evasion v armor

"

kasub wrote:

I'll lay out the pro and cons of an evasion build from the perspective of someone who has used one extensively. I'm assuming it's coupled with acrobatics and ondar's. I'm not even going to include other forms of reduction with armor although EC charges are pretty significant for armor users

Pros:

- Projectile damage will have a 5% chance to hit you if you built your character decently(not counting dodge mechanics since not sure how they interact with this). This makes all projectile enemies a joke.
- You will do better vs bosses when fighting them one on one.
- You will be able to dodge spells which is a significant reduction.


Cons:
- Puncture will do an insane amount of damage. On a character with decent armor(5k~) you can easily run while being punctured in a vulnerability map. Armor reduces the damage of puncture twice. At 0 armor the puncture of some normal enemies will reduce your HP significantly if not immediately staunched. Vulnerability maps coupled with a nasty rare enemy can result in a massive damage puncture(8k within a few seconds). This is a huge con which people like to dismiss.

- This came as a surprise but in 95% of fights highend evasion is just worse. With the same amount of armor you can do most map content without worrying about white and blue enemies, even rares do little damage in easier maps. Even with 10k+ evasion every encounter can lead to massive damage done to you. The benefit of evasion for 1v1 is a very minor part of maps which has made me question the use of evasion at all.
Say you run a goat map with double damage mods, with an armor build I can manage to clear the map with relative ease. With evasion a small pack of 5 goatmen leaping could mean death/huge life loss.

Personally I think the cons outweigh the pros. I made a 14k evasion character that had ondars and acrobatics which is a lot of points. Even then my armor characters felt much smoother to play. Leapers are one example, new act 3x physical mobs are all harder with evasion and devourers are insanely scary with evasion builds when a hard blue pack can hit for 4k+(or a fractured devourer..)

What other damage reduction sources did you use? evasion isn't enough, just like with armor users. Armor isn't enough, you'll probably need endurance charges, enfeeble, or other reductions.
Also, evasion isn't random. You are speaking like you had a chance to get hit by 5 goatmen at once. Even with 20% chance to evade, it's not going to happen.

"

IriZe wrote:

Yes, armor and endurance charges stack, but charges give the exact same reduction for evasion build too. 1 endurance charge means 4% reduced physical damage taken with both armor and evasion builds.

I simply refer to the following observation: suppose I have a character that's pure armor-based, reducing an incoming hit of 100 dmg by 50%. He has 1000 hp.

Then he can take 20 hits, with each hit doing 50 dmg. (He will die on the 20th hit)

If I have a 1000-hp evasion-based character with a 50% chance to evade the same hit of 100 dmg, he will also die on the 20th hit.

Now give both characters 25% flat reduction from endurance charges (yeah, you'd need like 6 and change endurance charges to do this, but it's to illustrate my point).

The armor based character now has 75% reduction, so takes 25 dmg per hit and will die on the 40th hit. That's a two-fold gain in survivablity.

The evasion based character will now have 25% reduction with 50% chance to evade. So, he takes 75 damage per hit and gets hit every other time. He dies in 27 or 28 hits, up from 20 -- a meager gain compared to his armored counterpart.

Yes, there are other things at play, but it remains true that endurance charges impart a higher gain to survivability (in the form of EHP or, equivalently, number of hits the player can receive before death) to armor-based characters than evasion-based characters.

Furthermore, the other effects you could throw down (like blind, for instance), often act as multipliers to EHP and treat the above two cases equally; those effects can therefore be set aside. (Blind will always quadruple your EHP [disregarding incoming crits] unless you have unwavering stance.)

Endurance charges do, of course, reduce incoming damage by the same flat amount (or, equivalently, % of incoming dmg) for both characters. It's just that this is more meaningful if you've already reduced the incoming damage somewhat.

(Yeah, there are edge cases where an evade character is just barely saved from being one-shot due to his endurance charges. But the above was the thrust of the claim I was making)

This is the same concept as for elemental resistances: that passive node that gives 2% max resistance makes a huge difference, as the gain in survivability from 75% to 77% ele resist is huge. In contrast, the gain from 0% ele resist to 2% ele resist is trivial.

"

I could say, enfeeble "stacks" with armor, because the less damage you take, the more reduction you have, that's why an armor build is going to tank a vaal hit (and, if you are insanely stacking reduction from other sources, evasion build too, but it's not very likely), and that's how kerkrom died. The enfeeble fell off.

You could, and you'd be correct. I think I mentioned that earlier.

"

Imo, evasion is much better for a ranged character, and with enfeeble, armor can tank heavy hits too, but it's not very likely that you are going to facetank vaal with a bow. We could say, enfeeble is op, and evasion has it's cons and pros, just like armor.

