So, Vaal pact nerf?

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oestergreen wrote:

Do you mind explaining to a poe noob (me) how evade works in poe? since its a % in the stat sheet, how can it be relied upon to save you from one or two-shots? I mean %-wise, even with 50% evade, you still gonna rip half the time, making the whole point of stacking evasion rather moot? or something i misunderstood? What is entropy and how does it relate to evasion?

Thx if you care to explain ;D so I can wise up on the poe mechanics hehe.

The same way block saves you from getting killed. If you have a 75% chance to block. There is a 25% chance you get hit by an attack. That means 3/4 attacks don't hit you. You statistically reduced the damage you take by 75% over a few seconds.

Now if you know probability, the chance you get hit twice with 75% block is 6%. 1/4 chance to get hit the first time. And 1/16 again to get hit the 2nd time. You have a 6% chance to get hit twice by the same attack.

The same reasoning for two hits if you have 50% evasion. There is only a 25% chance to get hit twice with 50% evasion. You went from having 100% chance to die to two bad hits with 0 evasion. To 25% chance to die with 50% evasion.

To prevent one-shots, you stack enough health to take on the full hit of one bad attack, evasion is really only there to give you the 'option' of not dying when getting hit by a string bad attacks, which is what happened to the person snorkle and draegnaar were talking about.

Like the guy got hit twice before dying. If he had evasion, he'd have 50% chance to avoid the first hit. And 75% chance to avoid the second hit which killed him. And if this was a 3 hit kill? It'd be 6% chance. ONLY 6% that he'd get hit 3 times in a row. So, while he can still die. It'd not be likely.

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oestergreen wrote:

Do you mind explaining to a poe noob (me) how evade works in poe? since its a % in the stat sheet, how can it be relied upon to save you from one or two-shots? I mean %-wise, even with 50% evade, you still gonna rip half the time, making the whole point of stacking evasion rather moot? or something i misunderstood? What is entropy and how does it relate to evasion?

Thx if you care to explain ;D so I can wise up on the poe mechanics hehe.

Evasion, i.e. the actual mechanic named "Evasion", is not RNG-based. The "X% chance to Evade Damage" in your character screen is an abstraction based on the entropy system.

Without getting into the somewhat complex math: think of your Evasion rating as a health bar for avoiding stuff. Enemy attacks take a percentage off that health bar based on their accuracy - the more accurate the critter, the more damage the attack deals to the Entropy Bar your Evasion gives you. if, after the attack resolves, there's still health left on your Entropy Bar, you Evade the attack and take zero damage. If the attack deals enough Entropy damage to empty your Entropy bar, the attack hits you and your Entropy bar fills back up.

If, as an example, you assume that you have enough Evasion to get 66% chance to Evade attacks, and that every single monster on the map has the exact same accuracy score, then you don't have a 66% RNG-based chance to not take damage. The Entropy system means you take damage on every third attack. Every. Third. Attack. Not mostly every third attack. Not an average of every third attack. Entropy says you're guaranteed to evade two attacks, then the third attack is GOING to hit you.

They set Evade up this way specifically to avoid the RNG streakiness that makes players gun-shy of using evade/dodge/avoidance as a defense in other games. The ol' "but eventually I'm going to get unlucky and take a bunch of hits in a row and die!" thing. Evasion is strictly deterministic, there is no randomness to it (shut up about the randomly selected starting entropy value, PoE Experts, I'm doing Entropy for Newbies here >_>). Evasion, thusly, means you take a series of evenly spaced out hits, dependent on your own evasion rating (higher is better) and your enemy's accuracy rating (lower is better, for you).

"Dodge", i.e. the effects of the passive keystone Acrobatics and several pieces of gear, is the traditional RNG avoidance chance people expect. 40% Chance to Dodge means the game rolls a dice, and if it lands in that 40% section the attack doesn't affect you. Stacking Dodge and Evasion means that Evasion's Entropy system makes it impossible for Dodge to fail you repeatedly in a row, while Dodge gives you an RNG chance to avoid taking whatever hit would finally break through your Evasion's Entropy bar. The two mechanics work excellently together, and as Snorkle stated, you don't really need nearly as much passive investment in defense as people think.

I have a Frost Blades Raider with barely more than 4.7k life, because I have an unhealthy obsession with using cool uniques instead of boring rares. I use Blasphemy Enfeeble, Stibnite flask Blind clouds, Acrobatics/Phase Acrobatics, Kintsugi, the frequent chills/freezes from Frost Blades, a Taste of Hate, non-VP Leech AND significant regeneration, and a nice-if-not-outstanding Evasion score on said character. It does just fine up into T13+ maps, I haven't met a map yet I can't rickroll my way through packs with that character. Certain bosses flummox me (to Gehenna with those chaos-spamming assholes in the Overgrown Shrine, man...), but that's a factor of me being unwilling to dump half my uniques more than a factor of defenses being bad. There's plenty of other bosses I can burn through without an issue because whenever they get through one layer of my defensive set-up, there's a bunch of other layers there to catch it.

