What is the point of deflection, evasion, and arm/eva hybrid?
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Arm/eva hybrid:
100% Genuine question, what is the point of this defense type? I feel like they should complement each other, right? It's not what it feels like to me though, it's like they're both competing against each other, you lack enough armour to tank and you lack enough evasion to well, evade... I feel like armour should work better against bigger hits, and evasion or deflection should work better against smaller hits Is there a reason why this isn't a good solution? This is a genuine question, maybe i'm short sighted Evasion and deflection: Both evasion and deflection have a maximum 95% chance to succeed, which means that both can fail at some point, right? The problem with this sort of thing is the reason why so many players complain about being "one shotted" Also, because of the way deflection works, sometimes it can be better than armour, because deflection will always mitigate at least 40% of the damage, but you need to invest a lot more in armour to get the same 40% First you need a lot of armour, then you need to take phys dmg as elemental, and then "armour apply to elemental dmg" I think we should be able to have 100% deflection chance with enough investment, and then we scale how much we can mitigate, starting from 10~20% up to 50% max Also, armour has a built-in hidden movement speed penalty right? Then it should be the most predictable/reliable form of defense imo, but for armor to feel decent you have to commit to it quite a bit, you either need to always use Cloak of Flames, or a specific body armour which have a lot of good affixes competing with each other btw, for example: - Spirit - Armour - Maximum life % - Flat life - Take phys damage as Chaos - Resistances(multiple! including the hybrids!) - Armour applies to elemental - Increased spirit efficiency - Notable essence And in the case of arm/eva: - Deflection chance - Armour applies to elemental Not to mention all the other affixes that are useful for specific builds, like life regen, thorns, stun threshold, etc It feels like armour and arm/eva needs to take a bunch of steps to become good, while ES and ES/EVA are much "easier" to interact with and don't have as many affixes competing for a spot The 3 steps necessary to make armour viable feels like unnecessary friction to me tbh, if you don't want to add more life to the tree then make these defenses layers worth picking up Last edited by Vyend#2601 on May 22, 2026, 4:55:14 AM Last bumped on May 25, 2026, 10:40:24 AM
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Genuine question - are you seriously unable to see how they complement one another? Maybe it would help to explain how to think about those defensive layers in general.
There are 4 pillars to defense: 1. Hit Points (Life, ES, Runic Ward, Sorcery Ward) 2. Mitigation (Armour, Resistances, Armour Applied, Deflection, Damage taken from X before life, Damage reductions (general + specific, like Critical Strike Bonus Dmg Reductions), slow/curse effectiveness reduction, X damage taken as Y) 3. Avoidance (Evasion, Block, Manual Dodging (tied to movement speed, immunities/charms) 4. Recovery (Regen, Recoup, ES recharge/start of, Leech, gain on hit/block/kill) The arm/eva hybrid needs to find a way to lean into getting enough HP. You get flat life on gear, and strength where you can. Dastard armour and body runes help. It's not difficult to get 3k HP on a Merc, which is enough, because on top of armour you have access to deflection, which is 40% less damage taken. You also have access to armour applied to ele. You are not exposed to double damage from chaos because you do not have ES but it is still difficult to obtain because of added suffix pressures. Armour applied to chaos can roll on shields and helmets from desecration. The more hit avoidance you have (evasion and/or block), the less important persistent recovery becomes, and the more important specialized DoT defense is - the bleed/poison/ignite immunities in the merc area are there for a reason, along with the charm nodes. Vice versa if you skimp on avoidance - now you have to worry about regen/recoup/leech a little bit more, and conversely, it contributes to DoT defense, making it more amenable for you to look for immunities to ailments like shock/chill/slows - since you can not naturally avoid being afflicted. Charms are still useful here. Evasion also doubles as a chance to avoid a critical strike. Blind is very useful for this. There's also access to critical strike bonus damage avoidance in that area of the tree, and as implicit on some AR/EV gear. Red slams don't factor in evasion aside from rerolling a critical strike. Critical strikes cause most one-shots. If you have good defenses that are spread across the 4 layers, it is very hard to become one-shot from a normal slam without being incredibly unlucky, or without juicing maps past your capability. All of the boss damage numbers are on poe2.db. You can go see how much defense you need to survive a slam. Most "dangerous" slams in the game usually have a damage range where it has a 5% chance to outright kill most players with conventional map mods. Some bosses are much more dangerous than others and this is compensated for by things like boss telegraphing. This does not mean death is an inevitability because eventually you're going to receive a hit - the hit also needs to be one that rolls within the fatal range, and then after all of your mitigations, is more than your hit pool. Those kind of hits do not occur very often unless like I said, you are under-specced. A lot of unlucky stars need to align for one-shots to occur if you know to build your defenses and avoid most boss slams. What I think happens most often is people are just under-specced. They don't avoid often enough for recovery to occur, the amounts of damage taken are not mitigated enough for recovery to be effective, or there is NO recovery other than flasks, or ailments increase the magnitudes of danger and damage past their defensive capability. I don't think it's one-shots that kill people the most, it's that fire ground explosion in a -max res map you took after you were armour broken by a rare with shocking ground while having low avoidance (ev or block) and no ability to recover the hp from the hit that broke your armour because instead of hitting your flask you hit dodge roll, which was too late. All of the layers complement each other in one way or another. Who am I to say anything, I don't respect my time either.