I agree.

"

By the way, i didn't try to say armor sucks, i tried to defend evasion here. And it's still true that armor isn't going to save you against heavy hits. Enfeeble will.
But with evasion, you should not get into a situation where you'd get a vaal-like smash.

I didn't mean to imply you did! I prefer evasion based chars, for the reasons you just listed here (among others) ;).

Hell, the reason that I gave above for why endurance charges work better for armor builds is similar to (though not quite the same as) the reason that Ondar's guile works better on pure ev builds than hybrid armor+evade builds.

"

syrioforel wrote:

I simply refer to the following observation: suppose I have a character that's pure armor-based, reducing an incoming hit of 100 dmg by 50%. He has 1000 hp.

Then he can take 20 hits, with each hit doing 50 dmg. (He will die on the 20th hit)

If I have a 1000-hp evasion-based character with a 50% chance to evade the same hit of 100 dmg, he will also die on the 20th hit.

Now give both characters 25% flat reduction from endurance charges (yeah, you'd need like 6 and change endurance charges to do this, but it's to illustrate my point).

The armor based character now has 75% reduction, so takes 25 dmg per hit and will die on the 40th hit. That's a two-fold gain in survivablity.

The evasion based character will now have 25% reduction with 50% chance to evade. So, he takes 75 damage per hit and gets hit every other time. He dies in 27 or 28 hits, up from 20 -- a meager gain compared to his armored counterpart.

Yes, there are other things at play, but it remains true that endurance charges impart a higher gain to survivability (in the form of EHP or, equivalently, number of hits the player can receive before death) to armor-based characters than evasion-based characters.

Hmm, i see your point now, somehow i missed that.

These calculations are irrelevant, as tooltip damage reduction is irrelevant (same for chance to evade). It's average. This, combined with how armor formula works, will lead to quite different results.
But it doesn't matter much, armor is still safer than evasion. Armor combined with other sources of defence is incomparably better, compared to evasion + equal defence sources.

"

torturo wrote:

These calculations are irrelevant, as tooltip damage reduction is irrelevant (same for chance to evade). It's average. This, combined with how armor formula works, will lead to quite different results.
But it doesn't matter much, armor is still safer than evasion. Armor combined with other sources of defence is incomparably better, compared to evasion + equal defence sources.

Are you making general statements now or only talking about evasion vs armor without Ondar's Guille involved?

"

torturo wrote:

These calculations are irrelevant, as tooltip damage reduction is irrelevant (same for chance to evade). It's average. This, combined with how armor formula works, will lead to quite different results.
But it doesn't matter much, armor is still safer than evasion. Armor combined with other sources of defence is incomparably better, compared to evasion + equal defence sources.

We actually made sense, and used calculations to prove something, you just spit out a nonsense.

You just completely missed the usage of evasion and armor. With armor you are probably going to be able to take more tiny hits. That's what armor is used for, and it's perfect for melee characters.

But, if you aren't melee, evasion is better.

Evasion is definitely very good option:
Take all Ondar's guile, acrobatics, phase acrobatics. With such a setup + shield, you are hardly ever hit. Combined with enough HP buffer it's very good thing!

And lastly:
Those who have a skill play evasion build, because of skill!

And in heretical way:
You can play meta-evasion IR build - just go grace and stack exceptional HP (6K+), forget armour on gear, forget evasion on gear, forget energy shield on gear!

"

mazul wrote:

Are you making general statements now or only talking about evasion vs armor without Ondar's Guille involved?

Statements are general, such as the whole thread. It's pointless to discuss about pure eva vs pure armor, as they both suck, taken separately, but even then armor is better. I described combined defences, where armor shines much more. For ex. block/armor works better than block/eva. Block/high armor/high HP is also better than block/eva/dodge/ondars/mediocre HP(because when you spend nodes on these defences and still want to do dmg you will inevitably lack HP, combined with lack of str nodes in the right side of the tree). How armor works better could be easily seen in higher difficulty, where mobs got high accuracy and hit damn hard.
Btw there are tonnes of "ar vs eva" threads, where all of this was stretched to infinity. I can find them if needed.

"

We actually made sense, and used calculations to prove something

Sorry, your calculations are completely wrong so you make no sense. It's you that think you make sense.

"

Those who have a skill play evasion build, because of skill!

Nope, people that want to have fun play eva builds. Those that want to last long pick armor.

"

And Armor helps a shit, cuze hard hitter migate your armor with such a big amount, that it feels like you run around with nearly 0 armor.

And getting one-shotted with high evasion is better why? You can dump everything into evasion, but you're still gonna get hit sometimes.