of averages, because they are indeed on Evasion's side. It might not be that acceptable to you, but it's acceptable to me; if it wasn't, I'd play some MMO like WoW, where I don't need to count on random loot drops for progression.

Actually in WoW you do get one-shot as well. You just don't have Hardcore mode.
And if averages are on Evasion's side, then Armour should get buffed a little, specially since Evasion has the benefit of avoiding elemental ailments unlike Armour.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

More to the point, the one-shot scenario is a borderline myth. It simply does not happen very often; you can count the number of monsters capable of the feat on one hand, all of which are unique bosses. It is far more likely that you can sustain 2 hits, which would make it a 2.66-shot scenario with 33% evade, a 3.5-shot scenario with 50% evade, and a 4.2-shot with 60% evade.

Sorry but this is bull.
Ofcourse you can obtain a ludicrous amount of HP such that getting one-shot becomes "almost" a myth.

The concept that the only way for Evasion melee to survive is by going massive HP+Block and usually Blind+Enfeeble as well, is not a good design philosophy.

Forcing a tank out of melee is precicely what alot of people, me included, have been complaining all this time.

I don't want to play a glass cannon either, but I would like to be able to play an evasion melee character that doesn't stack HP, shield, blind and enfeeble like crazy.
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Now let's get real.
The end game is balanced around a certain ability to survive hits.
That's why GGG designs monsters and mechanics that cause attacks and spells to be dangerous to maxed out characters.

Since Armour can survive big hits, and Armour isn't meant to be overpowered, GGG made physical hits that are dangeorus to the tankiest of Armour users.

As such, those same hits absolutely one-shot the shit out of Evasion users.

Ofcourse, the chance for such a hit to connect with an Evasion user, is very low.
But that doesn't prevent RNGesus from deciding whether you live or die.

Ofcourse, perhaps you can mentally calculate IN REAL TIME when your entropy will fail you, according to your 72.3% evasion plus blind plus 60% block, and react accordingly.
I don't think so.

No.