Hardcore evasion ranger feedback

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Torin написал:

Not the same, that is still an attack that also does elemental damage which is reduced by resistances. An armor build can still have some evasion or a shield.

And then. A look at the damage types addressed by each defensive system:
Evasion: attack physi/ele/chaos
Armour: spell physi. attack physi.
ES: attack physi/ele. spell physi/ele.
Block: attack physi/ele/chaos.
CI ES: Everything (urrrrggggg)

Anybody can have any of these stats they wish to. Evasion comes out way ahead in total damage avoidance against all but the smallest attacks, even when you aren't considering arrow dodging. Even if the armour character has capped 80% resists and the evasion character has only 75%, 50% evade with 30% dodge will (strictly) outperform 50% reduction. Again, against all but the smallest of attacks. edit: the problems evasion builds exhibit have very little to do with theoretical efficiency of evasion rating - there are practical problems.

Look, I'm not trying to claim evasion is better, but I don't care for the way you've simplified this issue by taking one mechanic out of context. I'm just saying armour and evasion both have one strength, one weakness when compared to each other. Armour can mitigate some (rare) spell damage. Evasion can avoid some (common) elemental damage.

You can't isolate something like: evasion does nothing against physi spells, and leave it at that. There's far more to consider. If you want to talk about block, anyone can have block. It has absolutely no bearing on the comparison.

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Asin24 написал:

My issue with evasion is, unlike other methods of damage mitigation, it relies heavily on luck. Sure, higher evasion grants you a better chance to dodge stuff, but in the end its basically a 'roll of the dice' in terms of just how much you will dodge. You can have 55% dodges and does 10 hits in a row, and at the same time you can get hit by 10 hits in a row depending on how random loves/hates you.

The element of luck I feel is the biggest weakness to evasion focused builds. It really needs some element behind it to back it up just to help a bit with the RNG issue.

come on man, you don't need to read the entire thread but at least read the first post

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Danos написал:

Evasion entropy.

From the mechanics thread, Mark explains what this is and how it works:

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Mark_GGG написал:

So I've been asked for details of evasion over PM, and don't want to have to keep giving single replies to more people in future, so since I don't think it's all been laid out in one place yet, it will be here.

Evasion in PoE is not fully random.

Each entity in the world contains an 'evasion entropy' value, between 1 and 100. The higher this value is, the more likely they are to be hit by the next attack. The initial value is random.
Every time something attacks you, they calculate their chance to hit as a percentage. That value is added to your evasion entropy. If the result exceeds 100, you're hit, and 100 is subtracted from the value. If the value hasn't reached 100, you're not hit.

Before anyone starts clamouring that they're not getting their actual chance to hit/evade, let's examine this mechanic in a bit more detail. Take the simple example of 100% chance to hit. Since you always add 100 to the entropy, it'll always exceed 100, and thus always hit, which is correct. The case of 0% chance to hit can similarly be trivially shown to be correct.
So let's look at 50% chance to hit. Since the initial value is random from 1-100, there's a 50% chance that the initial entropy value is higher than 50%, in which case adding the 50 from chance to hit will exceed 100 and thus hit, and a 50% chance the value is 50% or less, in which case adding 50 will not exceed 100, and thus not hit. So the first hit has a 50% chance to hit, as it should.
The second hit also has a 50% chance to hit, but will never hit if the first one does - provided you're only getting hit by things with 50% chance to hit you, you'll evade every second attack, and be hit by the others.
Let's say the initial entropy was 42. The first hit increases this to 92, and misses. The second raises it to 142, hitting, and then subtracts 100 from the value, leaving it back at 42.
I'll leave other percentages as an exercise for the reader, but they all work out - if an attack has 25% chance to hit you, every fourth attack will hit, and so on.

This is the mechanic by which streakiness is removed from evasion - it removes the possibility of failing to evade happening to come up several times in a row due to bad luck. Each attack has the correct chance to hit, and will hit you just as often as you'd expect in the average case using a purely random system, but the possibility of occasional but devastating non-average results - such as being hit by four consecutive attacks with only 10% chance to hit each - have been eliminated.

