[Sugg] Fixing Evasion

Let's see if we can, shall we?

Let me preface this thread by saying that I understand the idea behind Evasion completely. You're trying to create three different ways in which you can improve EHP (Effective Health Points), and the Armor/Evasion/ES system is exactly that: Armor reduces damage by a percentage, effectively increasing EHP by that amount, ES flatout increases EHP by basically giving you more 'health', and Evasion reduces a percentage of hits by 100%, which also effectively increases EHP by that amount.

The issue with the Evasion model, as pretty much anyone will tell you, is that 95% Evasion still means you die instantly 5% of the time. Yet the 5% is necessary, since it's impossible to balance a game that has the possibility of complete invulnerability. The whole concept of Evasion therefore needs a system that is both chance-based, to stay unique, while also being reliable. That's difficult, but I think I know how to do it.


Currently, Evasion gives a chance to dodge attacks based on the attacker's accuracy relative to the defender's evasion. With the way it's coded, you wouldn't be able to get 100% evasion no matter the cap, there'd always be a miniscule (<1%) chance to be hit. First, that calculation needs to change, and vary more linearly between 0 and 100%.

Secondly, Evasion itself should be shifted into tiers. Imagine the following:

Current system:
X Evasion gives 75% chance to dodge Y Accuracy.
EHP is increased by 300%.

Proposed system:
X Evasion gives 100% chance to dodge 50% of the damage for Y accuracy.
X Evasion gives 50% chance to dodge 100% of the damage for Y accuracy.
EHP is increased by 300%.


In other words, if you have enough evasion relative to the amount of accuracy mobs of your level have, you will have a 100% reliable 50% damage reduction. Your actual EHP in the above system stays exactly the same, so of a hundred mobs are wailing on you you're still gonna die just as quickly. The chance to RANDOMLY die is diminished significantly, while the chance to randomly survive is lower but still very much present. This preserves both the design and the flavour of evasion, while actually making it useful as a serious mode of defense.



Now, there is one small issue: I have no idea how difficult this would be to code. I imagine with some mathematics wizardry it shouldn't be too difficult, but I'm neither a wizard nor a programmer, so I wouldn't know. Additionally it'd require some balancing and rebalancing of numbers, especially for the Armor/Evasion and ES/Evasion hybrid builds, but frankly, Evasion is already in dire need of a lot of rebalancing, so I don't see that as a deterrent.

If I missed any other significant issues, feel free to call me out down here.

Let's see if this mod can post something 'useful', shall we?

What you appear to have done is offered a new, rather elegant method of an existing proposal: grant DR to Evasion. There are plenty of threads about that, but none with what I consider to be an appropriate application. In theory, this is very nifty: it retains the 100% damage reduction (avoidance) currently in play to some degree but then quantifies the DR still based on evasion chance.

My melee Shadow has 9338 Evasion at level 52 with Grace enabled. This grants a simple 70% chance to evade all incoming physical damage. 30% of the time, I'm taking full damage, obviously. He also has 1162 life, so unless it's a hard damage spike, he can handle merciless act 2 by himself, if I play smart. Which I do.

It's hard to calculate 'versus Y accuracy' because that's not what the stat states in-game. Yes, we could trawl the mechanics thread, but let's try to keep this within the stated game mechanics and blame GGG for any lacking clarity there. 9338 evasion at level 52 grants 70% chance to dodge 100% of the damage.

First point of query: Could you tell me how this would translate into your system? How much chance to 100% evade would I retain and how much of your 50% DR would I gain?

Second point: I've stated on other threads, notably my own epic little railing against Iron Reflexes, that the biggest threat is often not the initial hit but the after-effect: viper strike stacks, elemental ailments, puncturing. With my current evasion, I avoid a lot of these by simply not being hit at all. If you were to reduce my chance to evade 100% of the damage, even at the compensation of 50% DR, I'd be taking a lot more of these effects on board. With my unimpressive health maximum, these can be deadly.

Is your DR system worth the trade-off?

Opinion based on unusual experience: I care enough about evasion that I've made several characters and dragged them through a number of levels to test various methods. One ranger I focused *entirely* on evasion nodes. Her damage was nominal but the evasion was working wonders through Cruel. She had AD, A/PA...the works. With that character alone I came to believe that Evasion is far from broken. It just needs a nudge.

