Why I think that armour will always be better than evasion for a Hardcore character

First of all, I am an armour advocate. I simply believe a more static form of defense is more dependable. I'm going to attempt to put up an example of a Merciless boss critting bigtime to show WHY armour is preferable (to me) over avoidance any day.

Let's assume with Enfeeble up the incoming crit is 10000 damage before any other kind of mitigation. Why 10000? Two reasons:
1) It's a fairly easy number to work with
2) While it might seem ridiculously high, remember that the higher number I use the less it favours armour due to the way armour reduction is calculated.

Let's start out with Evasion. And go nuts with it. You're using Blind with 100% uptime and looking at an evasion chance of 95% (cap). Furthermore, you've gone for every single block talent on the tree and are looking at 75% block (cap). You're also using Dodge (30%).

I'm well aware such a build is probably impossible and at the very least impractical since it lacks dps, but humor me: Atleast this setup favours evasion.

First things first, we're checking to see what your total chance to get hit is:



Alright, so far so good. 0.875% of attacks will hit us, so every 114.29 (100 / 0.875) hits will hit due to the way evasion works.

Say our crit is attack number 114.29. This is going to hurt. But wait a minute! Evasion has a chance to avoid crits as well, which taking the words from the mouth of the dragon (mechanics thread) is truly random (in a mathematical sense):



This means that out of the 0.875% hits that roll a succesful hit against all your Evasion, you have 95% chance to avoid it critting, if a crit was rolled. Result:


Even with 7 Endurance charges up each reducing the damage 5%, you will still receive 6500 damage.


Now for the armour bit.

Say you have 25000 armour with your Granite Flask up alongside you base armor and modifiers (very attainable, 30k+ not unheard of, and certainly easier to attain than 95% evasion along with 75% block). Damage received is going to be:



Phew. So what does all this mean?
It means that with avoidance you will very very rarely be unfortunate enough to be crit hard enough to be oneshot. However when the stars align you WILL be oneshot if you have no other means of reducing the damage (Which you CANNOT if you're using Acrobatics), even if you have stacked your health to 6000 ish. For softcore, this is fine because it might only occur once or twice over the lifespan (the time you play it) of such a character, and the only repercussion is 15% experience lost if you're in Merciless.

Armour on the other hand will take the damage every single time, assuming you have no evasion of any sort (which CAN be added on top of armour, such as running with a shield). However, with enough armour stacked and a good Granite flask (obviously is up to the player to pop the flask in a timely manner, but let's not turn this into a discussion of player skill as that applies to both Evasion and Armour specs: Why did you take the hit in the first place?) you WILL live through the hit although a second, smaller one might finish you.

When we are talking about a Hardcore character which I am going to be pouring hours into, I would rather that the survival of my character is left up to me (popping Granite flask fast enough, followed by Seething healing flask) than a statistical bomb ticking in the background over which I have zero control.

My two cents.

EDIT: This post was made as a more or less direct answer to this thread: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/89113/page/1

Just how hard can max level map bosses hit anyway? Also just wanted to say that your armour number is more then fair. At level 65 with a granite I have a little over 27k armour. I also manage a 52% block rate and 3.4k health. Currently working on improving my max health.

I honestly think armour + block chance is the best of both worlds when it comes to evasion vs armour.

From what I am told, Merc Brutus can hit around 7000. (no source on that I am afraid) I am not aware if that is crit or noncrit. I set my number to 10000 as it seemed reasonable that even if it'd be an anomaly amongst instagib crits, it could happen, especially if you're unlucky enough to get a rare hardhitting mobs with a very unfortunate combination of affixes :P

"

edef wrote:

From what I am told, Merc Brutus can hit around 7000.

It's not nearly this high. Not even Cells brutus at his new level will hit that hard.

Blood slam has to be tankable, because anyone with a slow attack and/or lacking a fast escape ability will be FORCED to tank it. All balance on that point should be aimed at a max crit blood slam being survivable with a REASONABLE amount of health. 7000 ain't it.

I used to have exact numbers, but they've probably changed. Merc brutus slam used to be about 2k. Cells used to be about 3k before map difficulty mods factored in.

cheers.

