You know what happens when your Reflexes turn to Iron?

"

Grundnir wrote:

And then even worse, is the propensity of being one shot when the hit goes through. This goes up and up as you hit later difficulty levels, to the point of absurdity. No matter how much evasion you have, you never have 100%, and when monsters can deal so much damage as to kill you in one shot, it's going to happen eventually.

In my opinion, this is a big problem for evasion, and is something that I feel makes it non-viable for end game usage.

Only rhoa and incr crit damage+phys damage aura rares in chaos can 1shot 2k hp with 0 dr. For rhoa u can charge to mob 1st cuz its deal 1shot damage only in max charge distance, u can avoid charge with whirling blades, u can place totem to mob charge way. With increased crit monsters enfeeblle curse very helpfull.

What I would like to see as a change for evasion is:

for every 2500 points of evasion you are granted a evasion charge every time you evade a attack. Each evasion charge grants you a temp health bonus of 20% of your max health. Then the next hit you fail to evade the dmg is applied first to any temp health from active evasion charges then the remaining dmg applied to your normal health/energy shield.

This change is in line with the current charge mechanic, it doesn't involve any new keystones/regular nodes and would help mitigate the low health issue of going full on dex/evasion compared to full str/armor. It would also I feel greatly reduce the amount of 1 hit kills. It also falls in line with another posters idea of dex based characters are more aptly able to"roll with the punches" due to their finely tuned bodies.

Also debuffs like chaos dmg and puncture would still apply to your normal health instead of any temp health you have from the charges. AoE attacks suck as firestorm and cold snap would be applied to any temp health from the evasion charges to represent what Charan pointed out as the "reflex saves" from DnD where because of your high evasion you tend to take less dmg from AoE attacks do to being able to jump out of the direct area of effect. The attacks from the constructs which if I remember is 60% chaos/40% physical would work the same way as it does aganst ES where the chaos dmg would effect your normal health and the physical would be applied first to your temp health buff.

One of the problems I am seeing with evasion is that the game is setting evasion up as an alternative to health and armor, when evasion mechanics are more useful as a supplement.

Any build that attempts to use evasion as the sole defensive tool is doomed to eventual statistical failure. If you dedicate 100% of your defensive resources into evasion and have the ability to avoid 95% of all attacks, 5% of the attacks will still hit you and kill you instantly.

Without an appropriate amount of health/armor/shield to back up your evasion, it only takes waiting until the 96th attack to know you are about to die.

Instead of trying to find ways to make evasion a stand alone defensive solution, how about just trying to find ways to balance the tree so that evasion characters have enough health and mitigation to survive the 5%?

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Iscariot013 wrote:

Instead of trying to find ways to make evasion a stand alone defensive solution, how about just trying to find ways to balance the tree so that evasion characters have enough health and mitigation to survive the 5%?

I might be ok with that approach if it was the standard, but it isn't. As things stand, Armor is viable, Energy Shield is viable, but Evasion is not in late game. Why should two of the types be viable and one be only supplemental?

Furthermore, if they did take this route, then pure Evasion armor should probably be removed from the game. I really doubt that extreme of a measure would ever be taken though.

@Grundnir

I guess what I am saying is that if the evasion mechanic can't be made viable, at least make the evasion stats and the evasion section of the tree viable.

Another idea is to make evasion stats inherently include some damage mitigation. Much lower than pure armor, but high enough that the survivability armor+health = avoid+mitigate.

The whole reflexes being matrixy never even crossed my mind when reading the flavor text.

"Why should I dodge blows I do not fear"

To me this means, I have an unflinching will that does not break to the threat of physical pain. I shrug off blows instead of evading them.

I don't think the keystone was originally intended as a "fix" for evasion. I think it was actually a way to convert a hybrid of evasion and armor into full armor. Even if it was intended to convert a full evasion character into an armor character, that is a choice made by the player.

I would severely like a fix to evasion in its current state. Right now, its not remotely viable. I don't even think a glancing blow would be viable without having a massive amount of health coupled with it. Evasion just needs a little bit of tweaking to really get it moving. A glancing blow would be great. I'd like that as a standard though, not a keystone. Keystone's should be kept for flavor and style of the character. I would really like to see an interesting evasion keystone(that's not acrobatics cuz acrobatics is boring and counterproductive right now).

I don't like it because whenever I mention that my evasion build feels weak compared to armor/energy shield builds, everyone tells me to get Iron Reflexes.
The problem is, that isn't evasion and it feels totally against the kind of character I am trying to make. If I wanted to turn all my evasion into armor, why wouldn't I just make an armor build instead?
I don't like it.

Hey everyone. Some EXCELLENT feedback here.

I'll be the first to admit the bleeding idea was totally on the fly. While it's true that armour or ES users would also logically bleed, I figured that the heavy armour would change that 'gush of blood' into bruising/broken bones, or that the energy shield would absorb the blow -- and any blows that get through it are basically fatal to a dedicated ES user anyway.

