For the love of god, please, rework DEXTERITY. (Updated)

While this may more or less be an abridged version of things said in a certain other thread, this is an issue that is severe enough that I feel it warrants a Suggestion thread and a desperate appeal to our friendly developers at GGG.

In short, Dexterity is broken. I'm just going to say it straight, and detail exactly why in as concise a form as possible.

The first and most major flaw with Dexterity is that it's the only attribute that doesn't grant hitpoints or a hitpoints alternative. Strength classes gain hitpoints directly from their primary attribute, Int classes gain Energy Shield which is functionally the same thing. Both classes gain the capability to take harder hits as the enemies hit harder. Dexterity classes do not. Dexterity grants the the CHANCE to avoid a hit, rather than the GUARANTEE to survive it. This fundamental flaw becomes a huge issue at higher levels, where other classes can survive hits and have a bar from which to measure how much danger they may be in, DEX classes will go from perfectly fine one moment to dead in the next. There is no player error involved, only luck.

The problem here is that GGG is trying to treat chance-based Evasion as a primary defensive mechanic, something that it simply is not. Chance-based evasion should only exist on a character that can survive it's failure, and to do that it needs to have HP. This is already a huge issue from level 40 onwards, and it's only going to get worse as the level limit climbs, and even moreso when stat requirements are raised as mentioned in the Beta Manifesto, limiting squishy high-DEX characters to their sub-ideal armor. And yes I do mean sub-ideal, as I said chance-based evasion is useless on a character that can't survive it's failure, and for that exact reason.

I am aware that the skill Iron Reflexes exists, and I'm not happy with it. Honestly, I have a feeling that GGG is aware of the imbalance of Dexterity-based attributes themselves, which is why they give you the option to substitute it for something that belongs on another archetype. This isn't fixing the problem, it's only hiding it, and at the same time stifling character variety by making the only viable option. Turning Duelists and Rangers into ghetto Marauders with even more weakness to magic and elemental damage than normal.

I'm going to have to cut this short for now, but tomorrow I'll delve more into the issues related to the Dexterity stat and update this post. To get you thinking about what further points I'll make: Lack of damage scaling, irrelevancy of Accuracy Rating.

And finally, since this IS a suggestion thread, I'll give my own brainstormed idea for making Evasion more functional as a primary defensive stat:
Rework Evasion into a gauge, much like Energy shield. However, it is not drained by damage, but instead based on Accuracy Rating. Until the gauge is depleted, incoming attacks and projectiles will be evaded and instead drain the evasion gauge. This will fix two issues at once, first and foremost Dex characters' inability to take any hits with certainty, second it actually makes Accuracy Rating relevant, you can't just pump pure damage to make up for inaccuracy, as Evade doesn't care about damage. (Though Attack Speed would help.)

People often say that Armor is supposed to be good against many weak attacks, while Evasion is good against strong, but that is incorrect. Chance-based evasion is actually WORSE against strong hits because you can't survive the it's failure, whereas with weak hits you CAN. You don't get OHKOd by weak attacks, and OHKOs are the biggest problem facing the current Dexterity builds.

That said, my suggestion WOULD be true to that ideal. More damage will not drain Evasion any faster, but more attacks WILL, therefor it is STRONG against strong attacks and WEAK against (numerous) weak attacks. (And accurate attacks of course.)

How evasion should and shouldn't recharge is something left up to balance, however it shouldn't be handled the same as Energy Shields. Dexterity classes have light armor and many movement speed bonuses available to them, they're not meant to sit in the middle of a mob and swing away like a Marauder, but rather to dart in and out of attack range, (or just stay out in an archer's case) take advantage of mobility and positioning. For this reason Evasion should be quick to deplete, but also quick to recover, possibly with specific modifiers based on movement or attacking in order to further encourage mobility in combat. Dexterity classes can run better than anybody else, and Evasion should take advantage of that. This will be something that the upcoming DEX/INT class will really appreciate as well, because it's very obvious why they will be more dedicated to hit and run tactics than anyone else.

Dexterity characters in this game are incredibly unique and fun to play as, please don't let something as silly as stat balance ruin them. I don't care what you do, just make them better, and not by turning them into something they're not with Iron Reflexes.

Oh, and for the love of god get rid of or nerf Resolute Technique/Resolute Monsters. I mean seriously? You base an entire set of classes' survival on evasion, then you add a single passive ability that makes Evasion completely worthless in both PvE and PvP?





