Evasion or Armour on Ranged Ranger

Hi guys!

I'm relatively new to the game, started 2 weeks ago, so I'm still getting to know all the stuff about the game. I understand the core concepts, but I'm sometimes not sure what to build. I have a ranger lvl 40, using the bow as my weapon. Should I be building armour or evasion for defence, or a bit of both? I do not intend to go for "point blank" skill nor gem, so I'm mainly fighting from the distance. Is there a "general" rule about armour and evasion or is it situational?

Thanks a lot!

both is good but it depends on preference really , i don't like leaving things to chance so i rather just have a reduction in all the hits i take, rather than a chance to evade one or two big hits

The short answer is you want both, with more emphasis on evasion.

From what I've read and understand, evasion is very good with only a few points invested - this is due to the way combat mechanics work with evasion where hits/misses are guaranteed, i.e. if you have 33% evasion a mob will always miss one out of every three attacks against you. Armor is better only if you can invest heavily into it, which doesn't make sense from the ranger starting point. Armor mechanics described here http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Armour where you can see that it works well against low damage attacks, but not as well against high damage blows unless you have a ton of it.

Of course if you take acrobatics, you'd want to ignore armor entirely. This route works well - the premise being that you only need a minimal investment in defence, and have lots of points left for incredible offence. IMO acrobatics makes incoming damage very spikey, while regular evasion + armor has a more predictable pattern that allows leeching to work better.