You know what happens when your Reflexes turn to Iron?

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Loosing all your evasion rating to gain equivalent armour rating is not "all positives, no negatives". It's one positive for one negative.

It would be if evasion itself didn't have a reputation for kind of sucking. You're implying that people actually deliberate over whether or not to take Iron Reflexes if they're deadly serious about their durability as evasion-based characters.

Blood Magic? Absolutely -- that's a huge shift in character, and not one that everyone who uses mana would make.

Eldritch Battery takes away an entire angle of defence to provide more utility in the form of mana. Again, this is not something everyone who uses either mana or energy shield wishes to do. It's a choice and a good one to present.

Until Iron Reflexes is known to actually have serious repercussions (and I think Z's idea of reducing armour gain is a damn good one), the 'something taken away' with this keystone is negligible at best.

But sure, at absolute face-value, you're losing one thing and gaining another.

A little prying and talking with other players will reveal that you're losing an inferior defence type for a superior one.

That remains the general consensus.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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Charan wrote:

So while you're right (as usual), as a Keystone, IR needs a face-value 'cost'.

I would argue it has a face-value cost: you lose all your evasion rating. In exchange, you gain armour rating based on how much you lost.
Just like how blood magic removes all mana, but gives the ability to spend life on skills. Something is given, and something is taken. Same again (even more so) with Eldritch Battery.
The benefit may be outweighing the cost in this case, I'm not sure myself. But the cost is clearly there - you have no evasion rating.

The fact that converting means we do the giving and the taking in the same step doesn't mean the taking isn't there.

Loosing all your evasion rating to gain equivalent armour rating is not "all positives, no negatives". It's one positive for one negative.

I feel a good idea was posted earlier in the forum, elaborating on it:

What if you introduced a new health overlap similar to energy shield called "stamina". This "stamina" comes from your evasion rating (the numbered one).. EG: 2500 Evasion = 2500 Stamina.

When a hit passes through your evasion it lands as unmitigated damage to your "stamina", you then would receive X% of that damage as a Damage over Time - this would depend on the damage type, fire, cold, etc.

Once "stamina" reaches 0, the following form of damage is completely applied to your health pool.
- "Well what if you have 2 "stamina" left and you take 1000 damage?" - Have it so if ANY damage passes through "stamina" then there is no damage over time effect. Problem surpassed.

"Stamina" could regenerate over time, this could introduce new passives, keystones, affixes/suffixes.


What do you think?


PS: Is it possible to separate the base 5% evasion from the rest? If so, you could apply this to every character that has an evasion rating past the base 5%. This would be fair to ES/Evasion users and Evasion/Armour users, since they are going hybrid anyways and they would both have the stamina buffer.

PSS: I like the idea of having a keystone that grants a percent chance to have evasion act as armor upon having a hit go through. This intrigues me.

This being said though, I believe Iron reflexes is fine the way it is - Evasion is just downright terrible and far from viable in its current state. 95% hard cap with 0 mitigation is no good, simply due to the amount of passive points one needs to invest in Evasion% nodes to hit the cap. And to boot, the amount of life/life% needed to survive any hit in late game.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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Charan wrote:

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Loosing all your evasion rating to gain equivalent armour rating is not "all positives, no negatives". It's one positive for one negative.

It would be if evasion itself didn't have a reputation for kind of sucking.

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Charan wrote:

That remains the general consensus.

My point is that if this is the case, then the issue is that the positive outweighs the negative too much for many builds, not that the negative isn't there - the solution is therefore in balancing rather than necessarily in fundamentally changing the keystone to add another drawback, which is what you seemed to imply. I apologise if I misinterpreted your post.

As a side note, we do have some people telling us that blood magic has no downside and needs one. We also have a few people from time to time who claim it has no upside - currently we're pretty much only getting that feedback in one direction for IR, but there are people saying they can run evasion characters without it, where previously that wasn't really happening.

Downside to blood magic is not being able to run lots of auras, so people who say it has no downside are flat out factually wrong.

Downside is Blood Magic is bloody halfway across the Skilldrasil for most of us.

I figured isolating it down near the Duelist/Marauder was both appropriate and necessary.

Also, you're losing all that mana and gaining nothing for it. If it converted mana to health and then used health for skills, that'd be ridiculous. The loss with Blood Magic is completely different to the 'loss' with Iron Reflexes given that lack of conversion.

But sure, it's easier to stack life and life regen than mana, and it's more advantageous to do so given that zero mana=not death, zero life=death.

Still, I think we've had more than enough threads and responses regarding the imbalance of IR to indicate it's a problem in the community's eyes. This cannot be said of Blood Magic -- the last thread I saw speaking negatively about it was regarding its movement from the centre.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

As a side note, we do have some people telling us that blood magic has no downside and needs one.

I know this has already been covered from a few angles, but I really have to chime in on this one :). If you're using blood magic, you quite simply lose access to every percent-reserved aura. And can't run many flat-cost auras.

Determination, Vitality, and Tempest Shield are HUGE defensive boosts. You just can't use em. Hatred is a massive dps boost. Clever use of clarity with %regen equips can cover any mana habit...

Blood magic costs defense. Spending life for DPS? That cuts into several defensive attributes: regen, leech, ...

No downside ><. Should just pass that one by without a great deal of thought. There are more reasons than before to avoid taking blood magic.

Alright, so, it's just kind of a shitty comparison to IR. I guess we don't have to get so hung up on language and semantics here.

On a plus-side, Grace+BM as an evasion character is freakin' awesome.

Perhaps tack on

-25% Attack and Cast speed
-30% Movement Speed

For all the extra armor?

Then get rid of armour master and replace it with a branch of (+2% Movement speed, +2% Movement speed, +6% Movement speed)

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Corpsey wrote:

Perhaps tack on

-25% Attack and Cast speed
-30% Movement Speed

For all the extra armor?

Then get rid of armour master and replace it with a branch of (+2% Movement speed, +2% Movement speed, +6% Movement speed)

Holy fuck, talk about overkill...