Heck, just the other day my brother and I ran a Tul Breachstone - me on my Raider, him on his Earthquake Slayer. He has 1.5k more life than I've got, quadruple my DPS at least, and Slayer SupahLeech...and he used four of our six portals running constantly back to the fight because Tul kept catching him with Frost Barrage. Me? I watched for the tell, Whirling Blades'd through the guy to get behind him and thus avoid his big attack, and nothing else he could do much more than scratched me.

Defenses work fine.

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RPGlitch wrote:

The same way block saves you from getting killed.

It isn't quite the same, block is truly random and evasion has rng+entropy, meaning that you get hit when enemy stacks enough chance to hit on the counter to reach 100.

As an example of the worst case scenario, if you haven't been hit in more than 6 seconds the first attack rolls a random number 0-99 and gets 99, the enemy has 51% chance to hit so you add that to the counter to get 150, it passed 100 so you get hit and keep 50 on the counter. The next attack adds another 51 to get 101 which passed 100 so you get hit again, if the enemy had 50% chance to hit you instead, two hits in a row would never happen.

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RPGlitch wrote:

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oestergreen wrote:

Do you mind explaining to a poe noob (me) how evade works in poe? since its a % in the stat sheet, how can it be relied upon to save you from one or two-shots? I mean %-wise, even with 50% evade, you still gonna rip half the time, making the whole point of stacking evasion rather moot? or something i misunderstood? What is entropy and how does it relate to evasion?

Thx if you care to explain ;D so I can wise up on the poe mechanics hehe.

Now if you know probability, the chance you get hit twice with 75% block is 6%. 1/4 chance to get hit the first time. And 1/16 again to get hit the 2nd time. You have a 6% chance to get hit twice by the same attack.

The same reasoning for two hits if you have 50% evasion. There is only a 25% chance to get hit twice with 50% evasion. You went from having 100% chance to die to two bad hits with 0 evasion. To 25% chance to die with 50% evasion.

ya raics and 1453R are actually correct, with 50% chance to evade attacks from a monster theres actually 0% chance of getting hit twice in a row because of the entropy counter attached to evasion.


It basically forms enforced patterns, with 50% chance to evade it will be miss, hit, miss, hit, miss, hit. Now, if you start with a miss or a hit is random, the first attack that comes your way has a 50% chance of being a hit or a miss, but if it hits the next attack is a guaranteed miss followed by a guaranteed hit followed by a guaranteed miss etc.

Similarly if you have 75% chance to evade a given monster it will be hit, miss, miss, miss, hit, miss, miss, miss, hit, miss, miss, miss... etc. As racis says the entropy counter enforced these patterns as long as you keep getting hit, if you go 6 seconds without being hit it resets and you go back to a random chance for the first hit, once hit it will then keep enforcing the strict pattern again.

You can rely on evasion. Block and dodge are truly random and work in the way you describe, even with 75% chance to block AND 75% chance to dodge stacked together theres still a chance youll get hit 10 times in a row.



This is what makes evasion so strong for saving you from bursts of attack damage like this. Its not random, its not 'youll probably survive', its an absolute certainty that a rapid burst of attacks will be broken down. So bcause this example was a technical 2 shot, and given enfeebles accuracy debuff on this monster + a decent level of evasion will be well over 50% chance to evade it, we can be absolutely sure that 1 of these hits would have missed and the character would have survived.

The attack he was hit with was also a crit, another thing evasion does is downgrade attack crits to regular hits. If you have say a 65% chance to evade this monster, which a proper evasion build would likely have somewhere in that ballparker, if it crits you theres a 65% chance for that crit to be downgraded to a normal non crit attack.


Where chance comes into play in this situation for an evasion build is that we can be 100% sure one of the hits misses, but because ur evasion chance against a monster of this level cursed with enfeeble should be well over 50%, theres a chance you actually evade the second hit as well. If that fails theres then a chance you will dodge that second hit, 46% presuming its a melee raider we were discussing, if that fails theres a chance you will block the hit, character in question would have an 18% chance to block it. So evading 1 of the 2 is guaranteed, theres then 3 layers of chance involved where the 2nd hit may have been avoided, but we cant be sure either way. Thats why I said the character would take between 0 and 1k damage, cause its either taking 1 of the hits through the layers of damage reduction or both are missing.

Even better.

The character died to a two-hit combo where the first hit Shocked. If the character evaded one of those hits, then the Shock would not have mattered. Shock requires at least two hits to do its thing (absent Shocked Ground or similar modifiers) - a hit needs to apply Shock, and then second and subsequent hits can deal increased damage. Evade hits? You get Shocked less, and thus take less damage.

...I mean, I mostly came back to this hilarious truckbed party of a thread to help the guy who asked how Evasion mechanics work. But in the same vein, it's still smirk-inducing to watch folks say "HOW COULD HE HAVE SURVIVED WITHOUT VP?!?!?1?ONEQUESTIONMARK"...only to have a bunch of people break down the video, do some math, and go "actually, this wouldn't have been an issue at all if the guy'd put up, like...any layers of actual mitigation at all..."

