armor vs evasion vs energy shield

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Zakaluka написал:

it's no surprise many out there will get really pitifully bad gear

Zakaluka, don't say such mean things! I know you've always got good gear, but sometimes people can't help it.

Anubite hitting me with a bit of an inside joke.

Epsi, I've been through this issue so much I've had dreams about it. The perspective you're lacking is that of a complete combined defense. Armour doesn't go on its own. Actually, that's the core of most complaints against defensive systems in this game: it's not about how one system performs on its own. It's about how you combine the various defenses into a complete defense.

I have: life (about 3k), armour (lots), evasion (grace), block (staff), resists (80%), regen (3.9% + rejuv/IF). Where is the hole in my defense? Quite obviously, the hole in my defense is pure chaos damage that I can't block or evade.

Specifically, NOT chaos attacks, which are always split chaos/physi; I can also block and evade them. When an attack is split chaos/physi, an armour build takes only a very slight defensive penalty, because your reduction goes up a lot against the physical portion.

You're left with a defensive hole against chaos degen (poison arrow, degen aura on mobs, viper strike). You're left with a defensive disadvantage against elemental spells (not elemental attacks); just consider Elemental Adaptation or Phase Acrobatics/Arrow Dodging, or enfeeble, or any other number of defensive control abilities mandatory for the latter.

There are about 8 ways to plug the chaos hole, and regain a complete defense. Even in an armour build.

You can't theory me out of this opinion. I've tested it. I've made it work. You need a complete defense; I can get a complete defense with armour; you seem to be telling me I can't. Not true, I can, and it leaves me more than capable of coping with EVERYTHING, but laughably strong in lots of other situations.

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Zakaluka написал:

Anubite hitting me with a bit of an inside joke.

Epsi, I've been through this issue so much I've had dreams about it. The perspective you're lacking is that of a complete combined defense. Armour doesn't go on its own. Actually, that's the core of most complaints against defensive systems in this game: it's not about how one system performs on its own. It's about how you combine the various defenses into a complete defense.

I have: life (about 3k), armour (lots), evasion (grace), block (staff), resists (80%), regen (3.9% + rejuv/IF). Where is the hole in my defense? Quite obviously, the hole in my defense is pure chaos damage that I can't block or evade.

Specifically, NOT chaos attacks, which are always split chaos/physi; I can also block and evade them. When an attack is split chaos/physi, an armour build takes only a very slight defensive penalty, because your reduction goes up a lot against the physical portion.

You're left with a defensive hole against chaos degen (poison arrow, degen aura on mobs, viper strike). You're left with a defensive disadvantage against elemental spells (not elemental attacks); just consider Elemental Adaptation or Phase Acrobatics/Arrow Dodging, or enfeeble, or any other number of defensive control abilities mandatory for the latter.

There are about 8 ways to plug the chaos hole, and regain a complete defense. Even in an armour build.

You can't theory me out of this opinion. I've tested it. I've made it work. You need a complete defense; I can get a complete defense with armour; you seem to be telling me I can't. Not true, I can, and it leaves me more than capable of coping with EVERYTHING, but laughably strong in lots of other situations.

No, actually, it's the exact opposite. I am, and have been saying you CAN, however it is not only harder, but more complex, then to simply stack life. Armor is exceedingly worthless after a point. The issue is that the benefits for investing in more armor, passive wise, simply doesn't meet up with the benefits of getting "Yet another" 8% life node.

You also have to realise we two are talking about two completely different ends of the armor spectrum. I am commenting on the fact that evasion users that get IR because they cannot rely on a non-acrobatics evasion (Which is quite terrible). The issue is, that str users can reliably and easily get HP much faster then a dex, as they get 5 life for every 10 str highway node.

While yes, armor itself is MEANT to be part of a system of defenses, as I have stated in many other posts, the issue is that evasion-that-can't-use-acrobatics has no other way to become effective as a primary defense, then to become armor. While evasion-to-armor results in a higher-then-normal armor count, ranged IR users, cannot reliably use IR.

In the end, you can MAKE armor work, in the same way you can MAKE CI+EB work. The end result is simply a product that COULD have been MUCH better, should you have instead done something else. While I do admit, armor has its place, the issue I have been complaining about specifically, is how evasion is balanced, you go acrobatics for a good defense, IR for a meh defense, or evasion-without-acro for a rather horrible defense.

Another thing to point out is the fact that 4k hp+ and 1 3-5% life leech gem is a complete defense, unto itself, without armor, without curses, even without resist if you play a little slower. So while you can take the armor, in the end, you could reduce that armor to 0 and add some leech, and do just as well, if not better, because you have more damage via the nodes you respec'd from.

I've been trying to plan a build that is damage reduction based (armour), and have found it exceedingly difficult. Mainly for the reasons stated above, armour by itself is not a complete defense. below is what I've managed to get stat wise:

after 65 passive points:

+300 Str
+60 Dex
+0 Int

+102% increased armour
+110% increased life
+30 base life (exc from Str passives)
+3.4% life regen of max/sec
+5% max resists
+30% resist all
+5 max endurance charges
Iron Reflexes
Unwavering Stance
enemies cannot leech life

+15% increased attack speed.

Note in the above stats, there is a whole of 1 node invested in offensive passives.
There are 0 nodes invested in mana. Zaka suggested I needed more life to handle using blood magic, but to try and spend some points on mana passives was reducing life or armour or both, so I'm in a catch 22. AND I spent passives on endurance to get armour to be useful.

With the build, I'd still need to run grace, the armour aura, and at least 1 if not 2 offensive auras to try and buff the lack of damage I have. Which I can't do easily due to lack of Int nodes (would be relying on low level hatred, and maybe haste aura to keep under the Int reqs).

