after trying to go for pure evasion on my ritualist it became really apparent that almost every 'big hit' attack in the game is some sort of slam or aoe and it's really frustrating because they usually one or two shot you since you can't meaningfully get life increases on the tree at all. One poorly timed couple of white mobs hit some slams on you and it's over, it doesn't help that most of them have ridiculous ranges which can be quite hard to avoid with how little movement speed is available.

I agree with all of those points. Evasion sometimes feels insane. Until it doesn't. It makes building huntress currently very awkward because you have to path to the monk es nodes to get enough defenses wasting a shitton of points on the way. Solving this felt like a nightmare on Ritualist due to how many points you are sacrificing. I rolled a 2nd Huntress as Amazon now so i can have some of the defensive asc passives.

Had the same issue on Monk in 0.1 when i started. Was going for a lot of evasion. Didn't work at all. I simply rerolled to Infernalist because it felt very bad at that time and fixing it was not super easy either where I was standing in the endgame.

This is something I've been griping about since 0.1. In PoE1 there's other defences you can layer with evasion, you can add life, most monsters dont bypass evasion. In PoE2 it still behaves like a secondary defence despite the devs removing most other defences. 

Even shield block gets bypassed by slams and aoe, which coincidentally do the most damage out of all attacks. It's to the point that I wonder why they have the unblockable sound cue, half the games attacks are unblockable anyways. 

I wish someone would bring these points up to the devs because they talk about wanting build diversity and how players want to glass cannons over defence, but the truth of the matter is there just isn't really defence in the game.

Acrobatics is so bad its laughable i agree. I had 55% or something alike i slapped acrobatics just to see how bad it is. I got down to 2% :D Evasion doesnt exist but i also think ranger is fairly forgivable due to 30% dmg reduction with tailwind. Huntres start in the same place on tree but she has no build in damage reductions, and shes kinda melee xD

You just have to go energy shield, it was broken in every patch, its hard to build good life pool with literally 0 life nodes in your tree placement. 2k life is already a lot -> but still gets you one shot by half of the mobs in existence. I agree it suck you have to go way way out of your way to grab some monk nodes with energy shieldy giving extra evasion and alike. 70% evasion with 2k ES is roughly enough for any content if you have damage. Its not hard to get and ranger has extre reduction on top of that, I would actually love try build ranger sometime later.

Im running huntress with 67% evasion 1500life/1500 ES and in maps i basically never die. Bosses can one tap me still but meh what to do. Its hard to scale that further without significant improvements in gear

Just reached lvl 90 on my Zon today. 65% evasion / 50% block / 0 es

But I was about to start getting hybrid gear tomorrow so I can get rid of my block notes. I mean block is nice but I think I'm loosing too much dmg. investing into it.

Evasion / ES hybrid is the way to go 😎

All good points, i currently have 2.8k Hp 76% eva with acrobatics and still get one-tap or stuns-tapped.

acrobatic is too punishing, completely worthless with low% evasion. buff acrobatics! like giving them 20% mitigation if evasion failed. or something.

What made acrobatics strong/viable on 0.1 was that wind dancer gave you something like 64% MORE evasion where acrobatics made you have 70% LESS evasion, so you almost had no downside.

Now wind dancer is something like 30% MORE evasion with acrobatics being 75% LESS.

So it is why it’s much worse

I switched to hybrid. Lost ~30% block, maybe 10% dmg. But now I have 60-70% higher EHP against slams/one-shots. Much better. I do think pure evasion needs help, but to be fair it’s quite easy to path up toward ES nodes on the tree without sacrificing much.

But with new builds and play styles I can see it becoming a problem.

It’s pointless GGG wants to make sure you are not able to tank things. That would not be fun if you could.

1800 life and 85% evade chance just isn't enough to deal with all the Bs in this game, especially on corrupted maps that are extremely rippy. I'm literally dying every map when I get to a cluster of corrupted maps.

You are forced to either go es evasion hybrid, or go strength hybrid in order to get a higher life pool.

