In the context of PoE2, please reconsider the need for Accuracy and Evasion.

Let's look at what purpose accuracy and evasion serve, at their core. These stats are offensive and defensive faces of the same coin; and their goal is to simulate a dexterous and agile character.

Accuracy and evasion can be implemented in many ways, and the way which PoE uses (chance to miss) is one that works well for turn based games, RPGS or stiff action games where manually dodging and aiming is either impossible or uninteresting.

After the fantastic combat showcase of PoE2, I feel like the game GGG is building has outgrown the constraints that make accuracy and evasion a necessity. There are many reasons why I think keeping those stats as they are will turn into an outdated shackle that will be hard to shake off later, so it's best they're addressed early.

Agility and precision can be implemented in other ways.

The gameplay previews have shown us what an agile and dexterous character looks like. We've seen it in the monk and the huntress: zipping around the battlefield, constantly repositioning and avoiding attacks is a much better implementation of the agility fantasy than a chance to evade can ever portray. Similarly, responsive skills that shoot early in the animation cycle and allow for fast turning are a better model for precision.

If GGG would like these aspects of the character to scale with dexterity, I'm sure they can find ways to differentiate the behaviour of dodge rolls, the handling and turning of ranged skills, so that a high dexterity character feels more agile than a low dexterity one.

This works identically for monsters. A precise monster can aim better at you and shoot faster projectiles. An evasive monster can zip around and avoid your attacks better, especially considering the new AI file improvements explained by Mark. There's no need to compound all of this (in a way that's oddly multiplicative) with these monsters also having an artificial chance of arrows going cleanly through them without touching them.

Agility and precision hurt the player's learning.

PoE2 will likely feel more like a fighting game or, if you excuse the tired comparision, a FromSoft game, and learning attack patterns and precise movement is a significant part of player enjoyment. Having an arbitrary, stat based chance to miss or evade runs contrary to this, because it will cause constant distractions when internalizing movement and attack patterns. Did I correctly dodge that attack, or did I roll high on my evasion check? Did I miss that monster's hurtbox, or did I fail my roll?

Developing muscle memory to learn a fight, or to learn your own character, relies heavily on receiving precise and timely feedback. That's why netcode is so important for fighting games. Randomly having attacks missing in either direction because of a dice roll is a wrench thrown right into your brain's gears.

Accuracy massively hurts the "slow attack" gameplay GGG want to make viable by increasing variance.

I love the idea of slow attacks. I've been playing ignite and bleed for more than a decade precisely because I love the risk/reward aspect of being able to line up a boss for a big swing. I'm more than thrilled that PoE2 will let me focus on that, and the supercharged slam we saw on the demos was probably my favorite skill to watch.

All of that falls out of the window if we keep accuracy as is, because the already somewhat skewed risk/reward calculation goes out of the window if there's a significant chance to miss. Laboriously working up to a heavy stun and charging up a 4 second slam just to have it "mechanically" miss sounds absolutely painful, and unfortunately very likely as the side of the tree that most aligns with this playstyle is likely the side with lowest accuracy to begin with.

This brings me back to a previous point: There's no need for an accuracy stat, because precision is already implemented by the slow, unwieldy nature of the "imprecise" attacks themselves. Let a skilled player hit every time, if they have the skill to handle a slow, lumbering hammer with little maneuverability.

Ultimately, accuracy isn't a meaningful building choice.

Let's be honest: every PoE1 build has 100% hit chance. It just feels bad not to have it. This turns accuracy into a boring non-choice, and the only thought involved is deciding whether or not to use Resolute Technique. I imagine GGG's intent is to remove as many of these non-choices as possible.

Evasion can be a meaningful build choice, but there are substitutes.

Evasion doesn't suffer from being as mandatory as accuracy, since it's pitted against other forms of damage avoidance, and it's viable not to have any evasion at all. However, there are ways to implement similar tradeoffs as the one offered by evasion without actually gaslighting the player on whether or not a hitbox collided with them.

