Iron Reflexes vs Acrobatics question SOLVED.

I am a new PoE player. My first beloved character is a shadow which I have gotten to 43. I asked myself when planning my skill route "What is better, Acrobatics or Iron Reflexes?".

I asked google, the forums, and even global chat. No one could give me a straight answer and a straight answer could not be found.

So I spent the orbs of regret to find out my damn self. The verdict is:



IRON REFLEXES. Without a doubt and absolutely for certain in all cases.

The unreliability of acrobatics, even with all of the dodge and evade perks you can get, renders it absolutely useless in comparison to the steady and manageable damage reduction provided by Iron Reflexes. One might counter my assertion by saying "dodge is better for big attacks because you can take 0 damage out of a large amount". This, in practice, is false. The answer for big damage numbers is more health and mitigation. Having a 40% chance to not be one shot killed means you have a 60% chance that you are going to die. Instead, through larger health and mitigation, you can improve your character's ability to withstand and recover from large blows.

In the case of many smaller damage numbers occurring rapidly, Iron Reflexes is far more manageable.

After leveling my character all the way to 40 primarily by myself as an acrobatics shadow and then for the last 3 levels having Iron Reflexes. The difference is night and day. Iron Reflexes>>>>>>>^7>>>acrobatics.

Your logic would be infallible if not for the harsh diminishing return armor suffers against large physical hits. An evasion character and an armor character actually take very similar amounts of damage from large single physical hits. Armor trivializes small normal physical hits. The main defense is life.

I think this is much less clear which is better, and depends on many other variables (amount of life to survive critical hits, movement speed/mobility skills). Personally, I tried Iron Reflexes on my lvl50 duelist, but respecced back out of it because I didn't like getting hit all the time.

Someday I will get that high to do that maybe. I have a question though. Does a character on that side of the tree have to take those abilities? I don't know if I like it if stuck with having to take something to be able to play the game. Kind of ruins the reason for the skill tree for me then.

Armor will not reduce a single damage source by more than a twelfth of your armor, no matter what percent is quoted.
if I have 1200 armor, I am AT MOST reducing physical damage by 100. If I am worried about damage that threatens to drop me in two or three hits, that reduction may add one more if I'm lucky. An evasion character can reliably evade one of those attacks and be just as well off.
If you think evade is unreliable, you don't know the mechanics. With 25% evade, you dodge every fourth attack. There's no randomness except in how many hits taken before that first evade.

Iron Reflexes is overrated in my opinion. It mainly seems like an option for dex characters who prefer the armor mechanics over the evade mechanics. Armor is better in some ways but worse than others. For instance, armor won't help if you suffer an attack with elemental damage. Evade will (as long as its actually an attack and not a spell). On the other hand, evade doesn't help you against spells that do physical damage, where armor does. There are few spells that do this (I can only think of bear trap)

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MasterDinadan a écrit :

Armor will not reduce a single damage source by more than a twelfth of your armor, no matter what percent is quoted.
if I have 1200 armor, I am AT MOST reducing physical damage by 100.

Source?

What? You "dodge every forth attack?" not really bud you have a CHANCE to dodge ANY attack by 25%.. that doesnt mean that in 4 attacks youre guaranteed to dodge ANYTHING... matter of fact its more like you have a 75% chance to dodge nothing in 4 attacks. So yes thats totally random and dont listen to this guy. At that mentality youre basically saying if you go buy 100 lottery tickets youre guaranteed to win at least once... which is totally wrong.
Secondly you can easily see how much mitigation your armor is providing in the character sheet in game. If youre only reducing your damage by 100 then youre probably only fighting mobs that hit for 200 or so. At lvl 28 or so I think I already have around 40% mitigation.
Im not trying to flame but you dont have it right at all.

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hurticane a écrit :

What? You "dodge every forth attack?" not really bud you have a CHANCE to dodge ANY attack by 25%.. that doesnt mean that in 4 attacks youre guaranteed to dodge ANYTHING... matter of fact its more like you have a 75% chance to dodge nothing in 4 attacks. So yes thats totally random and dont listen to this guy. At that mentality youre basically saying if you go buy 100 lottery tickets youre guaranteed to win at least once... which is totally wrong.
Secondly you can easily see how much mitigation your armor is providing in the character sheet in game. If youre only reducing your damage by 100 then youre probably only fighting mobs that hit for 200 or so. At lvl 28 or so I think I already have around 40% mitigation.
Im not trying to flame but you dont have it right at all.

No there is no RNG when it comes to block or evade in this game it is hard numbers.

I have 50% dodge, I WILL dodge every other attack I have tested this and dev's have said this.

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hurticane a écrit :

What? You "dodge every forth attack?" not really bud you have a CHANCE to dodge ANY attack by 25%.. that doesnt mean that in 4 attacks youre guaranteed to dodge ANYTHING... matter of fact its more like you have a 75% chance to dodge nothing in 4 attacks. So yes thats totally random and dont listen to this guy. At that mentality youre basically saying if you go buy 100 lottery tickets youre guaranteed to win at least once... which is totally wrong.

Yes, we know thats how real probability works. However, evasion and accuracy in this game is specifically designed not to be like that. The mechanic makes it so that if you have for example a 75% evade chance against a specific enemy, you will always evade 3 hits, get hit once, and evade the next 3.

The evasion mechanic is explained by a dev (Mark) here:
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/11707/page/106#p748465

Edit:
Also, I feel like you are comparing armour + health with evasion without health. Both armour and health requires a large health pool to work. If you have armour without health, you will be easily killed in one or two large hits, this is the same as with evasion.

I'm thinking that the main splash screen of PoE should state something like...

EVASION IS NOT DIRECTLY AN RNG MECHANIC

...just repeated over and over.