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

Alright, thanks for clearing that up Mark. I'm glad that GGG has their eyes on this issue.

And I do acknowledge that Evasion may *technically* mitigate more damage than Armor, as it should, because we're talking about a risky defense vs a consistent one.

However, I think there are a few factors that need to be addressed. First of all, it's not ONLY about Armor vs Evasion, but rather Armor + HP vs Evasion. STR characters aren't ultra frail characters that suddenly become ultra tanky once they suit up in Armor. As they pump their Strength to get their core skills they naturally gain significant amounts of health. There is no monster in the game that can bypass or negate the extra HP STR-centric builds grant. Furthermore, because the vast majority of HP-giving passives (the few in the DEX tree in particular) give %-based bonuses that scale off STR, STR-based characters gain the greatest benefit with the least investment, when it's DEX-based characters that need HP more than anybody.

The second factor nobody has addressed is Endurance. STR builds gain the easiest access to Endurance charges and skills in the game. This makes sense and normally I wouldn't make a big deal about it, but it's the mechanics of Endurance that I find troubling enough that I need to bring them up specifically.

Endurance Charges as reflected on the character screen do not add a bonus to armor, rather, it adds 5% to your Damage Reduction regardless of whether you have 10% Damage Reduction or 70%. I may be mistaken, but this carries the implication that Endurance's DR% increase is calculated entirely separately from Armor's formula, and in fact is simply an additive +5% bonus to contribute to reaching the 75% DR% cap. This is a very big issue. This means that Endurance Charges, unlike Armor, do NOT scale linearly, and are NOT weak against strong attacks. IF this is the case then the entire point of STR classes being weak against strong attacks is COMPLETELY out the window. You can have 0 armor and 8 endurance charges and you'll be mitigating 40% of all incoming physical damage, be they melee or projectiles or for 100 or 1000 damage.

Furthermore, Endurance charges add Elemental Resistance AND reduces Critical Damage on top of that! One skill that every single STR build has easy access to completely negates not only one, but ALL THREE of their 'weaknesses'. (I use that term sarcastically, because HP is the best defense against crits and magic in the game, and STR has the most of it.) I understand that every class has charges and that charges are meant to be incredibly powerful, but this is just far too strong, it is literally erasing the only weaknesses of an already incredibly strong class that can easily afford to invest in them because their damage scales up with and without damage nodes.

Once again, this doesn't have a lot to do with Evasion or Armor specifically, and I could be mistaken about the Damage Reduction part, but rather I thought I'd mention it because it has a lot to do with the game's balance as a whole. Just for reference though, the Evasion bonus from Frenzy is a bonus to Evasion Rating, unlike Endurance, and so is subject to Evasion's weaknesses and diminishing returns just like everything else.

After producing that huge rant I actually forgot what I was going to talk about afterward. I'll just cut it short here and do some chaos to refresh my memory, balance is something I could rant about all day.

Why is the attack speed for frenzy charges additive while the damage reduction for endurance charges is a calculation separate from armor or resistance?

There is no mystery that armor will make your character more survivable than evasion. Test Acrobatics vs. Iron Reflexes. I know its tired advice from someone clearly biased, but I didn't get that bias from theorycrafting and EHP equations. My conclusions were drawn from a dual-wield ranger in 0.9.5.

The main disadvantage to evasion is the lack of synergy with health regeneration, life leech, life on hit, and the highest healing flasks. The gameplay consequence of a high evasion build (acrobatics) is that you end up overhealing when evasion works, and spamming instant flasks when it fails. The stress level is very high.

Alternatively, Armor will reduce a portion of each hit and benefit from health regeneration, life leech, life on hit, and saturated/sapping health flasks at all times. In practice a high armor build (iron reflexes) results in a much more predictable and stable experience- as you constantly benefit from the strongest healing sources when armor is working. Stress level is mild to moderate.

So you think armor fails at elemental damage and evasion is better? Get your resists maxed. With low resists a high evasion character will still take the full physical and elemental damage when attacks land. There goes 1/3 of your HP in one shot. Same low resists on a high armor character would yield even worse results. I want to have high resists for spell damage monsters anyway, so this is not a weakness of armor or strength of evasion to me.

Evasion works better against hard hitting monsters. The equations prove this, not much room for theory debate.

However, the majority of monsters are not rare-heavy hitters, and I found armor was a better overall choice for survivability. It's much less stressful worrying on the few heavy hitter occasions with iron reflexes, than it was nearly dying multiple times every map as acrobatics (just clearing trash between rares).

I know there are other factors I didn't account for, but from my experience strictly testing evasion vs. armor there was no doubt in my mind that armor was the superior defensive mechanism of the two for overall gameplay.

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Lo4f wrote:

Stuff.

I think you're exaggerating the instances of flask overhealing and the like. My experience w/ evasion in crowds has been much more favorable, so the point is moot and probably more a matter of how panicky you are as a player.

Also, if you're basing your experiences on armor and evasion off a character with and without the Iron Reflexes keystone, then having better survivability with the keystone isn't indicative of anything.

It's like taking a keystone that converts all evasion to energy shield and claiming that energy shield is better than evasion because you suddenly have 3000 es and can't be killed.

Keystones are meant to improve your build. Iron Reflexes does so by turning X evasion into X armor. X armor is much harder to obtain than X evasion because evasion is boosted by dex, so it's naturally more effective at protecting you.

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RabidRabbit wrote:

Keystones are meant to improve your build. Iron Reflexes does so by turning X evasion into X armor. X armor is much harder to obtain than X evasion because evasion is boosted by dex, so it's naturally more effective at protecting you.

If you are going to include dex in the comparison you need to include str aswell.

Evasion should not be weaker than armor just because you get evasion from dex. The whole idea of that is pointless just makes dex seem even worse.

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Sickness wrote:

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RabidRabbit wrote:

Keystones are meant to improve your build. Iron Reflexes does so by turning X evasion into X armor. X armor is much harder to obtain than X evasion because evasion is boosted by dex, so it's naturally more effective at protecting you.

If you are going to include dex in the comparison you need to include str aswell.

Evasion should not be weaker than armor just because you get evasion from dex. The whole idea of that is pointless just makes dex seem even worse.

If a level 60 armor user has 2000 armor, and a lvl 60 evasion user has 3000 evasion from using the same tier of gear, why shouldn't we be comparing 2000 armor and 3000 evasion on equal terms?

3000 evasion is weaker than 3000 armor; both are weaker than 3000 energy shield. Comparing them point-for-point is silly.

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RabidRabbit wrote:

If a level 60 armor user has 2000 armor, and a lvl 60 evasion user has 3000 evasion from using the same tier of gear, why shouldn't we be comparing 2000 armor and 3000 evasion on equal terms?

3000 evasion is weaker than 3000 armor; both are weaker than 3000 energy shield. Comparing them point-for-point is silly.

They are not on equal terms if you ignore the HP from strength but include the evasion from dex.

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RabidRabbit wrote:

3000 evasion is weaker than 3000 armor; both are weaker than 3000 energy shield. Comparing them point-for-point is silly.

In general, evasion and armor ratings can be considered equal in terms of overall damage reduction. It's not exact, but fairly close. This has been the case since 0.9.3 (and is even a patch note from that version).

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Damage is much, much harder to estimate accurately, and as such the estimate of damage reduction is more likely to be off.

In addition to the average damage reduction, some games also show the damage reduction for the last hit you took (along with the name of the mob who hit you). This would be a 100% accurate figure. Have you guys considered that?

"Armor Reduction on Last Hit: 54% (Sand Spitter)"