Is ES still the King?

I can't tell from the patch notes whether Evasion with Deflection is a viable endgame alternative now to ES. But in the livestream they made it sound that Evasion with Deflection is viable.

When I started with my first PoE 2 character I went all evasion. It wasn't a fun experience but as soon as I switch to ES, I'm getting better at surviving my maps.

Also the parry now requires you to face the attacker unlike before it works whether you are not facing the enemy? I thought in the livestream, they buffed the parry? I can't tell in the patch notes what exactly did got improved in the parry?

Depends on the tree. If you cannot scale health somehow, i think so.

Hard to say yet. Pure evasion was pretty bad before, but with very high investment and Acrobatics it was pretty strong. U could still get one shot, because it was hard/impossible to scale life above 3k.

I suspect they remove or rework Acrobatics in 0.3, otherwise it might be way too good with Deflection. I know deflection is based on evasion rating and acro deminishes that, but u can still get to maybe 8-10k evasion with acro. Assuming it's 1:1 with deflection, that's roughly 75% chance to evade and 75% chance to deflect ALL damage. It's basically lucky evasion, but the second roll is only a 40% reduction instead of 100%.

The life pool issue persists, but spikes of damage will be smoothed out by deflection.

Maybe they change more on the tree with EV/ES that we don't know about yet, which makes EV/ES worse aswell.


I plan on going full eva deflection in 0.3 on a Pathfinder.