To me, trying to get a balance character seems impossible. To make any of the defenses work, you still need to pile life. If you're not using BM, you need mana passive investment. To make the defense OK, you need to pile that particular defense on too. Which leaves you 0 nodes for offense.

I should be able to spend a quarter of my points on offense, a quarter on defense, a quarter on skill support (mana etc), a quarter on travel, and the last quarter of the skill points to buff the area of the toon I want to be really strong. The build above is about 66% defense, 33% traverse.

What are your thoughts on the investment to get a defense to work? I hear Zaka, in that they CAN work. I mean is the cost/benefit structure around armour/eva/ES and related defense systems well balanced (considering that you need to run a combination to make any of the defenses effective)?

IF you make an armor based, mitigation based, character, you must be completely aware and prepared to deal with the fact that it will be very sub-par to the normal HP stacking routine. Which is something both zaku and I are trying to get fixed in different ways, when he isn't busy trying to tell me stuff I already know, over the misunderstanding and my increasingly frustrating tendancy to blur the line between viability and efficiency.

Fair enough Epsi, am I right in thinking it's exactly the same for evasion based char as well.

I haven't played with trying to plan a pure eva based character, but it looks like it will run into the same point sink as what DR based character did. Everything into life + eva + acro. No offensive investment. Try and spare some points for mana investment.

I hope you and Zaka manage to get the cost of getting a defense system working well lowered.

As I said, my weightings for a defensive character should be 50% of passive investment, not 66% that we have now. Only doing 50% also reduces the amount of travel needed, so it frees up 12% to go into offensive or skill support (mana).

Just what are your thoughts on how much investment should be needed to make a defense system good compared to OK?

Pure evasion characters have a better time of it, in most regards, as they very rarely get those "Rhoa charge crits" or "Brutus GS crit", due to the fact that evasion rerolls crits, meaning it is very very seldom they get the "Big" hits that armor users take notice of, because of the environment of taking little damage, then getting 1 shot.

Evasion users do have an issue, but due to how the evasion system works, since evasion and dodge are two seperate mechanics (Even has a partial amount of mitigation to spells, in comparison to armors' lack). While prone to rng bouts of horseshit deaths, they are much less prone to the "Unavoidable" deaths that armor users experience while leveling, transitioning, and learning the armor system itself. Not even mentioning the fact that you get a base 27% chance to dodge, from the passive tree itself.

In my opinion, there should be no cap on how tanky you can get, I personally believe that if I regen 200 hp a second, have 3000 hp and 150k armor, I should be able to basically afk in mobs. The devs disagreed.

Hopefully the armor curve gets softened somewhat with the recent nerf of granites, into the realm of reason.

Though in my opinion, I believe life and life leech more so, is the true culprit in this system, as if you have enough life and enough reliable life leech, you don't need armor, or resists after a point.

Good point regarding crits Epsi. even with the 30% reduced damage from the Mara tree, Any physical damage crit will pretty much negate armour. Whereas there is a high chance that the eva character won't take the crit (but still gets hit for normal damage).

I wonder what the result would be if the armour equation took the non crit damage as the to work out the damage reduction, then applied that percentage to the crit damage. This would reduce the occurance of 1 hit deaths from physi damage crits on damage reduction builds.

Therefore you'd still take big damage, but not OHKO piercing damage. a 2k damage crit with crit multi of 250% would still do 5k damage, but instead of being reduced by 10%, it would be reduced by 30% ish (didn't do the calc, couldn't remember the exact DR formula other than it has a denominator of damage*12). That's a difference of 500 damage taken.

That also brings armour into line with the double defense eva has on crits.

What do you think?

The issue is that armor is made, specifically with marauders in mind;

If you look at the attributes, you can see that the intended defense for str is mainly meant to be HP, however you have an issue because evasion, without acrobatics, is rather bad.

Therefore, most non-acrobatics using evasion users, get IR, and now, though they have hugely inflated armor numbers, they are lacking that natural "Oomph" of HP that normal str users would have. The "Solution" to this, at the time, was the band-aid fix of flooding the dex area with HP nodes, to compensate for the natural and inherent lack of HP. However, they failed to realize that HP itself, is designed to be a defense unto itself, therefore simply put a mandate of dex users picking up more HP nodes, to reach the same survivability, as an str user would have to pick up armor nodes to reach said survivability.

Then, with basically every competitive class being based on a sponge-based playstyle, of massive amounts of liquid hp being lost and gained over a period of time, they began to tweak the damage numbers, to the point that armor became simply so inefficient, that HP became even STRONGER.

It was a conundrum.

The solution, would be to make it so that evasion is balanced inherently, without either acro or IR (Yes, both of them need to be nerfed for this to happen), and then mob damage and HP numbers need to be revised.

In my opinion of course.

Good history lesson. I was reading another dev talking about balance changes. He basically had about 5 things on a checklist of varying weights to determine whether the change should go through. It was basically to stop himself from making chain corrections that fix the fixes.

I can remember a couple of them:
1) does the change fix 2 or more issues?
2) is it a big or small change (code wise, how long will it take to program/modify)
3) is there a better solution?
4) is it simple? (as in is the solution a small number of steps/changes)
...

Sounds like GGG has been balance changing to fix balance changing :P :)

until all the passives are in (keystones), it will be difficult to do a full balance of the defensive systems. But as soon as they are, defense should be looked at first imo. Work from defense, determine what damage types ranges you want to see, work out the defense formulae, then go not on the offense side of things to bring it into line :P