You know what happens when your Reflexes turn to Iron?

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vankeris wrote:

Evasion is very complicated thing to balance in any game and I have yet to see it done so its on par with armor in any game.

In 90% of situations evasion was better than armor in Shadowbane. Armor didn't reduce spell damage, but most spells could be dodged. Armor was a flat reduction rather than a percent. That made armor OP against fast, low damage hits like daggers, but pretty useless against hard hits with 2 handed weapons. A lot more mobs used 2 hand weapons than dual wielded fast, low damage weapons. I know this isn't really relevent, but I just wanted to point out that it is possible for evasion to be better.

That's an interesting idea, but what I really liked from this thread was the idea that evasion is a player-controlled resource. Wouldn't that be the only logical solution? The cool thing about quick, assassin-like characters is that they don't need armor that reduces damage for them because they are fast and skillful enough to dodge everything. If you could just dodge attacks by pressing a button (while using up the resource) you could dive in and out of combat, for example using whirling blades, and have it regenerate. You'd be way more active than an armored character, as you would expect, plus you could be countered ranged characters or fast characters that don't let you get away for your regen time.

I wanted to update my progress, but dislike self-bumping, so it's nice to see this thread is yet for the grave.

SavageSeamstress has been retired at 27 -- Acrobatics/Phase Acrobatics was just crap. Seriously.

DonnaMatrix has reached level 33, focusing entirely on evasion with Arrow Dodging as her first key stone, with +life and +block chance nodes as her secondary targets. Her evasion is roughly 5.4k; her chance to evade is 73%. Chance to block is 36%, resists are almost max. I'm not sure how that 73% interacts with arrow dodging but she definitely doesn't eat many projectiles.

She has absolutely no problems in early to mid act 1 cruel.

Very interested in seeing how far I can take her.

I haven't read the thread.. But I like to bring the most annoying part of iron reflexes, to me at least.


The story is that I get acrobatics. Immidiately I am confined to evasion gear only. No armor and no energy shield. That's alot of gear sacrificed on the altar of dodgings.

If I instead pick iron reflexes, I can use ANY type of gear. No drawback, besides the path on the skilldrasil.
Hybrid gear? Np, just as good as plain.
Evasion/ES, Armor/ES, Evasion/armor, Armor, Evasion AND Energy shield!
That's six times the amount of gear than single Evasion.
Granted, ES is the worst choice, but it's still usuable if the item got good mods.

If I can't use 5/6 of the items in the game, I want to be REWARDED!

The prince went heavily into drinking and had a fatal accident, the princess was never rescued and the kingdom eventually fell into anarchy from repeated dragon assaults. The age of darkness lasted eternal and noone lived happily ever after. The end.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

I'm not sure how that 73% interacts with arrow dodging but she definitely doesn't eat many projectiles.

Arrow Dodging Formula - Attacker Accuracy/(Attacker Accuracy + (defender evasion/4)^ 0.8)

I'm really interested to see how far she can go as well, keeping in mind that she's an optimized Evasion tank build. I regret that this seems to be the only other option for survivability with Evasion characters..

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Deafjester wrote:

If I can't use 5/6 of the items in the game, I want to be REWARDED!

This is an excellent point you make here. I agree with you full-heartedly. I'm sad to hear that the prince went the path he did because of this, though.

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Arrow Dodging Formula - Attacker Accuracy/(Attacker Accuracy + ((defender evasion/4)^ 0.8)

Well isn't it just the basic accuracy/evasion forumla? Arrow dodging is supposed to double the chance to evade projectiles. At lvl 63 I have estimated 60+% evasion and archers in fellshrine still don't feel like they miss 95% of the time...

Anyway, I'm gonna start a melee evasion build as well to see what can be done with it. I really want to try evasion+shield+acrobatics build and see what can be made of it.

Further update: I've retired DonnaMatrix as well, integrating her style with Charan's. Charan is now a level 42 full evasion, full resists, 730 hp 15 hp/sec regen Blade-Shadow. Only 64% chance to dodge, no arrow-dodging yet, missing a few evasion node clusters.

He does okay in ruthless act 1. Died once to Kuduku, got a bit too confident. Other than that, he just zips around and stays out of trouble. Unfortunately, since he never uses a shield, he'll never reach Donna's extremely high evasion -- he'll always be a good 1k behind her there. He also can't block.

I'm surprised I didn't mention the Acrobatics trade-off thing, but probably did in another thread. Deafjester is absolutely right: to lock off that many defence options for what appears to be a pretty weak dodge offering is simply ridiculous. Acrobatics/Phase Acrobatics should be the keystones to a dedicated Evasion build and they're just not. Arrow Dodging is far superior right now...and that's sad.

Iron Reflexes can keep on doing its own thing -- we still don't have a great keystone for true evasion users.

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YoMicky wrote:

Arrow Dodging Formula - Attacker Accuracy/(Attacker Accuracy + (defender evasion/4)^ 0.8)

So we can't calculate Arrow Dodging using the Evasion rating/chance to evade % alone, given that it's supposed to be just double the chance to evade? Messy.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

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YoMicky wrote:

Arrow Dodging Formula - Attacker Accuracy/(Attacker Accuracy + (defender evasion/4)^ 0.8)

So we can't calculate Arrow Dodging using the Evasion rating/chance to evade % alone, given that it's supposed to be just double the chance to evade? Messy.

I was given this formula during a discussion of Arrow Dodging. The guy claimed that it was from a wiki, but with further research, I have to go ahead and retract this.

Seems it's just the percentage according to Mark.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Note: Even with no evasion rating (such as because of Iron Reflexes), you still have a 5% chance to evade, and that will double to 10%.

My apologies, I should have researched into this further.

Damn, I don't know what to think. Check this thread out and see what you can gather from it.

It seems that the formula I posted is the standard Chance to Hit formula, and that Evasion Chance, not Rating, is doubled for projectiles when you get Arrow Dodging. Keep in mind that archer enemies generally have very high accuracy rating to counter this huge increase in evasion.

I think that might be it, then. Sure, I may have 95% chance to evade arrows (easy to get with Arrow Dodging), but the archers have an insanely high accuracy to off-set it...

In which case, we're sort of back to the beginning, because what good is double the chance to evade if the enemy is already built to counter it? All this tells is that the standard chance to evade projectiles sans Arrow Dodging is much lower than listed...

Oh, it does my head in.