One such example is spell suppression. I think spell suppression is a great mechanic, because it gives a high-variance, relatively high-risk layer of defense that tapers down into low variance and reliability at the higher end of investment, which models pretty well how I feel a dexterous character should behave. If evasion were to be turned into "physical suppression" I'd be thrilled; roughly double the chance to evade, but make the player receive a glancing blow instead. If you do this, it will be possible to get accurate feedback and tells when learning enemy patterns, but also reward investment in dexterity-aligned defenses in a way that's meaningful and thematic.

Anyway, thanks for listening to my TED talk. PoE2 is looking incredible. Please free it from the ghost of accuracy and evasion before it's too late.

This is really smart and well put.

Adding this only so that doesn't look like sarcasm, as it genuinely ain't: accuracy has long seemed like a bit of a tiresome pointsink and a hangover from an early generation of games, though I appreciate the theoretical symmetry or opposing polarity versus evasion. Since I'm already compensating for substandard evasion with input, it makes sense to rely on that more. I only tend to find evasion satisying once (with a bit of help from input, recoup/regen, etc.) it feels like 100% dodge with an occasional "restart from checkpoint".

Accuracy has always been one of those "Diablo did it LUL" features that never really made sense to me. Why do casters get to automatically hit? Because fuck melee, I guess.

That said, I can imagine Evasion being useful in a different way. What if, instead of completely avoiding all damage, you instead take the hit's damage over a few seconds? Gives you time to react, but the bigger the hit, the smaller the window. Should apply equally to attack and spell damage, with your chance to evade being purely a function of your Evasion and the enemy's level.

TRUE

Also, besides missing quite often (with warrior giga slam skill)
From the PoE2 Exilecon gameplay , 90% of time the streamers wanted to use the slow skill they were stunned by the monsters out of the animation, making no attack, and losing 75% of health, making these skills basically useless outside of 1vs1 boss fights and only when the boss is stunned as well.

I agree with all of this. I'd like to add: one of the reasons spells are the overwhelming majority of builds is because there is no need for accuracy. In order for attacks to be competitve, from a very basic level, is to have that be true for them as well.

I've never totally understood why spells "can't miss" in PoE...wouldn't the same dodge mechanic that allows projectile attacks to miss be true of spell projectiles as well?

Someone made an interesting point in discord: according to them, it appears that no single hit in the demo ever missed. It's possible that accuracy is actually getting the boot but the items haven't been updated yet to match.

I would love to confirm this, but it's kind of hard to visually parse. Does anyone remember an instance where a hit is clearly rng dodged, by a monster or by the player?

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suszterpatt wrote:

Accuracy has always been one of those "Diablo did it LUL" features that never really made sense to me. Why do casters get to automatically hit? Because fuck melee, I guess.

There are games that have accuracy for spells too and it is similarly tedious

Its a tug of war though because players hate inconsistency but consistency is actually pretty boring in the long run. So developers are trying to get just the right amount of inconsistency into their games to keep it a bit fresher.

The issue with it in an ARPG is it boils down to a stat puzzle to solve rather than an actual mechanic, but truth is the game has loads of those already and it just makes it that little more diverse to have a character tick all the boxes.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

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suszterpatt wrote:

Accuracy has always been one of those "Diablo did it LUL" features that never really made sense to me. Why do casters get to automatically hit? Because fuck melee, I guess.

There are games that have accuracy for spells too and it is similarly tedious

Its a tug of war though because players hate inconsistency but consistency is actually pretty boring in the long run. So developers are trying to get just the right amount of inconsistency into their games to keep it a bit fresher.

I can agree with this, but inconsistency can be done right. I don't necessarily mind RNG mitigation. Block for example is a good thing, in my opinion; while it's fundamentally not too dissimilar to evasion, it does a few things right that evasion doesn't. It animates and sounds in a way that reflects the reality of the blocked hit colliding with the target. It can also be made subtly distinguishable from damage in a few ways (metallic clanging sound, blocking reel animation rather than a "hurt" animation). It also keeps stun relevant (I may get flak for this but I think stun is a good thing).

Evasion is just particularly bad because it works on a completely separate plane than what your eyes are seeing, and it's an illusion breaker. When a boss is stationary, stunned, you perfectly line up an arrow, fire at its center of gravity, and it just passes through the model... Yeah that's inexcusable.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

The issue with it in an ARPG is it boils down to a stat puzzle to solve rather than an actual mechanic, but truth is the game has loads of those already and it just makes it that little more diverse to have a character tick all the boxes.

