Stop spreading the Evasion vs Armor fallacy

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fevgatos wrote:

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anubite wrote:

Your example is a poor one, because there are no monster packs in the game that do 100 damage a hit (Brutus is a boss and does not come in packs) when you have sub 400 life.

The amount of armor required to get 50% damage reduction is much harder to get than the amount of evasion required to get 50% evasion chance, by the way. It is common even for pure-armor users to be sub 35% damage reduction, even with incredible gear. This is especially true end-game. Of course, endurance charges and granite flasks can bring you up to a high amount of damage reduction, you can also use those things with evasion, although to a lesser extent.

My point is, that armor and evasion are comparable. Neither is necessarily better than the other and both are weak to "spike damage" under unfavorable circumstances. Burst damage is only countered by having a sufficient amount of maximum life.

If monsters are doing 1/3 of your life per hit, you do not have enough life and you will never have enough evasion or armor to mitigate that particular fact.

If you want to disprove my point, use real numbers, like how much life YOU have at level 50, with how much armor you have at 50, with how much damage you do/would take from a common level 50 monster. And then ask, "What if I dodged half the time instead?" That is a more fair analysis.

I was ~25-30 level with something more than 50% evasion chance. I had the best evasion gear possible for that level (foxshade white leather) and still died pretty frequently to a small pack of mobs. My max hp was shit (not more than 400 or 500 hundred coupled with ES) though.

Still, you are saying that armor and evasion are comparable, which is false. Evasion REQUIRES you to stack a lot of hp. It's not a matter of choice or preference. If you go the evasion route you HAVE to stack hp's. If you go the armor route, hp is great but its not an absolute necessity. Early on and extremely late evasion is probably better than armor, cause that point you already have tons of hp. But mid game (cruel difficulty for example) evasion is outclassed by armor a lot

1. What was your life with your fox shade leather build?
2. What level were you?
3. What killed you?

With these three questions we can run a comparison for armor rating and I'm 99% sure we'll find out that you would have still died anyway. The fact you say "evasion requires more life" is just so wrong, if you have inadequate life with armor, you're dead. You cannot sacrifice life for armor, as you're implying here.

Your posts after this one suggest you haven't read the mechanics thread. Why haven't you?!

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Blackened wrote:

The only random part of evasion is the monster starting roll (or is it your starting roll, anyway).

If you fight 1 monster, and your evasion rating against that particular monster is 20%, you will evade 1 hit out of 5, no randomness, no luck. The random part is only when that streak starts, will you evade the 1st hit, 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th. Once you evade that hit, the next 4 will hit, and then you will evade another 1.

Anyway that's how I understood the mechanic thread explanation.

Also, your starting roll gets randomized if you dont get into a fight for a bit, so you can't go and count your hit, and when you are supposed to evade next, go see a hard hitting monster.

That's the RNG used in a lot of games. It's actually chance based, but each succesive hit that you dont evade increase the chance that you will evade the next one, until it reaches 100%.

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fevgatos wrote:

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Blackened wrote:

The only random part of evasion is the monster starting roll (or is it your starting roll, anyway).

If you fight 1 monster, and your evasion rating against that particular monster is 20%, you will evade 1 hit out of 5, no randomness, no luck. The random part is only when that streak starts, will you evade the 1st hit, 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th. Once you evade that hit, the next 4 will hit, and then you will evade another 1.

Anyway that's how I understood the mechanic thread explanation.

Also, your starting roll gets randomized if you dont get into a fight for a bit, so you can't go and count your hit, and when you are supposed to evade next, go see a hard hitting monster.

That's the RNG used in a lot of games. It's actually chance based, but each succesive hit that you dont evade increase the chance that you will evade the next one, until it reaches 100%.

The only two games I know of to use biased-deterministic-RNG are POE and LOL. I don't think it's widespread at all. But that's besides the point - Qarl assures us that evasion protects against "randomness" - which is the completely wrong argument use to justify not using evasion. Evasion is not random, you should not experience random spikes in damage with evasion. Evasion IS poor against swarms of monsters and thus is poor if you're going to go into melee range against a swarm of monkies or squids, but it is not poor because of some erratic, random nature.

