Are dodge builds viable?

I'm curious with the change to Chaos Inoculation if more dodge based builds are viable? Running high Dexterity builds, with as many evasion nodes as possible, with Acrobatics and Phase Acrobatics.

I can't work out if the increase in dodge and evasions would be enough to offset the complete loss of armour and energy shield.

Word on the street: No.

There's abilities in Merciless difficulty that can one hit KO a character without damage reduction. If we compare 50% armor to 50% dodge, the dodger would insta die every other time, while the armour tank could survive one hit and try to heal.

It's why Iron Reflexes is essentially considered a ranger must have at current.

Doesn't work at all.
Even with 95% dodge chance, the single hit that's gonna pass is going to kill you.

It's a bit sad, cause i would love to see it working

Dodge is unreliable.

agree with the above. relying on dodge alone is a recipe for disaster. works fine as a first tier defensive option, but when that fails, a backup is nice to have. acrobatics needs a rework, IMO.

Yeah, it's kind of sad Acrobatics is essentially useless late game then since you have no back up to the dodge. I guess investing into Energy Shield and Evasion is the safer route :P

Armour isn't very effective against 1-hit kill attacks either, though, especially if the attack has a lot of added elemental damage. In practice, surviving that sort of attack requires lots of life or ES (+ good resists).

Dodge and Evasion are different effects:

Dodge is a flat % chance, randomly rolled each time. It's similar to blocking but with no recovery animation.

Evasion's 'causes monsters to miss' is a reliable effect, so you won't get hit several times in a row with decent Evasion, but it depends on monsters' Accuracy. Evasion also gives protection against critical strikes, but this is rolled each time (so it can happen that of the hits that connect, several in a row are crits).

Arrow Dodging, despite the name, is Evasion-based, and an extremely powerful effect. If I understand correctly, it gives a 95% chance to evade non-spell projectiles as long as you would normally have at least a 47.5% chance to evade that projectile.

Dodge/evasion seems like my playstyle too....... I hope it gets worked out to be really viable.

There should be two changes.

The first should be that if a hit takes down your shield, damage from that attack doesn't carry over to health.

The second is that no single hit should take more than 99% of base hit points for that level. Meaning if you are equal level to an enemy and have NO extra hp at all, you will be left with 1% hit points from a hit that would normally kill in one shot.

These are just good game mechanics to prevent cheese.

I'm too new to know if it works here, but in other games that relied on dodge, the character could substitute damage reduction with increased HP. double your HP and it's akin to 50% damage resist, assuming that between hits you can heal up.

Disagree. It should be possible to die in one hit if you completely neglect life and ES.

What I would like to see, though is: a) lots of ways of pumping life so it isn't so dependent on the passive tree; b) a smoothing of the monsters' attacks (especially rares/uniques), so they deal less damage per hit but more often.