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

I agree the melee dex builds needs some form of damage limiter gold talent. or inherent factor in dex stat. Like 300 dex = can suffer at most 30% dmg. 200 dex = 40% suffer dmg at most. 100 dex = 50% suffer dmg at most.

Also what id like to adress is the lack of dmg melee wise for pure dex builds. as str provides +5 hp and +2% melee dmg for each 10 str. Dex only provides accuracy and bow damage and dodge chance as it is now.




Id want dex to have more passive benefits (intrinsic, fancy word! :3). Maybe even have these as gold talents, with drawbacks. Name suggestions are included. Drawbacks is something i didnt think of all too much.

This is my suggestions:

(Gold talent name: Reflex Honing)
For every 5 dex you can only suffer (100 - (.23 * dex)) % of your max hp in max damage.

(Gold talent name: Agile Strikes)
For every 5 dex you do 2% more critical damage bonus (Not critical hit bonus).

(Gold talent name: Nimble Teachings)
For every 10 dex you do 1 % more melee damage.

(Gold talent name: Wind Attuned)
Every 5 dex you get 0.5% extra movement speed.

(Gold talent name: Aggressive Response)
When you dodge you inflict normal weapon damage with a counter attack on 1 nearby foe.

(Gold talent name: Ambidextrous Mastery)
For every 10 dex you attack 2% faster *works only with dual wielding*.



Please feel free to add to this, as dex stat is pretty bland compared to strength right now.





Id love to play a pure dex dual wield ranger or assasin, but as it is now i just cant see myself using only dex builds since strength is so powerful and allround, while dex is... just unimpressive.

"

Planetsurvival wrote:

(Gold talent name: Wind Attuned)
Every 5 dex you get 0.5% extra movement speed.

Neat idea, but that's way too much. It's not hard to get 300 dex - that would be 30% extra movespeed, which far blows away any of the regular passives.

Something like 0.2% per 5 dex seems more balanced, you'll have people probably getting around 10% that way which would make it a nice one to shoot for, but not at the expense of ignoring all the other movement passives.

@Mark
I can appreciate that reasoning, especially because I like the Charge system a great deal. The cumulative bonus still seems rather absurdly strong in comparison to other charges, though maybe it's just hard to compare them because it's the only purely defensive set of charges. It's something I'll just have to think about for a while I guess.

@Lo4F

Well said. You basically summed up another issue perfectly. Because the DEX stat offers no form of hitpoints, DEX-heavy builds are extremely vulnerable to burst damage. Because Evasion offers no form of partial, consistent, or predictable damage mitigation all incoming damage becomes bursty in nature.

You don't know if or when you're going to be hit, but when you do it hurts. If you're hit once, if you're still alive, you've probably been stunned are in immediate danger of being hit again, this time most likely fatally. Your only choice in this situation is to hit a flask and run away and hope there aren't any archers in a 15 yard radius. When you have to hit the flask every time you get hit, your flasks run dry very quickly, and with flasks gone you've essentially lost your only burst heal available to you.

In PoE there are very few burst heals in the game, and that's another thing that ultra squishy DEX characters need more than anybody. Lifeleech and Regeneration are both based on maximum HP, making them unreliable for low-hp DEX characters, Flasks lategame are just too slow (especially if you run Blood Rage) to be useful in a tight spot, unless you run nothing but bubbling/seething life flasks on your belt, which actually isn't a bad idea. The only other burst heals I'm aware of are Health Per Enemy Hit and Health Per Enemy Kill, both of which grant such meager amounts of HP they're simply not going to do you any good past level 30 or so. Even if the heal were more significant, Health per enemy hit won't help you because when you suddenly get 75% of your HP knocked off you're going to need to get the hell away, not stand there attacking like a boss. Health per enemy kill is even less useful for obvious reasons.



@Planetsurvival
While I do feel that Dexterity is in desperate need of buffs in both the offensive and the defensive department, that really seems just excessive. We don't need to turn Dexterity in Better Frenzy. The main reason most of those simply won't work is because as far as I know there aren't any skills that add further intrinsic bonuses to stat points, as doing so would be incredibly powerful. What simply needs to be done is that Dexterity's already existing intrinsic bonuses need to be reworked to perform on the same level as those of other stats. Other than that, I actually feel the dexterity skill tree is quite nicely done overall, just the Dexterity stat itself (and by extension Evasion and Accuracy) needs to be improved. That's just my opinion, anyway.

"

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.

Thats simply not true. Despite the fact that dex gives base evasion for a start most rangers avoid standard dex nodes in favour of damage or utility nodes so they never pick up as many as a strength based character. This in part is due to what Sev is saying, that Dex basically has 1 proper use compared to Int and Str which have 2.