Applause for common sense! Hurray for Enfeeble! EntropAsion Eff Tee Dubya! The best defense may be a good offense, but the best offense is NOT FRICKIN' DYING!

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1453R wrote:

Even better.

The character died to a two-hit combo where the first hit Shocked. If the character evaded one of those hits, then the Shock would not have mattered. Shock requires at least two hits to do its thing (absent Shocked Ground or similar modifiers) - a hit needs to apply Shock, and then second and subsequent hits can deal increased damage. Evade hits? You get Shocked less, and thus take less damage.

...I mean, I mostly came back to this hilarious truckbed party of a thread to help the guy who asked how Evasion mechanics work. But in the same vein, it's still smirk-inducing to watch folks say "HOW COULD HE HAVE SURVIVED WITHOUT VP?!?!?1?ONEQUESTIONMARK"...only to have a bunch of people break down the video, do some math, and go "actually, this wouldn't have been an issue at all if the guy'd put up, like...any layers of actual mitigation at all..."

Applause for common sense! Hurray for Enfeeble! EntropAsion Eff Tee Dubya! The best defense may be a good offense, but the best offense is NOT FRICKIN' DYING!

its like a chronic retarded loop that recursively is fedback to itself reinforcing faulty logic

the belief in that no defenses matter besides instant sustain of hp pool gets somehow 'confirmed' by showing a situation where a ton of hit point and NO defenses (or even regular leech) result in a death and that somehow proves how defenses are 'useless'. it doesnt even make sense, if anything the death proves how good defenses can be.

things such as enfeeble, blind, basalt/ToH and 5 points in acro provides so much defense its not even funny. and the opportunity cost of those is 1 curse slot, 1-2 flask slots (depending if you want to use stibnite or go for other sources of blind- for bosses other sources generally are better) and 5 nodes if youre on the right side of the tree.

imho its kinda a 50/50

most players now will not get VP due to the downside of the regen being none for a x2 leechrate. mostly fast regen + life leech item gems and nodes will do the trick or get acuity or bloodseeker .. kinda like the challenge though but VP now is trash . ! cheer guys lets enjoy 3.1 without any things getting rekt more

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grepman wrote:

things such as enfeeble, blind, basalt/ToH and 5 points in acro provides so much defense its not even funny. and the opportunity cost of those is 1 curse slot, 1-2 flask slots (depending if you want to use stibnite or go for other sources of blind- for bosses other sources generally are better) and 5 nodes if youre on the right side of the tree.

Just one thing to add, since acro is brought up:

quartz flask > basalt, unless ACTUAL oneshots are an issue and basalt would save you from them.

even if all you got is acro/PA, a quartz flask is about 16.7% ave damage reduction against attacks and 14.3% against spells (more if you've got other sources of dodge/spell dodge), consuming fewer charges and having two uses from full without mods instead of 1.5, and works against all types of damage instead of only phys. Plus there's the whole phasing thing, which is alright too.

Hell, there's even a decent unique one available since it got buffed in 2.6, although most people don't quality it or use it as a quartz flask.


Just saying

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tyr300 wrote:

imho its kinda a 50/50

most players now will not get VP due to the downside of the regen being none for a x2 leechrate. mostly fast regen + life leech item gems and nodes will do the trick or get acuity or bloodseeker .. kinda like the challenge though but VP now is trash . ! cheer guys lets enjoy 3.1 without any things getting rekt more

There's not much reason to think acuity will get away with instant leech if VP loses it. We've seen in the past when it has absurdly more going for it than VP people are more than willing to flock to it instead to keep things braindead OP, even if it is cost-gated. It's gotta get changed too, or else very little is solved.

Now *maybe* bloodseeker can keep instant leech, albeit with some nerfs... since it's restricted only to attacks with that weapon, it's got way more design space to be balanced out (but still should probably lose it)

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Shppy wrote:

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grepman wrote:

things such as enfeeble, blind, basalt/ToH and 5 points in acro provides so much defense its not even funny. and the opportunity cost of those is 1 curse slot, 1-2 flask slots (depending if you want to use stibnite or go for other sources of blind- for bosses other sources generally are better) and 5 nodes if youre on the right side of the tree.

Just one thing to add, since acro is brought up:

quartz flask > basalt, unless ACTUAL oneshots are an issue and basalt would save you from them.

even if all you got is acro/PA, a quartz flask is about 16.7% ave damage reduction against attacks and 14.3% against spells (more if you've got other sources of dodge/spell dodge), consuming fewer charges and having two uses from full without mods instead of 1.5, and works against all types of damage instead of only phys. Plus there's the whole phasing thing, which is alright too.

Hell, there's even a decent unique one available since it got buffed in 2.6, although most people don't quality it or use it as a quartz flask.


Just saying

I prefer basalt/toh for the reduction to hedge the one-shots. and in hc environment you wont catch me without one. I usually have a vaal grace to cap/near cap dodge in situations where I might need it (and for things like breaches or harbinger maps where you pretty much can keep it up indefinitely).

phasing synergizes well with raider but its also kinda redundant for her and for other classes I still like hard reduction. and if you play cyclone you dont really need phasing as you pass through enemies anyway ;)