-----
Part 2.
-----





The second major flaw with Dexterity is the lack of damage scaling. It's mitigated to an extent by the ability to get ridiculously strong weapons to compensate, but it's still a huge issue for balance. Every main stat offers 2 things as inherent bonuses- Increased survivability and increased damage. STR characters get bonus added directly to their melee damage (and their ranged damage if they so choose) and INT characters get their mana pool increased. Larger mana pool means more possible spells, more possible support gems, more possible casting speed, and more possible regen from mana leech and what have you to support it all. Dexterity gets accuracy. Sounds good on paper right? Hit more often, therefor more damage. However, STR and INT characters don't NEED accuracy in the first place, because spells don't miss and melee/archers can get Resolute Technique. In other words, DEX characters gain something that allows them to do what everyone else already does better!

"Resolute Technique takes away crits though". How many Crit Marauders have you personally encountered? Hell, the only time Crit is actually worth having is if you're specifically building crit, and the int/dex Crit class isn't even out yet! Crit's base values are something like 150% damage at a 5% chance, that's effectively 2.5% more DPS, in other words, something that you can replace with a single damage node, and 5% chance to crit isn't exactly reliable DPS either. Call it a hunch, but I'd say it's more worthwhile to pick up Resolute Technique and pure damage than to waste many equipment mods and skill points on keeping your accuracy up to par.

In other words, Accuracy Rating simply isn't worthwhile. This problem is even further exacerbated when someone goes for a DEX-heavy build, and has more Accuracy than they can accurately shake a stick at. Accuracy does not directly increase damage, so past a certain point it is literally worthless.

And this isn't even bringing up the fact that bows for god-knows-what reason don't scale with Dexterity. It's hilarious that one can very well argue that Iron Grip Marauders make better archers than Rangers do, and this is a symptom of the major design flaw that needs to be addressed.

Now, as with evasion I am not going to only whine, but also attempt to offer my own solution to the issue- make Accuracy Rating also add to your Critical hits. The exact amount of course would be left up to balance, but doing so would make it so Accuracy Rating remain relevant no matter how high it went. Depending on how it's handled Critical Rate and Critical Damage could both work- Critical Rate would be more reliable for increasing DPS while Critical Damage could be allowed to scale better due to it not being limited to a 5%-100% scale and being harder to use reliably. I do believe that GGG really wants to encourage variety in this game, hence the gigantic skill tree, so a mixxed result would probably be ideal. For instance, have Accuracy Rating increase Critical Hit Rate by default, but also add 2 nodes to the Passive Skill Tree on the Dexterity side- One closer to the INT side that replaces the Accuracy-Critical Rate formula with an Accuracy-Critical Damage formula, specifically for Crit builds, and one down closer to the STR portion to the tree that grants IAS for DEX- for example 1% per 5 points- but removes the ability to crit entirely. This would be more suited to those who don't want to deal with Crit in their build and would prefer a more consistent DPS boost.

Adding Crit based on Accuracy Rating would synergize especially well with high-dex melee such as Rapiers, that only require DEX as a requirement AND provide a bonus in crit damage.

This would solve the issue of damage scaling for DEX-heavy melees and archers alike, without nerfing STR AND without compromising the unique styles of each archetype. STR melee fighters and archers will be unique in that they prioritize heavy hitting over everything else, DEX melee fighters and archers will be unique in that they prioritize their choice of attack speed or crits. This outcome is much better than simply adding a direct ranged damage bonus to DEX, because it creates unique differences between STR-based archery and DEX-based archery, instead of just outright making DEX-based archery better. You could even further capitalize on this difference by adding 'Heavy Bows' that have a Strength requirement to use, higher damage, but lower Attack Speed. You'll have Marauder Archers who's bows are slow but hit like anti-materiel rifles and Rangers who pepper monsters with shots and distribute Poison, Explosive Charges, and other nasty on-hit effects everywhere, and of course Duelist Archers that fit themselves somewhere in the middle. It's a variation that I think would be very exiting to see, and good for replay value overall.

Make dex give armor instead of evasion.

A note - there are no "resolute monsters" I'm aware of; only "accurate" ones, which simply have more accuracy than usual - and therefore will hit more often, but still not always if you've got a decent amount of evasion.
Resolute Technique will be a pain for Rangers fighting Marauders, certainly - as offense-to-defense matchups go, the Ranger is better off Witchhunting in any case - but the devs are aware of this one and I think are considering nerfing or disabling it for PvP.

