Adding Glancing Hits for Evasion Based Characters

Hello!

I've been tinkering with an idea regarding an added defensive layer to characters heavily invested in evasion defences, and my mind's always driven towards a type of glancing hit mechanic.

The idea would be to add a check after the evasion check and the evade hit/spell check. If a hit is successful for enemies in the glancing hit check, it will do its normal intented damage, but if the glancing hit check is in favour of the character, then the resulting hit will be diminished by a less multiplier similar to enfeeble, so say 30% less damage. OPTIONALLY, a fourth check could occur based to the chance to evade attacks, which would basically implement an unlucky roll to the critical hit strike chance of the enemy.

So let's assume a character with 60% evasion and 40% to evade attacks. A melee attack happens.

In 24% of cases it will result in a full on hit. If a glancing hit mechanic was to be added, it would then run a following check to see if it's a glancing hit or full damage hit. This check could be the evasion percentage again.

60% evasion chance
40% chance to evade attacks
60% evasion chance to trigger a glancing hit when damaged by attacks.
An Unlucky modifier to the enemy's crit hit roll.

"

Normally you would evade an attack 76% of the time, and you would take 100% damage in 24% of attacks on you. Let's call this like a 24% damage effectiveness, with full damage dealt 100% of the times you're damaged.

With my suggestion you would evade an attack 76% of the time, and you would take 70% damage in 14.4% of the attacks, and take 100% damage from 9.6% of the attacks. This would result in 19.68% damage effectiveness, compared to the normal 24% damage effectiveness. While also further removing the threat of oneshots with unlucky crit rolls.

The whole idea of why I personally would like to see a mechanic like this is to add another RNG layer to avoid those pesky oneshots when getting higher and higher up. It's tiring to feel forced to invest too heavily into life nodes, and if a ranger, you may often wanna consider a Kaom's Heart just to be able to survive onehits more often. Having an evasion based character and feel obliged to use a Kaom's Heart just to survive feels so counterintuitive, and the underlying problem is the oneshot threat. Glancing Hits would reduce the chance to get oneshot alot, and promote more options for evasion characters endgame.

So how would I suggets implementing this? I would make a node, or cluster, tied to Acrobatics. Let's say that from Acrobatics, you'll have a second branch ontop of the phase acro one. Add 3 minor nodes of 6-8% evasion per tiny node to force an investment of skill points, and the major node would read something like the following:

GLANCING HITS
Chance to trigger a glancing hit when damaged by attacks based on evasion chance. Enemy critical hit chance is unlucky.
50% less armour, 30% less ES, 30% less chance to block spells and attacks.


Suggestion may not be perfectly balanced, but the idea's what's important here right ^^

So ... pretty much reducing the main drawback of evasion significantly, at a very little cost ?

Why such a suggestion, what is wrong with evasion at the moment ? that seems like just more cheap way to get defenses so that you can stack more damage .... I think that we have enough powercreep in the game atm, imho.



Evasion is already pretty strong, and acrobatics is really strong atm, I really don't think that there is a need to buff that farthermore honestly.
Adding such a keystone would only made a 4 points investement with very little drawback since there are other ways of mitigating damage.

Stacking evasion alone is not enough to be tanky, layered defenses is what works best in PoE, that is just how it works.

But many just drink and believe the "duh defenses are terrible, only buffer matters !" misinformation spread by people that don't know how to build properly their characters on the forum.
If you want to feel tanky, you need to invest some of your resources in it, not just acrobatics + QotF and grace.



PS : critical strikes are already unlikely to happen ( attack based ones ) on evasion characters, because there are already two rolls just for crit.

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So ... pretty much reducing the main drawback of evasion significantly, at a very little cost ?

3 out of 5 hits will deal 30% less damage, while 2 out of 5 will still deal full damage. It does this at the cost of the same armour, ES and block chance loss that acrobatics already has, rendering other layers of defense very poor. If you consider removing the other defenses "a very little cost", you're hyperboling a bit too hard for discussion's sake.

"

Why such a suggestion, what is wrong with evasion at the moment ?

The fact that oneshots is what kills you lategame meta. The type of character that suffers today is not the armourbased meatier builds, nor is the armour/ES or pure ES ones. It's the evasion characters with acrobatics that will suffer way more than other archetypes.

"

Stacking evasion alone is not enough to be tanky, layered defenses is what works best in PoE, that is just how it works.