Some caveats:
1) If an attack would crit you, evasion is tested a second time, and if you evade, the hit is downgraded to a non-crit (it does not miss, since it's already tested for that and hit). This roll is purely random and does not increase the entropy value - it just generates a number from 1 to 100 and compares to the chance to hit. Details of why are in the spoiler.

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Given that this, if it occurs, would always be the next evasion test after the one to see if it hit, then if this did use the entropy value, then having above 50% chance to evade would make you immune to critical strikes, since you can't fail two successive evasion checks on entropy if their chance to hit is below 50%. If you were hit, that means you just failed the evasion check to evade the attack, and thus the entropy is such that the second test would be unable to hit you, and the crit would downgrade, whereas if it failed to hit in the first place, then critting or not is irrelevant.
While the concept of being so evasive you can't be crit is cool, the above behaviour is undesirable, and so checking chance to hit for the purposes of confirming a crit should actually stay a crit does not test entropy. Testing chance to hit for the purposes of actually hitting is always done via the entropy value.

2) Whenever the entropy value would be used, if a certain short amount of time has passed since the last time this occurred, a new random initial value is chosen. This prevents the player from waiting near a weak enemy until it hits (leaving them on a low entropy value), then running to a boss fight, to start knowing they'll have the maximum number of attacks evaded before they get hit. Entropy will perform it's function as long as you're continuously being attacked, but don't expect to transfer it from fight to fight.

Keep in mind there isn't an entropy counter for each enemy attacking, there is just one counter for the person being attacked. Here is an example of how this works out in game:

Two monsters are attacking me, I have 50% chance to evade.

Weak enemy attacks me for 100 damage, I evade.

Strong rare enemy attacks me for 1000 damage, it hits me.

Weak enemy attacks me for 100 damage, I evade.

Strong rare enemy attacks me for 1000 damage, it hits me.

Weak enemy attacks me for 100 damage, I evade.

Strong rare enemy attacks me for 1000 damage, it hits me.

Weak enemy attacks me for 100 damage, I evade.

Strong rare enemy attacks me for 1000 damage, it hits me.

Total damage: 4400. Damage mitgated: 400. With 50% chance to evade, thats less than 10% mitigation.

Because of this evasion is completely unreliable when being attacked by more than one enemy. This becomes a big issue when a large pack of flicker strike enemies with a rare monster in it attacks me, I often can't kite flicker strike and the hard hitting enemy can potentially hit me multiple times in a row with zero mitigation, unless I use a granite flask. It's really an issue everywhere though. This mechanic was added to make evasion reliable but it doesn't work.

Potentially the shoddiest evasion mechanic I have ever seen. I won't say the shoddiest defense mechanic I have ever seen, because that is clearly held by POEs armor system.

Extremely good post, Danos. I'll just make a few comments here, avoiding inasmuch as I can my well-documented history with Iron Reflexes. I also will not say which is better: Evasion or Armour, or really try to defend either. I think that ship has already sailed right off the rails, much like this metaphor.

This is just a quick explanation of how I play an evasion character.

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Danos написал:

I recently made an evasion ranger on hardcore to see if evasion is a viable defence. Usually I play on default, but I decided to play on hardcore instead because defence actually matters in hardcore. Since I don't usually play on hardcore I didn't have any items, I only used items I found or traded for. I made it to level 67 before I gave up on evasion and respecced into iron reflexes.

I may have missed something throughout this post but you don't specify what sort of evasion ranger. Archery? Sword+shield? Dual-wield? I know the answer is probably 'archery', but I'm not going to make that assumption. Not with this game.

BUT if archery, then I can already see one of the biggest problems: evasion without block is utterly useless. Utterly. By the way damage avoidance is calculated, the multiplicative effect of block chance is such that you're much better off with average evasion, average block chance over extremely high (relatively) chance to evade. The combination of chance to evade, chance to dodge and chance to block can leave you with some fairly decent damage avoidance chance overall. Decent enough? Not for toe-to-toe fighting, but certainly better than with evasion/dodging alone.

