Stop spreading the Evasion vs Armor fallacy

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

"

anubite wrote:

2. Armor is actually more prone to spikes in damage taken than Evasion.

Close enough. Proof time.

First off, if you haven't read about how evasion entropy works, stop quoting me and read the mechanics thread. Thank you.

Maths

*ahem* Let's try 60% armour reduction vs 100 damage (zero evasion rating) vs 50% evade (zero armour) with 10% enemy crit chance, 200% enemy crit multiplier, 100 enemy physical damage, 30 enemy elemental damage, and 50% elemental resists on both. Each takes 4000 hits.

Armour vs "criticals"
400 critical attacks
20 attempts evaded (base 5% chance)
380 critical attacks pass first evasion roll
19 attempts evaded second roll (become normal attacks)
361 critical strike pass both rolls

Armour vs "non-crits"
3600 attacks
180 evaded
3420 hits

Armour totals
200 evasions
3420+19=3439 normal strikes at 40 physical 15 elemental = 137560 phys 51585 elem 189145 total
361 critical strikes at 114 physical 30 elemental = 41154 phys 10830 elem 51984 total
3800 combined strikes at 178714 phys 62415 elem 241129 total damage

Evasion vs "criticals"
400 critical attacks
200 attempts evaded
200 critical attacks pass first evasion roll
100 attempts evaded second roll (become normal attacks)
100 critical strike pass both rolls

Evasion vs "non-crits"
3600 attacks
1800 evaded
1800 hits

Evasion totals
2000 evasions
1900 normal strikes at 100 physical 15 elemental = 190000 phys 28500 elem 218500 total
100 critical strikes at 200 physical 30 elemental = 20000 phys 3000 elem 23000 total
2000 combined strikes at 210000 phys 31500 elem 24150 total damage

So point 1 is that evading 50% of attacks is roughly equivalent to having 60% mitigation from armour, at least in the situations that are actually kind of scary (who cares about the ones that aren't?)

Now damage spikiness. Let's say a critical attack that hits, 1 attack before and 2 after,the two after are with shock status...

Maths

With armour, let's assume no evades, that would be
40 + 114 + 2*1.3*40 = 258 physical
15 + 30 + 2*1.3*15 = 84 elemental
342 total damage

With evasion, the first and third attacks are always evaded, the second is still the crit:
200 + 1.3*100 = 330 physical
30 + 1.3*15 = 49 elemental
379 total damage

So compared to 60% armour mitigation, 50% dodge is a little bit spikier. A little. About 11% more if you want to pull out percentages.

However, I should point out that evasion in this case has crits occur less than a third as often as armour. So yes, you'll be at a 11% disadvantage about 28% of the time, and at a huge advantage the other 72% of the time with evasion.

If you were arguing with anubite over the technical detail of whether evasion is spikier than armour... well okay. You might have had a point. But a review of this thread indicates it's mostly evasion whiners and some sophistry regarding the definition of random. So no, anubite's more right than you, you can proceed to the apology phase now. Thank you.

"

anubite wrote:

The only two games I know of to use biased-deterministic-RNG are POE and LOL.

"

1. Armor is no less prone to "RNG" than Evasion.

Armor is not a flat damage reduction. Armor is significantly less effective versus critical strikes. Monsters critically strike randomly. It is possible to take random spikes of damage while in armor.

"

2. Armor is actually more prone to spikes in damage taken than Evasion.

Evasion has psuedo-RNG. The same monster CANNOT hit you in long consistent strings, if a monster hits you X times, your evasion rating will FORCE a miss after a certain number of landed hits. Go read the mechanics thread. Evasion also has a hidden mechanic of reducing enemy critical strike chance.

"

3. Evasion is not a substitute for life. Neither is armor.

I'm tired of people saying that evasion sucks and that all dex classes must go iron reflexes. If you have a decent enough maxmimum life, evasion and/or armor are good. Evasion is best against single hard-hitting targets, like rares and bosses. Armor is best against swarms of enemies, where you're frequently surrounded and struck many times in a short time.

"

Stop convincing new players that evasion is "RNG" - it's not. You will not take some random burst of damage under evasion that kill you any more often than if you were using armor. If you're being one-shot in evasion gear, you would have been one-shot in armor - Brutus landing a crit on either defensive spec is going to hurt massively. Make sure you have a sufficient amount of maximum life.

"

Spreading misconceptions is toxic

"

anubite wrote:

"

fevgatos wrote:

"

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.