I scrapped her and incorporated her design into my main, the melee shadow. He doesn't have as many Evasion nodes, but he does have stacked life, full resists and almost 30 hp regen a sec. I'm making it work. Right now I'm very curious to see how the new Skilldrasil will affect him -- I've played with it the past week and know that evasion has *not* received the big fix people keep asking for.

I personally do not see an overhaul for evasion coming. Not with everything else GGG has scheduled. I'm pushing for a more likely 'fix': keystones. Iron Reflexes can stay precisely where it is -- right at the bottom. Arrow Dodging will be a lot more effective once GGG tweak archers not to have such insane accuracy, which is another thing I'm pushing for. Acrobatics/Phase Acrobatics are supposed to be the pinnacle of Evasion keystones, our Chaos Innoculation if you will. You can tell this because they address the one thing that tear evaders to shreds: spells. But 24% chance to 'dodge' is pathetic and completely insufficient for giving up both armour and Energy shield.


I see changes to these keystones 'fixing' evasion far more efficiently than a mechanic overhaul. I don't believe evasion is broken, it's simply not given the option to be a primary means of defence, an option provided to the other armour types via keystones.

Now if you're going to bring Dexterity into play, well, YoMicky's thread has that covered already.

In short, I'm not convinced DR is the way to go; it is the realm of Armour, and to grant Evasion DR is to tilt towards Iron Reflexes, effectively. I'd like to keep my relatively good chance to evade 100% of the damage, but need some sort of safety net against damage spikes. Whether that's my silly bleeding-on-failed-evasion idea or certain other conditional DRs (most of which propose a simple 'avoiding ohko' DR), that's the key to me. Other than spikes, I do fine. My playstyle suits very high chance to evade, not medium chance to evade with some DR sprinkled in.

If I wanted that, I'd just wear Armour/Evasion gear. No. Give me my 10k+ evasion and let me live on the edge. :)

I believe the simple calculation would be to translate the first 50% of current evasion towards the 100% half-evasion, then double the remaining percentage towards the 100%. So 70% full evasion equals 100% half evasion plus 40% full evasion.


I can sympathize with the argument about status effects, but I'm not entirely convinced that removing your ability to dodge quite as many Viper Strikes or Freezing effects is really that vital to your survival. Everyone else has to deal with them, everyone dies just as quickly to them, and I don't hear that being a significant problem. I'm currently leveling a full Armor tank, and Viper Strike is probably my #1 source of damage taken.

A full Evasion build should still be getting a rather significant chance to dodge, and don't forget block chance as well, so the added protection from status ailments would still be a nice draw to it. Perhaps we could even pretend that our 50% damage dodge also gives a 50% chance to prevent ailments from landing. That'd be a clean way to balance that out, if necessary.


I've never liked Iron Reflexes for one simple reason. It screams "We know Evasion is worthless, here's a keystone to solve it." It's be completely obsolete in my envisioned design and could be replaced with something people would actually ENJOY picking up, as opposed to being FORCED to. Perhaps a single keystone allowing all of the evasion from your gear to apply to spells, as well?

Make the OP's system standard, and make the old system a keystone. ES/Eva builds benefit more from the current system than his proposed system.

"

0nin wrote:

I can sympathize with the argument about status effects, but I'm not entirely convinced that removing your ability to dodge quite as many Viper Strikes or Freezing effects is really that vital to your survival. Everyone else has to deal with them, everyone dies just as quickly to them, and I don't hear that being a significant problem. I'm currently leveling a full Armor tank, and Viper Strike is probably my #1 source of damage taken.

Then you haven't asked many people. Status effects are the absolute most deadly thing in the game. That's why my whole build will be based around countering them. I use Chaos innoculation (chaos immunity), shield block and Grace Aura for chance to avoid status effects, and am planning to get Eye of Chayula (stun immunity) and Dream Fragments (Freeze immunity). Burning can be dealt with flasks, but unfortunately that leaves Puncture as the only remaining weakness.

