I don't understand why they nerfed Iron Reflex this way

Hi

After using IR a lot in the past I have come to think that IR should be replaced with a better keystone that would better define a dex melee oriented character instead of this nerf to IR.

I suggest a keystone that would allow a 2h weapon like sword/axe/mace be allowed to block at the cost of only being able to wear evasion or evasion hybrid Armour,ES gear to properly move fast enough since any piece of full armour would be too clunky. I think this keystone would add better synergy to the 2h nodes around the duelist that it is possible to acquire but pointless if your character is to survive later.

The leather and steel nodes with grace and determination WITHOUT iron reflexes is more then enough, not having a armour movement penalty is wicked, movement speed is a constant variable as long as dsync doesn't stop your character.

This nerf makes me think of of it this way: Would a marauder go for a keystone that did something at the cost of all STR life bonus?

GGGs nerf is perhaps a wake up call that we should face it and accept that DEX is actually a support and not a primary unlike, depending on your build, using INT or STR which a player could (if they really wanted to) use only blue or red and be just fine. Dex will always require either life or magic/STR or INT.

cheers

What is usually going on is that most sweet talents are always get picked most often because general consensus is seeing them very powerful usually as the result of alternatives being not so efficient.

We have Resolute Technique - that made up for broken hit rating (that should have been fixed).
We have Blood Magic that makes up for very poor mana regen mechanic. Aura stacking propped up the use of the passive skill gem instead of this talent.
Interesting, but Eldritch Battery also helps with poor mana regen.
Iron Reflexes - used to make up for evasion mechanic is unusable in Hardcore. Now de-incentivizes dexterity stacking (that is already the weakest main stat of all three).

I can go on, but almost every notable passive key stone is very questionable. They are supposed to "break" the game. Otherwise they won't be any more different than another +10 stat ones - nothing to think about, not good.

Iron Reflexes should be removed? Possibly, but is it that overpowered only because it converts trash stat into a stat that actually matters?

Should other strong talents be removed as well? Let Scrotie design the game, and soon you'll find out every notable passive converts something to hit rating. Zealot's Oath - regeneration into hit rating, Blood Magic - mana into hit rating, Eldritch Battery - energy shield into hit rating, acrobatics - half of armor and evasion that's lost to hit rating, Vaal Pact - life leech into hit rating. This will be fun, sure.

Evasion doesn't guarantee any worst-case scenario survival like armor does. Relying on it when playing in a league that guarantees you are out of it when your evasion failed you is short sighted in my opinion.

I'm hardly trying to explain my point, but you may have noticed that english isn't my native language.

But still, i will try to do some case-by-case with other keystone to explain why I think most of them aren't that problematic to me except IR.

Resolute Technique : maybe one of the most powerfull one has the huge drawback of beeing in the Marauder Area. What i mean is, if RT was in the Dex side of the tree, it would be considered trash because of the actual power of crit. It allow to create the medium but consistant dps tanky type of build, the typical Barbarian tank.
Good combined with Strenght, bad combined with Dex. Is in the strenght side.

Blood magic : Really good for levelling because it allow to only focus on health, later is replaced by the support gem because Auras become to huge. Help diversity in the early game but far from necessary because of the existence of mana leech.
Good combined with Strenght. Is in the Strenght side.

Eldrich Battery : For me the most interesting keystone and the best positioned one. Allow you to stack mana but force you to adapt your gear for it. Far from huge life nods but still close to some to make the keystone playable. Either allow for support builds which have to sacrifice some life or force you to go far away to get the big life nods. Mana stack isn't a broken mechanic.
Good combined with Int and possibly with Strenght. Is in the Int side.

Iron Reflex : Penalise Dex based build but is in the Dex side of the tree, free armor for ES build because combine the power of nullification clusters and Body&Soul clusters.
Good combined with Int or Strenght, bad with Dex. Is in the Dex side.

Armor behing better than Evasion atm just force highly Dex based build to not be viable.

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Papyrazzi написал:

Armor behing better than Evasion atm just force highly Dex based build to not be viable.

Man, thanks for your efforts! Your english is more than enough for me to understand what you meant to say without any distortions, and I think it's great.

I agree completely with your post, except the single quoted last part (though I agree with it overall as well).

I just don't see how evasion can ever be good for Hardcore type of play. Do you? Unless it is 100% evasion entropy basically guarantee that you will get hit at some point.

As you are never guaranteed that you won't be killed by (let it be) the only hit that passed through your almost perfect evasion, why not go full armor straight to try mitigate all the damage possible?

I'll try rephrasing my question. How does evasion need to be changed in order to become viable and up to par with armor without making it totally superior, if only it is ever possible?

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How does evasion need to be changed in order to become viable and up to par with armor without making it totally superior, if only it is ever possible?

