Dexterity, We Have a Problem.

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Grundnir wrote:

For that matter, the hybrids should also be effective in their own rights, but I'm currently of the opinion that armor hybrids are effectively worthless due to the way armor functions at lower values. When you hit merciless difficulty as an armor/evasion hybrid, your armor practically doesn't exist due to how higher damage hits act as a mode of armor penetration. You'd be better off going full evasion, but even then only partially so.

This has been brought up before also... although I've not seen an analysis of damage over time for hybrids vs. pure with typical gear.

Assuming that you take more damage with a hybrid from a hit due to lower armor and get hit more often than a pure evasion... you need more hp than a pure str to survive big hits, and less hp than a pure evasion. Yet as a hybrid you are splitting that aspect as well, so you will probably have lower hp too. For this you should be able to deal substantially more damage, but this isn't the case either.

To some degree this type of analysis is inaccurate, because it lacks data on actual damage over time and damage variance... theoretically the hybrid should take lower damage over time, but slightly higher variance. Coupling this eh, inconvenient trade-off with the fact you probably have lower hp... they should deal more damage... however I don't think any particular build is meant to deal more damage since skills are largely universal... and here we hit a dead-end of potential balance fixes... so in order to fix the situation you have to back up with offering higher health or a better overall trade-off when choosing hybrid over pure.

In either case, perhaps this hybrid analysis is wrong, but it's something I've thought about.

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zeto wrote:

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Grundnir wrote:

For that matter, the hybrids should also be effective in their own rights, but I'm currently of the opinion that armor hybrids are effectively worthless due to the way armor functions at lower values. When you hit merciless difficulty as an armor/evasion hybrid, your armor practically doesn't exist due to how higher damage hits act as a mode of armor penetration. You'd be better off going full evasion, but even then only partially so.

This has been brought up before also... although I've not seen an analysis of damage over time for hybrids vs. pure with typical gear.

Assuming that you take more damage with a hybrid from a hit due to lower armor and get hit more often than a pure evasion... you need more hp than a pure str to survive big hits, and less hp than a pure evasion. Yet as a hybrid you are splitting that aspect as well, so you will probably have lower hp too. For this you should be able to deal substantially more damage, but this isn't the case either.

To some degree this type of analysis is inaccurate, because it lacks data on actual damage over time and damage variance... theoretically the hybrid should take lower damage over time, but slightly higher variance. Coupling this eh, inconvenient trade-off with the fact you probably have lower hp... they should deal more damage... however I don't think any particular build is meant to deal more damage since skills are largely universal... and here we hit a dead-end of potential balance fixes... so in order to fix the situation you have to back up with offering higher health or a better overall trade-off when choosing hybrid over pure.

In either case, perhaps this hybrid analysis is wrong, but it's something I've thought about.

I've actually been leveling a slew of characters in an effort to gain some experience first hand in the different armor types and attain some perspective on them. It's probably more then is appropriate to do in this thread, but I'll give a brief breakdown of what I've found so far.

The characters I have thus far are as follows:
Armor/Energy Shield 1h/Shield Templar - Level 50
Armor/Energy Shield Staff Templar - Level 37
Armor/Evasion 1h/Shield Ranger - Level 58
Pure Evasion 1h/Shield Ranger - Level 29
Evasion/Energy Shield 1h/Shield Shadow - Level 34

As I stated previously, Armor hybrids seem the least useful. Due to higher damaging single hits acting as a form of armor penetration, later difficulty levels such as Merciless cause them to be as paper. EVERYTHING in merciless hits decently hard, and bosses especially so. This makes an already low mitigation value even less, and my only way to compensate on my Armor/Evasion Ranger was to begin focusing on pure health to counteract the effects.

In my (admittedly incomplete) analysis, armor/evasion feels like the weakest of the three hybrids for three reasons.
1) The armor mitigation analysis I've stated above
2) There are no Armor/Evasion hybrid nodes in the passive tree like what exist for Armor/Energy Shield (Body and Soul in the Templar area) and Evasion/Energy Shield (Nullification in the Shadow area). This seems like a strange oversight given the existence of the other two.
3) There is no direct synergy between Armor and Evasion like there are between the other two hybrid types. Armor and Energy Shield synergize due to the fact that Armor mitigates damage taken by your Energy Shield. Energy Shield and Evasion synergize due to the ability for Energy Shield to regenerate while you are not taking damage. This can be a little sketchier due to the delay in ES regeneration, but this can be lowered by 140% now due to the inclusion of the Nullification node, such that it is somewhat viable.

