Armor and Evasion

[Valeli]

How useful are these, presently? What about compared to each other?

I've gone through a lot of threads in ranged forums where people talk about how useless evasion is in HC because it won't work 100% of the time. But once I started a marauder and started looking at that forum, I saw threads complaining about how armor become useless for really high spike damage due to its mechanics which is, basically, the only time it would really /need/ to be useful.

Is there any general consensus other than that at this point, +life/+hp is good?

I haven't made it far enough to check for myself, but if armor really does get epically diminishing returns in cruel/merciless for the largest hits you'd be most concerned about, it seems as if evasion is a bit underrated.... I mean, granted it's not reliable. But if neither is reliable for large hits, at least evasion presently gives you a chance to just avoid it, no?

Everyone loves iron reflexes though, so I must be missing something?

[magicrectangle]

Everyone loves iron reflexes because it turns random into reliable - but you're right, the armor mechanic needs some work. I don't understand why it can't just work like a physical resistance, that is, a flat percentage reduction in physical damage. But for some reason it works really well against small hits, and really poorly against large hits.

[BaronScarpia]

This will sound silly - and it is - but if you don't have energy shield (aka "1up"), best thing is not getting hit. Passed that point, what magicretangle said - armor is bad, but you know how bad it is. Evasion is a big if.

Also, another reason to love iron reflexes is that it opens up gear selection. You can work with armor, evasion or armor+evasion, so it's 1 thing less to worry about. It's easy to find one piece of gear with high evasion or armor, but all of them can be hard. And gearing is hard enough with iron reflexes - finding the right mix of socket colors, links, using hundreds of orbs to put everything in place... Making an all evasion req usually doesn't worth it.

Added to that, Iron Reflexes is just a nice place to go on the tree, since it's near of Diamond Skin, a Frenzy Charge and it's on the way of duelist life circle. If you're a ranged Marauder, Ranger or Duelist, it ends up being too good to pass. If you're melee, good luck.

In the end of the day, imo, kiting, resists and shennanigans (aka totems) are your best friends. I.e. I can't equip my build yet, so I'm using spell totem with summon skeletons. What I do is cast the totem right on my back and when the mobs get closer to melee range, the totem starts to cast skeletons like mad, making hard to enemies hit me. I can cast the totem away too, and enemies go for it instead of me. AI hates totems. A lot. I would go with spell totem or ranged totem, since every totem acts like decoy tome by default. It was my best defense so far, and it takes one 3L-4L gear slot to set (i.e. spell totem/reduced mana/spell).

I never tried shield or energy shield to have a opinion on them, but it don't trust evasion or armor. Skipping evasion and getting the other passive with can't evade + can't be stunned is just a auto-choice for me, like Combat Reflexes on GURPS. "Pick it".

[fBSunny]

Evasion is not as random as it may first appear. If you have a 20% chance to dodge from evasion or other passives or w/e, you get hit one in 5 times, which seems obvious. However, it is not completely random, it means you will get hit four times, then dodge the fifth attack and this will repeat itself. This means that even if you have 95% evasion, there is no chance that you will get lucky and dodge 100+ shots in a row. This means that evasion could work well in SC where you don't care if you die as long as it is infrequent, but in HC relying on evasion will catch up to you.

The reason that Iron Reflexes is so good is that it means you gain armor from both % evasion and % armor nodes, and you get an armor bonus from dexterity. This means that if you have IR and stack evasion you can easily have more armor than a character who stacks armor normally. Here is a link that explains Iron Reflexes if you don't believe/understand me.

[magicrectangle]

This means that even if you have 95% evasion, there is no chance that you will get lucky and dodge 100+ shots in a row.

There is precisely a (0.95)^100 = 0.6% chance that you will evade 100 shots in a row.

[fBSunny]

There is precisely a (0.95)^100 = 0.6% chance that you will evade 100 shots in a row.

This is what you would expect it to be, but it is not what actually occurs in the game. This page explains how evasion works.

Here is a quote from that page.

This system is designed to evenly spread out hits and misses such that players always evade an average number of times according to their ‘chance’ to evade. For example, if a set of identical monsters attacks a particular player and have 25% chance to hit him/her, only 1 in every 4 attacks will connect. This will hold true until said gap has passed. Note that the chance to evade calculation on the character page is based on the average accuracy of a monster at the player's level. If one would like to prove this, a good test is to take an evasion character with 40+% evade with Arrow Dodging to a bunch of act 2 spitting cobras, and sit with a bunch of potions. No matter how many normal cobras you gather, you should be able to count roughly an equal the number of misses between each hit and never get two hits in a row.

[magicrectangle]

Oh, I hadn't read that, that's interesting! I suppose it is an effort to make evasion slightly better than it is in other games, but it still makes the damage more bursty than armor - though not as bursty as "traditional" dodge would be. Thanks for pointing that out.

[fBSunny]

Idk if you read the rest of that link, but it also states that critical strike can be dodged. This means that if the enemy has successfully rolled a critical strike, and you have already failed your evasion roll, another roll occurs. It is a random evasion roll that does not take into account the entropy value for your normal evasion rolls. If you successfully evade the critical strike you take a normal hit instead of a crit.

This gives evasion some usefulness against critical strikes, which imo means that some evasion along with your armor is in fact pretty useful.