"

Jakabov wrote:

"

1. Armor is no less prone to "RNG" than Evasion.

Armor is not a flat damage reduction. Armor is significantly less effective versus critical strikes. Monsters critically strike randomly. It is possible to take random spikes of damage while in armor.

This is incorrect. The existence of some minor, indirect (via crits) random element in armor does not make it just as RNG-prone as evasion. The effects of armor are completely static and the randomness of critical hits does not make armor random by association.

"

2. Armor is actually more prone to spikes in damage taken than Evasion.

Evasion has psuedo-RNG. The same monster CANNOT hit you in long consistent strings, if a monster hits you X times, your evasion rating will FORCE a miss after a certain number of landed hits. Go read the mechanics thread. Evasion also has a hidden mechanic of reducing enemy critical strike chance.

Considering PoE's design, which leans towards instances of insanely high damage that threatens to one-shot you, evasion is by definition more prone to spike damage. Armor partially evens out incoming damage while evasion does nothing except stagger the rhythm of incoming hits. The same logic applies here as in all other games with separate mechanics for avoidance and mitigation.

"

3. Evasion is not a substitute for life. Neither is armor.

I'm tired of people saying that evasion sucks and that all dex classes must go iron reflexes. If you have a decent enough maxmimum life, evasion and/or armor are good. Evasion is best against single hard-hitting targets, like rares and bosses. Armor is best against swarms of enemies, where you're frequently surrounded and struck many times in a short time.

If you have no/little armor, there are many things in the game that will one-shot you guaranteed. Many things. Like entire classes of mobs. It isn't realistically feasible to get enough life that these things become survivable with zero mitigation. A build without armor has an expiration date and will die sooner or later - probably sooner - from a hit that just isn't survivable. One can choose to accept this and play that way, but that doesn't really change anything.

"

Stop convincing new players that evasion is "RNG" - it's not. You will not take some random burst of damage under evasion that kill you any more often than if you were using armor. If you're being one-shot in evasion gear, you would have been one-shot in armor - Brutus landing a crit on either defensive spec is going to hurt massively. Make sure you have a sufficient amount of maximum life.

This is simply in stark opposition to the truth. If you ignore armor and build for evasion, you are more prone to dying from a random burst of damage. You aren't necessarily more prone to dying in general, though I think that's also the case, but it is self-evidently true that the chance of dying to spike damage is increased when building in a way that makes you take more spike damage.

Armor is not reduced to zero effectiveness just because a mob hits hard, and if you build correctly, you can have enough armor to fairly easily tank Brutus, Vaal-smash, or pretty much anything else. In fact, you can build so that the only thing that has a high chance of killing you quickly is chaos damage. If you do the opposite and ignore mitigation in favor of avoidance, you are guaranteeing that something will eventually instakill you.

Evasion's randomization mechanic is artificial, like Warcraft III's, but is still relatively random. More importantly, avoidance by definition does not affect single-instance damage. It only affects your chance of getting hit, and as such it makes absolutely no sense to claim that it can prevent spike damage. Since this game is specifically designed to have a "sponge" damage model - much like Everquest had, in fact - it becomes doubly important to maximize mitigation, even at the expense of avoidance. Getting hit many times is not what's likely to kill you, getting hit once for all your life is the real danger. Look at what almost all the HC players die from: one- and two-shots. This is precisely why they're pouring everything into armor, trying to prevent that.

"

Spreading misconceptions is toxic

Then stop doing it.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

Welcome to the thread, Jakabov. I take it you didn't read my post. Might want to scroll up to it. Probably also a good idea to familiarize yourself with evasion entropy over in the Mechanics thread if you haven't done so already.

For a quick summary:
1. The evasion entropy mechanic almost completely mitigates randomness; there is almost zero RNG involved with evasion. Also, it's not wise to underestimate criticals.
2. If you mean literally getting one-shot, of course evasion is worse, it would have to be. If you mean getting two-shot, they're surprisingly close; I proved this mathematically above.
3. Remember that closed beta CI build that everyone was always whining about? Lots of "life," no armour, no dodge. And everyone thought it was hideously overpowered. If you have a LOT of life or ES, you don't really need other defenses, although it's optimal to get them anyway because defenses are good.
4. Regardless of whether spreading misconceptions is toxic or not, I think we can all get behind reading the thread before posting a wall of text emphatically claiming that someone is wrong. Might save some embarrassment.