Dexterity, We Have a Problem.

It's not so much OCD, but the sort of research one should do when considering a suggested solution. The issue I see with this idea is that it is more complex on the surface, but again it really equates to making evasion work the same as armor.

Armor mitigates damage per hit, every hit.

Energy shield provides extra points, which regenerate via a different mechanic, to soak up a certain amount of damage over time entirely.

Evasion currently causes you to get hit less but when your hit you take a lot more damage, thus concentrating damage over time into huge, unhealthy, clumps.

Your solution is to add a look up table of innate armor values per unit of evasion. Only now you also have the potential for a full miss added into things. Also your new armor type doesn't require any movement penalty.

For instance in your example you have base armor for high evasion listed at about a 20% reduction in damage on hits. This is only 10% less armor mitigation than my high armor character gets!

This would make evasion, at heart, a vastly improved form of armor, and nobody smart would take straight armor anymore unless it also was significantly buffed.

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JohnChance wrote:

Your solution is to add a look up table of innate armor values per unit of evasion. Only now you also have the potential for a full miss added into things. Also your new armor type doesn't require any movement penalty.

First, it's not a new armor type. It's still just evasion, it still uses all the existing systems in the game without adding any new ones. The accuracy/evasion relationship stays the same.

I don't like viewing glancing blows/partial evasion as "mitigation". It's not mitigation, but a chance to avoid damage. As a side effect of altering the formula to avoid PART of the damage (rather than all or none), at really high evasion you can't take full damage anymore.

I suppose as a result it would begin to "feel" like actual mitigation, although it'd still be a bit less reliable.

Most random number generators perform considerably more operations than this would require, so the roll on evasion alone should take more CPU than the algorithm to apply evasion.

Side note: you can't improve accuracy without making evasion worse. I think an improvement to evasion that doesn't hurt accuracy is the best we can hope for.

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JohnChance wrote:

I slightly nerf armor mitigation, and suddenly strength characters are taking more damage, and the duelist takes a huge nerf as he uses both armor and evasion.

Ok stop here for a second. First, armoured characters would hypothetically still be taking the same exact damage. The nerf to armour comes in the form of armour penetration, but this would also be accompanied by a complete nerf to damage output from enemies. That results in the two being balanced out. Armour takes the same amount of damage from enemies, Evasion characters take less due to the nerf to mob damage. Everybody wins!

...except for the mobs, of course! ;)

Also regarding Armour/Evasion hybrid pieces, I believe this armor type to be the worst in the game. It will never provide enough armour as a pure armour piece, or enough evasion to matter. IR kind of acts as a band-aid for this, but then it also makes pure evasion armor the best alternative.

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JohnChance wrote:

Meanwhile nothing has really changed for the Ranger. Pure evasion still is awesome 95% of the time, but 5% of the time high damage kills you instantly at higher levels.

Incorrect, see my comment above. You must have misunderstood what I meant about pairing the nerf to armour with the nerf to damage from mobs, so really survivability changes for the Ranger if they choose to pick pure evasion specs. Armour isn't affected by this proposed change, however every other type experiences an increase in survivability.

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JohnChance wrote:

But a nerf to damage is a huge buff to life recovery, and to energy shield, both of which now have to be nerfed to keep things balanced.

Good point, I didn't even think of this! It would be interesting to see how GGG would handle this if they decide to take this route. I would think that nothing would change on this front, however.

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JohnChance wrote:

So we keep nerfing, and suddenly we reach the same point we are at now. Evasion is certainly balanced right now. The ranger takes about the same damage, as a percentage of life, that everyone else does.

This wouldn't result in a full circle...If you nerf damage outputon mobs then player survivability mechanics would still be more effective. Armour would remain the same because of armour penetration, evasion would then be more viable because they wouldn't completely explode from that 5% (very unlikely that many people would ever be this high on evasion.) Energy shield characters would also experience a small buff to survivability.

The one thing that may need to also be reduced would be the passive nodes that grant % Energy Shield.

