Evasion---Hard Counters with nothing to recounter

So this is not a QQ thread or a rage thread but a feedback thread on the problem with Evasion as it currently sits and a few possible solutions...

First off.. Hard Counters. Chris brought this up back when player Evasion/Accuracy was buffed and Rangers were updated. This is something that I believe GGG should take another look at before moving on again and heres why.

We have 3 different defense styles plus the hyrbid (combined) defense styles. Theres Armor, ES, and Evasion. For each of these playstyles there is a hard counter and a what I like to think of as a soft re-counter.

Armor players stack life. The hard counter to armor is elemental damage and chaos. Elemental damage is flat damage and chaos is mostly DoT in nature damage. The soft counters to elemental and chaos is the Elemental Resistances in the Marauder starting area and then life regen through out the tree. Most decent HP Armor tankers can regen I would say around 75% of the chaos DoTs (if not all) and with max elemental resists (which is almost mandatory for every build) and their high life/life regen can tank elemental damages. So the soft counter works against the hard counter. In addition Grace can give even a heavy tank upto an additional 20% evasion against normal physical attacks. Shields and dual wielding provide additional block benefits. Due to high amounts of life the chance to be stunned is extremely low and effects like freeze/chill/burn/shock are normally short lived. To summarize... a high life/armor build can potentially have 0 weaknesses.

Energy Shield players stack large amounts of ES and Int to get even higher amounts of ES than life builds use. Since they have large amounts of mana to spare it is quite easy for them to run grace full time giving them 20% evasion. The hard counter to ES is Chaos damage. Most ES users have little life making chaos extremely dangerous. Due to inherently low life focus ES users are easily stunned/shocked/burned/frozen/chilled. The soft counters that ES users can use are CI and Shavronnes for Chaos, and several items to counter Frozen. In addition ES is supposed to provide a 50% chance to avoid being stunned but as many ES players tell you its feels like it does nothing. A soft counter to being stunned is to use Chayulas Eye to become immune to stuns. Potions are often used to eliminate ailments but it is easy to be overwhelmed. Due to large amounts of ES it is hard to single hit kill an ES user and most are able to regen enough ES either by running away and letting shields naturally regen or through the use of Ghost Reaver and Life Leech. For those who have the mana regen it is possible to even run Arctic Armor full time to lessen physical and fire damage taken. If an ES user does not wish to take CI they can get a Shavronnes (albeit expensively) and possibly run a low life / Righteous Fire build. As we can see.. there are many soft counters against he hard counters.

Finally we come to Evasion. Evasion gives the player a chance to completely avoid many melee and ranged attacks. There is very few life nodes available to an evasion player and most are lucky to see 2k to 2200 life and very little life regen. A player with at least 50% evasion and Ondars Guile should never have to worry about any ranged attacks. All players innately have a 5% chance to evade but no player can reach 100% evasion and its is capped at 95%. In addition the game has a built in "streak preventer" which ensures all attacks are averaged out. A player with 50% evasion would easily be able to expect to get hit 1 out of ever 2 attacks. The hard counter to Evasion is spell damage, AoE DoT effects, monsters with "Hits Accurately", and Resolute Technique (attacks cannot be evaded). Due to low life Evasion players can often be 1-2 shot by monsters and are easily affected by status ailments. The soft counters that evasion players are given are passives to reduced the chance of status ailments, Dodge, and Spell Dodge. Dodge gives 20-30% chance to dodge an attack that was not evaded and spell dodge gives a flat 20% chance to dodge a spell. Because of the reductive nature of combining Dodge/Evasion/Block (a player with 50% chance to Evade will only be able to dodge 10% of the remainning attacks with 20% chance to dodge). In an attempt to mitigate critical hits Evasion users have a chance equal to their evasion chance to turn a critical hit into a non critical, but regardless of how high the players evasion is there will always be a chance to receive a critical hit.

The summary for Evasion users is that there is no soft counter to the hard counters put against them. Dodge can get up to only 30% chance and Spell Dodge is a lowly 20% chances which means the majority of the time "Hits Accurately", Resolute Technique, and Spells WILL hit. Evasion users face swift death near spell attacks and AoE DoTs due to low life and minimal life regen passives. The only ability Evasion users truly have in their favor is Ondars Guile which allows an evasion user to survive a pack of ranged mobs long enough to kill them. Without Ondars Guile most evasion users near insta die due to the "streakness" preventer guaranteeing that they will be hit when a pack lets loose with volleys of arrows or in the case of Tentacled Miscreations a single volley from a single mob.

