What are the benefits of choosing Iron Reflexes?

Just started my first ranged character with the duelist and am near the Iron Reflexes passive. So what are the major benefits in choosing this? Wouldn't a ranged character want evasion? But I suppose more armor is always good. I don't know, what to do.

It triples the number of base items you can choose from.
Pure Evasion, pure Armour or hybrid just doesnt matter any more, which is great when you are poor or playing selffound.

Plus you can use Grace aura for even more Armour.

It is a tradeoff.

The main benefit from Iron Reflexes is that you can pool evasion and armor together to provide better mitigation than either would provide separately.

That said, armor and evasion in and of themselves have inherent advantages and disadvantages that you should consider:

Armor only mitigates physical damage, but it always mitigates.

Evasion mitigates all damage from attacks, but only some of the time.

Evasion uses an entropy system to prevent long streaks of hits or misses.

Armor's main downside is that it is not as effective against large hits.

Evasion's main downside is that whenever a hit lands, you will take the full damage (assuming you have little or no armor).

Evasion benefits from Dexterity, but once you take Iron Reflexes, dexterity will not provide any defensive benefit (this change is fairly recent).

Note that if you plan on taking Acrobatics or Ondar's Guile, you should not take Iron Reflexes, since those two passives rely on or compliment the evasion mechanic.

The problem with evasion is that while armor always gives a certain amount of damage reduction, with evasion it is literally hit or miss.

Imagine your character is attacked twice a few seconds apart and both hits would normally deal 2000 damage. You have a choice between enough armor to reduce the damage by 50% or enough evasion to mean a 50% chance to dodge. Which is better?

Well, if you have 5000hp, it may not make a difference. But if you have 2000hp, it does. With Evasion, you dodge one hit and then promptly get one-shotted by the next. With armor, you take the first hit and then have a chance to use a potion, move out of the way, logout, or otherwise react before the second one hits. You probably survive.

Also, IR allows you a bit more flexibility since you can use armor, evasion, or ar/ev gear interchangeably and pick whichever one has the best stats on it rather than being a bit more locked in to one type.

Then there's also the Unwavering Stance passive which is very useful for a lot of builds(melee in particular) but prevents you from evading at all. IR lets you take that passive and still gain benefit from evasion gear by converting that into more armor. It isn't as important for a ranged character, but still might be useful in many cases.

Thanks everyone. I think I will be taking IR. Really am enjoying this ranged character more than my melee mara.

I tried running a ranged pure evasion build with Acrobatics, Phase Acrobatics and Ondar's Guile.

I found that for the most part it was fine -- I generally took less damage than I did with Iron Reflexes previously. Every once in a while I might take a big hit, but most of the time I took no damage at all.

The problem is that there are a handful of encounters in the game where I just could not risk evasion failing (e.g. Vaal's smash, Brutus, Kole, certain map bosses, etc...). With literally 0 armor, those encounters would kill me if I got hit. Even though every single one of those encounters could be manually evaded (i.e. don't stand next to Vaal when he's about to smash), I just felt it was too risky (what if I desync while fighting Brutus?).

So I switched back to using Iron Reflexes because I could manually evade the things that would one shot me, and for all other cases, I would prefer to have constant damage mitigation rather than "all or none."

The other downside to armor, is that it doesn't mitigate elemental damage from attacks, but that can be mitigated by resists.

Evasion and HC don't mix well. If you rely entirely on Evasion, you will eventually die. That just doesn't work in HC. Without any evasion though, after taking IR for example, you'll be constantly taking damage (which is annoying).

The benefit of IR is that you can get some really high armor ratings that just can't be gotten without it.

From my experience, in late game you'll take much less damage going for evasion, but you need to take Ondars Guile, Acrobatics and Phase Acrobatics. On top of that you need a decent sized health pool (like with armor also) and you need to be good at kiting and running out the way of big hits to avoid the chance of getting hit. Keep in mind with a pure evasion char, you can still use endurance charges to get some armor. If you're too lazy/not good at microing your character or if you're playing hardcore, you'll probably be better off going Iron Reflexes and big armor.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

Evasion and HC don't mix well. If you rely entirely on Evasion, you will eventually die.

this is true for any character/build, thats the beauty of hc =)

The truth is that the massive mix of AR+EV is the best possible defensive Situation. Picking IR is a selfgimping in 99% of all cases in my honest opinion. Even more if you use Enfeeble...

For example how uber a AR+EV char can become, check my Signature.

1k ar + 1k ev is always better then 2k of one of em. End of Story! Stun immunitys so damn easy, that US isnt a real Point to choose IR...

regards