[Fern]

Turn Order

Riposte critting, or any status that ends the enemy's turn but does not end yours causes said enemy to go first. This is basically abusable but is generally considered to be an unfortunate coincidence. Summoners dying cause their minions to two turn the other party, and boxer's geist allows you to send a high initiative boxer to the bottom of the ladder. I definitely feel the new system requires more rigidity, as the current meta and frequency of two turns is unfun to try and workaround.

To elaborate a bit more on what's being talked about here, here's an example that's more common than you'd think in a 1v1 scenario:

1. Someone with Riposte goes first and normally swings at their enemy, does not land critical hits.

2. Enemy's turn, they swing at the Riposte user a couple times. Riposte finally goes off and lands a critical hit.

3. However, it got that critical hit when the enemy just finished their turn, meaning the Riposte user is the last turn in this round. They're left with 1M (or 2M if they have Fleur) and usually that means ending turn.

4. Next round begins, and the enemy goes first, essentially having a "double turn" because the Riposte user had a (basically) useless turn previous round by sheer coincidence of life.
 
Thing is, this doesn't just happen with Riposte, it happens with anything that can make you gain momentum mid-fight. Sometimes people will unequip or just completely avoid things that give you momentum in that manner for the reason that it can be extremely detrimental.
 
On the other hand, being able to gain momentum mid-fight is a cool extra mechanic and entirely disabling that would just be a sad solution to that particular problem IMO. Maybe there should be a minimum momentum requirement for a turn to "count" in the round robin, so minor momentum gains like that don't suddenly get you killed? I'm not sure, but that's not the main point of this highly informative thread, so I won't go further with that train of thought.

---

I'm still of the opinion that the current game state is too polarizing to the point it's not fun. My problem with the SKI tax is not "I can't disregard hit entirely and still do good damage to everybody", it's "I need high hit for my character to have any meaningful impact in a fight". It's a huge part of why I preferred the idea of autohits not being generally full-dodgeable, because then you could just make Evasion! a high damage reduction against autohits while potentially still having it ignore status effect inflictions. At least then the person with low hit rate is at disadvantage but not entirely useless in the battle, and not feeling -obligated- to be stacking hit rate.
 
Because as it stands, the game makes you feel forced to get as much hit as possible by penalizing you for not doing it in a manner that's not so much "fair" as "too harsh" if that makes sense. This means that there's less incentive to go out and try other setups that could be more thematic or, I guess, "more original" for your character, and there's more encouragement for doing cookie-cutter meta. The bread and butter setups, because they're the ones that are considered to "work".
 
And generally the builds that are considered to "work" in people's eyes (to my knowledge) are the ones that can have at least some meaningful impact in a fight, some kind of usefulness, rather than being doomed to missing every hit and not contributing anything whatsoever to the battle or even the roleplay itself.
 
So I still think we should go back to having a damage reduction for "dodging" autohits, but making it fairly high (i.e 45% or so) and keeping the ability to dodge status inflictions. The second part alone, in addition to still being able to fully dodge basic attacks would still give Evade its own identity rather than just being alternate tanking, because after all tanking doesn't just let you "dodge" a game-changer poison when you get lucky (obviously not accounting for builds that stack up status resist.) 
   

TL;DR

I think the penalty for not building enough hit rate is too harsh to the point it gets very polarizing and makes you barely able to contribute meaningful things to a fight or even in the roleplay of it in some cases. I believe evade should go back to being a damage reduction (preferably somewhere around 40-45%) against autohits while keeping the ability to dodge statuses, which will help it keep a different identity from just normal tanking. Glancing Blows is a system that sounds cool on paper, but in practice skewers things too much in one side's favor and in a way that detracts from the general fun of the game, since you'll see people doing the same things over and over to -really- try and avoid the part of it that's considered very unfun.
 
But that's just my opinion/two cents. I'll take anything else at this point! I appreciate all the work into showing the math behind things, it helps put a more 'objective' and informative look on things!