Monster Accuracy and Evasion changes in 0.11.2

Even with 40k armor you don´t mitigate a vaal smash too much (see mechanics for armor mitigation).
So I don´t see how other defenses are that much better at not being one(!)shottet (except of course stacking 8k++ ES).

My poor evasion/acrobatics character met her demise in onslaught after meeting cruel vaal, and being hit by his lightning spell, the falling debris, and chaos damage dealing constructs all at once. But survived most physical mobs well up until this point. I followed up this evasion bow build with a melee with full evasion and shield build, that eventually went with armor/evasion then full armor with iron reflexes, because of vaal again and the increasing difficulties.

With this, I look forward to giving another evasion character a go, especially with the hybrid evasion/health nodes. And also have a bright outlook for armor/health hybrids. Possibly even trying out the hybrid armor/evasion again, since going straight forward with either hits some diminishing returns.

Really liking the changes in the Ranger tree, looking very promising.

The monster accuracy and evasion changes seem more like treating the symptoms though than the actual issue.

That, unlike the armor formula, there's an exponent in the evasion formula. Which would explain why those monster values scaled exponentially, simply because that's the nature of evasion.

Armor is simple. To reduce damage by half you need to have 12 times as much armor as there was damage done.

Evasion is not so simple. To reduce damage by half you need to have 4 times as much evasion rating as your opponent's accuracy to the power of 1.25.

Granted, that's a small exponent so at very low values it'll actually be better than armor. But it remains an exponent, meaning that as accuracy increases you'll need exponentially more evasion rating to maintain that 50%.

Lowering monster accuracy will mean that that exponent's influence is severely reduced. But magic monsters, not to mention rares, will probably still have accuracy ratings requiring vastly more evasion rating than armor to achieve that 50% damage reduction.

On top of that Maps currently only go to 77 and act 4 is still to come. Meaning that we'll see even higher accuracy ratings on monsters in the future and you'll run into the exact same problem there currently is again.

A real fix would be removing the exponent from the evasion formula.

Chris the idea of needing more accuracy to get similar damage done is very bad in my opinion. I feel accuracy needs to be looked at as the only way to scale it with respect to resolute technique is if you heavily invest in critical damage, which is hard to do as melee or even ranged if you want to have a healthy survival rate.

Accuracy right now is a bad system. The idea of missing might be nice, but overall it doesn;'t work out. In classical ARPG monster at higher difficulty get more HP and weapon upgrades make sure that you can still kill them quickly or slower if that is what you want from game design. The one thing that does not happen is that your damage gets off worse it is just simply not effective anymore.

Accuracy in PoE is the first system that actually makes you deal less and less damage as the difficulty goes up. Not only do the monsters have more HP if you do not get an upgrade dropped your damage gets lowered. This double dib is the first thing that should be addressed. Which means a fundamental change to accuracy. The amount of accuracy, crit and crit multiplier to get over the point where you are doing better than RT is also far too high.

Darfrost on onslaught is one of my character that takes quite a fair of damage nodes, but I actually am losing damage as the difficulty/ zones level higher. For a build meant to crit I decided to start investing in crit at the end taking RT as a must have 1/2 way through as the damage drop/ fall was too much and simply gear upgrades taking too long to drop or not drop at all.

I think the evasion changes seem good, they are based of things that annoyed me when I tried out evasion (Gallodin melee on HC used to be evasion based). Also that character is based on melee critting. It has 282 dexterity +317acc from gloves and +270acc from helmet 16% increased accuracy and with accuracy support +887 I still score below 90% hit chance at the end game. Accuracy scales horribly it is so bad that as you progress through the game you actually lose damage.



I hope GGG takes the time to change and alter accuracy (perhaps you can scale beyond 100, where you get extra damage, but damage that doesn't scale with crit i.e.). It is one of the weak points and bigger issues PoE has. With my experience I am not happy to see some mobs get tougher to hit and it does not make accuracy more valuable.

You now have to get even more accuracy to do the SAME damage, this makes accuracy less valuable and makes resolute technique and can't miss mechanics more valuable I firmly believe that you got this statement wrong, as what I can get from your post.

kripp called that passive tree strat, nice job GGG

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Gobla wrote:

A real fix would be removing the exponent from the evasion formula.

I kind of agree.

Why "kind of?" Once upon a time I charted EHP where the three competitors were:

• X armour, 0 evasion
• X/2 armour, X/2 evasion
• 0 armour, X evasion, Acrobatics

Predictably, the Acrobatics one started really good (even with zero evasion the dodge kicks in), but it didn't grow very well at all. But what was really fascinating was that the pure armour and hybrid armour/eva charts matched up almost perfectly. The exponent in the evasion formula almost exactly counteracted the effect of stacking two different defense types. And I imagine that it still might make sense to get Acrobatics if you don't intend to invest much in defenses of any kind.

So in a way, the evasion exponent is there to prevent hybrid arm/eva from getting out of control; I imagine the worry is people taking the arm/eva clusters and being super-tanky or some such. I don't know if such concerns are founded, but considering how closely things line up it would seem weird to me if it were mere coincidence.

I like what you're doing with evasion and accuracy. I run a evasion/dodge/block build and those flicker strike ghost is unsurvivable without decoy totem in play. Keep up the good work.

I like the semi unintended buff to Resolute techniques ;)

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Chris wrote:

It has many beneficial consequences like increasing the value of good Rare Thicket Bows relative to Lioneye's Glare.

dafug is this?

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maxboo wrote:

I guess the main problem with evasion still remains. In high level maps u get one shotted by bosses/mobs or whatever, it doesnt matter if you now have 80%+ chance to evade attacks or not...... so you still go IR for not getting suprised by a huge hit out of nowhere.

This!

Even with 95% chance to evade there is still possibility that I will get 1 shotted by white archer if I will be pure evasion character with no armor. So it still will be better to have IR and take many small hits with chance to life leach received damage than praying for good RNG.

Maybe hybrid evasion/armor will be viable if that chance to evade will be really much higher, but we will see after patch.

I'm still missing some added value for evasion characters. Something like keystone passive which will grant chance to evade projectile spells based on evasion rating in exchange for no armor rating.