I would even go so far as to say that Armor/Evasion is weaker then pure Evasion due to how Armor becomes less useful the higher you get in difficulty. Having to split your efforts between three defensive types stretches your passive points too thinly. You'd be better off going pure Evasion + Health.

I've yet to make a determination on whether I feel Armor/Energy Shield is better or worse then Evasion/Energy Shield, but I'm inclined to believe that Evasion/Energy Shield will come out on top due to how armor functions late game.

Yeah, my understanding is that armor is more effective on lighter hits, and evasion on harder hits.

So with a hybrid you have less armor than a pure str, so you will get hit harder by lighter hits, and your evasion is lower than pure evasion so you will get hit more often by hard hits, that won't be mitigated as much, since they are hard hits.

Seems like a losing combination.

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aurisacra wrote:

Accuracy should have an inherent +%critical as opposed to contriving some sort of "headshot" mechanic.

I agree in the sense that it should be made more offensively powerful, but this seems a little lazy and, in a game like this, the medium damage road will always prevail. Having steady, reliably powerful hits from Strength as opposed to small hits with an unstable amount of big ones in the middle will always do more damage. This 'Headshot' feature is nice because it makes your bigger hits more frequent, while not making them quite as huge as crits can easily get. It balances while adding to Dex.

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Torin wrote:

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Mortal321 wrote:

Isn`t int currently related to crit? Not directly but weapons with more crit chance usually require int to be used.

It is, but it is a badly designed as it is.
Str should be about adding more damage.
Dex should be about criticals.
Int should be about weakening enemy defenses and in that way doing more damage.

Same thing as I said above. I like these offense-based suggestions except I would change Dex to being about Attack Speed as well.


I would like to dispel the belief that I am suggesting making Strength and Dex. the same. This is not the case.I'm just seeing the inherent gap in damage that the two stats provide. A bow damage class will never do as much as a melee damage class at this rate because the melee class won't really ever consider accuracy a problem, and if they do then it's still problem.

I was suggesting making Dex. powerful enough to be compatible and not equal to strength. I realize that in some builds, like an elemental damage templar, that Accuracy is more viable than Melee damage. This is true, but look at the other builds. This thread, and this game, is entirely "build-based" and the problem won't apply to every build, but the fact is that pure Dex. builds are strongly disadvantaged.

Also, I would like to say that I like how evasion and Dex coincide with eachother, but that Evasion currently isn't powerful enough. People suggested adding in more Life Regen and Life to the Dex. side, but the fact is that you won't have time to regen life when you get 1-shot. Also, just because you have more life doesn't mean that you'll really have more survivability if you have absolutely no mitigation from huge attacks.

I'm finding that the best way to survive right now is by mixing a lot of Armor, Evasion, and ES, and that means not having an entirely Dex-based build.

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zeto wrote:

Yeah, my understanding is that armor is more effective on lighter hits, and evasion on harder hits.

So with a hybrid you have less armor than a pure str, so you will get hit harder by lighter hits, and your evasion is lower than pure evasion so you will get hit more often by hard hits, that won't be mitigated as much, since they are hard hits.

Seems like a losing combination.

Yes this is how armor and evasion have been described from the patch that changed how they worked but it has never worked like this in game but only on paper.

Well it works like this for armors but not evasion. Evasion is not more effective against harder hits because due to random nature of evasion you can get hit twice in a row and die or die from one hit if enemy does enough damage.

One cannot just look at way evasion works in a void. You have to look at it in combination with all other elements in the game.

Having a defense that depends only on luck is a really bad design.
I would be better to make evasion an ability based on dexterity while dexterity based armors still give armor value but less then strength armors. Similar to the way D3 did it.

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Torin wrote:

I would be better to make evasion an ability based on dexterity while dexterity based armors still give armor value but less then strength armors. Similar to the way D3 did it.