I think that these two alternatives work the most effectively:

-giving evasion glancing blows

-slightly nerfing armour(pure damage reduction is still the best means of defense in any case in my opinion) and reducing the amount of % energy shield gained from passives.

Clearly evasion is below the other two forms of survival. The reasoning behind this is that while the chance to completely negate an attack's effects is a powerful thing, its random nature completely counteracts the effectiveness of this trait. Always taking significantly less damage and/or having a protective extra layer of health over your health pool will always trump a percent chance to take no damage.

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AdmiralAardvarke wrote:

I suggest making Dex improve armor and attackspeed, so the benefits are more consistent and reliable.

I like the aspect of reliability here, but the second Dex starts doing armour or attack speed, things get ridiculously out of hand and out of character.

My apologies for taking so long to respond to these posts. I'll be reading the rest of this thread now...

Increasing critical chance with dexterity sounds fair to me. +2% increased critical chance per 5 dexterity? Sure, won't be much, but would maybe bring the stat up to par with Str and Int. For 300 dex you'd get 120% increased critical chance, which would be a flat +5-7% crit chance on most weapons/spells. I'd be nice for critical-strike based builds and would make dexterity a decent investment for spell-based builds as well.

Yomicky,

I think your misunderstanding. If you nerf the damage output you also have to nerf health and health regeneration, which makes each point of damage do the SAME real amount of damage when we are talking percentages.

If health from strength is too low then each point of damage is a greater percentage of the total health your character can get. If health regeneration from something like trolls blood and golems blood is too high (40% regen right now based on total health value) then the lowered damage might as well not exist.

So you have to nerf both health and health regen, which means your evasion character is getting hit for the same obscene PERCENTAGE of his health that we were dealing with before.

Evasion is currently balanced very well around the idea that all characters should take, and have to deal with, the same amount of damage over time. By that reasoning the huge clumps of damage taken by the duelist are roughly equivalent to the constant damage taken by the marauder.

Nerfing damage output, then nerfing health, and with it almost automatically nerfing life regeneration AUTOMATICALLY nerfs evasion as well, as a duelist with lower health can't take as much damage from hits as he currently is taking, which negates your original nerf to damage.

It's a full circle loop which at best changes nothing. At worst something gets missed and energy shield becomes more powerful by far, or health is left alone and health regen in the armor part of the tree suddenly is healing more damage than your taking making you invincible.

John,

I realize that if you nerf damage and health then it would result in a balance to where you're dealing the same real proportional damage.

I would not nerf health.

I'm suggesting lowering damage and adding in an Armour Penetration mechanic so that armour users still will take the same real amount of damage. Meanwhile, since health wasn't nerfed and damage was, other builds like evasion builds would be taking less proportional damage.

Solves the problem of Armour being vastly superior to other means of survivability by lessening the burst effect for Evasion users when they get unlucky. Simultaneously armour remains proportionally untouched except in cases when a mob doesn't have Armour Pen.

On the offensive front of Dexterity, I still stand that Dex should add to Accuracy but that Accuracy rating should not be required to be so high in order to maintain a decent chance to hit.

Accuracy should then also apply a small bonus to crit chance (makes sense, if you know how to hit someone you should know where to hit in order to do more damage.)

If you don't nerf health the health regen becomes vastly overpowered, sort of like a super energy shield that regenerates even during combat. My character Two Bears has 40% passive health regeneration per second, which goes up significantly when he throws down a regeneration totem. In your game world he'd be invincible.

I also disagree with the idea that armor is overly powerful. My armor using characters are about on par with my energy shield using characters from what I've seen dabbling in massive alt-itis. Only evasion seems to have any problems and that isn't with it's balance but with how the basic mechanic actually works.

Armor spreads out damage over time through mitigation. You take 30-50% less damage per hit, but your always getting hit, so over time your able to handle a lot more incoming hits.

Energy shield acts like a massive layer of extra health over the top of your real health points, and it regenerates as extremely fast speeds any time your not actively getting hit for even a few seconds. So again you can take a lot more hits, you've just got to dodge and kite a bit to let energy shield regenerate, it's pretty much a perfect armor type for a caster or other ranged character.

