Pure evasion builds feel completely miserable and not viable at all

The claims that anything but ES would be useless are exaggerated. There's lots of characters playing juiced up max tier maps on builds without ES.

A more truthful claim would be that ES is stronger than life; and that life builds are more limited and require some sort of strong'ish defensive extra from their ascendancy.

For life+evasion in particular, at the moment there's pretty much just one truly viable build for it; crossbow witchhunter.

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Iska#3079 wrote:

If they add a visual indicator when your character is dodgeing something it would probably help out alot. like actual dodge animation, or maybe the healthbar blinks, or even like a line that blinks across the top of your characters health bar would help. but yes, evasion doesnt feel really good compared to ES. Miss a dodge and go splat.

If you mean an indicator when you evade something, I think doing that in a sensible well might be a bit tall of an ask. You might be hit by small attacks 5 times a second over several seconds, so it'd be a bit yanky to have the character do an animation or to blink something in the UI.

Meanwhile for 12 defensive nodes, and 9 total mod slots on gear, I'm getting 11k ES on an Amazon... Which nothing but a pinnacle boss can 1 shot.

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Jhaerik2#3188 wrote:

Meanwhile for 12 defensive nodes, and 9 total mod slots on gear, I'm getting 11k ES on an Amazon... Which nothing but a pinnacle boss can 1 shot.

You can also get enough EHP on non-ES & non-MoM builds to survive any attack that is not basically meant to always be certain death if not avoided or the result of max juicing with a lot of effective damage increase on monsters.

Phys damage from hard bosses tends to max out at around 5000, with some exceptions, like Arbiter's slam on the highest damage roll reaching 5823 phys + 2183 fire. Even that is survivable and it doesn't really go significantly higher for effective damage from there for any single attack. Arbiter's nuke is also survivable though need Arbiter-specific gear setup which gets quite expensive.

But yeah, surviving all except the couple of outlier attacks from bosses does have high gear pressure and might not be possible at all on life+ev (except for Witchhunter) and you really need the ascendancy to provide some extra defense. And your passive tree is gonna be like 40 defensive nodes.

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tzaeru#0912 wrote:

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Jhaerik2#3188 wrote:

Meanwhile for 12 defensive nodes, and 9 total mod slots on gear, I'm getting 11k ES on an Amazon... Which nothing but a pinnacle boss can 1 shot.

The amount of armor or evasion you have to get for it to be effective is obscenely higher than ES though. It's not even close.

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avastcosmicarena#5899 wrote:

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tzaeru#0912 wrote:

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Jhaerik2#3188 wrote:

Meanwhile for 12 defensive nodes, and 9 total mod slots on gear, I'm getting 11k ES on an Amazon... Which nothing but a pinnacle boss can 1 shot.

The amount of armor or evasion you have to get for it to be effective is obscenely higher than ES though. It's not even close.

In the terms of passive tree investment, it's honestly a similar amount of nodes. Non-ES Titans, bear Shamans, Witchhunters, tend to have 25-35 nodes on defense, while pure ES setups of roughly equivalent survivability vs hits like Arbiter's slam have a similar amount.

For those particularly high ES builds, it's really more like 40, though they do pass pretty much everyone except Titans.

Maybe, just maybe, evasion was never meant to be played "pure". To me it looks more like "support" defense which serves best as additional defensive layer for other two.