Ya… I ran half and half Evasion and Armour on my second Ranger in 0.1.0 and it was 10x easier than straight Evasion.

The obvious issue with evasion is even if you’re maxed you still take a hit about 1/20 attempts. If that hits a one shot you’re still dead. With zero mitigation it’s just a matter of time till that card gets punched… and oh does it get punched.

So with Decent Armour, Decent Evasion and Decent Block (I ran hybrid Mace / Bow) I only got hit like 1/10 times but those hits didn’t one shot me… I just shrugged them off, popped a potion and kept rolling.

Just like the weakness of all Armour is you take every hit even if they deal less. So there is a threshold where a certain amount of armour (just enough to survive 1-2 decent hits) and a certain amount of evasion felt like it worked better.

But this was 100 hours of Full Tank Pathfinder 👌… took me only 20 hours of DPS Pathfinder to reach that conclusion. Seriously… it was so much easier.

I'vd been an evasion build on 0.1, but there is definitely something wrong with the evasion mechanics as of now

So I have a few theories on how they can fix life. Idk about evasion specifically, but tbh I feel like the biggest problem with armor and evasion right now is that life is just worse than ES. Buff life, and you’ll inherently buff the other 2 defenses as well.

That being said, here are some examples of my suggestions:

1. Increase life gain per character level. Pretty simple, just reward players for getting to higher levels by giving more life. Probably the easiest way of fixing it without it getting out of hand imo.

2. Add higher affixes to gear. If you want life to be any kind of similar to ES without completely gutting one or the other, then treat them similarly. Sure you can add a couple more life nodes on the tree, but unless you’re going back to how poe1 was that won’t be enough. You have to make changes to gear. A well rolled piece of ES gear on any slot is going to have a few hundred ES at least, so make life similar. Make it so an armor based chest can roll almost 400 life on the highest tier, and maybe give us an affix on chest armors for percent increased life. Make it so things like gloves, helmets, and boots can roll more than 200 life fairly easily. It seems like a bit much, but when you consider some items for ES can have 400-600 ES you get my point.

3. Make it so strength is the primary way we scale life. Yes I know stat stacking would be a problem, but that would just be something to tinker with. If you want strength to be a method to scale life, then lean into that. Buff how much life strength gets, give us a passive notable that gives us more life per strength, and reduce attribute requirements across the board so non-warrior builds can still get decent life amounts and not go maces.

Not all of these things need to happen, they could focus on just one or two. Once you can comfortably get 3-4k life when you enter maps then that will be an acceptable state and the other defenses will be in a better place as well. As long as life is stuck at under 3k for majority of builds it will never be as good of a choice as ES, which can easily hit 4-5k by maps if you’re doing it right. I mean FFS my first character when poe2 came out in EA I hit 4k ES without really trying by act 3 cruel. That was without buying any gear, and I wasn’t even CI which meant I had around a thousand life as well. A similar life based character would have been just over 2k. We need that gap closed, and we don’t need ES nerfed to do it.

Now this is how you post criticism when beta testing. Hope a lot of you took notes.

I would put this on the poe forums as well.

Armour is actually worse than evasion and is not tied to life.

I also feel like this is a product of having hybrid classes. If evasion was better Monk would never die because they can have 2k+ ES and evasion. Same can be said whenever we get a STR/DEX class

Especially since energy shield doesn’t work like a “shield” and more just an extension of HP..

Any amount of ES should be “one-shot protection” alerting you that you’re about to be fucked… instead it just staves off the shittier of the one-shots

Great post. My suggestion to GGG after reading this is they need to add a bunch of spirit related support gems. A phasing gem could easily be put into winddancer or ghost shroud.

i liked this so much i actually read it all

Pure evasion can dodge 90% of all physical and you have resistance for aoe like the other builds.

You also have a node to make you able to dodge aoe's.

Did they break it ? Because people were posting builds using this that were able to just face tank end game content with 85% all evade.