I don't think evasion is that bad actually, it's a bit underrated. There are multiple advantage running an evasion based char :

- Ondar's Guile is a really solid Keystone with 0 drawback making it totally mendatory for evasion based char (and I don't like it for this reason), ranged mobs can be really dangerous and Evasion can prevent beeing hit by elemental or even chaos damage ranged hits (snakes for exemple)

- General better resistance to elemental attacks

- Enfeeble is extremly powerfull combined with high Evasion (20/20 enfeeble reduce mobs accuracy by 69%)

- Entropy may guarantee to get hit at some point, it also prevent to get hit multiple time in a row and give time to leech/regen from pots .

- Ondar's Guile vs reflect for ranged build. Building medium accuracy and using projectile weakness.

- Really powerfull against critical strike.

For me the only issue with Evasion for Hardcore is that it has a poor synergy with "1 trick poney" build that stand still and spam the same skill which discourage from beeing active. You need to react faster.

Now the strenghts of armor :

- Stable damage reduction, give you the time to react. You can play Poe even if you didn't slept the last 72 hours.

- Endurance charge stack additively with your armor's damage reduction. Arctic Armour is really strong combined with armor (I think too powerfull).

- You can anticipate your weakness : elemental damages and boss's hits. You know you will not have mitigation against them, you don't have to "guess" you're fine against them. yes that's an advantage for me because most hardcore player die because of the element of surprise.

To sumerize :
Evasion : less weakness, but you need to react faster against them.
Armor : more weakness, but they are less dangerous and more anticipable. Endurance charges and Arctic Armour maybe too powerfull?

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Papyrazzi написал:

Скрытый текст

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How does evasion need to be changed in order to become viable and up to par with armor without making it totally superior, if only it is ever possible?

I don't think evasion is that bad actually, it's a bit underrated. There are multiple advantage running an evasion based char :

- Ondar's Guile is a really solid Keystone with 0 drawback making it totally mendatory for evasion based char (and I don't like it for this reason), ranged mobs can be really dangerous and Evasion can prevent beeing hit by elemental or even chaos damage ranged hits (snakes for exemple)

- General better resistance to elemental attacks

- Enfeeble is extremly powerfull combined with high Evasion (20/20 enfeeble reduce mobs accuracy by 69%)

- Entropy may guarantee to get hit at some point, it also prevent to get hit multiple time in a row and give time to leech/regen from pots .

- Ondar's Guile vs reflect for ranged build. Building medium accuracy and using projectile weakness.

- Really powerfull against critical strike.

For me the only issue with Evasion for Hardcore is that it has a poor synergy with "1 trick poney" build that stand still and spam the same skill which discourage from beeing active. You need to react faster.

Now the strenghts of armor :

- Stable damage reduction, give you the time to react. You can play Poe even if you didn't slept the last 72 hours.

- Endurance charge stack additively with your armor's damage reduction. Arctic Armour is really strong combined with armor (I think too powerfull).

- You can anticipate your weakness : elemental damages. You know you will not have mitigation against them, you don't have to "guess" you're fine against them. yes that's an advantage for me because most hardcore player die because of the element of surprise.

To sumerize :
Evasion : less weakness, but you need to react faster against them.
Armor : more weakness, but they are less dangerous and more anticipable. Endurance charges and Arctic Armour maybe too powerfull?

A great post with nice thoughts.

Let's take a look step by step.

- Ondar's Guile may be good, but it takes RNG and then it doubles it. The result is, however, still RNG. By the way, the same (solid talent with meaningless) can be said about Resolute Technique for most builds. Even when I used EK, I felt this talent is a must. Critting into a double-stacked phys reflect pack felt like getting a direct headshot from a rocket launcher.

- General better resistance to elemental attacks for an evasion-based character? Can you please elaborate? Do you count those RNG chances to evade ailment status talents? Or are you speaking about dodging elemental damage based spells and attacks?

- Enfeeble is still extremely powerful for armor-based builds as well. The mitigation it gives far outweighs in my opinion the RNG'ness of evading hits.

- What you say about entropy is exactly what I call damage taken spikes. You don't take damage for a while, then a hit (that is stronger, due to lower mitigation). When you compare that to constant taking of much smaller (better mitigated) hits, your health is almost always lower than its maximum value, allowing regeneration, flasks and that very leech to benefit you all the time, more effectively. Dodge entropy just helps your flask effects to end prematurely due to your life goes constantly capped and lowered, again capped then lowered - in spike manner.

- Ondar's Guile vs reflect for ranged build with medium accuracy and using projectile weakness - you will not have impressive dps due to that. As well, unless you spec double curses, you will lose Enfeeble, but that's much better in my opinion.

- Evasion is really powerful against critical strikes? Well, I'd say Marauder's critical strike damage mitigation talents are strong and predictable at the same time.


I agree with everything you say about armor.

But your summarize didn't make much sense to me.

How is evasion gives less weaknesses? You take damage in huge spikes. When you can afford to die from time to time, evasion may be viewed as "overall better", but how can you react to what basically one shot kills you? Will you be pressing "Resurrect" button faster?