Also taking the same levels of armour VS evasion your damage reduction will always be higher. Its actually much EASIER to gain armour than evasion by some distance.

I assume originally this was done because dex adds directly to it and perhaps it was wrongly assumed it would balance out if they made it harder to get evasion than damage reduction. The reality is my ranger has 40% evade, if she takes iron reflexes then she has nearly 60% damage reduction (based on identical numbers)

Lastly damage reduction armour has higher base numbers than evade gear and armour mods are far more common.

"

Mark_GGG wrote:

The average monster damage estimation is accurate for a standard hit from a default attack of a monster of that level. I don't know if it accounts for critical strikes, I'm certain it doesn't account for any of the things I mentioned in 4) in my post.

Cheers for clearing some things up Mark. Just to clarify, im not saying Evasion is utterly worthless or that Damage reduction is overpowered. In truth damage reduction works about right from my experience playing my marauder. But evasion is far to fragile atm. I get that its supposed to be more fragile but currently its benefits are seriously outweighed by its negatives.

To take what you said in your long post on point 4 as an example. You say its difficult to estimate DR cause of situational random modifiers like monster auras etc. Surely that equally true with Evasion (albeit to a lesser degree)?

Heres the thing, sure DR is not always going to perform to its optimal level but the way it works is that at the start of a fight (any fight) generally speaking your going to be able to gauge within a second or two roughly how capable of going toe-to-toe with that monster group you are. The way it defends you is consistent if not throughout a level then most certainly throughout a fight , it then makes it quite easy to manage your health and stay safe. Add to this that generally armour users are strength based and have a lot of health and you have a very steady if not fantastic form of defense, its super reliable, you know that your not suddenly going to take massive damage spikes from something after its hit you once or twice.

With evade not only are you generally on lower health totals (so naturally more fragile/squishy) but also the way evade works means that in a given fight you can go from taking zero damage to being killed in a split second without any chance to react of plan against it. It kind of removes player skill OR forces you to play very methodically and slowly, which seems at odds with a dex based class to me. And thats not accounting for the fact that +accuracy modifiers on magic/rare monsters in ruthless and above are very common. Add to that the fact that your main nemesis as a ranger (bow user) is other monster bow users. Their accuracy is already seemedly higher than equivalent melee mobs and when they get +Acc and +dam mods they become utterly deadly, to the point where you can be more or less stun locked as soon as they appear in range at higher levels. Other ranged creatures arent so bad as you can use your enhance mobility to avoid it, but projectiles are so fast its difficult to dodge them manually if you get say 3 or 4 archers shooting you.

All that said I am aware this is still beta and for all I know the whole of act 3 could be elemental damage heavy and therefor actually favour evasion builds, there could be mods (both monster and player/gear) in the pipeline which will level the playing field. But currently evasion feels very weak compared to damage reduction. I played two charcters to level 45 each using purely those two armour types (marauder and ranger) and the marauder was far an away the better character in terms of survivability even with substandard gear compared to the ranger. Playing him felt predictable (in a good way) and tactical, playing the ranger at what is now level 52 on merciless feels a bit like playing russian roulette!!

"

Sev wrote:

@Mark
I can appreciate that reasoning, especially because I like the Charge system a great deal. The cumulative bonus still seems rather absurdly strong in comparison to other charges, though maybe it's just hard to compare them because it's the only purely defensive set of charges. It's something I'll just have to think about for a while I guess.

@Lo4F

Well said. You basically summed up another issue perfectly. Because the DEX stat offers no form of hitpoints, DEX-heavy builds are extremely vulnerable to burst damage. Because Evasion offers no form of partial, consistent, or predictable damage mitigation all incoming damage becomes bursty in nature.

You don't know if or when you're going to be hit, but when you do it hurts. If you're hit once, if you're still alive, you've probably been stunned are in immediate danger of being hit again, this time most likely fatally. Your only choice in this situation is to hit a flask and run away and hope there aren't any archers in a 15 yard radius. When you have to hit the flask every time you get hit, your flasks run dry very quickly, and with flasks gone you've essentially lost your only burst heal available to you.

In PoE there are very few burst heals in the game, and that's another thing that ultra squishy DEX characters need more than anybody. Lifeleech and Regeneration are both based on maximum HP, making them unreliable for low-hp DEX characters, Flasks lategame are just too slow (especially if you run Blood Rage) to be useful in a tight spot, unless you run nothing but bubbling/seething life flasks on your belt, which actually isn't a bad idea. The only other burst heals I'm aware of are Health Per Enemy Hit and Health Per Enemy Kill, both of which grant such meager amounts of HP they're simply not going to do you any good past level 30 or so. Even if the heal were more significant, Health per enemy hit won't help you because when you suddenly get 75% of your HP knocked off you're going to need to get the hell away, not stand there attacking like a boss. Health per enemy kill is even less useful for obvious reasons.