It does feel to me like they just need to rethink the three main defenses in the PoE2 context in general. In PoE1 there are a lot of other defenses doing the heavy lifting, with armor/es/evasion generally being more secondary, so the design for defenses works there. But in PoE2 all you really have are those defenses and resist.

Ideally all three basic defenses should at least somewhat work against everything, so that the gap between each isn't enormous.

Evasion specifically really needs a damage delay mechanic. Something where if you have a high chance to dodge an attack, some portion of the damage is taken over the next couple seconds or so instead of immediately, and only the up-front portion is used for stun. (Whole thing for other ailments.)

Evasion not working on slams is actually so BS. 80-90% of my deaths are from slams or some sort of AoE. They’re already punishing enough with 1 hit either killing me or taking 80% of my life. I understand the concept of having movement speed available on the tree for evasion builds as a “just move out of the way” option. But sometimes, or a lot of times, I don’t have that as an option.

Players need accuracy for slams but monsters don’t? Why?

Players need more accuracy at long range for projectiles, but monsters don’t? Why?

Rolled into a map with double slamming monsters and charge shot crossbows. I didn’t stand a chance. Dodging the crossbow shot just for it to explode at my feet and kill me felt so bad.

this is soo goood. i was just wondering while playing my amazon, i kept getting 1 shot. and acrobatics is ass, 75% for a working defence that none of the others have to sacrifice for.

Great post with great feedback, I totally agree with you. I started my huntress going full evasion with acrobatics and even like that and having the buckler's block I got oneshotted so often that I was stuck in level 87 for a while. I had to redo my entire tree to get as much ES as possible and now survivability is ok, not the best but ok. The full ES is still broken, any mage class can have easily 5k+ ES without much investment and with high ES regen and the skill that totally fills your shield when you move away for a bit it's just like you never die. If at least their conterbalance was much slower clear or very slow boss killing but no, they have everything.

The real evasion is the spacebar we pressed along the way

Evasion is a really strong defensive layer but it can't work alone.You need more to stay alive

10k evasion without acrobatics is not much, I think that this massively influenced your post/experience.

I'm on 13k evasion with acrobatics (of course with running buffs, when I get hit it drops to ~10k) and it feels awesome. My damage also feels good. I invested like 4 div and gambled some pieces myself. It's far from perfect.

That does not mean that evasion needs work, it's super late game with many investments.

Hybrid life/Block chance/ES with a little evasion is the way to go

And I was thinking I was playing wrong. The only way I die on 16+ maps is from slams or unfortunate spam from white mobs that leads to stun.

Those interputs are fucking ridicolius, stoping your attack, movement, its basicly death sentence.

And shit on the ground. Poison pools, flame pools, blood pools. Its death sentence for evade/es build.

GGG made eva obsolate and is suprised that people NEED to clear a screen in 1 tap. Be quick or be dead.

This post needs WAY more attention, well done.

Great post, i mostly agree, unfortunately the amount of damage reduction you can get in the game outside of armour is borderline nonexistent at the moment. Adding some sources of % less damage taken if you haven't been hit recently or other things like that it would help a lot, the other thing you can do is mechanical defense, stop enemies from hitting you with freeze or pin, it is often vastly underestimated how much survivability a single cc ability can give you.

You open with the claim that evasion might be worse than armour, full disagree, evasion is 5 times better at the least, armour is incredibly shit, it protects you from even less things, it basicly doesn't exist for any hit that does significant damage aka slams and it only works on phys. Some armour can help if you get swarmed but white mobs that melee you but outside of that it's completely useless atm.

I have managed 95% acrobatics in 0.1 and 0.2 and feel invincible. I think evasion is extremely strong once you reach the top end of gearing but there is that weird spot when you’re just starting off your early and mid tier maps. 

It's pretty clear that GGG have no idea where they want to go with defenses. This needs to be addressed in the next dev interview.