Flicker Strike is highly effective against evasion characters due to the high accuracy rating of their users and even with the current nerf there is still a significant chance to be chain hit/killed by Flicker mobs.

Sea Witch packs which can chain cast Cold Snap has been known to keep evasion users perma frozen even with maxed cold resists.


Now a possible solution (soft counter) to the hard counters should be passive in nature. First.. since Dodge is added in in a reductive chance manner it should be significantly buffed. (reommend top end around 50%). Even a user with 75% evasion chance (near impossible in end game) would still have an 11% chance to be hit. Thats still gives a significant chance to be 1-2 shot in end game. As a down side I would make it so that for every 1% dodge chance the player looses 2% armor and ES. At 50% they would have 0 armor and 0 ES.

Second.. passives to reduce total damage taken from all sources by around 20-30%. This should help mitigate low life and cover Phase Acrobatics (spell dodge). The critical mitigator could be removed. These passives should be behind the dodge passives to eliminate non Evasion/Dodge users from abusing it. (Combining that with Iron Reflexes?? that would be broken).

Lastly. Hits accurately mobs should probably be removed and Resolute Technique should cut another players chance to dodge/evade in half rather than remove it completely (for pvp balance of course... if anyone really cared about PvP).

MObs don't have RT... Is this for PVP?

Spells hit AR just the same as EV, what do you mean by this

How do you reach the conclusion of 'low life' when they have access to more HP nodes than the str part of the tree?

Another confusing post saying that EV sucks because spell dmg

No ALL builds have to stack life( or ES) its just armor works a lot better with life than evasion.

Look really just go IR even after the nerf evasion isn't viable unless you have huge life AND
use all the armor mitigation skills on top.

Basicly if you want to go evasion you need more life than an armor build from an area of the tree that has very few HP options.

add a keystone after acrobatics that rolls crits 4 times (2 times by evasion, 2 times by dodge) instead of the 2 times currently by evasion

buff acrobatics or the acrobatic improvement nodes for a total of 40-50%

buff phase acrobatics by 10%

introduce a unique that makes evasion and dodge "lucky"

add more life regen nodes....

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maxor a écrit :

No ALL builds have to stack life( or ES) its just armor works a lot better with life than evasion.

Look really just go IR even after the nerf evasion isn't viable unless you have huge life AND
use all the armor mitigation skills on top.

Basicly if you want to go evasion you need more life than an armor build from an area of the tree that has very few HP options.

EV side of the tree has more HP options than the Ar side. Please stop spreading mis information

Evasion characters are the ones that should stack the most life, to survive that potential hard hit. Lot's more than (well build) armour characters.
There really are enough life nodes on the right side of the tree to reach 4k life or more.

Agree with what you are saying but you have no clue of what a soft/hard counter is.

A hard counter totally counters something for example CI -> chaos or RT -> evasion
A soft counter is strong against something without totally countering it 100% for example elemental resist -> elemental damage

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Delirii a écrit :

Evasion characters are the ones that should stack the most life, to survive that potential hard hit. Lot's more than (well build) armour characters.
There really are enough life nodes on the right side of the tree to reach 4k life or more.

So if you take all those life nodes to have 4k life do you still have enough points to increase your dmg or whatever? Achieve good survivability and dps is IMO easier for armor using strenght based builds (beacause streng boosts your base HP and gives dmg bonus).

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kovarda a écrit :

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Delirii a écrit :

Evasion characters are the ones that should stack the most life, to survive that potential hard hit. Lot's more than (well build) armour characters.
There really are enough life nodes on the right side of the tree to reach 4k life or more.

So if you take all those life nodes to have 4k life do you still have enough points to increase your dmg or whatever? Achieve good survivability and dps is IMO easier for armor using strenght based builds (beacause streng boosts your base HP and gives dmg bonus).

And that's exactly why they gave the right side more %life, because of less base life and because EVA builds need more of it then armor. DEX chars also typically have more attack speed so can get more mileage out of Life On Hit, it all kinda evens out.

Pretty much the only hard counter to pure evasion builds are physical spells which can be soft-countered with spell block and phase acrobatics. Blind is your soft counter to a soft cunter 'hits accurately' (and an awesome debuff overall if you got AS for it).

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Pretty much the only hard counter to pure evasion builds are physical spells which can be soft-countered with spell block and phase acrobatics. Blind is your soft counter to a soft cunter 'hits accurately' (and an awesome debuff overall if you got AS for it).

Exactly. The only really dangerous thing is EK. And maybe Bear Trap, but that thing is easier to avoid manually.