"

Zakaluka wrote:

"

edef wrote:

From what I am told, Merc Brutus can hit around 7000.

It's not nearly this high. Not even Cells brutus at his new level will hit that hard.

Blood slam has to be tankable, because anyone with a slow attack and/or lacking a fast escape ability will be FORCED to tank it. All balance on that point should be aimed at a max crit blood slam being survivable with a REASONABLE amount of health. 7000 ain't it.

I used to have exact numbers, but they've probably changed. Merc brutus slam used to be about 2k. Cells used to be about 3k before map difficulty mods factored in.

cheers.

I stand corrected.

It does not really change the outcome that much though. Lower damage is just going to favour armour even more as the reduction will be proportionally higher.
I am aware this will mean that the evasion build will probably not be one-shot, but it will still fall behind because the numbers used in my example were explicitly made to skewer the results in favour of pure evasion/dodge/block + life. No one is going to reach 95% evasion with 75% block, or atleast not with a build that clears a map more than once every few hours.

What about enfeeble? http://en.pathofexilewiki.com/wiki/Enfeeble

34% lower damage, 39% lower crit damage

That 10000 damage crit is now 4026, which you can live if you have enough life.

"

RushSecond wrote:

What about enfeeble? http://en.pathofexilewiki.com/wiki/Enfeeble

34% lower damage, 39% lower crit damage

That 10000 damage crit is now 4026, which you can live if you have enough life.

"

edef wrote:

Let's assume with Enfeeble up the incoming crit is 10000 damage before any other kind of mitigation.

Again, the more we lower the damage, the more armour is going to be favoured, especially considering the extreme amount of evasion used in the example is not realistic in any way but purely used to give the upper hand to evasion.

Evasion will be more spikey no matter how you twist or turn it, as you will not take damage 10-40 hits in a row and then suddenly you take full damage. The full damage hit might be from a lowly summoned add hitting for 100, or it might be a crit from the most nightmarishly rolled up rare you can conceive.

This again leads to my former conclusion: For a hardcore character where you want to have as much control as possible over what is going on, armour has the upper hand.

The problem with all of this theorycrafting is, you're taking one case, and using just that. In those instances, yes, Armour is less random than Evasion, but you're not factoring in what Evasion does better than Armour. And that is that Evasion works on every, single, attack in the game. All of them, including elemental attacks, can be Evaded and Dodged. Armour only works on Physical attacks. Yes, both types of Defense are still going to build towards high Elemental resists, but Evasion characters are still going to take less damage in the long run just by virtue of not having to facetank every single elemental attack in the game.

"

ghostcub wrote:

The problem with all of this theorycrafting is, you're taking one case, and using just that. In those instances, yes, Armour is less random than Evasion, but you're not factoring in what Evasion does better than Armour. And that is that Evasion works on every, single, attack in the game. All of them, including elemental attacks, can be Evaded and Dodged. Armour only works on Physical attacks. Yes, both types of Defense are still going to build towards high Elemental resists, but Evasion characters are still going to take less damage in the long run just by virtue of not having to facetank every single elemental attack in the game.

I do not think taking damage in the long run is a problem per se. The problem is taking all the damage all at once. When it comes to hardcore, it is about control. You do not want your hp suddenly dipping to less than half every 5 minutes, with basically no damage coming in inbetween. You'd much rather want that hp orb hovering around 3/5 or 4/5 constantly as that is much easier to react to with flasks.
Spike damage kills, constant damage doesn't (as long as you can outheal it with either life steal or flasks).

I am aware that chaos is probably the biggest achilles heel of an armour build as it is currently hard to build your resist for, whereas many chaos attacks can be avoided. However, if you haven't built chaos resist as an evasion stacked character it's gonna hurt every bit as much as it does on an armour based one whenever the hit eventually does land.
So to be honest, that's more of an achilles heel of any non CI build (which also can't use the two dodge keystones, so losing a layer of the evasive defense right there).

EDIT: Bad wording.

Fair enough. I will give you that, but I've never been one-shot on a decently built Evasion/Acro Shadow or Ranger, of course, I'm not a Map runner either as of yet (in iether CB or OB).