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

You're also forgetting that for all intent and purpose it's easier to stack different forms of defense over trying to stack the crap out of just one (ie the progression is not linear and it's easier to get armor + evasion to 30% than it would be to get armor on it's own to 60%)

Of course the above numbers are pulled out of my ass but the principle stands. For some builds relying on three or even four forms of defense is better than simply targetting one both in terms of efficiency of items and overall effectiveness.

A good example would be a CI witch using nice ES/Evasion items along with a lot of shield nodes granting +ES and a crap ton of block over just stacking the crap out of ES alone.

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Korgath wrote:

You're also forgetting that for all intent and purpose it's easier to stack different forms of defense over trying to stack the crap out of just one (ie the progression is not linear and it's easier to get armor + evasion to 30% than it would be to get armor on it's own to 60%)

Of course the above numbers are pulled out of my ass but the principle stands. For some builds relying on three or even four forms of defense is better than simply targetting one both in terms of efficiency of items and overall effectiveness.

A good example would be a CI witch using nice ES/Evasion items along with a lot of shield nodes granting +ES and a crap ton of block over just stacking the crap out of ES alone.

Determination and Endurance charges completely break that assumption. They actually make it far, far, easier to stack high armor than to use hybrid or stack high evasion.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

If you have lots of armour, but a small life pool, you probably won't get one-shot. You'll get two-shot by two back-to-back attacks. Your chance of survival is still way higher, because with epic timing and insta-heal flasks you could still pull through.

So yes, in very high-damage situations (read: undergeared/underlevled), armour is much more forgiving.

Doesn't that prove my point though? At the point where you are the most vulnerable (low geared) armour simply protects you better. Sure if you have perfect items in every slot and march around with 8000 health both armour and evasion will protect you. That's more because of your high healthpool than your chosen type of defense though. All that proves is that health > all.

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RushSecond wrote:

Well that's up to my skill as a player then. I don't plan on letting a high damage physical enemy hit me when there are casters still alive nearby, just like you wouldn't let a spider stack 4x viper strike on you.

Even the best player in the world will take a hit at some point. Maybe a momentary distraction, or simply because his reactions are slowed after a 20 hour gaming session. Fact is, you WILL get hit at some point, and one day it will be one of the big hitters if you play from now to infinity. This discussion is about how you best deal with that happening, since how you recover can be the difference between life and death for that character.

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tinghshi wrote:

The ONLY time AR is better than EV is when you have the chance to get 1 shotted. However, if you build your character right, that will NEVER happen. No bosses in the game is capable of such high damage, and even an EV character can build up a substantial amount of life.

But either way, IR is better than pure armor any day, so it doesn't really matter.

I disagree. It is also better when you have a chance of being 3-shotted, with additional hits coming from spells (I know you can have 20% chance to dodge those but again, if you're out of luck they WILL hit you). My point is that I would rather rely on having the damage reduced so that the survival of my character is up to my reactions, and not having bad RNG at a very unfortunate time.

The second bit I agree with though. IR is imo the best defense in the game. But as it converts your Evasion to Armour, that doesn't change this discussion. The armour granted by IR has the same mechanics as armour granted by both granite flasks and strength gear, you just get more of it basically.

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RenoR wrote:

However, there is a very small additional aspect which could make all your efford in vein ;)


See it as "risk of life".
There will always be the 0,00001% chance to die, but would it be reasonable to not do anything in order to keep your safty at maximum? (for instance stay always at home because you have the risk of dying outside)

I don't believe this applies. That's the same thing as arguing that if Im afraid of dying in the game, the safest way not to is to not play it :P While technically true, that's preposterous. What I am looking for is the safest way to actually play.

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RenoR wrote:

1, How high is the chance to get critted by a high damage mob if you have high evasion? As evasion reduces crits it might be extremly rare to get crit and even if you get crit only very few monsters can oneshot you if you have spected into life

I did this calculation. Abysmally low, under 1% chance (and that's not even factoring in the crit chance). Sounds good, but my problem is that IF you're unlucky, you're going to eat the full damage of that crit, and there is nothing you can do about it no matter how good a player you are.

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RenoR wrote:

2, Evasion is probably better vs "dangerous mobs" >>overall<<. Lets say hard hitting and dangerous mobs deal 85% of their damage to your armour build but only 60% damage(40% evasion) to a evasion build then CHANCES ARE HIGHER to die on a random occasion to stronger mobs because you are less prepered vs hard hitting mobs.
Also Evasion works well against elemental attacks which reduces overall damage
This means you have to compare "overall risk" vs "borderline risk" properly. Espacially if you play hardcore you can say that you just dont play maps where brutus occurs because its not reasonalbe to do it.