Which leads me into my first reiteration from other posts, and even conversations with devs: the abundance of evasion nodes is a big fat red herring. Of course new players are going to assume they can rely on all those nodes to give them some sort of protection. There's so many of them, and they add up. A new player has no idea how stupidly important stacked life is to an evasion build -- why would they think that? Your typical idea of an 'evader' is not some overbulky life-tank. Having to supplement evasion with some life is fine, but right now, an evader's focus should be something like 80% life, 20% evasion. If that. And then there are resists to consider, too.

So, neither disagreeing with your argument nor really saying anything new: the supremacy of life as the main defensive 'stat' is extremely problematic.

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Danos написал:

Long range chaos snipers.

You know the ones. They cast a projectile spell that does 50% physical damage and 50% chaos damage, and attack from far off screen. Evasion is the only build type that takes full damage from these enemies. Armour builds reduce the physical portion of the spell, energy shield / life builds split the damage between energy shield / life, chaos inoculation builds are immune to the chaos portion of the spell. Evasion doesn't really have any defense against this enemy type, except for the spell dodging keystone or granite flasks. I'll talk about this later..

These will shut down an evader SO quickly. I've honestly grown a little weary of pointing out the prevalence of chaos damage in act 2 and the fact that, yet again, only two things can really counter it: high life, or CI. Multi-shot chaos damage spells that can shotgun are just ridiculous, at least in normal difficulty. I can get a viper strike evasion shadow to the 50s and 60s with very little real effort for the most part, but when I hit the pyramid, things just slow...right...down. I either die a lot trying to clear some rooms or I have to very carefully unpick a crowd. It doesn't help that the Vaal snipers like to stay back and typically hover near that totem that just won't let them die.

This is also typically before I've acquired some of my usual tricks, too. Temporal Chains can be hard come by, most importantly. It's important to note how effective TC can be against these snipers; their cast speed/rate is much easier to manage.

Whether these snipers are a problem with evasion or act 2's damage/difficulty I'm not really sure, but I have far more trouble with that area as a dedicated life-stacked evader than virtually any other playstyle.

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Danos написал:

Oversoul falling rocks + chaos minions.

I only came close to dying twice before entering maps, once to ruthless oversoul and once to merciless oversoul. Both times were to being stunned by chaos minions and then being hit by lasers / falling rocks. Because I had to put so many points into defence, my damage wasn't very high and I couldn't kill the oversouls chaos minions before he came back. Evasion does nothing in this fight, except mitigate damage that the melee minions do, which isn't very useful.

Yep. I find my best defence with the Oversoul is to almost never stop moving. Running around to avoid those beams, running to dodge the rocks, running to stay away from that hammer. Thankfully, Viper Strike is made for hit and run. Again, if you were an archer, that's not much use to you.

But if I were to play an archer, I'd forego evasion altogether, for reasons stated above. And yes, the prevalence of evasion nodes near the ranger's starting point really don't help there. On the other hand, maybe the proximity to Iron Reflexes makes it a foregone conclusion, that rangers should build up their evasion only to convert it to armour.

As an aside and in reference to your damage issue: viper strike is one of the few attacks that virtually doesn't care for weapon damage or buffs thereof. Its damage is quite fixed and increased only with supports such as Increased Duration and curses like Vulnerability and Temporal Chains. It really is the best possible skill for an evader, being the ultimate in 'hit and run' that requires virtually no Skilldrasil support to be effective.

Just more reasoning why I'd never, ever go evasion with anything but sword/dagger+shield.

On the note of your Rhoa issue, well, I TC those bastards the moment I see them, which turns their charge into more of a leisurely trot easily avoided, but I am not sure if the charge itself cannot be blocked. And if it can be blocked, then that, to some degree, solves that.

I used to be one-hit killed by these, but I have sufficient defensive measures now that it almost never happens. I've yet to face the skeletal rhoas at a map level, but I'll come back to that in a bit too.

