Question about Duelist armor?

I'm playing a tanking Duelist. I heard Evasion Tanking was good, but I'm not sure. Should I go with really high evasion and get Evasion type armor? Or should I aim for high armor? Also, the passive skill Iron Reflex's that turns all of my Evasion into armor...what do you guys think about all this?

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Eiyer wrote:

I'm playing a tanking Duelist. I heard Evasion Tanking was good, but I'm not sure.

You heard wrong. The general consensus right now is that evasion needs a lot of work.

Ok, thanks. I guess I'm going the right way then. So I take it I should get the Skill Iron Reflexes?

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Chris wrote:

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Pixelmancer wrote:

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Eiyer wrote:

I'm playing a tanking Duelist. I heard Evasion Tanking was good, but I'm not sure.

You heard wrong. The general consensus right now is that evasion needs a lot of work.

There were two changes in approximately 0.9.3 to improve evasion - reducing the average monster damage so that an unlucky streak wouldn't kill you before you could run away or drink potions, and improving the consistency of to-hit rolls so that you don't get streaks at all (i.e. if you have a 33% evasion chance and one monster is hitting you, it goes miss-hit-miss-miss-hit-miss, etc). Once these changes were made, players seemed a lot happier with evasion. Since then it appears that average monster damage (especially in higher areas) has crept back up again. This may have contributed to evasion being described as broken again. Any thoughts?

I was just going on what I've read. This thread for one example; http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/35775. I haven't gotten high enough level with a pure dex character to have an opinion myself. My highest evasion character was a half armor half evasion archer duelist that was in like his early thirties. I'm not the best one to ask.

I think the problem is not evasion really. Eliminating streakiness was a very great way to make evasion more solid.


I think the problem is melee in general is thought of a pretty weak atm. I hear just as much talk bout armor not cutting it ether so its hardly just an evasion thing.

Though this talk could come from simply chaos and as far as I understood it chaos was not meant to be beaten. (Though it can by range builds so clearly there might still be a problem here.)

Another thought is the thing I tend to hear is along the lines of "even if you could get 90% evasion you will still be one hit killed 1 out of 10 hits." So it seems the general thought is that evasion builds (maybe even melee as a whole.) lack the hp for it to work.

Take this all with a grain of salt mind you as I have not played in chaos and really have no want to do so. This is just thoughts I have on the subject.

Yea, I think the problem is melee, not evasion. It is true that evasion needs hp to work, but I see it as a normal thing. It's only mathematics it's not like you can do anything about it.

Basically, range is better than melee because melee doesn't deal more damage than range. The risks of the melee playstyle isn't rewarded enough.

A simple solution would be reducing bows attack speed a bit. Afterall, it shouldn't be possible to shoot with a bow as quickly as with a sword. It's just like claws which should be faster but are not, sadly.

Indeed. Melee seems to get punished in every game, ever. Most games work to make everyone do similar damage, so if that is the case...melee does the same damage but takes more for being closer? Plus they, then, must spend more resources (passive points, gear concessions, etc) to survive which in turn makes them do less damage than ranged that require less defensive considerations.

It's a very hard thing to address, since no one has seemed to solve this (Diablo 3 put a flat 30% damage reduction to melee and they still suck). So ideas would be useful.

Perhaps give melee weapons more damage output, and defensive items more resistance? Say shields are super good, but using it will hurt your damage in favor of the extra survivability (the basic trade-off). While using dual wield or two handed weapons would give them a mean offensive bite.

Ranged should, in theory, do less overall damage considering similar builds since they can shift more resources into damage over defense. Thus with 50/50 defensive/offensive passives a melee should do more damage overall, but since ranged can go 25/75 they will do more damage but must be on their toes?

Seems unfair on paper, but the simple fact is that ranged always comes out on top simply due to dealing in-answerable damage compared to wading through a river of enemies.

Evasion can work, but you need block to help it out. If you can achieve something like 72 block and 67 evasion in merciless you can be quite strong vs melees, but if you want to handle areas like MoC you won't have enough hp to do it. Secondly ranger really is a better shield evasion and block character, but still has the low hp problem.

The problem of the lack of strength and hp nodes on the right side of the passive tree.

I am beginning to think strength should be decoupled from hp.