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

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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.

Technically US isn't a high-Armour keystone, it's a low-Evasion keystone. The distinction becomes relevant when you consider ES builds (which may have a decent amount of Armour, but presumably not as much as a life build that wears straight Armour gear; certainly, I hope typical armour values for ES characters will go down when the whole Grace + Determination + IR mess is sorted out).

I don't think it's a bad thing for non-evading builds to be able to get stun immunity. Even with zero Evasion rating, inability to evade is still relevant when you consider how Blind works (especially since the introduction of Smoke Mine, giving a guaranteed method of blinding). As you say, high-Armour builds already have very good stun protection in most circumstances, so going to complete immunity is not especially overpowered. I think US is overrated on life-based builds to be honest, but I don't want to see it removed entirely (it has its niche in the form of builds that deliberately get hit/block a lot, e.g. using Aegis Aurora or Molten Shell).

Also, I don't think we need any more 'removes/converts all X' keystones when it comes to defences. The ones we have are bad enough. I thought the old Acrobatics was too extreme, but the current version, where you keep half your Armour and ES, is actually quite a reasonable tradeoff (at least when it comes to Armour; maybe ES/Eva hybrids could use some love compared to their ES/Armour counterparts). Doesn't really help with stuns per se, but it definitely helps vs the 'swarms of monsters' who are trying to stunlock you.

@Scrotie
Actually, Unwavering Stance's purpose is quite similar to what I'm suggesting for Evasion.

Unwavering Stance removes what's left of the tiny chance for an Armour user to be stunned.

My suggested Keystone helps Evasion become reliable against that tiny chance of being one-shot.

I believe my suggested Keystone doesn't really need a drawback, apart from inconvenient placement in the skill tree, because AR+EV users will already mitigate a good portion of the damage, and as such are very unlikely to meet such an attack, and if they do, their Evasion will be considerably less, and as such reduce that damage by a very small amount.

Similarly, ES+EV users also mitigate less damage due to lower Evasion, and since ES values are pretty high, are also less likely to face such a threatening single-hit.

However, my initial suggestion was indeed needlessly overpowered.
It should only affect attacks that are really close to one-shots.
So I'm changing the "minimum damage treshold" required to trigger my suggested keystone to 70% of maximum HP+ES (originally suggested 30%, which was really a needless buff to Evasion).

There really was no need to mitigate something that can't even 2-shot you.

Made two major changes to the suggestion:

1 - I've figured out a penalty to compensate its advantage and weed out any potential attempts to abuse it.

Whenever the Keystone triggers you get a 10% Less Evasion for 3 seconds, stacking up to 10 times (100% Less Evasion).

This means although the Keystone helps you survive a one-shot, you have 10% less evasion for 3 seconds, becoming easier to hit, and if you do get hit by a one-shot during that time, it'll be less mitigated (since you have less evasion than before) and increase the penalty to 20% less evasion, etc.

2 - Changed the formula to calculate the mitigation based on how much damage it dealt above 70% of your HP+ES, resulting in a smooth transition from a 70% hit to a 71% hit and beyond, so that it really only makes a difference as the incoming damage approaches one-shot potential.

BLABLABLA anything that prevents one shotting of characters with decent defense +1, also goes especially for life as far as I'm concerned

Further adjusted the calculations, and added a cap to the mitigation.

That's a lot of words to fit into one passive. It might work better if on a unique piece of equipment, or in less words.

They aren't so many words anymore -_-

Personally, I do not agree with this because the entire idea of evasion is to... well evade attacks, not mitigate the damage. The original purpose of evasion was to be able to fairly often entirely evade those heavy hitting blows, not reduce them all to tolerable damage, as I feel that that is a job for armor.

At the moment, I feel that evasion is at a good place, if you have enough of it. As I mentioned, evasion is not built for you to face tank all of the damage. Evasion play should be more kiting and trying to stay out of direct contact, since the longer one is face tanking with evasion, the more likely you are ti be hit. Evasion should be used to entirely prevent damage, so that when you jump in and quickly attack an enemy at close quarters, it is unlikely that you will actually be damaged.

Also, not sure if the op knows this, but uncanny means strange or weird.

Consider that this is effectively "barely" dodging the attack with pure Instinct.

That's all.

Evading an attack in real life is not always 100% effective. Sometimes u are grazed instead of hit.

That's what this is about.

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Nurvus wrote:

Consider that this is effectively "barely" dodging the attack with pure Instinct.

That's all.

Evading an attack in real life is not always 100% effective. Sometimes u are grazed instead of hit.

That's what this is about.

If that were so, it should be built into the original mechanic where you have some x% chance of getting hit, some y% chance of evading 50% of the damage, and z% chance of evading all damage. You mentioned earlier that you didn't want to play Path of Casino, but chance is what the whole idea of what evasion is. If you want pure reduction 100% of the time, you should have picked an armor build.