Please post this to the official Poe forums. Your arguments are well thought out and well written. Make sure to follow official channels for feedback. Thanks for going this work

I always thought they should have included a major passive that was between completely bricking your Evasion for acrobatics. Something like "Glancing Blows" where you Evasion might take a smaller hit but its a flat damage reduction if you get hit.

Haste aura wasnt removed was it? They just removed it from already fast monster types. You can still get it

Armor and Evasion have both been very bad defenses in Path of Exile's history. You can't just invest in them. You need some sort of extra layer. And even then, you have to heavily invest in it at all to feel an effect for either one. It'd be nice for them to change it but what's more likely to happen is they're going to introduce more layers of defense on gear as mods (such as the Catalysis node where you take 5% of physical damage as a random element) or mods on uniques that will have to be paired with it to get away from pairing it with ES.

That said, I'd like for Evasion and Armor to actually be worthwhile investments, or at least have close by nodes that can be invested that make going pure evasion without ES viable.

Also, you have a source on that "haste removed last patch?" You made your post 12 hours ago from when I'm posting this and I got a haste aura companion about 6 hours ago. Is RNG just being RNG, for you? Or did I miss something?

Ok but do you have any 1shot build for tier 15s or? Link me pleaserino

But the vision is a difficult game.... They have stated in the interviews, it's not supposed to be playable and isn't supposed to be a suffrage. It's supposed to be a struggle like a souls game...

I like the game and like dipping my toes in it and cannot wait for these issues to find a balance. Until then Last Epoch is about to drop a new season and D4 is about to drop.... Something, hopefully is good.

Evasion is absolutely not viable in the endgame with the amount of effects on the ground and Wind Dancer falling of in 0.3s, very limited access to spirit to grab recovery support gems or recovery/regen on the tree in the part of huntress tree start makes it very hard to survive. The cost to move to ES is also too hard if you decide to play bleed build and you have to stack str for stomping ground. Its rough, the mixed melee/ranged playstyle cannot be applied as evasion is absolutely garbage in melee

Honestly you just don't have enough evasion. That percentage isn't accurate and 75% isn't enough as a primary defensive layer.

As an evasion character you need a few things this patch to survive.

1.) stun recovery. Because evasion characters have lower life you're going to get stunned. Picking up stun recovery is so valuable to ensure that you aren't getting chain stunned. Also making dodging slams easier because you don't get locked down.

2.) more actual evasion numbers. My char is pushing around 16000 evasion and feels extremely slippery. Only time I get hit is when I fail to see an coffin slam boi or the lightning corruption monsters spawn up. (Big threat to evasion. I think they're ground targeted instant lightning zaps.)

I played my first character last season as a monk. This season I went deadeye and am trying pure evasion on the rhoa and it's pretty easy to die. I'm in tier 2 maps now and did my first small gear upgrade after campaign.

I'm 100 percent getting into hybrid when I'm upgrading again. I'm a new player so I don't really know loads but thinking of getting big energy shield skills on an amulet and a megalomaniac in the long term so I hopefully can keep roughly to the build I was planning before I realized the issues with pure evasion.

Yeah ive tried pure evasion amazon, you litteraly get oneshot buy blue mob AOE attacks. Its not a viable defence at all without ES. i have 1200hp, there is nothing i can do to get more. I have no ES gear to equip that doesnt tank all resists. So its a struggle to even do T1 atm.

No one has even mentioned the entropy aspect of the evasion calculation. Your primary defensive layer can just decide to fail, which is why pure ES feels so fucking bad. Life nodes on the tree would help.

Jokes on you, the warrior's side has only 1 life node, and it's 3%. And you want a ranger to have life nodes?! /s

The ideology behind "all your defenses should come from a gear" is absurd while you have ES in current form. Rather put ES on the "life" level or bring back life nodes on the tree

I’ve been saying this since release. Pure evasion just feels like shit, Acrobatics works totally arbitrarily (it absolutely isn’t ALL). Friends playing armor based characters were totally fine. Hybrid characters feel fine. Pure evasion was dogshit.