[Fern]

Currently not feeling up to writing a long post on the matter, but I wanted to drop a quick two cents.
 
I agree with most of the points brought up in the initial post. Specially the part where Evade being too good actually ends up making it one of the worst choices in the game, due to the reason that most people feel obligated to counter-play it as much as humanly possible.
 
I'm of the opinion that the Hit vs Evade match-up feels more polarizing than it did before the rework. Despite not being "tank" characters, dodgies still had their semblance of DEF/RES, usually from the racial base + Aptitude bonuses in addition to whatever other mods they'd coincidentally have.
 
The DEF/RES nerf, while not massive, is still fairly noticeable. It not only affected tanks, but dodge characters as well. People that were made of glass became paper, which would result in hit stackers doing far more damage to dodge characters compared to the gameplay before the rework.
 
I believe that while this isn't the sole reason as to why hit stackers eliminate dodge characters much faster than before, it's part of it.
 
I have been building some new setups for my characters in accordance to the recent update, and most of them feel like if they don't have reliable hit stacking to get around Evade most of the time, they will be unable to do damage for most of the match. The exception (on my end) is when my character is a crit damage build, that's when I feel more comfortable with having like 40% hit rate on average against someone that's a dodge character, or even 30%. Because when the hit does land, it's pretty big.

But what if I'm not a critical damage build?

It ends up feeling more obligatory to stack hit at that point, because the dodge character will race most of my damage fairly often at that otherwise. Basic attackers actually have a better time than they did before, for the reason that they naturally build hit and crit at once, so they don't really have to stress much about the damage IMO. But other build archetypes don't usually do this sort of thing, instead relying on magic damage or special skills, etc.

And special skills cannot critical. Magic (usually) does not critical. Dodge characters tend to be glass cannons, so you end up wanting to make sure that your damage can compete with them.
 
I think that if Evade wasn't so "glaringly good", then there wouldn't be much of an incentive in the community scene to stack hit rate to high infinity. Before the rework, from my own perspective and experience of things, building hit rate didn't feel so overly mandatory unless you were a basic attacker for the reason that you didn't have to fear your build being entirely invalidated if you didn't have a high amount of it. I'm aware that this also led to the "doomwall no SKI meta", but that was a different system where DEF/RES worked differently compared to now.
 
Make a tank character without a class like BK or Ghost in the new system and try to take in the damage in the PVP scene - you'll often end up feeling like your character isn't a tank at all. Sometimes you'll feel like they're not durable in the slightest, in the more extreme cases.

Despite this, going DEF/RES currently seems more optimal to me in this meta, for the reason that people are stacking so much hit you won't actually be able to execute the "dodge" part of your character in the PVP scene.

As for solutions, I unfortunately don't think I have any. This is a tough topic, and I doubt easy ones will come up. People will likely present (and have presented) very wildly different solutions that won't be commonly agreed upon is what I imagine, which isn't necessarily bad but I feel is part of what shows how difficult this topic is.

Originally in the survey for the systems, I was going to vote glancing blows then refrained from doing so for the reason that I didn't feel comfortable with most of them. If there was a 'none of the above' choice, I would've chosen that instead.

I understand the want for dodging to feel like actual dodging instead of 'alternate tanking' (which I honestly think it already is that way again simply due to being able to completely negate damage/glancing existing), but I feel the current system doesn't actually work that well in SL2's particular gameplay scheme. You could argue "but most RPGs have it very similar to this, so it should work here too!" but as far as I understand SL2 is -inspired- by some games rather than copying them, which also leads to it having its own general gameplay feel. There's also the part where the game has a competitive aspect, unlike those most other RPGs, and that's also a fairly big influence when determining how things should and shouldn't work.
 
I doubt my ramble is well-structured, as I had mentioned earlier, and I don't necessarily think I'm entirely on point about everything I just said. But I wanted to share my opinion in hopes it could be of use in some way.
 
edit: i ended up making a long post anyway bruh