I like this idea in concept, but what you basically end up with is the Armor/Evasion defensive type, and I can tell you from experience that doesn't really work out so good in reality as it sounds on paper. Just a few posts above I gave a pretty thorough breakdown on why I don't feel Armor/Evasion is viable. If the rest of the system remained as is, the same would apply to your suggestion.

Basically it amounts to, anything but extremely high armor values end up being nearly worthless in later difficulties.

Technically, you can die in one hit even with armor (and it's not even as hard as it sounds due to the way the armor mitigation formula works) - the difference is more that strength-aligned characters usually have more life than dexterity-aligned ones, widening the gap between "one-shots strength characters" and "one-shots dexterity characters".

If Iron Reflexes converted armor to evasion instead, I'd take it in a heartbeat.

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Skivverus wrote:

Technically, you can die in one hit even with armor (and it's not even as hard as it sounds due to the way the armor mitigation formula works) - the difference is more that strength-aligned characters usually have more life than dexterity-aligned ones, widening the gap between "one-shots strength characters" and "one-shots dexterity characters".

If Iron Reflexes converted armor to evasion instead, I'd take it in a heartbeat.

I'm surprised to hear that to be true, I assume you must be referencing extreme scenarios that occur in MoC, which I haven't gotten any pure armor characters into yet.

The big different here though is that you are encouraged to get bigger health pools with armor becuase they synergize with eachother. Each one makes the other more powerful, increasing your pool of effective health. You don't get this same benefit going evasion/health. When one takes effect, it only accounts for the defensive type that applies to that scenario (either your evasion because you dodged a hit entirely, or your health because you took one full force to the face). With pure Armor, you're pretty much getting hit all the time, and both defensive pools apply on each hit.

First:

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golem09 wrote:

How about a keystone that makes you retain 1 HP if you are hit by an attack that would have killed you AND made more damage than 60% of your HP.
Would give time to throw in a potion and/or run away.

Also armor/health chars couldn't use this because attacks would for them never reach 60% damage.

After I read this post and really took time to think about it I realized that this is a possibly decent idea. However, I don't think that it should be a keystone. Instead I think that evasion should have either have a built in limiter on how much damage you can take per hit based on a percentage of your max hp. Somewhat similar to what they did to reflect auras for mobs.

I think that in the case of being hit that evasion should either stop you from taking damage that is greater than 80% to 90% of your max hp. Making two hits in a row for such cases still a guaranteed death sentence but no more 1 hit deaths. However, the problem of characters with heavy armor and little evasion still getting this benefit when they shouldn't. If this is indeed too much of a problem (which it shouldn't be after my next suggestion) then the percentage of your max hp that the damage can not exceed can be determined by a formula that uses your evasion rating in some way.

Second:

As for armor being torn through like paper. I don't know if I would like the damage of mobs being lowered so much as there are definite cases where armor can still be useful and as new content and such rolls out it may just be fine.

I do think that the formula for how armor and damage interact with each other may need some slight tweaking so that it is a little bit more effective for large amounts of damage and still about as effective for normal mob damage.

Third:

This one is shorter: Accuracy should be made more important by lowering the accuracy of characters that do not go dex, maybe base accuracy should either be lower. Really anything that would force none dex attackers to pick up more dex or accuracy nodes to boost their dps could work. Even raising mob evasion rating across the board could work.

Finally:

This is not really a suggestion but just another observation about the weakness of armor/evasion hybrid armors based on some math I was doing today. Correct me if I am wrong please.

It seems that when taking Iron Reflexes the best case scenario is to use pure evasion armor instead of hybrid armors due to how conversion math is done (at least how I understand it to be done from my probably limited observations) unless you only have % increase armor. However this best case for hybrid armors only ties the results for pure evasion armor regardless of whether you get % increase armor, % increase evasion, or a mix of both. It is important to note that it is therefore impossible for the hybrid to be better due to the fact that dex gives increased evasion.

This is my understanding of how it would be calculated:

(armor + (armor * % increase to armor)) + (evasion + (evasion * (% increase to armor + % increase to evasion))) = Resulting armor due to Iron Reflexes.

Sorry for the large wall of text but this is my current view on the things mentioned in this thread!

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Guadagno wrote:

However, I don't think that it should be a keystone.

My idea was that with it being a keystone, high level dex chars can decide between going the iron reflexes or the non-lethal hit route.