Evasion is a consistent mechanic. It is not random.

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Blackened wrote:

The only random part of evasion is the monster starting roll (or is it your starting roll, anyway).

If you fight 1 monster, and your evasion rating against that particular monster is 20%, you will evade 1 hit out of 5, no randomness, no luck. The random part is only when that streak starts, will you evade the 1st hit, 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th. Once you evade that hit, the next 4 will hit, and then you will evade another 1.

Anyway that's how I understood the mechanic thread explanation.

Also, your starting roll gets randomized if you dont get into a fight for a bit, so you can't go and count your hit, and when you are supposed to evade next, go see a hard hitting monster.

This is exactly how I took it too. I don't think it's very fair to call evasion random when the only random part is where you start in the 1-2-3-4-5 chain. After the very first hit, it is 0% random.

This is completely backwards of any other game's evasion mechanic I've ever seen, but in a good way. If you have a 5% chance to evade a mob, you won't go 5 minutes of combat before something misses you as in other games. You'll evade exactly every 20th hit. Likewise if you have 95% evasion on a mob, you can count on every 20th hit landing.

Blocking seems to be a large part in physical mitigation as well. My dual wield Shadow has better survivability than my 2H Marauder. My Marauder has to stack crazy AoE lifesteal or chug flasks to live because every hit lands for ~70%+ damage.

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anubite wrote:

1. What was your life with your fox shade leather build?
2. What level were you?
3. What killed you?

With these three questions we can run a comparison for armor rating and I'm 99% sure we'll find out that you would have still died anyway. The fact you say "evasion requires more life" is just so wrong, if you have inadequate life with armor, you're dead. You cannot sacrifice life for armor, as you're implying here.

Your posts after this one suggest you haven't read the mechanics thread. Why haven't you?!

1. HP + ES was ~500 (400 hp, 100 ES)
2. Around 30
3. Some blackguards

And you don't need a comparison for that. I was partying with a marauder, he had about 700 hp and blood magic. He had less than 40% damage reduction and I had about 55% evasion chace, he still tanked everything like a boss.

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fevgatos wrote:

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anubite wrote:

1. What was your life with your fox shade leather build?
2. What level were you?
3. What killed you?

With these three questions we can run a comparison for armor rating and I'm 99% sure we'll find out that you would have still died anyway. The fact you say "evasion requires more life" is just so wrong, if you have inadequate life with armor, you're dead. You cannot sacrifice life for armor, as you're implying here.

Your posts after this one suggest you haven't read the mechanics thread. Why haven't you?!

1. HP + ES was ~500 (400 hp, 100 ES)
2. Around 30
3. Some blackguards

And you don't need a comparison for that. I was partying with a marauder, he had about 700 hp and blood magic. He had less than 40% damage reduction and I had about 55% evasion chace, he still tanked everything like a boss.

My level 27 Shadow has twice as much life as you did and probably the same evasion rating. You do not have enough life. 300 life is a big deal by the way, when you consider the HoT of flasks. The marauder did better because he had armor (which is good for tanking enemies up close due to evasion not being optimal against swarms) and because he had 300 more hp than you. He also likely had 2% or more life regen per second, which contributes significantly more staying power in combination with flasks. He may have even been using endurance charges and a shield/staff. Your judgment is clouded and the only way to clear it up with hard number crunching, really. I should go about doing some comparisons to prove my points I guess, but it's a pain getting monster accuracy rating and average damage on hit.

400 life is "acceptable" at level 14-18, not 30.

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fevgatos wrote:

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arual wrote:

The important thing to bear in mind is that the Damage Reduction & Chance to Evade figures given in the Character panel are estimates based on imaginary scenarios. Your actual Damage Reduction & Chance to Evade differ with virtually every mob type depending on how much damage they do pre-reduction & how much accuracy they have.

