Unavoidable damage mechanics are BAD for game balance.

Ok, I will assume that everyone is familiar with the fact that the current meta is all about Armor and Endurance Charge uptime, which is, of course, a 180 degree turn from 1.3, where Acrobatics was king. Sure, Evasion got hit pretty hard by nerfs to Ondars, but that's not enough to justify the fact that nobody is playing Evasion/Dodge only right now (you might see some Eva/ES or Eva/AR rarely, and it takes insane gear *cough*ETUP*cough*).

I feel that the reason for that is that there were too many rapid fire unavoidable phys damage hits introduced in act 4 which of course appear in maps. All those ground explosions are the first example that comes to mind. How on earth do you think a character who depends on avoiding damage is going to deal with high phys damage spikes you flag as unavoidable? Even with AA, Chaos golem and 3 endurance charges up it's impossible for characters with 0 armor to deal with a 1k physical damage detonate dead that gets cast 3-4 times a second. So it's basically either Armor up or GTFO right now.

IMHO all physical damage instances should be AT LEAST dodgeable - that is to say, they could go past evasion all the time but you could still dodge (or spell dodge) them. I mean it makes sense in the most basic of ways - a character with 50+% chance to dodge/spell dodge things has no ability to dodge a small ground explosion? It is absolutely nonsensical to create an entire playstyle of physical damage avoidance and then go "you know what? there's also this super high dps physical damage instance that you can't dodge or evade, so good luck with that".

And please, just because I or others cried on the forums about evasion being bad, don't just outright nerf things that hurt it to oblivion. Give us a way to deal with it as outlined above. All these whine-induced nerfs lately are even WORSE for game balance than bad mechanics.

Armor isn't even that helpful but in normal, cruel and merciless even with endurance charges armour do nothing.

I'm doing pretty fine without endu charge and armor and eva and overstacking res and block

Every defense type has a type of weakness

Armor - ele dam + chaos dam / repeated high damage spikes (bone giant, golems) / DoTs
Eva - spells/spike damage can pass by (better than armor if you are getting hit by average higher damage.) / DoTs
ES - Not a mitigation so you have to make sure regeneration/leech is not an issue
HP - Same as ES
Regen builds, noregen/lower regen maps
Block - Takes 1 character slot, you need spellblock vs spells.
Leech - Nerfed atm, hard to leech ele dam (I don't really know how it works, since I haven't used it post patch)

Resistances: Physical damage

Elemental resistances - Capped at 75 you need purites/nodes/items to increase it, elemental weakness curse, penetrations, physical damage
Chaos resistance - Forces you to stack ES (CI), otherwise hard to get, and capped at 75.
phy + ele

I don't know why you think that evasion should not have the downsides it has now, I still remember the QQ threads about how armor is useless and it should protect you vs ele dam just like evasion does, no matter what you pick it will never be able to protect you vs everything.

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KillerB a écrit :

I'm doing pretty fine without endu charge and armor and eva and overstacking res and block

Every defense type has a type of weakness

Armor - ele dam + chaos dam / repeated high damage spikes (bone giant, golems) / DoTs
Eva - spells/spike damage can pass by (better than armor if you are getting hit by average higher damage.) / DoTs
ES - Not a mitigation so you have to make sure regeneration/leech is not an issue
HP - Same as ES
Regen builds, noregen/lower regen maps
Block - Takes 1 character slot, you need spellblock vs spells.
Leech - Nerfed atm, hard to leech ele dam (I don't really know how it works, since I haven't used it post patch)

Resistances: Physical damage

Elemental resistances - Capped at 75 you need purites/nodes/items to increase it, elemental weakness curse, penetrations, physical damage
Chaos resistance - Forces you to stack ES (CI), otherwise hard to get, and capped at 75.
phy + ele

I don't know why you think that evasion should not have the downsides it has now, I still remember the QQ threads about how armor is useless and it should protect you vs ele dam just like evasion does, no matter what you pick it will never be able to protect you vs everything.

The problem is that Armor can still get capped resistances, block/spell block as well as ES to protect itself from elemental damage. Nobody whined about that. People whined that armor didn't do anything against PHYS damage, which was indeed true.

Now, the problem with Acrobatics/Phase acrobatics is that it can do NOTHING against physical damage that is flagged as undodgeable. There is no mechanic to protect you, while armor characters have access to mechanics that protect them from armor's weaknesses. However, there were very few instances of such damage before act 4, and they were never incredibly high burst.

Essentially, GGG created white mobs that simply kill an evasion character within seconds, no matter what the evasion character stacks to defend itself from them.

Which physical damage is unavoidable? Detonate Dead is fire, is it not?

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PrimordialDarkness a écrit :

Ok, I will assume that everyone is familiar with the fact that the current meta is all about Armor and Endurance Charge uptime, which is, of course, a 180 degree turn from 1.3, where Acrobatics was king. Sure, Evasion got hit pretty hard by nerfs to Ondars, but that's not enough to justify the fact that nobody is playing Evasion/Dodge only right now (you might see some Eva/ES or Eva/AR rarely, and it takes insane gear *cough*ETUP*cough*).
...

They didn't really buff the armor though, it functions pretty much the same as in 1.3. The damage of monsters got a rise on average and so the armor formula was tweaked a bit to mitigate roughly the same amount. The key words in your post is "current meta", people say "armor is the way to go now" and suddenly everything else is "unviable". That's bullshit, armor doesn't protect you more than in 1.3, evasion was always super weak against physical spells/single huge physical hits that get through (only now we have AA that actually works better for evasion type characters).

I have a pure EV/Acro ranger and she's as survivable as in 1.3, maybe slightly more due to AA being insanely good for kiting, also have an EV/ES/block no Acro trapper - same story. Did I respec in a bit more life nodes anticipating the monster damage increase? Yes. Did it make character unplayable/uviable etc.? No.

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Starxsword a écrit :

Which physical damage is unavoidable? Detonate Dead is fire, is it not?

DD is Phys. And if you ask me: THAT is the Problem.

The game is TERRIBLE at communicating Dmgtypes to the player or Telegraphing DANGEROUS attacks.
Its atrocius in this regard and very player unfriendly, and imho the main factor why People die.

But this deserves a own Thread.

This is a games about mechanics and interracitons within the mechanics.

Your mitigation must be composed of multiple layers to protect you from everything or mostly everything.

Because every single form of mitigation has it's own weakness

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ZINIAO a écrit :

and 4) apathy.

Best defense to anything in any videogame. I need to learn this - I don't get "angry" when I die from dumb stuff/mistakes, but I definitely feel disappointed and stressed about catching up my exp, or comparing my skill to my (probably inaccurate) perception of how others are faring.

Even as the hamster wheel of leveling past 90 continues, it's important to stop caring and have fun :)