I do not see where you are coming from with this. The hard hitting mob had his damage reduced 15%. We assume enough health to survive the hit for both the armour and the evasion build. say it's a 3k hit that your armour reduced to 2550 (15% DR). Sure, you will eat these hits more often with armour than you will with evasion. However, the evasion build takes the full 3k damage when the hit goes through. Meaning that you're gonna see BIGGER SPIKES on your health orb.

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RenoR wrote:

In my opinion hybrid armor(STR/DEX) provides the most survivabilty vs attacks->it reduces the hard ones and also the medium ones.

I think if this was the case, we would see A) more duelists high on the HC ladder B) less people opting for Iron Reflexes.

EDIT: Also, see Strill's post above :)

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RenoR wrote:

In the end all comes down to the quesion:
Which defensive builds grants the most overall survivabilty?
because it makes no sense to care about getting oneshotted by uberbrutus if you dont even reach him because you died to a pack of blue bears as a result of having no evasion.

Well the most important thing here is obviously having enough health. I never said the game is impossible to survive with an evasion build. My point is that armour simply allows for a more "fluid" style of tankiness where the damage doesnt come in semi-random big chunks, or atleast not as much so as evasion.

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soranamae wrote:

I think the OP is completely biased towards armor

Why are you factoring a Granite flask into the equation? Evasion is something that works 100% of the time... It is ALWAYS on, regardless of what you do

Because any player worth his salt will pop a Granite flask when he sees the big hit coming. You cannot do that if you have taken the dodge keystones as it reduces your armour to 0 no matter what.

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soranamae wrote:

A Granite flask lasts 8 seconds, but it doesnt even matter since you will be dead by the 2nd hit, unless you spam Seething flasks

You have hit the proverbial nail on the head. I am in charge of keeping my character alive. Not a statistical chance of not being hit by this and that attack. Only me and my reaction time in popping the Granite and then spam healing flasks. I much prefer that over having a risk, no matter how low, that no matter how well I play, I will suddenly take a giant burst of unmitigated damage.

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soranamae wrote:

Either way, as others mentioned, with a full HP evasion character, nothing in the game will one shot you anyway, and with a 90%+ evasion build with acrobatics etc, that means you will be unkillable vs bosses because the enthropy system will make sure once you are hit, you wont be hit again for the next 50+ attacks, by which time the boss will be dead

It takes more damage to oneshot an armour character than it does to oneshot an evasion character if they have the same amount of health. That's a fact. If you have very high evasion, it is unlikely you will get hit but the point is that sooner or later it will happen.
If both characters have enough health that no single ability can oneshot you, armor still protects you better from 3-shotting when you include spells due to the first physical hit being mitigated so the 3 hits all in all have dealth less damage.

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soranamae wrote:

The only way that evasion character will ever die, is by being extremely unlucky in a massive group of hard hitting mobs, since the first hit of each mob is truly random, which means you could get hit 5 times in a row or something

But lets face it, why would you put yourself in that position in the first place?

Again, that is my point. You have no control if you land yourself in that situation. You might be lucky and dodge every single hit, but then again, you might not. You only have one chance in hardcore, and I would rather be in charge of that myself than trusting Lady Luck.
About not getting into the situation, I quite agree. But the discussion is what would keep you alive if you for whatever reason, own mistake or not, land yourself in a situation like that. If you played perfectly forever and never took a single hit, guess what. You don't need neither armour nor evasion then :)

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soranamae wrote:

And there is more! Im willing to bet a high % of HC players will not die due to their own mistake but rather to the usual disconnect... Guess which character has a higher chance of survival? Armor character will be toast if that happens, but the Evasion character will be completely safe, since no boss in the game can attack enough times to kill in the time it takes for timeout

I do not believe factoring in disconnects has any merit. You might as well disconnect in front of a pack of rare lightning flinging skeletons in Chamber of Sins level 3, in which case neither armour nor evasion will help you much.

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soranamae wrote:

All of this assuming the enthropy system Mark spoke of actually works, of course (I need to test it properly myself, but my evade is still too low)

I can assure you it does :)

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soranamae wrote:

In fact I was thinking, if you get say 5% hp regen per second, it means that, unless there is a boss that can hit you twice within 20 seconds, you are immortal, like... literally oO

Provided you are against a boss that does purely non-spell attacks and has zero adds (such as Brutus) then yes. However there are way more situations where you are going to take hits from several sources at once :)

EDIT: Sorry for the looong post, I just felt that everyone deserved an answer :P

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Strill wrote:

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Korgath wrote:

You're also forgetting that for all intent and purpose it's easier to stack different forms of defense over trying to stack the crap out of just one (ie the progression is not linear and it's easier to get armor + evasion to 30% than it would be to get armor on it's own to 60%)

Of course the above numbers are pulled out of my ass but the principle stands. For some builds relying on three or even four forms of defense is better than simply targetting one both in terms of efficiency of items and overall effectiveness.

