Suggestion for defenses

When a system gets to me and I can't explain why I usually throw it into Excel to see what's going on numerically. What I can say is that the intended balance for the different defense types isn't really reflected in the current mechanics. I was looking specifically at base items figuring the starting point before multipliers would give the cleanest ratio.

In general the ratio was about Armour & Evasion 3 : Energy Shield 1. This is were the first break down really happens. Since Armour can only block at most 20% (base Value 3 -> .6) of it's value that would mean Energy Shield is already 40% more efficient to build into. On top of that since Armour by default only effects Physical damage the discrepancy for the effective health pool widens.

At a baseline the inherent ratio should be adjusted to make building higher Armour values easier, the suggestion comes in the form of some kind of glancing mechanic. Once damage mitigation is at for example 50% there would be a chance to fully mitigate the physical damage, scaling up slowly to the cap of damage mitigation. As it stands now Armour is undervalued mechanically and is kind of boring to look at from the macro level.

Evasion is its own animal to deal with. It feels wrong to gear into currently as the inherent random value for Entropy means you could last 4 or 5 hits or get pancaked immediately. I'm genuinely unsure if the 3 to 1 ratio is balanced in the games current state, but when we take a look at what it would take for Evasion to act similarly to Energy Shield through the Trait Acrobatics it would reduce your final Evasion value by 75% (base Value 3 -> .75), making it look like Energy Shield is likely 25% more efficient than Evasion.

There likely needs to be a ratio adjustment, I also don't see why Entropy needs to have such a large randomization scale. Or for that matter why the Entropy meter can't be adjusted by gear/traits.
Honestly my suggestion would be either reducing Entropies initial randomization pool or adding a way to adjust max Entropy before a hit is registered.

The efficiency values are probably a little scuffed since the three defense types are relatively unique, but at the very least in their current state the STR/DEX users are likely under served. We can see this in the way the player base is largely building Energy Shield only in the end game.

TL;DR
Armour and Evasion need a baseline adjustment to their core values to scale with Energy Shield.

Armour needs some mechanical adjustments, and maybe another mechanic to make it more interesting.

Evasions' Entropy mechanic is fine but needs some TLC, reduce the initial random pool or give the player the ability to increase the max value.

So... nerf energy shield to make armor and evasion have more spotlight?

(it's a joke)

They need to nerf ES otherwise balance issues will continue.

Another idea is to buff significant the Armour and change the way that Evasion works. Evasion should have a percentage to mitigate the damage becouse hits doesn't always hit in critical parts of body. Fir example being hitted in hand isn't the same as being hitted in chest.

Not sure how serious this is since text looses context, so I will take it at face value.

ES in any other game is a perfectly functional system, likely doesn't need any balance changes as the core stat is harder to build up than the other 2.

Armour and Evasion both need flat value buffs to at a minimum have the same effective power as ES, I did mention this.

Armour is boring and needs a new mechanic, it also needs the damage cap adjusted or removed. Neither of the other 2 have a reduction cap hard coded into them.

Evasion already has that built in, Critical Hits get rolled twice, once to check if they land and a second check to reduce them from a crit to a regular hit. I was mostly making the point that guaranteeing you get hit after so many attacks in the Entropy meter system makes it so you get unfairly punished compared to the other two systems due to the fact that there is no inherent damage reduction.

Though to your point giving evasion a stepper system similar to what it does for critical hits would make stacking evasion feel less all or nothing, regular hit gets down graded to 50% hit, 50% hit gets down graded to 25% hit. Maybe scaling with your overall Evasion rating?

Figuring if the average for evasion is somewhere between 1/8 and 1/4 hits then further reducing that hit could be a slippery slope. That's why my proposed change was to the inherent Entropy value, being able to consistently evade a handful of attacks incentivizes smart movement, which for a Dexterous character makes sense.

Thea value of stats are different.