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Danos написал:

Rare + magic monsters with Increased Accuracy and Increased Accuracy auras.

Why do these mods even exist? All they do is make evasion even worse. Why not add some more mods for monsters, like ''All physical damage ignores armour'' or ''Does 200% increased damage to energy shield'' to bring other defences more in line with evasion.

I agree, really annoying mod. But it's the increased crit chance mod that really scares me as an evader. That second crit roll is incredibly important to surviving as an evader, and increased crit chance sort of walks all over it. The damage spikes that kill an evader aren't always crits, but if a crit lands, good lord do you feel it.

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Danos написал:

Evasion is completely unreliable when being attacked by more than one enemy. This becomes a big issue when a large pack of flicker strike enemies with a rare monster in it attacks me, I often can't kite flicker strike and the hard hitting enemy can potentially hit me multiple times in a row with zero mitigation, unless I use a granite flask. It's really an issue everywhere though. This mechanic was added to make evasion reliable but it doesn't work.

I can only imagine how awful being an archer trying to rely on evasion would be against flicker strike mobs. Again, stacked life+overall chance to avoid damage+temporal chains+blind+viper strike leaves me not at all bothered by flicker strike mobs, but that's still a lot of work to do what a few skills and armour could handle anyway. There is no way anyone could say that the evasion path is even vaguely efficient. Doable, yeah. Stupidly hard work, though.

I recently heard a term used by a dev to describe what I feel to be the *only* viable Evasion build: Mobile Melee. I've already described a bit of it above, but the essence is a devotion to hit and run tactics, using hex mastered temporal chains to be significantly faster than your enemies. Whirling Blades has two functions: spreading blindness and true active dodging in conjunction with just how slow the enemies will be when cursed with Temporal Chains. I favour blood magic and lots of life, simply because it's one less resource to worry about and it allows for pretty much endless whirling blades. If an evader cannot use whirling blades, an evader dies. It's that simple. I've experienced some desync with whirling blades (never as much as some people, it seems), but it's never so drastic as to make me discard that skill as a survival tactic.

I mentioned the importance of blocking earlier. So important. Crest of Perandus is my current method for that (the extra life is nice too), and I'll be grabbing quite a few block chance nodes as I move along soon.

As for actual evasion nodes, I haven't taken a single one. Acrobatics, Phase acrobatics and arrow Dodging, yes. But I'm relying entirely on my gear's evasion rating and a well-leveled Grace. I have 40% chance to evade with those alone. If I'd bothered with all those evasion nodes, I might have been able to knock it up to 60-65%, but that's at the cost of the life nodes and hex master. No thanks.

So there's a caveat, I suppose: I'm an evader, absolutely, but I've realised how useless actual evasion nodes typically are. The diminishing returns alone are enough to encourage an evader to focus their hard-earned points elsewhere.

And this comes back to the amazing abundance of evasion nodes. What the hell? Other than Iron reflex users, they're really genuinely useless. And it took me months of testing to really grasp that. I can't see a new player being even close to that obsessive/stupid.

So that's how I play evasion -- evasion itself plays a fairly small role in the build, but at the same time, I much prefer it over raw armour or energy shield for my style. I actually tried IR with it once and was really struggling with all the little hits and their effects. As an evader, I am almost never frozen, burning or shocked, because I'm that much harder to crit and that much harder to hit in the first place. Yes, when a hit lands it typically hurts a lot, but that's why I take all these measures to avoid being hit. Not just evasion rating, but speed advantage, mobility, greatly reducing the enemy's chance to hit via blind...

None of this might be worth half a bean in higher level maps. If being able to do higher level maps solo is one's idea of viability, then I can't really say. Since we haven't yet had act 3 in the beta mix, I remain wary of using maps as a guide for true 'end game play', just as I did not build for Maelstrom of Chaos. I build for content, and for me that means handling act 2 merciless alone. Which I can. Not without hiccups, but it can be done.

