Is it just me or is Evasion complete garbage?

Deciding whether you live or die based on a coin flip seems silly to me when there are guaranteed ways to not explode on contact with physical damage.
Everyone who's said there are pure Evasion builds out there also says that they tend to die a lot.

So to further explain my argument here, lets compare all of our options.

Pure Energy Shield
Chances are you're going to have an insane amount of it and be able to replenish it extremely fast, physical damage is not a major concern.

Pure Armor
Speaks for itself, physical damage is a non-issue.

Pure Evasion
Heads you die, tails you live.

Energy + Armor
No need to worry about physical damage, if anything gets through your modest shield, you'll reduce it anyways.

Armor + Evasion
Heads you take some damage, tails you avoid it completely, not too shabby.

Energy + Evasion
Heads you die, tails you live, you have a half or a fraction of what Pure Energy would have and none of the protection Energy + Armor has.


I'm not going to say it shouldn't exist, I'm just saying that if you can't get your hands on armor and you have to have evasion in your build, you're better off going down to Iron Reflexes than taking your chances on the flip of a coin.

What are everyone else's thoughts on the matter?

For boss killing? Yes, its useless. For maps clearing? Its pretty much god tier stat. Just Jade Flask with 100% increased evasion mod makes me pretty much immortal while clearing (agains monsters that are not using spells that is)

Pure evasion + dodge is far from garbage. These days, you can get (close to) max dodge with some investment. If you supplement your evasion/dodge gear with some "physical damage taken as X", you're pretty much set.

Most things that will oneshot you in endgame, are crits. Read up on how evasion handles crits.

Leveled to 100 with ease last league with my evasion/max dodge Raider. Without rotas, just doing T16 maps. Safe, fast and did every boss.

on SC evade + dodge is absolutely fantastic, if your on HC it needs some serious padding behind in the form of some phys reduction, high lifepool or phys taken as ele damage.

As a standalone stat it isn't even close to armour which has vastly superior consistency and most of all VMS which is the single best utility for hard content in the game :p

It depends on what starting point you're at. Only Ranger and Shadow can do pure evasion because of the stupid amount of move speed they can get. You should be manually avoiding most of the hits, and if the occasional one or two that gets through kills you then you're definitely playing with way too little life.

Anything doing over 3k damage is extremely slow and will never hit you unless you let it.

Edit: Damn words, damn me, messin up those words.

its just you

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Phrazz wrote:

Most things that will oneshot you in endgame, are crits. Read up on how evasion handles crits.

exactly. and not only crits, but all on-hit effects. bleed, poison, stun, etc etc

evasion alone probably does suck, but you need to supplement it with dodge of course.
with 95% evade (raider can get easily) and 75% dodge that gives you a 98.75% chance to avoid all attack damage.

vs bosses now-a-days its easy enough to play around the mechanics where you won't be getting hit anyway.

some things to keep in mind. even with armor for physical mitigation, it caps out at 90%, and you can still get one shot. maybe it wouldn't be from physical damage, i dunno, but i've played plenty of armor "super tanky" juggs and shit, and i just feel like paper compared to my raider evasion builds.
getting hit every time feels like trash, personally.

there are other ways to get physical mitigation as well. you can still get fortify, you can get damage taken conversion, other less damage taken mechanics like kintsugi.

end game worries about deaths are almost ways going to be coming from spells anyway, because there are less ways to mitigation and avoid spell damage.

I think it's just that evasion is harder to build than other sources. I confess I still don't know how to build one properly.

Defenses are meant to work in layers.

Aside from the elemental and chaos resist, you're still looking to mitigate incoming damage multiple ways.

Pure Armor stacking helps reduce physical incoming, but because of how its calculated you still build around it, supplementing with things like molten shell, basalt flasks etc - it's not so much "pure" than it is focused. But it still takes 10k armor to mitigate 1000 damage last I checked.

Evasion by itself only applies to a portion of what might actually hit you and really needs dodge and spell dodge to shine - otherwise it's doing absolutely nothing against all that other junk coming at you not affected by evasion.

Pure Energy Shield is basically a recharging health bar. However, mixing it with armor or evasion/dodge heavily penalizes it's final maximum. Not mixing other layers leaves a major weakness to incoming physical - a basalt only goes so far.

If anything ES/armor or ES/evasion is more on the "worthless" side. Not only do you get a fraction of ES, you don't get enough evasion/armor out of it to make up for it.

My 75% evade, 10/40% dodge without grace and 12k eHP trickster say that you are wrong.

the biggest difference in the terms of defenses that i have experienced is that getting armor and block takes a fucking crazy amount of investment by way of gear and passives.

evasion+dodge, at least for raider and trickster/assassin, comes so easily with very little investment. especially for raider.
with an ascendancy choice of raider, onslaught (which ascendancy gives) jade flask of reflexes, 5-7 passives and either withering step and/or vaal grace, boots with some spell dodge (temple boots or atziri step), you can have max evade + periodic dodge cap.
its extremely defensive for its investment.

i've always preferred the right side of the tree for hp nodes as well. they are less frequent, but their amounts are higher per node and they're located next to your normal travel progression so you don't need to go out of your way to get much.
with the left side of the tree there are more clusters of hp nodes but they have less values meaning you need more of them, and they're often times out of the way requiring more travel nodes. the passive investment for hp on left side of the tree is way too high for being the "tanky hp side". not to mention the higher passive investment for armor and/or block make it pretty taxing to get decent defense.

and of course then you can still get one shot. everyone can still get one shot no matter how tanky you get/are. sooo....

i will always choose to get just tanky enough with as little as investment as i can - which is why im always playing ranger/shadow

ES is great, but its a lot more gear dependent thus costly. occultist can be EXTREMELY defensive but you usually can't do it straight out of a league or in SSF because you need such better gear for ES