armor vs evasion vs energy shield

I sugget watching Devmoon stream in order to see how evasion works so nicely.

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VictorDoom написал:

you guys should probably try evasion and block chance with decent ammount of life and regen+vitality aura you can get swarmed and you will rarely get hit, and if you use enfeeble curse almost no hits at all

Try evasion? I made a pure strenght and armour build...

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SL4Y3R написал:

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Startkabels написал:

I invested a lot in defence.
I have just checked my armour and have 6K armour and only 55% DR in merciless, doesn't make sense with very high focus on defence....

Armour and general defense is based on the notion you are using end charges. If you're not. It will fail.

Charges are supposed to be optional, at least according to the devs, which clearly they are not in this instance.
Frenzy charges were fixed ages ago to make them no longer mandatory, not sure why endurance charges have been left alone so long, they're just as mandatory as the old 8-stack frenzy ranger build was.

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SoujiroSeta написал:

There is a key point you missed in evasion:

Evasion only works against small packs of enemies. It fails when many monsters attack you. Which essentially is the problem. Every instance has waves of enemies coming at you, hence why evasion is bad.

The only time evasion is preferred over armor/es is if the monster would one-shot you anyway if you had armor/es (brutus).




It doesn't matter whether evasion can avoid damage or not. What matters is that swarms of enemies attack you at once in PoE, and evasion fails when attacked by multiple enemies. If there were zones with smaller packs but really hard hitting monsters that can 1-2 shot 10k ES, high armor high life marauders, then evasion would have it's place. Unfortunately that isn't the case. Hence, it's randomness, whether you evade is based on rng, and unreliability, requires small packs of enemies attacking you to work and is still based on rng even against small packs, makes it the worse of all defenses.

Evasion still works with full effectiveness against large packs. If you have 50% evasion you'll evade 50% of hits on average whether the pack is small or large. If the presence of a large pack suddenly lowered your evasion chance down to 12% then it would be behaving like armor (and thus rendered pretty much useless).

Optional?

lol. They should uh.... Do some math.

I am prety sure they have a list of things they have to do, and balancing skills etc. might not be the highest priority atm, but lets hope it will become more and more prioritized in time, when such things as desync etc. will be solved. Then I really hope to see some pro balancing, designed to make game chalanging, fun, addictive. Especially for pvp part, because thats always way more interesting than destroing brainless AI again and agin.

My bad Zaka. For some reason, I thought it was much higher than that. Although, a 40% reserving aura is horrendous :P How tanky would you be without the granites though?...

PS: I've missed your dissections of the game lately! Not enough essays coming from you :)

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StillSingle написал:

Although, a 40% reserving aura is horrendous :P How tanky would you be without the granites though?...

In the current state of the game, giving up granites just means you can't tank elites/bosses anymore, and have to resort to misdirects or kiting for those specific situations.

And, also: if you just use a high level RM, determination is a 30% reserve. If you have a high level RM and also 10% reduced reservation in passives, it's a 27% reserve. Basically, if you're just making a tanky build, RM over Det is enough to make it manageable. If you're making an aura stacking build, you probably want the 10% in RM passives as well.

My time lately is eaten up by a full time job and night classes. Once in a while I find some time to play a little. Full on theorycraft is out for a while; I still want to make that video series about defensive systems for OB, though. It might just be a little late.

So basically the granits cancel out the increased physical damage rares and uniques deal. That's a fair deal I reckon.

30% is by far awesome considering just how much armour you get from that aura :)

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Zakaluka написал:

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StillSingle написал:

Although, a 40% reserving aura is horrendous :P How tanky would you be without the granites though?...

In the current state of the game, giving up granites just means you can't tank elites/bosses anymore, and have to resort to misdirects or kiting for those specific situations.

And, also: if you just use a high level RM, determination is a 30% reserve. If you have a high level RM and also 10% reduced reservation in passives, it's a 27% reserve. Basically, if you're just making a tanky build, RM over Det is enough to make it manageable. If you're making an aura stacking build, you probably want the 10% in RM passives as well.

My time lately is eaten up by a full time job and night classes. Once in a while I find some time to play a little. Full on theorycraft is out for a while; I still want to make that video series about defensive systems for OB, though. It might just be a little late.

Must
Post
Here.

The issue with armor zak, is that you are not only grabbing those 10+ Armor nodes, using granites, endurance charges and enfeeble. It's that your doing all that when those 10+ armor nodes in hp, combined with the leech you already have, will do the job, much much better, without using any of the active defenses such as end charges and enfeeble.

The issue is you are making it sound like enfeeble/end charges/granites are exclusive to armor, but not to life. End charges+Enfeeble+Granites on even a mediocrely beefy(Life) character will push them into near-invincibility that you may experience. All the while, that life is also likely serving as a resource, and mitigating status effects, stuns etc.


While zaku is right, that armor is viable, the issue is, it is no where near as efficient as evasion or energy shield passively. While it gets on-par with the other defenses, when combined with active skills it meshes well with, the issue presents itself: Why am I using a defense that is being propped up by several other factors, to make it even par with other defenses? To put it in perspective, you're getting 60% of armors benefit from factors that aren't armor, and 40% from armor itself, after being boosted up.

The issue is how simply inefficient armor is as a PASSIVE defense, which is what these three defenses are. The issue is, however, armor is supposed to be exceedingly weak, due to the fact that STR has a natural life gain, and armor is the STR defense. The issue with that however, is that Evasion users, who can't get Acrobatics, get IR, which converts their evasion to armor. The issue with that is that evasion, without acrobatics, does not function well at all.

I believe, making evasion a defense that can be efficient and viable without acrobatics, is the issue here, more so then it is armor being weak.