Evasion works the opposite way of armor, it stops you from getting hit at all 95% of the time, but when you do get hit you take full damage right to your health, and those massive blows come all at once, concentrating what little damage you get into a messy clump that is hard to deal with.

Lowering damage taken and leaving health alone would indeed help evasion, but only because it becomes easier to deal with clumped damage. You could just as easily say that the problem would be solved by adding more +health nodes to the dexterity segment of the tree.

Either way it's a band aid fix that causes more problems than it solves. To really make it work the way your thinking then you'd need to nerf armor, nerf energy shield, nerf health regeneration, nerf shields, and probably nerf things I simply can't think of off the top of my head.

Not to fix the problem, but merely to lessen it. Especially in PVP you are going to see high DPS, high accuracy, characters who will eat your bandaged evasion character for breakfast.

Just throwing my 2cents in.

Dexterity compared to Strength and Intelligence just seems weak for many of the reasons mentioned. E.g., evasion gets capped regardless and it only takes 1 hit on a higher level of difficulty to leave you dead. This is why my Ranger utilizes Iron Reflexes with completely Dex armor.

I would rather see something more useful such as increased attack speed or even just speed. With accuracy stats stacking on top of accuracy nodes, it's overkill when it caps out in the end.

On a separate note, I believe the Ranger tree is very unorganized and way too many little dex nodes that always separate a good packet, forcing you to waste even more passive skill points on dexterity. Very few packets are NOT surrounded by at least 1 dex node, and compared to the other classes, it's a poor design.

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JohnChance wrote:

A cap at a percentage of life would be the same as not being able to be killed at all. Eventually you'd have people running around endlessly at 1 health point laughing at any enemy they saw.

That's why I said 'total' and not 'current' life. If I have 100/100 hp and my cap is at 90% of total life, then the most damage a single hit can deal is 90. If I get hit once, I need to recover 81 hp before I get hit again, or I die, but a hit that would deal 200000000 damage will still only deal 90 so it has to hit me at least twice to kill me.

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We also have to remember that not getting hit via evasion has synergy with both other armor types WAY out of proportion to the way it works alone.

My suggestion has nothing to do with the core 'avoid attacks' mechanic of evasion, so I'm not sure this is relevant. Rebalancing evasion to make my idea a core part of it would actually solve this problem very simply:

* If you're mixing evasion with armor, you're already mitigating the damage on each attack. The cap on each individual damage source would be anti-synergy with armor. The cap would only kick in if your armor mitigation was insufficient to reduce the incoming damage below that cap, and the cap would be somewhere in the 90-100% range unless you stack a *lot* of evasion.

* Make the cap only take effect if the damage source will be dealt to hp and not ES, to avoid ES/evasion becoming OP. Once again, anti-synergy between my new mechanic and ES.

In both cases, the chance to avoid damage completely still makes mixing some evasion with armor or ES valuable, but my new mechanic doesn't do anything at all to help people who mix defensive types - it's only particularly useful for pure evasion builds as an alternative approach to mitigating damage spikes.

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If I get hit less than my energy shield regenerates more often during battle, which means that I can take more hits for the same amount of energy shield.

If I take less hits then there is less damage for armor to mitigate, and my health regeneration or flask use can keep up with each bit of damage I take more easily.

My suggested solution (on a previous page) may or may not be the answer, but any solution the will work has to take both of these factors into account.

Evasion isn't simply broken, it's almost impossible to balance because it's very easy to knock it either into the realm of invincibility or uselessness, and it's easy to amplify the effect it has on other armor types, making them too broken.

All of that is more true now than it would be with my idea. Adding this new cap mechanism would be a buff to evasion, and could be matched by nerfing the chance to evade, or modifying it with another new mechanic such as yours.

I haven't tried a pure evasion build past early Cruel or so, because I only play HC and I'm not quite that masochistic, but it seems like this damage cap mechanic would allow pure evasion, low hp builds to work in a satisfying way, being viable but still vulnerable, and removing the annoyance of oneshot kills while preserving the feeling that pure evasion is a risky, demanding play style.