This is a much larger conversation and one in which I have a strong opinion that's not necessarily relevant, but I dislike any mechanics that boil down to "you must max this number for your build to be viable". This includes resistances. I always found max res and ailment avoidance to be much more interesting mechanics than res capping.

That said, I understand there must be *some* degree of friction when removing any one piece of gear, so that you are forced to think and find a new point of equilibrium. Resistances do this job reasonably well; the need to fix resistances after swapping a piece adds barrier of entry to equipment changes, and more importantly, gives you a satisfying feeling of stability and "completeness" once you've fine tuned your character until being exactly at the res values you want.

Resistances do this well because you have to keep all three (+chaos when relevant) balanced, but accuracy doesn't. Accuracy is linear, binary, and frankly pretty boring. You must get 100% chance to hit; that's all there is to it. If we want GGG to push further in the direction of mechanics like resistance capping (which I'd be personally sad about, but I can understand) I'm sure they can find better approaches than accuracy, especially considering the immersion-breaking qualities of accuracy that I've been talking about.

Hell, if you want to keep accuracy and evasion with these exact names for theme reasons, I'd be cool with the result of an evade to be downgraded to a glancing blow + stun avoidance. This would resolve all of my issues really, and it would still be significantly different from Armor in that it's not scaled differently for big and small hits, and it works around stun.

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Falcord wrote:

This includes resistances. I always found max res and ailment avoidance to be much more interesting mechanics than res capping.

That's because they didn't think about resistances when they put them in they copy pasta'd D2, as a result they aren't a choice they are a mandatory gear tax to promote fresh gearing on tiered difficulties.

In Last Epoch they are a choice, because monsters get automatic penetration up to 75 so the delta between a 0 res character and a capped resist character is only 1.75 x damage taken, not 4 x damage taken. This allows you to play a character without bothering with resists in LE which I found very interesting, in PoE this is completely non-viable.

I probably agree with you about accuracy overall btw I don't think its quite the right level of interesting, I'd honestly rate it as mandatory like resists for anyone that actually needs it. I would prefer a system where you could play a 90% hit chance build, even a crit one, without feeling like a moron.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

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Falcord wrote:

This includes resistances. I always found max res and ailment avoidance to be much more interesting mechanics than res capping.

That's because they didn't think about resistances when they put them in they copy pasta'd D2, as a result they aren't a choice they are a mandatory gear tax to promote fresh gearing on tiered difficulties.

In Last Epoch they are a choice, because monsters get automatic penetration up to 75 so the delta between a 0 res character and a capped resist character is only 1.75 x damage taken, not 4 x damage taken. This allows you to play a character without bothering with resists in LE which I found very interesting, in PoE this is completely non-viable.

I probably agree with you about accuracy overall btw I don't think its quite the right level of interesting, I'd honestly rate it as mandatory like resists for anyone that actually needs it. I would prefer a system where you could play a 90% hit chance build, even a crit one, without feeling like a moron.

Yeah, I think we agree.

I like how LE does it too, though I'm not sure it's an ideal system; it clings too much to the ARPG trope, so people often get confused when they find out how they actually work.

If I were redesigning PoE2 from the ground up, I'd give elemental resistances the "Reduced cooldown -> cooldown recovery rate" treatment. I'd start elemental resistance at 100 and make it uncapped, such that the damage you take for each element is multiplied by 100 / (100+res). This would provide a clear incentive to stack about 100 res and show diminishing returns later, such that choosing exactly what value to stop at becomes a meaningful choice like life or armour, and one potentially informed by the content you're facing and the elements you're particularly weak against for one reason or another. It also would be reasonably easy to conceptualize; "+100 res means 50% damage. +200 res 33% damage, +300 res 25% damage..."

I think this would be better than LE's solution, because all that LE does is move the heavily nonlinear part of the function away from the values players can reach, so investment in resistances is more uniform, but it's still a capped value so it becomes uninteresting at the highest tiers of investment when you can justify to max each one of the resistances anyway.

Anyway, this is getting sort of off topic, but I'm excited about the opportunities that PoE2 affords GGG to redesign base mechanics, now that the games are separate.