Hardcore evasion ranger feedback

danos - for your single target blind, try frenzy with blind and point blank/added fire damage (if you can afford to, manaleech if you can't).

10% chance to blind is chainable on frenzy, the way it scales its attack speed. The same way that faster attacks on frenzy isn't terribly effective because of its already massive attack speed bonus. Makes it a good skill for bow-tanking with point blank and blind.

The way entropy works - if you're keeping yourself above 50% chance to evade, you now literally get 87% chance to evade on those big targets once you have a blind applied. Now that we know the way entropy works, when you're bow-tanking a single rare by itself, you actually don't need seething flasks to recover from big hits. As long as you can recover your HP before some number of attacks goes off you're golden. I'd only want to let, say, 4 attacks go by, though - you never actually know what your real chance to evade is.

Cheers.

I thought Charon was exaggerating when he said that evasion passives were deceptively bad, and I was gonna show him by picking my +30% notable evasion node.

With +98% evasion already from my dex/passives (level 40), the +30% increased my evasion by 15%. Fair enough. 15% evasion should make me about 10% harder to kill, or so I thought. I open my character sheet, and see that the 49% is now.. 51% !

Yep, +30% evasion made it so monsters have to swing 4-5% more often at me to kill me! Now they're gonna get it !

This is a notable passive, meaning that it should be compared to either Fitness (10% life 20 str) or Thick Skin (18% life). But in fact, it provides me similar benefits to a single 8% node, except it's only vs attacks that can be dodged. Our notable evasion passive is worse than a minor life node.

This is also only at level 40. It gets worse with higher dex. However, it does get slightly better the more base evasion you have. A 15% increase will yield more benefits for someone with 2k base evasion than someone with 1k, but this is also true for armor.

A way to fix this would be to make dex give "more evasion" instead of "increased evasion". But that would only give you more total evasion to convert to armor...

Cliff notes: Evasion passives are worthless, even if you happen to go right next to them. They're decent if you have IR and low dex.

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Pwere написал:

I thought Charon was exaggerating when he said that evasion passives were deceptively bad, and I was gonna show him by picking my +30% notable evasion node.

With +98% evasion already from my dex/passives (level 40), the +30% increased my evasion by 15%. Fair enough. 15% evasion should make me about 10% harder to kill, or so I thought. I open my character sheet, and see that the 49% is now.. 51% !

Yep, +30% evasion made it so monsters have to swing 4-5% more often at me to kill me! Now they're gonna get it !

This is a notable passive, meaning that it should be compared to either Fitness (10% life 20 str) or Thick Skin (18% life). But in fact, it provides me similar benefits to a single 8% node, except it's only vs attacks that can be dodged. Our notable evasion passive is worse than a minor life node.

This is also only at level 40. It gets worse with higher dex. However, it does get slightly better the more base evasion you have. A 15% increase will yield more benefits for someone with 2k base evasion than someone with 1k, but this is also true for armor.

A way to fix this would be to make dex give "more evasion" instead of "increased evasion". But that would only give you more total evasion to convert to armor...

Cliff notes: Evasion passives are worthless, even if you happen to go right next to them. They're decent if you have IR and low dex.

hmmm... how about a flat increase to % chance to evade? at least on the notables

Flat increases, like what blind seems to do, sound terrible to me, because they cannot be balanced. It either sucks without them, or is OP with them.

If Dex added flat evasion rating (the way it does for accuracy), it would stack better and be useful for everyone, rather than a waste of points even for Dex characters.

It would also make more sense that a Dex character would still be able to dodge without armor. It might come in handy in cutthroat leagues or some other fancy setting.

Actually, now that I think about it, they could then switch Accuracy to a %, and give weapons an Accuracy rating. That would help a lot with the whole Accuracy mess that most people bypass either with RT or being a spellcaster.

Flat increases to %evasion aren't a terribly good idea. That'd introduce increasing returns to the system, which would cause a lot of problems. In fact, it's responsible design to incorporate diminishing returns into every defensive system - or at least don't let them scale any better than linearly.

Currently:
ES and ES regen scale linearly.
Armour scales linearly, until you incorporate endurance charges - at which point armour begins to exhibit increasing returns (hyperbolic upward increasing)
Evasion exhibits diminishing returns, but the diminishing effect isn't nearly as severe as your character screen would lead you to believe.

First, I make a claim: because of the way evasion entropy works, Effective Health is now a meaningful concept for evasion (unless you're standing still and letting a rare and one trash attack you repeatedly). Thanks, that makes this explanation easier.

