The secret to balancing evasion

Evasion is not balanced at high level. Anyone who has tried a pure evasion character
in hardcore maps can tell you this.
Monsters hit hard on maps and with the right combo of curses, shocks, crits, map mods, and monster maps they can do tremendous burst in seconds.

Evasion can protect you from their attacks most of the time. But eventually you will run into
a streak where you dont dodge and get smashed in the face and die. Armor is always consistent.
If you could survive a certain group of mobs once with X armor you could survive the same mob
100 times in a row. Evasion will eventually fail you.

Even if we designed evasion to NEVER have streaks (eg 50% evasion means you avoid every 2nd attack, 25% means you avoid every 4th). You would still die due to streaks (say you avoid every 2nd attack and the attacks you do dodge are all the weak hits and you eat the strong hits).

No amount of tinkering with the RNG can fix this. Evasion needs to be consistent or its outclassed by armor.

How do we do that without losing evasion's unique feel.


Heres the solution.
Evasion now doubles as an anti-critical strike stat. The higher your evasion the less likely you
are to be crit. Natural there would be a scale: say at level 10 you need X evasion to lower the enemies crit chance 1% and at level 50 you need Y evasion to lower enemies crit chance 1%.

Perhaps we would make it lower crit a smaller amount for pvp? Or add a special case where
Vaal's smash ignores this crit reduction. There are little changes that could be made
to fix such things.

The goal should be that a pure evasion character is immune from crits. A hybrid character (evasion armor or evasion es) rarely gets crit. And a character with almost no evasion
gets no crit reduction at all.

Now he isnt in danger of being 1 shotted (at least no more than an armor user is), he has some form of consistent protection, but still the chaotic protection of random dodges. This also wouldnt require players to change their builds.

This isn't a confusing concept: could be placed neatly in the defensive menu and explained with a simple tool tip

It wont require that evasion users change their build much.

And its easy to imagine why the mechanics work. Your quick, agile shadow couldnt avoid the enemies spear altogether but at least he managed to make it so that it dint strike a vital spot.

Good idea, but thats never happen.
Eva was buffed a little and no new buffs for EVA in near future we didnt see.

Your idea sounds nice, thats why GGG already implemented something similiar it a long time ago.

1. Evasion is not random, with 80% you will bei hit every fifth attack, with 66% every third and with 50% every second attack.

2. Evasion works as an anti-crit stat. If You take a critical hit, there are to seperate evasion rolls. One determines if you are hit and the other if the attack stays a crit or turns into a normal hit.

Their anti-crit measure isnt as strong as your idea, but i can be compensated if you either stack hp or es. Same as armour, because amour does nothing against high hits/crits.

If you want to know more about how evasion works in POE:

http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Evasion

"

NotRegret a écrit :

Evasion is not balanced at high level. Anyone who has tried a pure evasion character
in hardcore maps can tell you this.
Monsters hit hard on maps and with the right combo of curses, shocks, crits, map mods, and monster maps they can do tremendous burst in seconds.

Evasion can protect you from their attacks most of the time. But eventually you will run into
a streak where you dont dodge and get smashed in the face and die. Armor is always consistent.
If you could survive a certain group of mobs once with X armor you could survive the same mob
100 times in a row. Evasion will eventually fail you.

Even if we designed evasion to NEVER have streaks (eg 50% evasion means you avoid every 2nd attack, 25% means you avoid every 4th). You would still die due to streaks (say you avoid every 2nd attack and the attacks you do dodge are all the weak hits and you eat the strong hits).

No amount of tinkering with the RNG can fix this. Evasion needs to be consistent or its outclassed by armor.

How do we do that without losing evasion's unique feel.

There ar no streaks in evasion, evasion is never killed by streaks. It is always killed by something else.

"

Heres the solution.
Evasion now doubles as an anti-critical strike stat. The higher your evasion the less likely you
are to be crit. Natural there would be a scale: say at level 10 you need X evasion to lower the enemies crit chance 1% and at level 50 you need Y evasion to lower enemies crit chance 1%.

This already exists.

AT LEAST research a mechanic before you make claims on how to balance it.

If an agttack would kill an evaison character in one shot it will also kill ANY REASONABLY COMPARABLE ARMOUR CHARACTER.

That's it. end of story.

I'm playing evasion right now using high block and the new acro. I did it before and I'm reviving something similar but now I have kaoms. Like I first thought, if you have high life you feel invincible. 6.5k life, 30% evasion (75% of my dps is from anger/wrath), 40% dodge and 63% block and for the most part nothing is bothering me.

Give evasion access to more flat life and more high % life nodes rather than small ones all over the place and evasion will be on par or better than armor.

"

Moosifer a écrit :

I'm playing evasion right now using high block and the new acro. I did it before and I'm reviving something similar but now I have kaoms. Like I first thought, if you have high life you feel invincible. 6.5k life, 30% evasion (75% of my dps is from anger/wrath), 40% dodge and 63% block and for the most part nothing is bothering me.

Give evasion access to more flat life and more high % life nodes rather than small ones all over the place and evasion will be on par or better than armor.

Before 1.0.0 Evasion's life nodes were like 30% more efficient than Str and had access to (right side) about 10-20% more life form life nodes. In the end a equivalent Ar and Ev builds before patch had a 10% difference in HP, which really makes no difference in the grand scheme of things.