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The mitigation of deflection and armour should be swapped tbh. GGG employees should use brain: can't deflect big hits, armour always gives damage reduction, make sense?
edit: actually remove your deflection/ar applied to elemental dmg bloats. Last edited by Brisket5450#4084 on May 22, 2026, 12:44:36 PM
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" Ok, life and recovery (leech, recoup, damage taken etc) plays a big role on arm/eva, but what about everything else i said? You mentioned blind and armour applied to elemental, but both of these are more effective on full evasion or full armour builds, both are considerably less effective on hybrid arm/eva, or am i wrong about this? And you can easily get leech, recoup etc with full armour or full evasion too, and the movement speed penalty from wearing full armour is negligible in endgame Not to mention that is way harder to get resistances on arm/eva because it can both roll armour apply to elemental and deflection on the suffix iirc I genuinely want someone to prove me wrong, and i'm not being sarcastic, i've never seen a top build that relies specifically on arm/eva I really think that arm/eva doesn't make any sense but i'm 100% willing to change my mind, in fact, i actually want someone to change my mind because all the stuff you mentioned from recovery to block can be applied to other defense types and it works even better there, so i don't see your point to be completely honest Last edited by Vyend#2601 on May 25, 2026, 5:03:19 AM
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" Don't forget that 3 main defenses (arm/eva/es) are very old system. Deflection is a recent addition to this system, and a very rare event of GGG actually doing something to plug the holes. Same goes for armor applied to elemental. Before, evasion always meant "you'll be oneshot periodically, greet exp penalty". Hence, arm/eva class was meant to smooth the incoming damage: you evade less, but you get to mitigate phys damage more compared to pure evasion class. Same goes for eva/es class purpose. Right now, we are at the crossroads: GGG had added new defense layers, but didn't optimize old layers in light of this addition. Maybe it'll happen next patch, maybe next year :shrug: Balance and poe never mixed well. |
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Most funny thing is, deflection is reiteration of old dodge mechanic:) Dodge was simpler, standalone trigger chance and 100% damage nullification, not 40%.
- GGG removed dodge from poe1, evasion became total crap. - GGG added spell suppression to poe1, which was like dodge, but spell only, and 50% damage reduction. - GGG removed spell suppression from poe2. - GGG added deflection to poe2. They know what they're doing, no?) |
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" " If they would do that, everyone would want to use them, since armour is unreliable in terms of mapping and big hits and evasion is unreliable for many hits if you are not investing into it in a fairly high manner. And the movement speed penalty from wearing them is pityful so close to each other for wearing any pure evasion, pure armour or pure ES armours. That there is near to no distinguishable difference between them. Pure armour having -0,05 base movement speed and energy shield offering -0,03. (As you can see here:https://poe2db.tw/Body_Armours#BodyArmoursItem) So unless you can profit from stacking both, this kind of armour is worse as going for one of them. While I would like to argument that evasion is still on a better state with enough skill as pure armour is, since it not only does little for "small" hits on high maps, depending on how you play and does near to nothing to big hits, evasion is a chance to avoid all damage while you can stack more speed and have it easier to actually avoid all damage or simply dodge. " TBH, this pressure is gigantic on all armour based builds, cause armour without armour applying to ele damage is kind of trash, except of in campaign, while evasion without deflection is pretty fine I would like to say. Deflection is cool if you are new and not really skilled I guess, but otherwise it is a dead stat in my sense. A ES character has far less pressure on gear itself, especially if you are able to make use of CI on your characters, which denies even more stat pressure on gear. Therefore all these archetypes are in a very bad spot in terms of gear and that is what it is. While I would like to argue that armour to ele damage can make some better impact as deflection if you know what you are doing, it makes in my understanding more sense to stack higher evasion to just avoid damage as it is to stack immense values of armour, cause the investment needed for it to be useful would prolly be around mirror tier and then the question arises, why even going for it. In the matter if you have to do it, I would prolly take more evasion and get as much armour as I could and roll for armour applies to ele damage, in any case, to make this defense somehow useful. So it would make the most sense. Having high chance to avoid damage, offering damage reduction against small/tiny hits, you get barraged from and having additional elemental reduction through armour applies to ele which can go above 100% of armour. But you are very right about your assumption that the modifiers itself are a problem and at the current state don't complement each other but stay in a very difficult and harsh competition. Armour applies to ele damage and deflection should be at best implicit modifiers and rune slots, not part of the actual affixes and if we need armour and life for characters there should be a way to reach both in a meaningful way, which there isn't at the moment. So you either abandon life and or defenses playing armour or armour and evasion rating combined. It feels like armour is dragging everything down :,D |
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" Even back then i don't think arm/eva made any sense tbh, you end up with so little armour that the dmg mitigation barely makes any difference, it also prevents you from having a higher evasion chance " Imo that's the sort of thing they should prioritize instead of adding new ascendancies |
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5a3KnBt1o4
isn't meta but its at least an example of someone making armor/ evasion work |
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