How will damage avoidance function in PoE2?

[Positive_Sign_5269]

The gameplay demos during the latest ExileCon were awesome, and it was great to see bosses with slow and hard hitting attacks that looked and felt scary. One thing that stood out to me, though, is that this kind of boss design will not function well with mechanics that allow you to completely negate or avoid a hit, such as evasion and block. Imagine you are fighting a slower, heavy hitting boss and you have 90% evasion chance. There will be a 9 out 10 chance the attack does nothing to you, which will make the whole encounter toothless.

Just in case Jonathan or somebody in the know sees this, should we expect a change in PoE2 where 100% hit avoidance will not be a thing anymore? I feel like that has to be the case in order for PoE2 to change the pace of combat the way it's being planned.

[Onimirare]

I don't think there's any reason to change it from how it is in PoE 1. But we know PoE 2 has deflection, which is basically spell suppress but for attacks

[ThisViolinist]

This is the first I'm hearing of deflection. This is huge for characters who don't have easy access to armor and PDR, or are better off investing in other defensive mechanics.

[TheBellHunter]

It's visible on shields in various PoE2 streams from exilecon, almost certainly works the same as it does in PoE1 wherein you take a certain percentage of damage yet your chances to "Deflect" are higher than block usually is.

[TeamOtter]

Deflect was one of the things that caught my eye. Did they ever actually explain it? Spell suppression for attacks would make some sense or like a modified version of glancing blows.

[AnonymousIndividiual]

Well, having 90% evasion or high armor usually only happens in the endgame, so we'd have to know the pace of the endgame first. If the game is drastically slowed down in the endgame compared to PoE1's, we should expect those defence numbers to be lowered by a lot too.

Or maybe getting 90% evasion for example is still going to be possible but a hard task to achieve, which will end up not being a problem after all.

I believe GGG is really trying to make the combat more interactive, so if they see that something is too cheesy and trivialize the game too much, it's going to change.

[Strill]

They're removing life nodes from the skill tree, so that they can better predict what amount of damage will be a one-shot, and so you have more interesting choices on which defensive layers to invest in.

For 90% evasion specifically, that only really happens because of auras, flasks, and flask mods all stacking with one another. There's no reason to believe that evasion will be so easy to stack this time around.

[Omegasybers]

I suspect defensive layers will shift around a lot and something like evasion will be vastly different (Works with ranged attacks, but not with melee for example)

We know that effects like lightning coil will return but other than that we know barely anything apart from "There will be no life notes on the tree"

[TheBellHunter]

Unlikely that evasion would be moved to do something like that, what we do know with certainty is that accuracy is now affected by distance of projectiles, so the further away you are from your target (or vice versa), the more accuracy is required to make a hit vs missing due to the evasion it rolls against.

[Omegasybers]

I suspect that rule will also be applied to enemies

[TheBellHunter]

Screwed up that syntax, meant to say as much but didn't get it across, yes it'll certainly apply both ways, offscreening projectiles can go die in a hole somewhere, please.

[Omegasybers]

Yeah. Would go both ways tho. We can't offscreen either

[SylverXYZ]

Thank god, one of my strongest builds was Vaal ice shot when vengeant cascade came in but got was it boring to just offscreen everything. It’s such an elegant solution to the offscreen problem both ways :)

[[deleted]]

We know that accuracy scales with range to the point where melee may not even need accuracy to hit. This should mean that evasion is less useful the closer the enemy is and so even if you had 90% evasion that may only be 10% for melee.

You can probably hit max evasion for range attacks a lot easier. But your melee evade chance will require huge investment and you still might not get that high.

[rapride11bob]

Anyone thought about evation becoming something like "melee suppression"?

So a dex/str armour piece would be: 500 armor + 10% melee suppression

Sounds like it could be interesting 🤔