I also agree that keystones are not the solution -- you'll note that the majority of my post, while deriding Iron Reflexes, is suggesting an overhaul of high-end evasion build overall, not just the acquisition of a new keystone. I merely said IF -- just that. I think keystones are a brilliant idea, they really are. But they shouldn't be necessary to justify one of the game's four main types of defence. It's as simple as that.

I also apologise for the cross-threading -- I originally wrote this post as a reply to YoMicky's excellent Dexterity, we have a problem, but soon realised my reply wasn't about dexterity, but Iron Reflexes and evasion. Thus I felt it deserved its own place. Yes, certain points from other threads are relevant and salient, but the core point is that Iron Reflexes is currently a band-aid, and I believe GGG are better than that. I really do.

Re: Iron Reflexes as a name. Every argument I've seen for it really is describing an iron will, not Iron Reflexes. So maybe it's a pun. Lord knows I've made a few of those in my time. If so, it's an unjustified one. The whole thing, from the name to the function, reeks of bad design to em. Reeks.

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I'm going to pull a quote by Mark from another thread here, just to bring some unsanctioned but very timely GGG input to the conversation. It's from this thread:

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Each of the three defenses has a weakness; Armour only protects against physical damage, Evasion only protects against attacks, and Energy Shield is ignored by Chaos damage.

For the purpose of context, Mark was responding to a thread seeking clarification on how dodge and evade interact.

Let's put it this way:

A=Armour: only protects against physical damage

B=Evasion: only protects against attacks

C=Energy Shield: ignored by Chaos damage

How would you arrange these three seemingly equal forms of defence in a triangle, as has been implied here?

I think this is a triangle trying to describe a square. Point A implies that Armour's weakness is elemental damage -- but nothing in that triangle really prevents elemental damage quite as effective as the elephant in the room, D: elemental resistances. Point C just says 'get Chaos Innoculation, it'll buff your energy shield anyway', and point D, the issue at hand, is extremely vague to me. There is no clear A,B,C equilibrium between Armour, Evasion and Energy Shield to me.

And to bring this back to relevance, Chaos Innoculation, a single keystone, removes Energy Shield's weakness as stated above. In contrast, Iron Reflexes doesn't in any way augment Evasion because all it does is make Evasion into Armour -- that's not a balancing act, that's the very essence of imbalance. That's 'hey, you're on the losing side, come join mine!'...and while that might seem melodramatic, Iron Reflexes does seem a little coercive to me.

Am I missing something here? Is there are a nice tight triangle between Armour, Evasion and Energy Shield?

"

indczn wrote:

I believe the problem with evasion stems from the life/armor interaction. Since armor provides damage reduction, killing an armored character requires higher damage output from the monsters. On top of that, the armored classes get a generous health pool bonus from strength and generous easy access health nodes. This causes even higher damage spikes to be necessary to kill the armored character (ie, rhoas).

Unfortunately, dexterity/evasions offers no reduction and no health pool bonus, so those massive damage spikes required to kill the marauder are likely going to one-shot the dex character. Reducing the damage output makes armor stronger, and GGG has tweaked it several times, but I think its going to be a really difficult balance.

You're the first other person I've seen point this out.
I've been saying this for a while now, seems like there's always another evasion thread going around. I've never really been convinced that there is anything wrong with evasion. If there is a problem it is that there is no feedback to the player that they evaded. I think this causes a lot of people to immediately blame evasion when they die, while being oblivious to the many times that evasion saved their life.

The fundamental balance problem that exists is that there is no direct counter to armour, besides large damage packets. Problem is, large damage packets counter everything else too, not just armour. The player then needs high life to counter the big damage. So now you need armour and high life to survive.

I'd still say armour is the problem, not evasion. Funny thing about armour is the more you need it the less it does for you. It will make you near invincible against weak enemies that weren't a threat anyway, but does almost nothing against dangerous hard hitting enemies.

The previous (before 0.9.3) armour mechanic had a comparison built in (similar to evasion vs accuracy) - but it was never used. At one point I suggested making use of this "armour penetration" stat, it would have allowed GGG to create monsters and player skills that counter armour and armour only. That would make balance a lot easier, and remove a good deal of these problems.

That's very interesting, Malice. I totally concede that what I perceive as a lack of balance between the defence types could be remedied not by 'buffing' the 'weaker' angles but (this seems to be the core of your point) by 'weakening' the strongest.

It still doesn't quite address the keystone=evasion necessity issue -- which I can't even speak to from personal experience, since I've never taken Iron Reflexes and never will. I'm fully aware of how often evasion saves my bacon because while there's no feedback from the game, there's me being attacked and not taking damage from every single attack. At 40-45% chance to evade, you can definitely see that in practice.

I'm actually going to start a melee character today that tries to maximise evasion. All the possible nodes, twinked gear, the works. No block chance nodes until all evasion nodes are taken. Everything but Iron Reflexes. Not even sure how it'll deal damage...heh.