You know what happens when your Reflexes turn to Iron?

This is a great thread, and while I'm only on page 7, that's all I've time for right now. But I do have some thoughts.

I won't say that evasion doesn't need to be tweaked, because it certainly does (specifically the keystones). However, I don't think it needs an entire mechanic overhaul as many are suggesting. I'm talking about the player controlled mechanics people are suggesting. I just don't think those types of things work well in a game like this.

On top of that, I think GGG has already designed an evasion based character to be played with a play style that emphasizes player skill with things like flicker strike, whirling blades and tactical, player controlled movement. With skills that move you around so fast, you are manually evading pretty much everything, the better you are as a player, the more survivability your character has. Add to that a 95% (capped) chance to automatically evade anything you aren't skillful enough to evade (plus you can get some block chance too pretty easily) is really, quite nice.

Charan touched on this around page 6-7. He took IR and he didn't like it, it didn't fit his play style which, to be honest, is how GGG designed evasion characters to be played (it seems to me anyway).

All this being said, evasion is very risky to rely on for a HC character. I like a lot of the ideas in this thread, particularly the "evasion charge" idea that would add temporary hitpoints while you had evasion charges going. At any rate, I think suggestions like that are the way to go when thinking about making evasion work better for HC characters, particularly.

Of course, I don't really like IR at all either and agree with Charan that acrobatics and phase acrobatics should be the keystone pure evasion builds go for. I think a lot of good things can be done with the keystones, and I have faith that they will.

Anyway, I just wanted to share my opinion. I'll probably post again when I have time to finish reading the whole thread.

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Malice wrote:

I've never really thought the acrobatics improvement nodes were worth it. 20% for 1 point seems a lot better than 24% for five points. And I don't find spells to be much of an issue for the most part, if you keep your resists up. Overall I'd rather have 5 more life nodes, or run speed or something than a lousy 4% dodge chance.

Pretty much the same, but I can be a completionist and we're playing a numbers game here. Every little bit and all that.

The fact that four support nodes and another keystone after it 'aren't worth it' is definitely problematic to me.

Your view of Acrobatics as 20% chance to block for just one point has been bothering me this past day or so -- yes, I think about these things last thing at night sometimes.

Cue half-arsed math at 8am:

If I have that theoretical (and yet documented) 70% chance to evade (against equal level monsters, etc), 20% chance to dodge and 30% chance to block...then I figure it looks something like this:

3/10*8/10 chance to be hit before blocking, based on the formula here.

That is, 24% chance to be hit, or 76% chance to evade.

Am I right in assuming block chance is simply the same formula continued? 30% of that 24% will be mitigated, leaving me with a 16.8% chance to be hit at all, or an effective 83.2% (rounded, 83%) chance to not be hit at all. Throw in Acrobatics' extra 4 nodes and it's bumped up to 84%. Whoopydoo.

Let's assume I forsake some evasion in favour of block chance then. Retool things a bit: 60% evasion, 45% block, 20% dodge. Same math (I hope) gives me 82.4% chance not to be hit.

I have been dabbling and can't really find too sweet a spot between evasion and blocking...

And none of this takes into account the damage reduction being sacrificed for acrobatics.

Hm. It really does appear that if you can get 75+% chance to evade at any given level you're doing very well indeed.

I'm strongly considering finding some way of creeping over to those templar spell blockers.

I always liked the idea of galncing blows, there should be some DR even on evasion char since getting 1 shoot with fairly high chance to get hit anyway (5% is still alot) and low HP is just nonsense. Bleeding idea is also good one.

The idea that i was supporting mostly in the "evasion sux" topic is that every armor should give ARMOR stat just in different amounts, so even DEX chars will have DR even if they fail to evade.

Thats also reason and my playstyle every time i rolled an archer in this game. I was only wearing duelist gear for evasion+armor stats, additionaly i needed STR anyway in my build for some skill gems and Iron Grip make nice use of the STR as bonus.

The pure dex armor i find useless, unless you wear only like 1 part of it from all the items you can wear.

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Charan wrote:

So what if dex/evasion were to somehow give a percentile chance, after a full evasion has failed, to reduce taken damage?

In revisiting this thread (and relevantly necro'ing it), I realise that with the extra roll for evasion after evasion has failed, to calculate a chance to avoid critical damage, GGG actually implemented this suggestion in their own rather elegant way.

Also, as I've noted elsewhere, I totally gave up on trying to achieve a decent evasion/dodge/block percentile and shoved every passive point typically devoted to evasion or block% chance into life, relying instead on whatever evasion my dex gear gave me.

It worked.

My sentiments in the original post about Iron Reflexes remain unchanged. It's bloody awful.

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Charan wrote:

"

Charan wrote:

So what if dex/evasion were to somehow give a percentile chance, after a full evasion has failed, to reduce taken damage?

In revisiting this thread (and relevantly necro'ing it), I realise that with the extra roll for evasion after evasion has failed, to calculate a chance to avoid critical damage, GGG actually implemented this suggestion in their own rather elegant way.

Also, as I've noted elsewhere, I totally gave up on trying to achieve a decent evasion/dodge/block percentile and shoved every passive point typically devoted to evasion or block% chance into life, relying instead on whatever evasion my dex gear gave me.