The real problem with comparing EV and Armour is that most players make no attempt to support evasion with secondary defense and wonder why they're getting overwhelmed.

We've had this discussion, and I'm fairly sure we are talking completely different points in the game unless you did alot of high level mapping in CB, which evasion was worse then and maps didn't have such high spike damage.

Generally evasion classes get less base life and don't get the big % nodes so they have to invest more passives to get the same amount of life, but even still they have lower str so even if they have a slightly higher % total they end up with a lower overall health pool than a STR user, hence my suggestion to add more/better flat life passives to DEX tree.

You talked about using blind, end cry and granites. If you use blind you are cutting your DPS down (although you can put it on tempest shield but it won't proc very often, especially compared to a high APS skill). If you lower your DPS you end up taking more damage because combat lasts longer. This only works in isolated situations where it's you vs a boss which doesn't happen often in maps.

End cry is good but unless you're using kaoms rings, if you stick to DEX side of the tree at best you're getting 1 charge from tree and 1 from bandits. 25% reduction is not great, ask any armor user as their biggest complaint is how shitty armor is against hard hits, making them rely on, you guessed it, their high life pools. Except they can have 7 end charges, 5-10% (or more if they have good gear) DR from their armor as well, with the big life pool.

For an armor user, using an iron skin granite can bring them from 10k armor to 30k, for an evasion users, they get 6k armor (less if acro), so it's virtually useless because in the situations you need it, it will be under a 5% DR.

You know your shit so I'm not going on a full scale attack but you have no characters that are in maps and it's hard to really listen to someone saying evasion is fine without them at least experiencing a 75+ map using pure evasion. From my experiences with it, less than 4k life, with any tricks you'd like to add, you're going to get crushed and 4k is being kind. I have end cry and enfeeble on cast on damage so everything ends up with enfeeble and like I said the last time we had this discussion, it's the elemental damage that fucks me up. Even with 6.5k life I find myself down under 2k suddenly. DEX users can't get elemental adaption and DW users (like my current build) can't user saffells w/o a giant drop in effectiveness.

So again, I respect your opinion and agree during playthrough that evasion is great. End game it's garbage without high life. Feel free to prove me wrong but unless you're going extreme tank you'll find the same results I have.

"

Moosifer a écrit :

We've had this discussion, and I'm fairly sure we are talking completely different points in the game unless you did alot of high level mapping in CB, which evasion was worse then and maps didn't have such high spike damage.

Generally evasion classes get less base life and don't get the big % nodes so they have to invest more passives to get the same amount of life, but even still they have lower str so even if they have a slightly higher % total they end up with a lower overall health pool than a STR user, hence my suggestion to add more/better flat life passives to DEX tree.

I'm more than happy to show you the Ev vs Ar helth efficiency in current content if you'd like.

"

You talked about using blind, end cry and granites. If you use blind you are cutting your DPS down (although you can put it on tempest shield but it won't proc very often, especially compared to a high APS skill). If you lower your DPS you end up taking more damage because combat lasts longer. This only works in isolated situations where it's you vs a boss which doesn't happen often in maps.

Blind can also be attached to a skeleton totem. So no, you don;t need to cut DPS, a skeleton totem with blind will have nearly or total 100% blind uptime on a boss, in an AoE setting it's lower than 100% but you can always have splash skellies (where it aproaches 100% again).

Skelton brotem OP.

"

End cry is good but unless you're using kaoms rings, if you stick to DEX side of the tree at best you're getting 1 charge from tree and 1 from bandits. 25% reduction is not great, ask any armor user as their biggest complaint is how shitty armor is against hard hits, making them rely on, you guessed it, their high life pools. Except they can have 7 end charges, 5-10% (or more if they have good gear) DR from their armor as well, with the big life pool.

actually it's 20% DR vs 28-36% DR. Not a huge difference without significant base armour which I am (also) more than happy to explain diminishing return on, though suffice it to say you need significant armour to get enough Dr for the ECharges to be individually much more efficient on an Ar character.

"

For an armor user, using an iron skin granite can bring them from 10k armor to 30k, for an evasion users, they get 6k armor (less if acro), so it's virtually useless because in the situations you need it, it will be under a 5% DR.

It's still +500 OHKO threshold :P

"

You know your shit so I'm not going on a full scale attack but you have no characters that are in maps and it's hard to really listen to someone saying evasion is fine without them at least experiencing a 75+ map using pure evasion. From my experiences with it, less than 4k life, with any tricks you'd like to add, you're going to get crushed and 4k is being kind. I have end cry and enfeeble on cast on damage so everything ends up with enfeeble and like I said the last time we had this discussion, it's the elemental damage that fucks me up. Even with 6.5k life I find myself down under 2k suddenly. DEX users can't get elemental adaption and DW users (like my current build) can't user saffells w/o a giant drop in effectiveness.

So again, I respect your opinion and agree during playthrough that evasion is great. End game it's garbage without high life. Feel free to prove me wrong but unless you're going extreme tank you'll find the same results I have.

Given reasonable comparison the real issue is mostly psychological. You make some salient points, given certain assumptions, but there are plenty of use cases that completely sidestep those assumptions.

My biggest issue with evasion is that the Acrobatics cluster is basically mandatory on evasion builds and the lack of flat hp from life nodes means a huge chunk of mire passive point spent compared to armor user. And even after that you can still die to spike damage just as easily as an armor user.