A Hill Worth Dying On

[Celerity]

Under the system of evasion as I imagine it, only damage would be evaded, not spell effects. So, CC and debuffing would not be devalued, rather quite the opposite.

Would this also include tank rage? If it did include it then it may alleviate some of Yaffy's concerns with tanking. Also what about combat refreshes from basic attacks and combo stuff like +x damage to core attacks?

I was talking based off how evasion currently works in game. If a basilisk, for example, evades my electrify it both doesn't take damage and doesn't get stunned.

If the mob still took the cc effect then it would be better yes, I still wouldn't like it for being rng and would actually just rather see a straight nerf to the damage of epic attacks.

Power becoming more important would just mean more of a reliance on low cost, lower power skills, rather than a complete dependence on cloth. I can tell you right now that I have absolutely no problem managing my power using heavy armor, because I largely use skills that have excellent damage to power cost ratios, and further improve those with cost effective modifications. Parry, Riposte, Punch, Jab, Infuriating Blow, Finishing Blow, they all have extremely low power costs and I basically can sustain myself in combat with decent food indefinitely. So I reject the everyone wearing cloth argument.

That may be true for your specific build, but for me using hammer/ment even if I don't use my nukes and I'm using best food in the game + flower + max power mods I still have to use dig deep and my basic attacks during some group combat just for power regen. Even mentalism has some pretty high power cost abilities. I'm not complaining btw, I just think this means the power situation is already in the correct spot for my specific build. If I started missing my attacks then I could see myself getting serious power issues just from using small attacks alone and I think it would force me into cloth armour which would be a serious blow to my survivalability with how much I rely on the leather combat refresh heal.

The moment I use pound to slag it takes ~160 power which is about 1/3 of my total power. You're right that if that misses then I may be screwed in a fight so your aim of nerfing burst damage would be achieved, but again I would much rather just see a straight nerf to the damage rather than an rng fix. In all honesty I would probably just keep using the exact same build but just get frustrated if my attack misses, that's what I already do in dc minus the frustration since I'm far above the mobs level anyway so it doesn't really matter if my attacks miss. And in fact I don't see it ever mattering as long as you have an augmented and transmuted build, since the mobs should always be weaker than you, meaning you can accomodate the rng more. This could change in the future if content specifically designed for full max-enchanted builds comes out, but at the moment I just see it as another punish for less well geared players.

Why do you think evasion would make kiting easier for ranged players? As far as I can tell, it would more negatively affect ranged players than melee players for 2 reasons.

One: Non-kiting players would also gain the benefit evasion; someone kiting a mob is not being hit by the mob, so they would only suffer misses on their opponent, their opponent would not suffer misses on them.

I meant comparatively. As I see it there's basically 4 main ways to play:

1. Build mitigation and face tank such as unarmed, shield, staff, cow, bc with extra skin etc.

2. Use crowd control to avoid damage such as roots, stuns, fears etc.

3. Kite with ranged attacks, easier when using movement speed buffs or slows on enemies

4. Just build damage and hope to kill the mob before it kills you

Now obviously people use a combination of these, but my idea was with how evasion currently works, and that would make all of them harder because you would have damage decreased in all cases, but then additionally 2 would be affected more if cc had a chance to miss, and 4 becomes less likely to work the longer combat goes on. Therefore, I meant that 1 and 3 would become better methods by comparison. Just as a sidenote, I believe ranged to be superior simply because they have the option of 3 at all, which they can use in conjuction with the others and don't seem to have any other downside really.

Also maybe I missed something but I don't think you ever said that the evasion would apply to players too?

In the case of evasion applying to both mobs and players, even with cc effects not being evaded, cc would still be devalued (assuming the evasion is unmitigatable from stuns) just from elongating fights because of the diminishing returns on cc; a 3 second stun is much more impactful in a 10 second fight than a 3 second stun and a 1 second stun is in a 20 second fight. Take the fight even longer and it gets even worse, as after that the stun does nothing until 60 seconds have passed. Kiting may cause a power concern in a long fight, but this is incredibly build specific I think, and in the case of mitigation, I see only benefit from making fights longer, unless you have a very front-loaded mitigation ability on a long cooldown. As far as I'm aware nothing like that exists, blocking stance, deflective spin and elemental ward are probably the closest to this but they actually have fairly short cooldowns and I see them used more than once in some group combat pulls already.

The above is exaggerated, since a 10% evasion rate would only cause a 10 second fight previously to last 11 seconds on average now, so the impact would actually be quite minimal, but I think it's interesting to think about regardless. In fact, it makes me wonder if this change would actually significantly affect anything at all.

My final thoughts are that I actually don't mind it too much, still not the solution I want to see just because of rng and I'm not convinced it will stop players from using nukes and stacking damage mods since if the relative balance of power is maintained, i.e. same evasion rate on both players and mobs, then the exact same strategy should still work on average, and with a bit of rng allowance from top tier gear I imagine it would be the same situation as now, whereas lesser geared players will simply suffer from rng as well as people in general would be annoyed by it. We could then talk about having a higher rate of evasion on the mob than on the player but to be perfectly honest I think mob damage is already too high and that would be a bad idea.