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- General better resistance to elemental attacks for an evasion-based character? Can you please elaborate? Do you count those RNG chances to evade ailment status talents? Or are you speaking about dodging elemental damage based spells and attacks?

Anything that is an attack and not a spell can be evaded, either if it's physical or elemental.
Which mean for exemple snakes that hits for half physical half chaos damage would deal 0 damage if evaded but would deal full chaos damage and mitigated physical damage against armor.

You say Evasion is RNG, but armor ALSO is RNG, you have an approximate value of damage reduction but you don't know exactly how much you will mitigate.

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By the way, the same (solid talent with meaningless) can be said about Resolute Technique for most builds. Even when I used EK, I felt this talent is a must. Critting into a double-stacked phys reflect pack felt like getting a direct headshot from a rocket launcher.

I agree and don't agree, you still chose to not play around crit and prevent you to increase your damage with crit. Also it protect you from an eventuality that isn't likely to happend really often BUT that could cause you to die (and because dying mean an infinite lost, removing a very unlikely but unmanageable chance to die mean a large increase in "chances to live" (not to be confused with defense)). It's not like it's a real increase in your defense like what could give Ondar's Guile.

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- Enfeeble is still extremely powerful for armor-based builds as well. The mitigation it gives far outweighs in my opinion the RNG'ness of evading hits.

Well again, I agree and don't agree. Enfeeble is used by armor based char to counteract the potentiel loss of mitigation against big hits because it's there weakness.
Evasion build don't lose that mitigation (because they have none), which mean they gain the ability to evade over armor char vs big hits.
Enfeeble vs little hits don't bring much for armor build but can bring a lot for evasion build.

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- What you say about entropy is exactly what I call damage taken spikes. You don't take damage for a while, then a hit (that is stronger, due to lower mitigation). When you compare that to constant taking of much smaller (better mitigated) hits, your health is almost always lower than its maximum value, allowing regeneration, flasks and that very leech to benefit you all the time, more effectively. Dodge entropy just helps your flask effects to end prematurely due to your life goes constantly capped and lowered, again capped then lowered - in spike manner.

I totally agree, even if i think that most of the time the life leech rate is fast enough to counteract the spikes of damage. I agree about pots, and i think we need a higher tier of health flasks. Still there is some flasks nods like herbalism that have uses for this situations.

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- Ondar's Guile vs reflect for ranged build with medium accuracy and using projectile weakness - you will not have impressive dps due to that. As well, unless you spec double curses, you will lose Enfeeble, but that's much better in my opinion.

you can compensate the low accuracy with a high crit chance. It sound stupid to build a dex bower with no accuracy but it's maybe the best way to play evasion.

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- Evasion is really powerful against critical strikes? Well, I'd say Marauder's critical strike damage mitigation talents are strong and predictable at the same time.

Fair enough.

RNG = basically a coin toss to find out whether you are lucky or not. Throw a dice for dodging a hit. While evasion entropy definitely mask that, but when considering any single hit out of battle context (how many hits were previously evaded, etc) it can still be considered RNG, because when you encounter the very same situation over and over - and evasion will definitely give you different outcomes (unless it's pure 100% dodge).

Armor in this context can never be considered RNG. Yes, while armor mitigates weak hits amazingly well, it mitigates strong hits worse. But it's never the case, when you encounter the same mob twice, and one time he consistently hits you very lightly (and you take negligible damage), and next time he is consistently doing brutal hits to you (and you take rather big and poorly mitigated damage). This can be the case with map affixes, but you can easily determine whether you die or not beforehand.

I agree with almost everything you say, but I only want to underline the following. When learning a new encounter, you should be able to get the feel whether you die or not. With armor, after you got killed by, say, that very Vaal Smash, you realize that you will die. You can try and estimate what you should do to not die anymore, when you are going to encounter Vaal Smash again - be it run away, or stack endu-charges, use granite flask etc. If you once find what works for you, you will never get suddenly screwed as with evasion. Sometime you dodge what potentially kills you, sometimes not - it's not acceptable for me at all.

What I am basically trying to say - with evasion you can never be sure you'll survive something if you have already survived it before. With armor - you definitely can. The game is designed to be repetitive and hardcore play requires guarantees, as you can never be "always lucky".

Yes, you're right, I was trying to play the Devil's Advocate defending evasion over armor, knowing and feeling that ATM armor is better at least as a surviving mechanic and not necessarily as a defensive mechanic.

Quoting myself :

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Armor behing better than Evasion atm just force highly Dex based build to not be viable.

Well, i think we derived from the initial subject which is Iron reflex and why it is worst for Dex build than for Int/strenght ones.

Actually, yes, this change also made me think about why it was made actually like that.

I already thought, that Dexterity is extremely bad for my EK life-based tank Marauder I wanted to play, but I needed the stat for gems like Grace and Haste. After I realized that I'll at least get some extra armor from converted evasion that dexterity innately gives, I was feeling a bit better about that. Right now I feel I need to avoid Dexterity at all costs, only reaching IR from bottom of Duelist's 1.5% Health Regen node.