Normally spellcasters are fragile in classic fantasies where they have high damage.
Archers types can withstand a few hits but their toolkits are about kiting.
And we have rogue types who have even more damage than casters since they have to go melee range
and we have tanks who can literally walk into the damage and survive enemies, while fighters in the balanced state...


Annnnnnd we have poe2...
Where spellcasters are the tankiest and highest damage
and "tanks" are rupert-tierdrop builds.

So wheres the issue?
Evasion is on luck. Having a chance to get a technically infinite scaling defense mechanics is bad. Same for block btw, which is evasion that triggers thorn. :D

Armour formula is a "get this high lvl armour to ignore content*"
* only physical



So in endgame lest say you have 10k ES.
That makes your character a damage spongue. Since it soaks up any damage type. Bleed supposed to counter ES but I guess with a skillnode you can counter that since there are plenty of no-hp only ES builds...

You have 10k ES and 1k hp
get a 10k lightning strike with 75% lightning res and you get 2.5k damage. Youre left with 7.5K ES

Youre a warrior with 10k armour a 2.5k life.
Hit by the same lightning and you're dead.

Ok... lets get hit by physical damage.
Our mage got hit with a 10k physical aoe and barely survives with 1k hp.

The warrior straight dies, because 10k armour only mitiagetes 9% of that damage. XD
Lets reverse this. The highest physical hit you can survive with 10k armour and 2.5k hp is: around 3k*.
if it doesn't crit*
**And ONLY if its a physical attack and doesn't apply bleed or poison after that...


There was plenty of long discussion between forum members.
Block should reduce incoming damage by an amount and leave armour handle the rest. Block making a gamble mechanic that can potentially shield you from technically infinite damage is not good in game balancing. We already have the issue where without a shield the only way to survive is hitting so hard that you become a "ranged melee character" At that point you could technically walk naked. You don't wear gear to reduce damage, you wear it so you can have such absurd stat you can tap the screen clear.


Evasion again is tricky... its a technically infinite scale mechanic, but endgame you just play a 1:5 chance to have the opportunity to click the respawn button. (don't forget, whatever kills you doesn't even bother an ES wearer)

Evasion could have been recoup. Or implement the Bloodbourne/Hollow Knight rally mechanic.

"

The value of stats are different.

This was why my starting point was to look at how the base defense values of items stacked up to each other. Once you start adding Increases and More into the mix the numbers fluctuate wildly, but they are all based around the flat values gained from gear and passive flat bonuses.

"

Evasion is on luck. Having a chance to get a technically infinite scaling defense mechanics is bad. Same for block btw, which is evasion that triggers thorn. :D

Neither of these mechanics are infinite defense, no matter how high your Evasion you will get hit, it's the Entropy mechanic I was talking about. In its current form when you haven't been hit within 3.33 seconds a value is constantly being rolled between 1-99, once an attack is registered at your character that value locks in place as the initial Entropy. The mobs attack creates a value based on your evasion ratting and the attacks accuracy rating + a base amount for the attack that is being checked. The Entropy score and the final value from that calculation are added together. If that final value is 100 or more then the hit goes through and the Entropy value is dropped by 100. This value will continue to roll like this until you have had 3.33 seconds of time not rolling attacks.

My suggestion to make this feel more consistent was to reduce the initial 1-99 down as this gives any particular attack the chance to always hit you the first time. And then I made an assumption that the current average when you hard stack is around 1/8 to 1/4 attacks will always hit.

Block wasn't on my radar as it's separate from the 3 base defenses, I view it similarly to dodge roll, it's a choice some characters make (like taking Blink instead of dodge roll) and isn't unique to any specific stat. Where if your building Strength your likely not going to have any good avenues to get Evasion or Energy Shield through gear.

To address the Infinite Defense point though, all blocked attacks build your stun bar. When your stun bar fills you have a 3 second period where you can't block or evade attacks. In that time you could absolutely get pancaked. It also can only block Melee and Projectile based hits, similar to Evasion. And in order to make Block function similar to Energy Shield through Notable Passives it nerfs the damage reduction from 100% -> 50%.

