Evasion vs Armor itemization

Armor gives armor rating. Items that grant armor grant the largest movement speed penalty.

Movement speed is an integral stat in POE, if under-appreciated. The faster you run, the easier it is to get out of danger. This means you can physically avoid projectile spells, boss attacks, or flee out of melee range while on low life. It's also super important in competitive racing and PVP.

Leather gives evasion rating. Items that grant evasion grant a 'medium' movement speed penalty, except for some endgame leather pieces, which actually grant a bonus to movement speed, instead of an implicit reduction.

Evasion can be converted into armor with iron reflexes. The result is that iron reflexes builds get more armor using leather than pure-armor users do, even if the pure armor users are specializing in building armor.

Evasion rating works fine on its own, scaling evasion rating down so that when it's converted, it isn't better than pure armor, would disrupt current balance of evasion vs accuracy and possibly disrupt the itemization of evasion overall.

It makes sense that heavy armor should reduce movement speed. Normalizing movement speed reduction makes the game less interesting.

It seems that pure armor items are too weak, in comparison to leather.

The solution, I feel, is to give pure armor a free implicit mod. If you are using non-hybrid gear, non-leather, non-cloth - you get an implicit, free +stun recovery%. The amount is based on the base item. Most armor users are melee fighters, so it makes sense that they would have above-average stun recovery. By adding to pure armor a whole new stat, it is no longer "directly" comparable to iron reflexes builds, which are now "giving up" stun recovery in order to use iron reflexes.

You might then say, that wouldn't Unwavering Stance negate my idea? Wouldn't it just mean an iron reflexes user just needs to get Unwavering Stance to negate "pure armor"'s new benefit? Yes. That's maybe the only downside - is that iron reflexes would still be better. But stun recovery is the only sensible mod I can think of, that would be useful, not too strong, and still compelling for taking a movement speed hit. I think it would be fine, it would just mean... Unwavering Stance is less necessary for a pure-armor user and would still make "pure armor" better than it is currently, without raising the flat value armor gives, which could also disrupt the entire balance of the game. My suggestion to fixing this weird "imbalance" of leather vs steel is to not directly try and rebalance existing values, but to introduce a new value to steel armor.

Interesting suggestion, however there already are some armour pieces with implicit mods, maybe just one though - Astral Plate. All resist is much more interesting than stun recovery.

On the other hand I don't think melee users who choose armour as their primary form of defense need stun recovery at all, because they tend to have big life pool and rarely get stunned at all.

In theory it would be better to remove stun recovery from pure STR gear mod pool so it is more likely to roll something useful for a melee user like life or +def or F/C/L res, but if every gear had some special cases like that it would make the game unnecessarily complex.

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dzordzo написал:

Interesting suggestion, however there already are some armour pieces with implicit mods, maybe just one though - Astral Plate. All resist is much more interesting than stun recovery.

On the other hand I don't think melee users who choose armour as their primary form of defense need stun recovery at all, because they tend to have big life pool and rarely get stunned at all.

In theory it would be better to remove stun recovery from pure STR gear mod pool so it is more likely to roll something useful for a melee user like life or +def or F/C/L res, but if every gear had some special cases like that it would make the game unnecessarily complex.

While glorious plates don't have it as an implicit, they don't have a MS penalty.

If we are gonna keep armor how it is, I rather see armor give a +life (flat) as it's more useful than the armor rating anyways. Put it on a lvl 1 armor and see how many lvl 80s are running around with that on.

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dzordzo написал:

Interesting suggestion, however there already are some armour pieces with implicit mods, maybe just one though - Astral Plate. All resist is much more interesting than stun recovery.

On the other hand I don't think melee users who choose armour as their primary form of defense need stun recovery at all, because they tend to have big life pool and rarely get stunned at all.

In theory it would be better to remove stun recovery from pure STR gear mod pool so it is more likely to roll something useful for a melee user like life or +def or F/C/L res, but if every gear had some special cases like that it would make the game unnecessarily complex.

+resists are an idea, but we already have an abundance of those stats as it is, and having implicit life gains on pure armor gear I think will just hurt itemization, rather than improve it, but it could work I guess

An alternative would be a flat damage reduction. -X damage taken from ranged/melee attacks (like some uniques have), though that overlaps with armor's purpose already so I dunno. There aren't many stats we could pick that "feel" right, but I do think adding an implicit value to using heavy armor would fix the issue between iron reflexes and pumping armor rating.