Chance to evade is obviously "random", since its based on the enemy's accuracy. But how is armor just an estimate? Damage reduction , in every single game I have played is exactly that. How much %less dmg you will take. Is the mechanics here different ?

The actual amount of damage reduction you benefit from during gameplay is dependant on the actual amount of damage you take in a given hit. The 'estimated' figure is calculated from a set figure, presumably generated from some set table given your level and/or current zone.

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mechanics wrote:

reduction = armour / (armour + 12*damage)

If you are running around with 600 Armour and you get hit for 150 Damage you'll get 25.0% DR. If that hit had crit you would get 18.2% DR. Then take into account the massive variance in attack values in an area, especially with trash vs bosses and the difference can start to be fairly substantial.

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anubite wrote:

The only two games I know of to use biased-deterministic-RNG are POE and LOL. I don't think it's widespread at all. But that's besides the point - Qarl assures us that evasion protects against "randomness" - which is the completely wrong argument use to justify not using evasion. Evasion is not random, you should not experience random spikes in damage with evasion. Evasion IS poor against swarms of monsters and thus is poor if you're going to go into melee range against a swarm of monkies or squids, but it is not poor because of some erratic, random nature.

Evasion is a consistent mechanic. It is not random.

DotA uses the same system. Anyways, back to evasion.

Its not about being unlucky and not getting evades. I know that's out of the question. Thing is, no matter how much evasion you have, your HP always need to be at least 4 to 5 times more than the enemy's damage, else you'll die.

If you have tons and tons of armor but a pathetic pool you will still die as well. Both cases you need to have a pool for when you do end up taking damage and you will. I cannot for the life of me figure out why this is such a common issue with players.

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fevgatos wrote:

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anubite wrote:

The only two games I know of to use biased-deterministic-RNG are POE and LOL. I don't think it's widespread at all. But that's besides the point - Qarl assures us that evasion protects against "randomness" - which is the completely wrong argument use to justify not using evasion. Evasion is not random, you should not experience random spikes in damage with evasion. Evasion IS poor against swarms of monsters and thus is poor if you're going to go into melee range against a swarm of monkies or squids, but it is not poor because of some erratic, random nature.

Evasion is a consistent mechanic. It is not random.

DotA uses the same system. Anyways, back to evasion.

Its not about being unlucky and not getting evades. I know that's out of the question. Thing is, no matter how much evasion you have, your HP always need to be at least 4 to 5 times more than the enemy's damage, else you'll die.

But that simply isn't true. Because when Brutus hits you with a critical strike, you basically have no armor. The damage done by enemies like Brutus (and certain rare monsters, like bears) is so large your damage reduction from armor is pitiful; easily less than 10 to 15% (that is not 4 or 5 times). You need similar amounts of life for evasion and armor, you cannot, absolutely cannot tell me that armor builds can work with less life than an evasion build. Both kinds of builds need significant amounts of life.

Taking 4 or 5 hits from Brutus is probably death! If you're dying in four or five hits from a monkey, then you have a life problem, not an armor or evasion problem.

With the way % life regen works, armor builds get just as much life as evasion builds. There's no reason even to have a smaller life pool with armor because you're just hurting the synergy of % life regen and endurance charges. Evasion doesn't have % life regen (or that much of it potentially), so it in theory is less reliant on life than armor...

The main problem is that too many players have this incorrect idea about evasion/armor because when they play a ranger or a shadow, they get all those juicy offensive nodes INSTEAD of life! This is why they blame evasion. Listen, there are LOTS of life nodes for both of those classes and you NEED to take them, you cannot say, "Well, I'll just dodge more." Because getting over 60% evasion chance is pretty much impossible.

400 life (even with 100 ES) is not enough survivability for level 30; Piety will CRUSH you, CB Vaal would tear you apart with his chaos minions; you cannot build glass cannon in this game and you need to keep increasing your life. In HC, the minimum cut-off is 3k life at 60, unless you're doing a crazy wacky build, but for the common player, you cannot be under 3k life. You need to linearly increase your life to this amount by constantly upgrading the +life on your gear and the +life% from your tree.