But many just drink and believe the "duh defenses are terrible, only buffer matters !" misinformation spread by people that don't know how to build properly their characters on the forum.
If you want to feel tanky, you need to invest some of your resources in it, not just acrobatics + QotF and grace.

Overall, your reply contradicts itself a bit. Acrobatics removes the usefulness to build evaasion+acrobatic characters with armour/es/block. You're down to evasion/evading atk/spell, and the hp pool obviously. "It's strong, just add more of the other defenses" isn't really an argument since acrobatics is meant to nerf other layers of defense. Ya know.


While yes, the most well rounded defense is likely, and logically, a little bit of this and that. But there's a reason that we have CI in the game, that sacrifices your life for way more ES to have a completely different character build available. There's a reason we have Unwavering/IR in the game, to get a more solid damage reduction while also being immune to stuns. And there's a reason we have Acrobatics in the game. To add a defensive layer to evasion in the form of evading attacks/spells when they do roll past the evasion check.

Bottom line is that ES can scale their when-hit effective HP quite high with just stacking ES and some eva/armour here and there. Armour based characters have solid survivability in that they take heavily reduced damage from hits overall, despite being hit more often. Evasion characters however need to sacrifice alot more for Acrobatics in losing some of the multi layered defenses, while maintaining a very low when-hit effective HP due to low damage reduction. Two of these three build archetypes are just plain preferable in HC or for people striving to die extremely seldom in SC than the third.

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Umadia a écrit :

"

So ... pretty much reducing the main drawback of evasion significantly, at a very little cost ?

3 out of 5 hits will deal 30% less damage, while 2 out of 5 will still deal full damage. It does this at the cost of the same armour, ES and block chance loss that acrobatics already has, rendering other layers of defense very poor. If you consider removing the other defenses "a very little cost", you're hyperboling a bit too hard for discussion's sake.

Multipliers (@MORE, LESS) always stacks multiplicatively, not additively, plus builds already using other ways to reduce incoming damage, making armour and ES unnecessary means that there will virtually be no drawback since they would already be building around it with Acrobatics.
The block reduction will not make a big difference for bow/DW builds that don't focus on it, even shield based builds that don't focus on block at all won't really feel that extra difference compared to the benefits imo.

"

Umadia a écrit :

The fact that oneshots is what kills you lategame meta

There it is then, the "content one shots you with untelegraphed attacks at high level" forum legend.
Seriously, if you are building only full evasion without the buffer required and/or any other layer, it just won't be enough. You need to invest more, and invest in a more clever way in something that will make you tankier, really.

"

Umadia a écrit :

Overall, your reply contradicts itself a bit. Acrobatics removes the usefulness to build evaasion+acrobatic characters with armour/es/block

I said other layers, other mechanics.
Armour and block are not the only defensive options besides evasion, there are many other things to consider.

Armour builds with only armour and unwavering stance are ..... not that tanky.
Unless they have something else ( EC, block, fortify, etc .... )
Tanky characters usually do not take unwavering stance imo, usually.

Pretty sure that HC racers overall take Acrobatics as their main defense mechanics + some other mechanics to complete it just to get the minimum survivability "threshold", and then invest most of the rest into damage for clearspeed purposes.
I could be wrong obviously, I don't have concrete stats and I have not been checking all racers out there, but for the few that I've seen ... Acro seemed popular. And for good reason: it is very strong, but not quite enough just on its own.

Attacks can be a threat in high level content .... but they seem to be less of a threat when everything is dead of course, where spells seem to get through more easily.
Now, if you are a melee, evasion might make a bit more of a difference than if you are a range.
If you have "low" dps and need to actually need to deal with mechanics (including ennemies's attacks ), then it can also be useful.
But overall, you can't avoid all monter's mechanics so you need some "degree of tankyness" seriously, and evasion is not in such a bad spot atm, because of how strong Acro is.


You can check my "shieldinGaijin" build if you want, acro + eva based.
It felt pretty tanky this league ( it was in Incursion SSF HC until 94 ... and then I tried to "toy" with phys reflect in a t2 blue map to see if it was manageable ... I was dumb enough to not remove all my supports because I though that it was fine ... and it instantly threw the char to standard league -___-" )

Huh, it's been a while since I've seen Lightning Coil seriously used, but that does raise a significant point about Evasion that was often mentioned in the past: You absolutely must have mitigation on top of the evasion or other avoidance mechanics. In LC's case it mitigates physical damage by splitting some of it into lightning which gets taken down by resistance.