@Planetsurvival
While I do feel that Dexterity is in desperate need of buffs in both the offensive and the defensive department, that really seems just excessive. We don't need to turn Dexterity in Better Frenzy. The main reason most of those simply won't work is because as far as I know there aren't any skills that add further intrinsic bonuses to stat points, as doing so would be incredibly powerful. What simply needs to be done is that Dexterity's already existing intrinsic bonuses need to be reworked to perform on the same level as those of other stats. Other than that, I actually feel the dexterity skill tree is quite nicely done overall, just the Dexterity stat itself (and by extension Evasion and Accuracy) needs to be improved. That's just my opinion, anyway.

I read your post. My Idea of a dex fighter is someone who uses precision attacks that hits hard with poison/enchantments/bleeding/Crippling strikes/combo attacks (like in D2 assasin) in various ways. Also skilled in alchemy and to avoid near death even when hit by a freight train of a blow and after said hit roll out of harms way and recover with a dex skill called "Improvised Potion" or something like that.
Maybe even "Necrotic Imbuement: steals 5% of damage inflicted with weapons as life, but uses mana for each strike."

All in all i want dex fighters to be more then I can dodge/hit precisely/use 2 poison skills/frenzy.
Now they added Lightning strikes which is a good step on the way, but dex based combat needs more.... intelligent skills to use.
To be blunt i want a blend of the assasin from Diablo 2/Titanquest/Dungeons and Dragons as dex fighter based ideas.

"

Planetsurvival wrote:

...to avoid near death even when hit by a freight train of a blow and after said hit roll out of harms way and recover

I like this direction for high dex (evasion) characters. It reminds me of a couple old favorite defensive talents from WoW:

Ardent Defender
Cheat Death

Introducing a periodic 'saving grace' type keystone and leaving the current dexterity/evasion mechanics unchanged would be interesting. Trying to think of a substantial negative modifier that might balance it.

"

Lo4f wrote:

"

Planetsurvival wrote:

...to avoid near death even when hit by a freight train of a blow and after said hit roll out of harms way and recover

I like this direction for high dex (evasion) characters. It reminds me of a couple old favorite defensive talents from WoW:

Ardent Defender

Spoiler

Any damage that takes the paladin below 35% health is reduced. This reduction applies only to the portion that pushes the paladin below 35% health (example: a paladin at 50% health takes a 40% hit; the first 15% hits as normal while the next 25% is reduced). In addition, once every 2 minutes an attack that would have killed the paladin will fail to kill, and instead heal the paladin for up to 10/20/30% of maximum health depending on the paladin's defense rating (example: a paladin with defense equal to only 5 times his or her level will receive no healing from the talent, while a paladin who is immune to critical strikes from boss creatures through defense will receive the maximum amount).

Cheat Death

Spoiler

You have a 33/66/100% chance that an attack which would otherwise kill you will instead reduce your health to 10% of your maximum health. In addition, all damage taken will be reduced by up to 90% for 3 sec (modified by resilience). This cannot occur more than once per minute.

Introducing a periodic 'saving grace' type keystone and leaving the current dexterity/evasion mechanics unchanged would be interesting. Trying to think of a substantial negative modifier that might balance it.

The idea is that dex based classes like you said should have a "saving grace" gold talent. But not without a quirk naturally. This is to alleviate the Harder modes and the fact that dex builds has so low hp and if they get hit they die really fast.

"Emergency Intuition": every 30 s, get a free emergency intuition charge that allows for a dodge roll 8 meters back and take no/limited damage if enemy damage would kill the player outright. But suffer hp and mana regen penalty due to the superhuman effort involved when this happens for 10 s. Can only hold 1 charge of emergency intuition at most.

Right now im pretty bored with my assasin, all i do is spam vipersting and run away. as my viper sting does 37 chaos dmg/1 s/1 application. And the melee build with lightning shield + lightning strike feels like a templar kinda, not an assasin or dualwield ranger style of fighting.

Just pooling some info from other threads:

Good things about armor:
Strength related, so you also end up with free health.
Endurance charges in the Str area
Reliable
Greater net reduction than evasion, according to character sheet (which is less accurate for DR than Eva)

Bad things about armor:
Weak vs very high damage, particularly crits
Doesn't stop elemental damage

Good things about evasion:
Stops elemental attacks
Can get lucky
Compounds with Dex

Bad things about evasion:
Low base health, causes more stuns
Non reliable
Large spikes of damage - highly sub-optimal for flasks and life leech scenarios

------------------
And the key worries on each:
The armor/health synergy is VERY strong.
Evasion doesn't function well with the flask system (heals over time) or the similar life leech. Huge drawback.
A small bad string on your evasion can get you killed, especially if you get a tiny bit of lag.
Armor's weakness to elemental damage is minimal because of how prevalent elemental resist is.

