Defensive strategies; some are surprisingly overpowered in this game.

Evasion is much easier to utilize and is better overall, though armor in combination with endurance charges and granite flasks is considerably powerful. Sadly, you cannot build for armor like you can evasion.

Utilizing evasion requires you build high life though, just like you were using armor. If you find evasion weak, it may be because you are not getting enough +flat or +% life.

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coastermonger wrote:

Hey thanks for the replies on this, I'm sorry if some of it came off as negative or for the inaccuracies. The problem is, there are still some misconceptions out there about how damage is dealt and sometimes even the path of exile wiki doesn't provide a sufficient explanation.

My basic argument about armor instead of evasion is this:

Imagine you have the option of taking 10x hits at 100 damage a piece, with 90% reduced damage.

OR

You can take 10x hits at 100 damage a piece with 90% chance to dodge.

Evasion becomes more of a luck tactic, with the possibility that you could get very unlucky and get multiple hits in a row of very high damage.

Armor is more of a slow and steady tactic. You're always going to take damage, but it gives you time to react to it.

To each their own play style though. Evasion does tend to work better for ranged if anything.

As others have already pointed out, eva is not random - e.g. (this is an example one of the devs gave, but i forge in which topic): if you have 50% chance to evade and a monster hits you, the next hit of the enemy will be evaded 100% - so evasion makes sure that the % is always true and there are no lucky or unlucky streaks (it might be that its first hit misses and the second hit 100%, but in the end you will ALWAYS evade 50%)
(EDIT: mind though that e.g. block is truely random (at least i think i've read that as well on the forum, but please correct me if i'm wrong), so if you have a 50% chance to block you always 'toss a coin' and you can get lucky/unlucky)


And armor gives the written damage reduction only for average hits, weaker hits get reduced more and harder hitting enemies will get reduced less by armor...

The tell-tale sign that a critic of Evasion hasn't tested it sufficiently is when you don't see any mention of how rarely a good Evader gets hit by a critical.

Right now, my Melee Shadow fears 'increased critical strike chance and damage' rare mobs more than any other type. Any. Allies cannot die? pffft. Four viper strikes and a TC, back off, watch and laugh. Same for life regen, extra energy shield, you name it. But increased critical strike chance can eat through that second evasion critical check and ohko me before I can land four vipers and get the heck out of the fray.

Naturally you stack life -- if you're not using CI/ES, you should stack life anyway. Do I agree with this? Of course not. A physically 'enduring' evader is not exactly a comfortable image in my mind but I can abstract it and say that 'life' isn't just body mass or muscle but some vague indication of how long your character can stay alive. Fine and well.

Recommendations to take IR over pursuing a true evasion route are understandable, given how obviously well evasion rating converts to armour rating (don't get Zakaluka started on this, please!), but I feel that certain changes of late made by GGG have actively improved the true Evader's stance and should not be so easily discounted.

If you want to be a true Evader you have to play like one. Yes, this is risking desync because Whirling Blades IS your active dodge skill. But it's not like you're using it to move back and forth within the crowd. You're using it to get out of there, hopefully after somehow crippling, disabling or thinning the herd.

This is just playing against a hopefully temporary state of the game, however. Without effective desync, I imagine an evasion style that relies on WB might be pretty standard.

But to iterate: that second evasion check in the event of a critical strike is amazing. I had my doubts, but when combined with stacked life, block and dodge, it's really a bacon-saver and no doubt.

Acrobatics is the single most underrated keystone in the game.