Overall, though - I don't know what your experiences with evasion have been, but the ones I've played (those who've died and those who haven't) have never been one-shot killed, even in the maelstrom.

I also wonder how many players actually invest in evasion.. not flaming the OP at all, just a general question. On my dex-based characters I make sure to pick up a few +evasion passives and not rely solely on the inherit bonus that dex gives, and as Skiverus said, I have never been 1-shotted by a mob (well at least not for several patches)

As for PvP, I highly doubt resolute technique will work the way it does in PvE, they'll either disable it or nerf the damage players who have that passive cause. Would be game breaking otherwise.

As for Iron Reflexes, I don't consider it a bandaid fix any more then Resolute Technique is, it's just an option. Personally, if you find that option entails the greatest chance of survival, you should take it no matter what.

in what god had something to do with the fact that you don't put enough hp passives?

Here are some ideas.

Evasion chance also gives the same % to dodge spells. Now evasion is weaker against melee than armour (which makes sense) but has some advantages that Str builds don't have, which is superiority vs casters.

Secondly, remove the accuracy mod, its unfair considering its already hard for melee dex.

Thirdly add a new mob mod: Armour penetration.

There are a couple of keystone concepts that can help with this of course.

Honestly, if you going to be a duel wield dex light armour wearing character, you should be the least survivable character in the game, and also the highest dps. I think its ok for such a build to not be viable in hardcore. Use a shield, go ranged or get iron reflexes. Otherwise death should be a fairly regular thing without sick gear.

"

Angryafrican wrote:

Thirdly add a new mob mod: Armour penetration.

Arguably, this is already in the game to an extent - "more damage".

Seriously, any damage mod on a monster will have a disproportionate effect against armored targets due to the nature of the equation, and elemental damage mods bypass armor entirely (but not evasion).

"

Skivverus wrote:

Arguably, this is already in the game to an extent - "more damage".

Seriously, any damage mod on a monster will have a disproportionate effect against armored targets due to the nature of the equation, and elemental damage mods bypass armor entirely (but not evasion).

Firstly there are woefully few high damage elemental based monsters to make the evade ability to 'potentially' ignore elemental damage worthwhile, furthermore the high damaging elemental unique mobs you might actually have an advantage against usually have ridiculously good accuracy ratings thus nullifying entirely any ability you may have had to evade it.

Secondly high damage against damage reduction is nothing like accuracy against evade. As potentially it will still effect the evasion based character a certain proportion of the time as well, and when it does it will hurt ALOT more than it does vs armour characters.

My marauder doesn't notice any significant damage spikes vs damage mod monsters, certainly not significant enough to make me worry or ever use a flask. I cant remember the last time he used a flask in fact. Where as my ranger when she meets high damaging monsters or god forbid high damaging archers, has to kite around like a 14 year old playing COD in order to stand any chance of survival.

A comparable monster mod to accuracy for armour based characters would be armour piercing which ignored a certain proportion of damage reduction but had no effect VS evasion.

Thats a long way to solving the evasion inbalance but it would be a start. Currently armour users have no monster mods that are tough to beat, where as evasion toons have to fear alot of monsters when you start getting past level 45.

"

Wittgenstein wrote:

I also wonder how many players actually invest in evasion..

Heres the thing though my two characters (until about 2 levels ago) where completely comparable, I built them specifically with testing armour VS evasion in mind. Both characters have focused purely on damage nodes and spent just 1 passive each on +10% evasion and +8% armour respectively.

The ranger has MUCH better gear and even at the same level had over 10% lower evade compared to my sub geared marauder who had 10% higher damage reduction... please explain how thats fair or balanced? The only benefit evasion has it that it can evade elemental damage, but as I point out above thats not much comfort for a variety of reasons.

"

Sev wrote:

The first and most major flaw with Dexterity is that it's the only attribute that doesn't grant hitpoints or a hitpoints alternative.

+2% evasion per 10 points dex. Evasion is strictly better EHP than armor point-for-point due to elemental damage from non-spell sources and negating stun.

Stopped reading there. Just more silly complaints from every ranger/duelist out there who wants to be completely untouchable in melee.

lvl 56 claw ranger, flickering through chaos w/ 600 hp, 55% evasion, and 61% block.

With the same amount of hp, I personally think evasion is better than armor. People complaining are often those who take only offensive passives...