It worked.

My sentiments in the original post about Iron Reflexes remain unchanged. It's bloody awful.

The saddest part of the games defense mechanics, is it always comes down to HP, or ES propping up rather lackluster secondary defenses.

I seriously want to know why armor protects LESS against harder hits. Yes I understand the math, but this is what it is.

I want to know WHY marauders are taking eva armor and stacking it with IR. Iron reflexes is an abomination to the skill tree, and needs to be removed, even if it means that all the dex classes have to suffer through the horror of being evasion based while the devs figure something out.

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Charan wrote:

My sentiments in the original post about Iron Reflexes remain unchanged. It's bloody awful.

I totally agree with this. I have never taken it, nor even been tempted to on any build.

The only part of your original post I did not agree with:

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Charan wrote:

Unless you blended in some armour, in which case it wasn't the dex/evasion that saved you, it was the str/armour you dipped in.

I feel that NO build should be able to completely ignore armor or at least energy shield. That's being a one-trick defensive pony and that's bound to fail from time to time.

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TheSwampDog wrote:

I feel that NO build should be able to completely ignore armor or at least energy shield. That's being a one-trick defensive pony and that's bound to fail from time to time.

I couldn't disagree more here.

Iron Reflexes wasn't always in the game. It exists because a lot of people were/are of the opinion that evasion sucks, and liked to complain about it, and say how much better armour was/is. So GGG put IR into the game, basically saying, OK you don't like evasion and want armour instead, here, use this.

I hate, like legitimately HATE, Iron Reflexes. It's a shoddy passive, it doesn't do anything to make Evasion better, and perpetrates the whole "Evasion is broken" thing people keep spouting. Evasion as a defense is not broken, it's just not understood by the majority of people.

All they see is that Armour characters and ES characters survive better then they do, but never try to figure out why. The truth is that every character needs to take Life passives (or have a legitimately high Str score to accent the life passives) or the corresponding survivability passives. If you don't have the life/ES, and the resists, you will get ROCKED in this game. I am lumping Life and ES together, as ES as a defense really is just an extra life pool unless CI is taken, then it becomes a bit more.

I can take a pure Eva/Acro/Phase acro character to Merci end game, and survive, and flourish. Yes, I end up micromanaging a tiny bit more than my Armour heavy Duelist or Marauder, and yes the DR on Evasion sucks immensely, but that can be fixed/tweaked eventually (I still think that 60% Evasion is a good break point).

Evasion as a mechanic, with all the changes is no longer a bad defense, it just needs the right support to pull it off, pretty much just like every other defense in the game. You wouldn't fight Vaal Oversoul on a Marauder with no extra life, and try to tank his Infernal Blow style hit, would you?

Something that makes my mind spin is that tanks are building into IR just to turn grace into armour rating. That's a pretty expensive move, even if you're purely focused on stacking life/regen (which has even gained popularity lately, it seems).

Thing is, the people doing this are the same ones winning half the weekly races. So obviously, they're on to something. But I think it's not as much of a no-brainer as everyone seems to believe. Asked if he'll be taking IR, panda laughs. Like, the answer is so obvious it doesn't warrant a response. Gotta take the man seriously, but there's something missing:

Pros:

#1 - Grace provides a huge amount of rating. That's a lot of armour. Level 17 grace with IR, including whatever evasion rating you had beforehand, will provide on the order of 1.7k armour rating, probably more than half of what you had without it.

#2 - Unwavering stance.

Cons (reasons to run grace and keep it as evasion rating, on a tank):

#1 - That's expensive. In a life/regen build, golem's blood is a must. But now you have to spend 4 points to get IR. Worth it? Maybe, but I'd suggest no is a reasonable answer given the rest of what's coming.

#2 - In a life-stacking build, armour has horrible scaling. So horrible that it's providing very little reduction. Yes, against endurance, armour provides increasing defensive gains for stacking it higher. But if you have no %IAR, the armour EH curve is still so shallow it looks like a straight line.

#3 - In any build imaginable, your first 2000 evasion rating scales effective health many times faster than armour. When you over-cap DR with a 100% incr granite flask, grace as evasion still provides 20% avoidance. Grace as armour with over-cap DR gains nothing. But do avoidance mechanics (block/evade/A,PA) actually improve effective health - with a large enough buffer, absolutely. We're talking about life-stacking tanks, anyway.

#4 - Enfeeble. The quality bonus of enfeeble applies to evasion, not armour. My staff templar (29% block+grace as evasion) gets 50% total avoidance in a level 65 map with enfeeble up, and I don't have quality. I can still cap my DR on demand with my iron skin granite flasks. If my DR is capped anyway whenever I want, what benefit is there to giving up that 30% evade for more armour?

Total avoidance is: 1 - (1-%block)*(1-%ev)

#5 - Evasion applies to more of the damage you're taking than armour does. Having some of both is definitely beneficial.

TL;DR You're trading 20% chance to evade (30% with enfeeble, 38% with quality) against ALL attacks, for 6% physi-only reduction. I understand wanting to do that, but treating that choice like a no-brainer: "duh, IR" - that's not terribly thoughtful.

And a lot of very smart people see it that way. Actually somewhat confusing for me.