Also, I'm getting stunned a lot... more recently. I'm thinking it's a much more valuable stat than people give credit. Try making a melee caster - it's rough. My spells fizzle often enough... and it's lead to many deaths. Certainly, this does offer the tantalizing suggestion - what if wearing pure armor gear gave you an implicit X% chance to avoid spellcast interruption? I think that'd give armor a really powerful purpose.

faster stun recovery kind of sucks imo. It would be much better if it increased your stun threshold.

That said, there's 3 reasons why leather provides more defense than pure armour.

First, there's the flat evasion mod that can grant I think up to 380 evasion vs 120 for armour. This is huge

Second, dex gives evasion% while strength gives flat hp (no scaling).

Third, with iron reflexes, evasion gear can benefit from global evasion % and global armour %.


That said, one thing that is often (almost always) overlooked is that iron reflexes drop your evasion to 5% while someone that's using strength based armour items will be around 10 to 15% evasion simply due to leveling and how the formula works. Someone using armour gear will naturally have more hp simply because of the area they are in also. There's also the opportunity cost of picking iron reflexes.


Evasion might be better but armour certainly isn't far behind when it comes to iron reflexes

typicality evasion is on average better late game, and armor is better early. but something your not factoring in is that with evasion you can get really unlucky and take 3-4 hits strait and die but armor doesn't have that problem. if they both reduced the same it wouldn't be fair to evasion because they are adding risk with the chance to take the burst.

I would throw a RIDICULOUS amount of money at GGG if they would just scrap Iron bloody Reflexes altogether.

Be thankful their sense of fairness and morals far outweighs their greed.

You can have your implicit armour mod if we can get a life buff to acrobatics. Deal?

Ps I am kidding. Sort of.

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jrk14 написал:

typicality evasion is on average better late game, and armor is better early. but something your not factoring in is that with evasion you can get really unlucky and take 3-4 hits strait and die but armor doesn't have that problem. if they both reduced the same it wouldn't be fair to evasion because they are adding risk with the chance to take the burst.

You can not get hit by 3 or 4 attacks in a row if you have high Evasion, it's not possible, because of how Evasion in PoE works. If you have 50% Evasion (average) agsint mobs, you will evade every other attack, it's just how the system is designed.

I previously suggested that Iron reflexes be changed to read:

"converts all evasion rating into armour
30% less armour from converted evasion rating"

That'd make all 3 armour types nearly identical for the purposes of IR, leaving just a slight advantage on dex-aligned gear. It'd also bring IR itemization back into the realm of sanity. I don't know, at some point, if I've repeated something enough times I'm not sure it serves a purpose to do so anymore.

Pure-dex IR does have one pretty huge drawback most people don't recognize: Unless you really go all-out gimping your DPS, you're limited to 3-4 endurance charges. Hell, most IR rangers I've met don't even bother maintaining their endurance charges at all. In that scenario the rating scales pretty terribly when big hits start coming in. Great against rank and file, ofc.

Evasion, on the other hand, isn't tied by the hip to a second mechanic that you NEED for rating synergy. But I'd still like to see the armour and evasion budgets equalized. 15k armour through IR, even without any endurance, is a bit too impressive for how easy it is to reach.

I completely agree with Anubite's analysis on armor vs evasion.

Giving some stun recovery is one way to do it, and I'd actually like that since getting stunned is a deadly reality for melee classes. But I'd rather have reduced stun threshold, because the act of being stunned is a greater problem than the length of the stun, in my opinion.

But like others have said, I think the real culprit here is Iron Reflexes. My melee duelist with 142% combined armor+evasion bonus, running Grace and Iron Reflexes with the 4% bonus per Frenzy charge to evasion (now armor) has incredible damage reduction, making him almost untouchable (except for chaos dmg ><). There is no way I can achieve that with other melee toons who don't go IR, even with equivalent %armor nodes.

The thing is that right before I re-specced into IR with the duelist, he was a fragile piece of glass, with his average evasion and average/low armor. Now he's the best tank. The difference is just incredible. Broken ? A little.

I think the overall culprit is the armor formula, and Iron Reflexes itself. Change the armor formula so that it's better than currently with lower armor values, but not as strong with higher values. That might help fix IR, but still, the higher Evasion mods that can show up on Evasion gear will still win, compared to the Armor mods.

Also, dump the movespeed penalty of armors and shield. It's just bad and slows down early game.

Edit:
Just had an idea for Iron Reflexes.

"Character has a chance to gain an endurance charge when hit, equal to his chance to Evade."

The idea is to keep Evasion and Armor separate, yet make the IR character tougher than before, without making the keystone too good to use with pure Armor. It'd be perfect for a hybrid Armor/Evasion character, and pure Evasion *(ranger) would still be able to get decent use from hit, at least for the bonus to resistances, which they need.