So I'll acknowledge that gap in my knowledge. Only speaking from experience as a dedicated Mobile Melee character.

I feel for you very deeply that you bashed your head against the evasion wall, but admire that you made it so far in hardcore.

Suffice to say that while I don't think evasion is broken, I do think it's grossly misrepresented as a 'primary' source of defence. Again, this comes back to the game's inexorable demand for high life or ES, which may well be another argument altogether.

For the record, charan, I agree mostly with your assessment of evasion for archers. You absolutely need another layer of protection. Block isn't the only way to add that defense, though. I used Blind with level 15 LA (levelling LA is a key part: more targets, more blinds). A 5-target lightning arrow with high pierce, fired at a tightly clustered group of monsters, can hit upwards of 30 times, and gets that many opportunities to apply blind.

There are a few different ways to get high pierce. With Blind linked and mana leech being almost mandatory early on, though - until the very late game it sticks you with proj weakness and Piercing Shots. You're left with W.E.D. or Penetration, Blind, and Leech linked to LA. There are a few ways to escape that configuration later. With a high physi bow you can support level 15 LA with 3% physi leech from gear, for instance. That allows you to drop Leech and link Penetration with W.E.D. Just don't expect to link faster attacks, and you'll need a cheaper fill-ability (I use burning arrow) for when your leech isn't keeping up.

Archers don't have a great selection of mobility skills; we definitely need one. As a result you have to rely on a combination of defensive controls. Blind linked to your AoE does something interesting, though: even if you only apply blinds to, say, a third of your targets, that's another source of 25% total avoidance. la: firing once into a large mob pack adds significant avoidance. Every additional shot you can fire before they close strengthens your avoidance even further.

It's certainly worth the DPS trade-off if you're a pure evade archer. Try it out. Also experiment with other defensive controls to solve your other problems. My typical plug: conversion trap eliminates the threat from big packs of chaos snipers. you get to divide them up and take them out one at a time. It's also good for splitting up a huge wave of melee mobs charging you. Other people have found good use of frost wall for such things, but I don't personally like the way it plays.

I did discover that blind isn't necessary for EK at all. Simple reason: whirling blades. On that note, hopefully we get more defensive control abilities and a mobility skill for archers.

Vaal is more troublesome for A/PA archers than A/PA melee, as charan noted. You need incredibly high DPS to pull it off. That fight is already my biggest gripe against evasion as a system. Rhoas, though, are a bit more manageable as an archer than melee; that was my second main hit.

Very well said.

I think a step in the right direction for evasion would be to tweak its effect vs critical strikes. Instead of not receiving extra damage sometimes, you should always receive less extra damage.

Say you have 50% to evade vs an opponent with +300% crit damage. Instead of sometimes "evading" the crit and receiving either 100% or 400% damage, you would always receive 250%. Your skills at evasion made the critical hit less critical.

This way you'd need a bit less max life to feel safe, and stacking evasion would guarantee not getting one shot so easily. You would receive more ailments, but they'd be less devastating.

Absolutely, Z. I really was a bit myopic with my response. I'm glad to see that my method of 'supplementing' evasion can be applied to other types of play. Blind...man, Blind is just amazing.

I have nothing to say in the face of the extremely comprehensive and articulate posts recently added here...

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Charan написал:

I think that ship has already sailed right off the rails, much like this metaphor.

...but I had to say I laughed pretty hard at this

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Charan написал:

I may have missed something throughout this post but you don't specify what sort of evasion ranger. Archery? Sword+shield? Dual-wield? I know the answer is probably 'archery', but I'm not going to make that assumption. Not with this game.

Yeah, I was a bow ranger. While leveling I used burning arrow + weapon elemental damage / mana leech for single target and lightning arrow + mana leech / lesser multiple projectiles for aoe. I had terrible luck finding items with links, didn't have a 4 link for a long time even though I checked the vendor every level.