And that's what it's balanced (roughly) around. The game isn't built where you can stack only a single kind of defense and get everything you want from it, nor should it be.

Evasion is an amazing defensive layer, because it requires very little investment to get returns.

Unlike dodge/spell dodge,armour, regen and life leech which all require substantial investment for returns.

A jade and a 2k evasion armour with blind will reduce your incomming hits by 80% in high tier content, that's pretty absurd already.

Peace,

-Boem-

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Fruz a écrit :

You can check my "shieldinGaijin" build if you want, acro + eva based.
It felt pretty tanky this league ( it was in Incursion SSF HC until 94 ... and then I tried to "toy" with phys reflect in a t2 blue map to see if it was manageable ... I was dumb enough to not remove all my supports because I though that it was fine ... and it instantly threw the char to standard league -___-" )

Ouch. That sounds like something I'd do right there, lol.

I've been playing a lot on the left side of the tree the last couple of leagues so I haven't been playing EV for a bit. I used to a lot but stopped, mostly because I always felt EV was great until it wasn't. Meaning, it's great to see all the whiffs but when you do mistime a one shot mechanic and get obliterated it just feels bad. And in that situation one can't help but think that a worse geared AR based character would have had some absorption and therefore survived. I mean, if I dodge 4 hits and get one shot on the 5th is it really fair that the AR toon can just absorb all 5 hits? Should I get one chance for a connecting hit to do less damage? Seems fair. Maybe if the hit would be a one-shot you get a glancing blow roll? That's probably a dumb idea. I think logically what the OP is suggesting makes sense but I'm not good at fairly evaluating in-depth balance issues like this. Probably should have kept my mouth shut. :)

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Jackalope_Gaming a écrit :

Huh, it's been a while since I've seen Lightning Coil seriously used, but that does raise a significant point about Evasion that was often mentioned in the past: You absolutely must have mitigation on top of the evasion or other avoidance mechanics. In LC's case it mitigates physical damage by splitting some of it into lightning which gets taken down by resistance.

And that's what it's balanced (roughly) around. The game isn't built where you can stack only a single kind of defense and get everything you want from it, nor should it be.

It's not just coil anymore though, the new rares from incursions ( at least helmet ) have such mods, chieftain has it in its ascendancy, ToH is a thing ( never had one, but I know it exists lol ), cloak of flame is also there for cheaper budget.
I might be forgetting some.

I tanked a white elder slam on this char btw, it was at the edge and didn't think it would hit ... well it did ! ( and .. OUCH, survived it still. next yellow elders didn't hit me with the slam anymore tho ).

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Phaeded a écrit :

I mean, if I dodge 4 hits and get one shot on the 5th is it really fair that the AR toon can just absorb all 5 hits? Should I get one chance for a connecting hit to do less damage?

You don't just get oneshot like this though ( some telegraphed hit could and likely should have that potential though ).
And where you dodged, the armour guy might just have been stunned too. There are many elements to consider.
Plus if it's a hit that would have one shot you ... unless absurd amount of armour, or other mechanics to go with it, it would have mitigated very little of it.

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Fruz a écrit :

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Jackalope_Gaming a écrit :

Huh, it's been a while since I've seen Lightning Coil seriously used, but that does raise a significant point about Evasion that was often mentioned in the past: You absolutely must have mitigation on top of the evasion or other avoidance mechanics. In LC's case it mitigates physical damage by splitting some of it into lightning which gets taken down by resistance.

And that's what it's balanced (roughly) around. The game isn't built where you can stack only a single kind of defense and get everything you want from it, nor should it be.

It's not just coil anymore though, the new rares from incursions ( at least helmet ) have such mods, chieftain has it in its ascendancy, ToH is a thing ( never had one, but I know it exists lol ), cloak of flame is also there for cheaper budget.
I might be forgetting some.

I tanked a white elder slam on this char btw, it was at the edge and didn't think it would hit ... well it did ! ( and .. OUCH, survived it still. next yellow elders didn't hit me with the slam anymore tho ).

Oh yeah, Damage Taken As is quite a powerful mod in its own right if you've got lower phys mitigation.

I do have a ToH in standard and it can certainly be powerful. But defensively not so much for my Pillar Sunder Juggernaut since his physical mitigation is kinda silly and ToH would actually make him take a bit more damage overall from most phys hits. That's due to endurance charges and armor though, but it is amusing to facetank Minotaur while wearing an Abyssus.