A good example would be a CI witch using nice ES/Evasion items along with a lot of shield nodes granting +ES and a crap ton of block over just stacking the crap out of ES alone.

Determination and Endurance charges completely break that assumption. They actually make it far, far, easier to stack high armor than to use hybrid or stack high evasion.

Frenzy charges granting 4% evasion each along with grace aura have a very similar effect due to the difference between how armor and evade reduce damage.

Yes, it's easy to stack one thing if you target it specifically but it's still difficult to stack it to the point where it's comparable (in terms of overall damage reduction) to a multi layered approach. Especially for armor given that a ton of damage in this game completely mitigates it.

What you want to do is cover as many bases as possible. having 40% evade and 40% damage reduction would be more effective overall than aiming to get your armor on it's own to a comparable level (before taking into consideration charges) especially given that it does nothing against elemental attacks or chaos damage.

[Edit]

On the other hand I completely advocate stacking defense when you know what you are up against, like taking res flasks for specific areas or stacking different stats on items.

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Frenzy charges granting 4% evasion each along with grace aura have a very similar effect due to the difference between how armor and evade reduce damage.

Determination gives more armor. Completely different to Frenzy's 4% increased evasion - its only barely more than a single 10% Evasion node with 3 charges.

Grace is static and still gives less than what Determination alone would offer as a multiplicative bonus.

And the Endurance charge mechanics are also essentially multiplicative on an EHP standpoint - a low 15% DR from a heavy crit turns to 50% DR with 7 Endurance. And that's nothing to say of a smaller hit which would be reduced to a fraction of the normal amount.

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soranamae wrote:

Either way, as others mentioned, with a full HP evasion character, nothing in the game will one shot you anyway, and with a 90%+ evasion build with acrobatics etc, that means you will be unkillable vs bosses because the enthropy system will make sure once you are hit, you wont be hit again for the next 50+ attacks, by which time the boss will be dead

The only way that evasion character will ever die, is by being extremely unlucky in a massive group of hard hitting mobs, since the first hit of each mob is truly random, which means you could get hit 5 times in a row or something

Sorry your flat out wrong here, the only major boss mob I can think of who doesn't have a spell attack is Warden. And hes not hard for anyone to beat. The others all have spell effects. Piety literally oozes spell attacks, as does Merveil. And to recap back to the much quoted mechanics thread...

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Evasion
Evading an attack prevents all damage and other harmful effects from the attack. Only attacks and attack skills can be evaded. Spells cannot be evaded.

Now granted DR doesnt affect spells either, but generally tanky DR builds have access to more resists, more life etc And if your on lower health (which an evade toon will always be due to stat requirement naturally granting an armour user higher health even if you both take the same life% passives) then one decent spell (specially a crit) will annihilate an evasion user, where as an armour user will probably survive it.

Evade always was an unreliable form of defense when going pure, its why 95% of builds which use pure evasion then get IR converting it all to DR, cause its better. It was this way when I played CB, its still the same. The diminishing returns of evasion and fact that even with passives you can hope for at best 20% extra evade at full frenzy means on average your going to be around 55% to 60% evade at best, not 90%, its near impossible to run about in 90% evade. Furthermore to get those frenzy bonuses means hitting, quickly at least 5 times while you facetank the boss with your lower base evasion... not easy

Evade heavy builds are viable, with say an 80/20 split toward armour, cause even that low amount grants enough DR to survive the damage spikes, alone its a poor form of defense and Im yet to see actual evidence of anyone prospering with it beyond theorycrafting.

Probably better still is evasion/ES... but thats not easy to get the nodes are very spread out and rarer. Cause that grants stun protection, resistance to spells AND evasion. But ES takes alot of investment to make it work endgame.

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Feragore wrote:

"

Frenzy charges granting 4% evasion each along with grace aura have a very similar effect due to the difference between how armor and evade reduce damage.

Determination gives more armour. Completely different to Frenzy's 4% increased evasion - its only barely more than a single 10% Evasion node with 3 charges.

Grace is static and still gives less than what Determination alone would offer as a multiplicative bonus.