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Charan написал:

BUT if archery, then I can already see one of the biggest problems: evasion without block is utterly useless. Utterly. By the way damage avoidance is calculated, the multiplicative effect of block chance is such that you're much better off with average evasion, average block chance over extremely high (relatively) chance to evade. The combination of chance to evade, chance to dodge and chance to block can leave you with some fairly decent damage avoidance chance overall. Decent enough? Not for toe-to-toe fighting, but certainly better than with evasion/dodging alone.

What do you mean ''the multiplicative effect of block chance'' ? I thought the way it worked was that first the evasion roll is checked, and then the block roll is checked. So for example if you have 50% chance to evade and 30% chance to block, 50% of hits are evaded and 15% are blocked. I'm not sure though.

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Charan написал:

Which leads me into my first reiteration from other posts, and even conversations with devs: the abundance of evasion nodes is a big fat red herring. Of course new players are going to assume they can rely on all those nodes to give them some sort of protection. There's so many of them, and they add up. A new player has no idea how stupidly important stacked life is to an evasion build -- why would they think that? Your typical idea of an 'evader' is not some overbulky life-tank. Having to supplement evasion with some life is fine, but right now, an evader's focus should be something like 80% life, 20% evasion. If that. And then there are resists to consider, too.

So, neither disagreeing with your argument nor really saying anything new: the supremacy of life as the main defensive 'stat' is extremely problematic.

Yeah, life is pretty important for evasion builds. It's impossible to make a pure evasion build, only a life/evasion build. That's why I suggested adding some life to the evasion passives.

I focused mostly on stacking life. I prioritized my passives as life, I focused on evasion gear with life on it and I helped oak four times. I had 2k hp by lvl 38. My resists were mostly capped at all times, and my evasion % bounced inbetween 40 and 50 as I leveled.

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Charan написал:

Temporal Chains can be hard come by, most importantly. It's important to note how effective TC can be against these snipers; their cast speed/rate is much easier to manage.

Temporal chains is pretty good, I was planning on using either that or enfeeble as a crutch against the vaal oversoul.

Unfortunately the int requirement on enfeeble is too high for me, even at level 75 I only have it at level 10 because I don't have enough intelligence to level it further. I also never saw temporal chains as a quest reward. I didn't have one until merciless oversoul and I had to grind merciless fellshrine for a couple hours to get one. After almost dying to ruthless oversoul I figured I needed one for merciless oversoul. It didn't have much of an effect on the falling rocks and I almost died again anyway.

I picked blind as soon as I saw it as a quest reward but the % chance to blind was too low to use with burning arrow for single target and my aoe killed things fast enough that I didn't see much of a point using it with lightning arrow. When I eventually acquired some 4 link items (at level 66) I had to choose between faster attacks or blind for single target and weapon elemental damage or blind for aoe and blind just didn't seem good enough to use. Offence can be considered a form of defence and if enemies die really fast or if they're constantly stunned they aren't much of a threat.

I was going to use a flame totem supported with blind / knockback / faster casting for some additional defence but I didn't find a flame totem gem until I was already in maps and between all my curses, auras, dps abilities, and utility skills like phase run I just didn't have the links for it. It's a lot easier to just use decoy totem with iron reflexes anyway.

I don't know at what point evasion would be considered ''broken'' but I think at the very least it's pretty terrible at the moment.

oh, the way I was taught to calculate overall avoidance chance is to multiple chance to be hit rather than chance to be missed.

Thus if you have 40% chance to evade, 40% chance to block and 30% chance to dodge, it'd be .6*.6*.7, and then subtracted from 1, multiplied by 100 for the overall percentage chance to avoid damage. It's much simpler than I've described it.

But let's use that as a basic example.

With the above model, you have a 75% chance to avoid physical/melee damage completely. And that's leaving you with lots of nodes for life and other goodies.

Let's assume you ignore block and miraculously get your evasion to 70% (that really would take a LOT of nodes).

You're at only 80% chance to avoid damage completely. And you've sacrificed way too many nodes to get there.

That's why I stress blocking.

Which is a funny thing considering I created a sword that won't allow you to block. Oh man, lesson learned right there.