"

So in endgame lest say you have 10k ES.
That makes your character a damage spongue. Since it soaks up any damage type. Bleed supposed to counter ES but I guess with a skillnode you can counter that since there are plenty of no-hp only ES builds...

You have 10k ES and 1k hp
get a 10k lightning strike with 75% lightning res and you get 2.5k damage. Youre left with 7.5K ES

Youre a warrior with 10k armour a 2.5k life.
Hit by the same lightning and you're dead.

Ok... lets get hit by physical damage.
Our mage got hit with a 10k physical aoe and barely survives with 1k hp.

The warrior straight dies, because 10k armour only mitiagetes 9% of that damage. XD
Lets reverse this. The highest physical hit you can survive with 10k armour and 2.5k hp is: around 3k*.
if it doesn't crit*
**And ONLY if its a physical attack and doesn't apply bleed or poison after that...

This section is making a bad assumption about stat stacking and gear stacking. The core values are currently showing you build ES at roughly 1/3 the rate of Armour or Evasion. Using the same values for ES and Armour is like talking about a level 10 getting hit by a level 30 verses a level 30 getting hit by a level 30.

My ultimate point though was that with effectively 1/5 the value of each point of Armour being truly effective means the core values before any increases needed to be adjusted up to account for Armour being valued only 3 times higher than ES.

And that when stacking Armour it needs some kind of mechanical benefit over stacking resistances and other defense types. It's boring in its current state, plain and simple.

"

Evasion could have been recoup. Or implement the Bloodbourne/Hollow Knight rally mechanic.

Considering what their stated goals for this game are, giving Evasion a staggered damage timer so you have time to heal it back some way would be pretty fun.

I think it still needs core value adjustments, and to allow for all hits to roll damage to lower values similar to how crits are currently rolled. Getting pancaked because of badly telegraphed AOE sucks.

"

Neither of these mechanics are infinite defense, no matter how high your Evasion you will get hit,

The infinite potential here is that you have a 75% chance to completely null incoming damage.

You can get hit by a trillion damage if you get the lucky roll, you just nope it.
Block scaling is so bad many endgame player when hitblock cap just drop armour and replace it with ES or evasion.
Whatever bypass that lucky infinite mitigation will more than likely to kill you anyway...

Well... I raised my voice many times in these forums that I hate passive skills.
A map is decided before you even enter it. You cant create meaningful combat where the meaningful decision is buying/gambling the right stats.

Like the Kitava builds where they triple the value of fire res stat. Just because you get +15% max fire res to reach the hard cap of 90, and with an ascendency point you turned the same stat to cold and lightning too wont make you a better player.

Just because as a warbringer I put a point to turtle charm so my shield can block any damage and buy the unique shield to give me a lucky block chance wont make me a better player.


And here I am only talking about some stats.
While these needs to be tuned, I think the game fundamentally needs defensive trade off skills too. Every build in the end is about 1 or 2 button, so there's room for skillslots. We need an "oh shit" button that cant be turned into a gamebraking "Iwin" button either.

The game doesn't have mitigation skills!
You cant create a tank!

I am trying it, but its not possible.
Every support gem and skill just give life regen.
Theres a few passive skill to transfer incoming damage to elsewhere but that's more of a core build feature. (and arguably not even optional)
Ie: if I play turtle charm - armour brake thorn warbringer the Wooden Wall ascendency wont help me much.

Lets say I give up Anvil Weight talent to get that, it wont work, because I don't have the min-max totem skills to have 3-4 totems down in time to make it work either...
And a titan or a monk or anyone else really wont care about kitavas or totem warbringer option...

Statistics speak the words of true. ES is by far overpowered defence than Armour or Evasion.

There should be 3 options to balance the gap between them.