Now we need to compare a graph of effective health vs evasion rating and a graph of effective health vs armour. Assume 550 accuracy rating on the mob (average for level 65) and 700 physical damage per hit (a vague guess for average at the same level)

Compare these two characters in terms of effective health scaling, to their respective defensive ceilings:
An armour character with 100% IAR and 50% shield defense, running determination, with 5 endurance charges. (50% shield def because that's what's easy to get)
An evasion character with 100% IEV and 30% shield defense, running grace, with 5 frenzy charges (+25% IEV)

Armour ceiling (no granite, no flask buff) for the armour character is about 22k.
Evasion ceiling (no flask buff, incl. dodge) for the evasion character is about 28k.

So now, plot effective health vs. rating on those two different domains. Evasion to the rating ceiling:

Notice, diminishing returns.

Armour to the reduction cap:

Notice, increasing returns.

A few reason this is all a very unfair comparison:
1) Arrow dodging. Pretty much infinite effective health vs projectile attacks. (evasion curve 50% steeper if even a third of your attackers are ranged)
2) Avoidance applies to a larger subset of incoming damage than armour (armour curve is often significantly shallower)
3) The reduction curve gets shallower anytime damage per hit goes up; the evasion curve stays right where it's at.
4) The reduction curve gets shallower anytime you're facing split-damage attacks (any attack with an elemental or chaos component attached). The evasion curve stays right where it's at.
5) Those curves don't account for crit. Crit makes the evasion curve significantly steeper and the reduction curve slightly shallower.

example: if monsters do 1100 damage instead, 15k evasion rating provides more efense than 10k armour rating, due to relative scaling. The overall theme I'm trying to convey here is that you can't even really compare them on paper. There are so many varaibles that it's comparing apples to oranges. You can realize though that at reasonable values evasion scales better than armour; it's when you start pushing that 60% line that things get a bit muddled.

aw shit, someone unleashed the Z-beast.

I still think life nodes, pound for pound, outweigh evasion nodes.

um, yeah. I'd have to plot %ev vs %life, but something tells me the slope is highest in the %life direction. Big issue is that recovery doesn't benefit from %life, but does benefit from %ev.

So it depends what you need more, effective buffer or effective recovery. Most people are probably still in a place where total buffer matters more than effective recovery.

I said in the second paragraph of the OP that evasion seems okay in theory. This is the problem with just looking at this from a math perspective and not actually seeing how it works out in game.

There are so many exceptions to evasion working correctly that it may as well not add any effective health at all. Maybe it's okay in default league to die occasionally, but in hardcore if it doesn't work consistently then it may as well not work.

Evasion is great until 5 skeletal rhoas charge you from the bottom of the screen for 800 damage each and you almost instantly die.

Evasion is great until your getting shotgunned by chaos snipers in a small indoor map for full damage.

Arrow dodging is great until something starts casting projectile weakness on you in a map full of ranged enemies.

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Zakaluka написал:

First, I make a claim: because of the way evasion entropy works, Effective Health is now a meaningful concept for evasion (unless you're standing still and letting a rare and one trash attack you repeatedly). Thanks, that makes this explanation easier.

I specifically mentioned flicker strike, you can't stop a rare flicker stike enemy and a bunch of trash flicker strike enemies from attacking you. You're also assuming that all enemies deal the same amount of damage and that is incredibly simplistic and untrue as well, even if it makes your explanation easier. My example for evasion entropy was just to show how it works in game and how it is unreliable.

My ranger is now level 76 and still in the hardcore league. The game is so much easier with iron reflexes even though armour is bad because evasion is even worse.

I was actually considering making a meelee evasion build but I just can't bring myself to do it because I know that I will die in maps if I even get that far.

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Danos написал:

I specifically mentioned flicker strike, you can't stop a rare flicker stike enemy and a bunch of trash flicker strike enemies from attacking you. You're also assuming that all enemies deal the same amount of damage and that is incredibly simplistic and untrue as well

All I'm really assuming is that you won't get the same pattern of incoming attacks multiple times in a row. Which is a very reasonable assumption, as long as you're actually moving and killing things.

Forget the theory, other than to help wrap your mind around what kinds of situations evasion will excel with. For instance, the very situation you bring up (flicker rares) - A/PA evasion seems to be the safest build in that scenario. You need a big enough health pool to survive the initial flicker spam, that is, you take 2-3 elite flickers to the face. In my experience ES and armour suffer horribly, but when I'm on my A/PA shadow I can grind my teeth and dps through it. Special flasks and all:

Flicker is evadable. For a very short time it wasn't, that was a bug.

I think the disconnect here (why danos thinks evasion sucks and I think it's [color=#00FFFF]fabulous[/color]) is because I've spent a very long time developing a peculiar play style centered around control and mobility. It works incredibly well. That's code for: I decide when to subject myself to attack, and how many attackers at a time. You may interpret this as "just don't get hit" but that's really not it at all.

It's all about staying in motion and maintaining control of every situation so that no more than X attackers may hit me at once. When attackers are more menacing (elite flickers) X=3. When attackers are small and weak X can be much higher. Against a rare with increased critical damage X=1 (and never, ever more - as an evader you absolutely have to read rare names)