50% damage reduction is more mitigation then most armor builds get, your suggestion wouldn't be balanced. Giving evasion any sort of actual % damage mitigation wouldn't be balanced at all, that's what armor is for. The problem currently is that you need enough life to survive one hit and that is incredibly difficult because certain enemies just do too much damage. The solution to the evasion problem is to either reduce enemy damage or to increase the amount of life that is available either on gear or on the passive tree.

Also I just thought I'd point out something I've noticed often with people who have a problem with evasion. You can't just stack evasion and expect to survive, just like you can't just stack armor or energy shield and expect to survive. You need both life and resists, on any build. If an evasion character ignores life and resists you are going to get one shot, just like if an armor marauder focused on just armor would get one shot, or a witch that just focused on energy shield would get one shot by chaos damage. The only exception is chaos inoculation which is a keystone that specifically lets you ignore life, but you still need resists.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is that regen (and hence flasks) are weaker on Evasion builds because the damage is so random. So instead of constantly being at full health from your regen, you get a big spike of damage, pop a flask, and it fills up and wastes half the flask before you take the next hit.

I have to say that i agree with Charan especially becaus eof his last point: to have some damage reduction and a somwhat lower chance to evade is EXACTLY what the str/dex armor does...

any adjustment to evasion's underlying system needs to exactly preserve its overall characteristics. Second, the idea must preserve accuracy's value. Quite frankly these are the top two reasons why most suggestions on this matter aren't likely to work.

That is, X% evasion needs to negate X% damage.

Now, it seems like you've actually considered that. Great. However, something really strange happens under your system when you start stacking rating to a super-high %evade.

I made another post detailing the math that would go into an approach very similar to what you're talking about. Maybe you'll pick up on what I mean about odd things happening at high evasion. You and I are talking about basically the same idea, except you've chosen a pretty different characteristic than I did. And frankly I hope that other thread dies, please don't bump it back up to the top ^^

And, to Charan, I agree: putting a system in place of evasion that feels like mitigation breaks it. It breaks the RP flavor of my favorite classes. Evasion still needs to feel like evasion. But something still has to be done to make high evasion builds desirable. 85% evasion is currently nowhere near as desirable as 85% reduction. Something has to be done to smooth out the spikiness of incoming damage.

If my bleeding idea is viable, then a keystone to the effect of 'any lethal damage dealt is reduced by 50% and causes puncturing' would suffice. Unfortunately that might include the final tick of the bleeding, which would be hilarious and silly to say the least!

That said, I've observed that it's often not one source of damage but a series of spikes that do me in. I do take those with the territory of making a crazy evader, though.

Honestly, I think I'd be happy if GGG somehow tweaked Acrobatics/Phase Acrobatics to be a little more worth the drawback. I'm totally happy to play my evader with no armour or energy shield -- as long what I gain with that sacrifice justifies the choice.

Right now, not quite.

"

0nin wrote:

Let me preface this thread by saying that I understand the idea behind Evasion completely. You're trying to create three different ways in which you can improve EHP (Effective Health Points), and the Armor/Evasion/ES system is exactly that: Armor reduces damage by a percentage, effectively increasing EHP by that amount, ES flatout increases EHP by basically giving you more 'health', and Evasion reduces a percentage of hits by 100%, which also effectively increases EHP by that amount.

I don't really agree with this.

Evasion does not increase your effective hit points. What it does is provide
- Average damage mitigation over time (hence, increases flask charge efficiency)
- Stun, status ailment and other on-hit effect avoidance
- Only works against attacks

Armour provides:
- Average damage mitigation over time (hence, increases flask charge efficiency)
- Increase in effective hit points. The amount varies from a large increase (versus many paper cuts), to a small increase (versus big heavy hits).
- Some stun avoidance, and stun duration decrease, due to less damage taken
- Only works against physical damage

Energy shield provides:
- Stun avoidance
- Large increase in effective HP
- No damage mitigation over time, but increases flask efficiency due to automatic regeneration
- Does not work against chaos damage


Evasion does not increase your hit points, effective or actual. An evasion user will have to stack just as much or more life as an armour user to safeguard against hard hitting enemies and the occasional burst, especially if going into melee.
That said if you can get enough life to survive, I think evasion is superior to armour in terms of average damage mitigation. It's just missing the effective HP boost.