1) Make Armour mitigate all incoming damage from all sources except chaos and also make Evasion work with different rules.

2) Nerf ES ( i don't suggest this option. We had enough nerfs lately that destroyed the game completely).

3) Buff significaly Evasion and Armour passives.

I'll address this in post order.

Kraivan#1745

The values you see on your character page aren't hard values, they're averages based on your level. A 75% evasion rate doesn't mean a D4 gets rolled and if it lands on a 1 you get hit. At the same time it truly only affects Projectile and Melee swings, most of the deadly hits have some portion of AOE or Spell damage which fully bypasses the evasion check entirely.

It's true that in the game currently there are no reliable ways to "tank", but that's not a bad thing. Defenses exist to keep you alive just long enough for the enemy to die, that's why regens are the most common type of life extension support gem. They are there to make up for bad positioning so you don't have to blow through all your flasks because of 1 mistake. The idea is to build around 2 or so active damaging abilities and take just enough defenses to not die.

Ultimately the game exists for you to have fun, if being a slab of meat for enemies to wail on is what your after than more power to you. Builds like that are 100% the reason I'm saying Armour needs more mechanical attention to it. Some way for it to negate more of the damage in an interesting way.

Irin77#4248

"

1) Make Armour mitigate all incoming damage from all sources except chaos and also make Evasion work with different rules.

This is basically saying Armour should be ES, and from the follow up about Evasion I can only imagine the end goal would to also make it ES.

ES is a fine mechanic in a stand alone situation. I think it would be more infesting to have each Defense have a mechanic tied to it. Give the game more texture.

Homogenizing every defense down to "Extra Life Bar" would just be boring.

"

2) Nerf ES ( i don't suggest this option. We had enough nerfs lately that destroyed the game completely).

I agree, ES is fine where it's at and doesn't need nerfs to bring it in line with where Armour and Evasion are currently at. They need some TLC to bring their utility in line with ES.

"

3) Buff significaly Evasion and Armour passives.

While this is a solution to the problem, it's more of a band-aid. It covers up mechanical issues that are just fundamentally unbalanced. Without addressing the underlying Ceiling for Armour and the problematic chaos of Entropy all you'll really see are over inflated numbers, get pancaked because you stood in the ouch zone. And then role ES because its statistically the best defense right now, and your upset at your big numbers not doing anything.

"

It's true that in the game currently there are no reliable ways to "tank", but that's not a bad thing. Defenses exist to keep you alive just long enough for the enemy to die, that's why regens are the most common type of life extension support gem.

"defenses" in its current form is a stat check entry.

In campaign you had the option (more or less) to change rings and charm to match to enemy elemental type.

In endgame you MUST have
all res 75%,
your mitigation stat capped
high hitpoint
and even max resistances
and absurd dps.

Currently by not having mitigation... or t be specific the only def stat is regeneration in various forms like
- regen
- flask
- leech
- recoup
- % of max life per second
- guard (which is temporary max hp)

the game is technically a race about your healing per second vs enemy damage per second.

In the first big interview they stated they need oneshot the player, because there's literally no other way to kill them.
How can you kill any player who have 75% chance to get 0 damage, and in that 25% time whatever they get will be healed back in a splitsecond?
yep... just nuke them off.

And by this a not mentioned new statcheck is given: "must have 4k hp/12k ES"

And once that is hit endgame changes from arpg to idle game. Its not even about beating the map anymore. Its about how much high tier currencies you can get to either flip them on the market or play gatcharolls.

its not even about beating enemies, it to run maps for that 0.01% drop of "progress"

Tank archetype is to survive enemies, glasscannons are about not getting hit at all.
In between we have brawlers and variates with range and support skills.

Do we want tanks to be able to afk a fight? Dont know... maybe? In a zoom-zoom game where builds are measure in divines/hour we know tanks would fall behind.

Endgame bossfights are just bulethells with bosses having invincibility cycles.