And the Endurance charge mechanics are also essentially multiplicative on an EHP standpoint - a low 15% DR from a heavy crit turns to 50% DR with 7 Endurance. And that's nothing to say of a smaller hit which would be reduced to a fraction of the normal amount.

Still only works on physical damage, have fun getting crit with attacks or the elemental damage portion because you had 5% evade rather than getting yourself 20-30% at the expense of 5-10% of your physical reduction.

I'm not saying it can't work but what I am saying is that I would rather have any source of damage need to hit me 5 times to kill me vs getting two shot by something I didn't stack against and then needing 10 against everything else. Unless of course you know in advance what damage types you are up against.

What I'm talking about is the lowest common denominator and all that. I would rather choose an extra 2 hits over something that can already two hit me over an extra 1 against something that needs 5 hits to kill me.

Now I understand it can be difficult for some builds to incorporate multiple different forms of defence (Bow users can't block for example) but that doesn't make the point less valid. You want good elemental resists because.. well you need it. You want granite flasks at a minimum because you need some form of physical resist. If you can get it then you would like to avoid spell attacks. If you can get it then you would rather reduce your chance to be crit through evade. With the way progression works it can be easy for some builds to dip into all of those things without a large item or passive investment for the returns. It's like the old question of getting more hp vs dps.. you kill 95% of content in one hit, why would you want more damage over health until you can sit afk for a minute before dying? You resist over 70% of physical damage, why push it to 75% over getting 20% evade?

[Edit]

Determination also reserves a huge portion of your mana/life unless you invest heavily into reducing that. This leans you even more toward putting all your eggs in one basket since you are basing a large portion of your character to that one thing which is providing you 0 bonus against anything other than a physical hit.

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Korgath wrote:

Determination also reserves a huge portion of your mana/life unless you invest heavily into reducing that. This leans you even more toward putting all your eggs in one basket since you are basing a large portion of your character to that one thing which is providing you 0 bonus against anything other than a physical hit.

Nearly any weapon user can get enough mana leech to negate this problem and use two or even three percentage auras at once.

"

What I'm talking about is the lowest common denominator and all that. I would rather choose an extra 2 hits over something that can already two hit me over an extra 1 against something that needs 5 hits to kill me.

That's what I'm trying to tell you. Endurance charges have none of armor's downsides. Their reduction does not vary with the damage amount. On top of that they give resistance, which is what armor is weak against. They cover all of armor's weaknesses, AND can easily quadruple your effective HP to boot.

Don't forget that hard hitting bosses do not mean armor loses it's cool yet evasion retains it.
Not only do bosses do more damage, they also have a higher attack rating, meaning you dodge less. So while it is true to say a hit dealing less damage will favor armor more, it is highly likely the person who struck you for less damage will have had a lower attack rating, meaning a higher chance to dodge.

Without knowing the attack rating values of the enemies in question you can't know for sure, but I would expect to see something like this:

Minions have low atk and low damage. Meaning you evade more and armor mitigates more. They are probably roughly even, with armor mitigating a bit more due to the fact that it does not do anything for elemental/spells.
Bosses have high atk and high damage. Meaning you evade less and armor mitigates less. They are probably roughly even, with armor mitigating a bit more due to the fact that it does not do anything for elemental/spells.

The only difference now comes in how you prefer your damage over time line-graph to look. Personally vs a boss I would rather have it smooth (armor) than take increased damage the majority of the time and then have a breather every now and again when I dodge.

Finally, I think we can agree that whether you have dodge or armor, you need elemental resists as well. 75% fire resist will block 75% of fire damage with armor spec leaving you taking 25%. If you are dodge spec, you already evade some of that fire damage. Let's say you dodge 20% of fire damage. That same 75% fire resist will now reduce you to taking 20% of overall fire damage instead of 25% if you had not bothered to dodge. What I am trying to get at here is the higher your mitigation, the less value avoiding damage becomes. The same applies for blocking. If you mitigate 0% of damage, blocking becomes important. If you mitigate 100% of damage, blocking is not important. If you are armor spec, blocking is less important and you could argue it has a lower return on investment than you may get elsewhere.

Truthfully I doubt there's much in it in terms of sustained damage taken over time, probably a small tradeoff for the whole evading magical stuff and a different shape damage taken over time graph. The deal-sealer for me was that +armor talents also feature a HUGE amount of +life and +life regen around the same area which scale nicely.


I only started playing yesterday so correct me if I am wrong ;)

You can get critted 3 times or more in a row with an Armour build. You CANNOT be critted more than once in a row with an evasion build.