---------------------
{MATH}
Armor formula:
reduction = armour / (armour + 20*damage)
Capped at 75%

Typical extreme tank build gets 4000 armor. Typical Chaos mob hits for 150. Crits for 300. Blue/Yellow/Aura can spike it higher (I'll double it here). 150 = white mob hit. 300 = white mob crit, or special mob hit. 600 = special mob crit. Assuming that all mobs have 5% to crit (the ones with more don't do double damage base unless you stack auras), and white mobs account for 75% of the mobs in Chaos:

(71.25% of mobs) 4000 armor vs 150 damage = 57% reduction
(27.5% of mobs) 4000 armor vs 300 damage = 40% reduction
(1.25% of mobs) 4000 armor vs 600 damage = 25% reduction

Now, lets *assume* that health from Str is equally powerful with the increased Evasion from Dex. Personally I am 100% certain that HP > Evasion, and if anyone out there thinks that the Evasion is superior, you're welcome to do the proof + math for such a situation.
So with those equal, we can say that 4000 armor and 4000 evasion are equally easy to reach (your evasion from Dex is negated by the Health that the 4000 armor example has).

I did my best to take the Evasion/Accuracy formula and reverse engineer mob accuracy at level 60, which provides the following Evasion values (4000 being the important one):

1000 Evasion Rating = 24.3% evade
2000 Evasion Rating = 35.8% evade
3000 Evasion Rating = 43.6% evade
4000 Evasion Rating = 49.3% evade

So, based on the armor chart up above, 4000 armor is greater than 4000 evasion against the bulk of mobs (71.25% of the time), a bit worst against the heavy hits (27.5%), and far worse against the heaviest hits (1.25%).
If you take the aggregate of the mitigation armor is providing, you get an average mitigation of 51.93%.
{/MATH}

Honestly, I don't terribly like the idea of a cooldown-based defensive ability. Hence why I suggested it function more like the shield, charged specifically while running or not attacking, and having a short charge cooldown after you yourself attack instead of after being attacked. Obviously that's a major advantage over the Energy Shield, so the disadvantages would be that it's ineffective against Spell Damage, Reflected damage via auras, and wouldn't be capable of the same capacity as the Energy Shield. (This one may be a bit tricky to balance, since energy shield is essentially a buffer vs damage while ideally Evasion would be drained by Accuracy Rating, and avoid damage entirely in order to preserve it's advantage over strong/elemental melee attacks.)

Essentially this would mean that DEX classes have to make themselves more vulnerable when they attack, (not entirely, whatever amount of evasion you have still exists, it simply won't be regenerating as you get attacked like it would while you're running)meaning you won't have an issue with 'dodge tanks'. By having Evasion regenerate via movement (or possibly just not attacking) it emphasizes mobility (who would have thought) and by extension, positioning. DEX-based melee usually need to shift position every couple of seconds to keep from being overwhelmed, and Archers naturally have to never let anything get near them, both of these behaviors would be legitimately encouraged by a game mechanic in their favor instead of simple necessity, and also provides a buffer against things like being ripped apart by a handful of archers just trying to get close or picked off while trying to get to safety at low health.

The problem with a long cooldown-based ability is when it gets blown you just end up sitting around waiting for it to come back, which is counterproductive to the hack 'n slash genre. It's also incredibly arbitrary, and only becomes a resource you have among the numerous resources you already have. Defense against instant, unfair death is something that a character should be able to specifically prepare and have ready at all times. Chance-based evasion doesn't provide that, because you can never know if you're going to get hit or not, player skill is entirely removed from the equation. One thing this game has been really good about is encouraging specific playstyles with the different abilities, and simply having an ability with a set, lengthy cooldown encourages nothing but waiting.

That and having a hard-coded dodge roll that triggers on it's own and throws you in a specific direction can be very irritating to the player and potentially get them killed regardless.

The best way I can think of for solving the Dexterity's hp and healing issue (that fits into the game style) is apply an evasion gauge/charge-style system (it's essentially the same thing you guys suggested but doesn't only work on fatal attacks and replenishes differently.) and maybe to buff instant 'hp per enemy hit' effects at higher levels to be more substantial and possibly replace Blood Rage's attack speed at low HP (something DEX characters never take advantage of because they never, ever want to be low HP) with substantially increased lifeleech speed/HP per enemy hit at low HP. (Something that could well save their lives.)

Also seen a proposed idea (since my post) to simply make Evasion more effective vs crits. Though this would be a very small bonus, it would still help.