[Nekojinn]

With the addition of Druid ever since this post was made, I believe it's good to talk about it again.

I was actually gonna make my own thread but I'm glad I saw yours, let me explain what I believe to be fair, first:

Evading is, without a shadow of a doubt, incredibly OP if left unchecked. It's a omnidirectional omniparry, if you're able to pair evade with other DR tools (very rare due to the CEL cost) you can become really really tanky. The ability to just Evaded! to reduce damage to 0 is incredibly strong.

Having said that: Wow flanking is kinda huge???

If you have enough evade debuffs and hit buffs you're able to easily get 280-300 hit builds, I've done it before and I feel with the addition of Druid that has become much easier, Purity Edge on a class with both brighten and snake wrap can get out of control.

On top of that, these classes can benefit from flank! If you use (Call) Hawk Strike you can even make that target flanked at all times, until your next turn! (Admiteddly I haven't seen many use this, but it can literally give your gunner or dagger teammate 50-70 hit)

I believe evading is overpowered as heck, but I also believe flanking is a mechanic that HARD punishes melee evadies who are already on the weaker side due to distance being one of the best way to defend yourself (unless you're against a Solblader, then distance is meaningless.)

Truly, the solution to this is to make so Armor of Eyes can ignore flank! (this is a jest)

TLDR: Evade overpowered, but melee evade weak cuz flank punishes, can flank be bonus hit pwease?

[Ray2064]

Just rework evade or have CEL give HP I beg you

[Poruku]

We've been begging dev to rework evade for literal years, people have been complaining about evade ever since it was changed, for a wide variety of reasons and situations. When is anything gonna change? Why would we think Dev's gonna do anything different this time?

[Nekojinn]

To be fair, Polk.

In the same update that gave us str crit, Dev did add something for CEL in the test servers, that, after testing, proved too strong and wasn't added into the live servers. (It was crit damage reduce on CEL.)

Balancing in this game is not easy, everyone has their own opinion on what should be nerfed and what should be buffed.

For example, Omina. Can we get an Omina buff, please? (sorry couldn't control it.)

I do believe that Dev has their eye on evade, as the smoke/light tile interaction change recently has proved. I'm sure it will get more attention in the future as well, balancing is not easy when trying to make things both fun and competitive.

As I said in my post, Evade is definitely overpowered, I do not think evade is weak at all, it just isn't commonly paired with other DR sources. Evade is at it's strongest when you also get more DR on top of it, I've been running an evade build with 40 def/res and just by evade-walling I can solo a few T3 rematches without worry, and having DR sources means I don't get exploded by anyone touching me, especially since I Tetraite myself against critters.

But I do understand that evade is commonly used on builds that don't stack other DR sources, and I do believe getting exploded when someone is able to hit you is fair, as you're not really getting other ways of defending yourself.

The issue is with the fact that:

In some matches, the evadie will make the newplayer hit negative in PvP, thus making the match unwinnable and evade overpowered.
In other matches, the evadie won't be able to keep up with the opponent's 80% hit chance on them and die in 4-6 hits.

I do not know what the perfect solution would be, but I do believe making things like flank into bonus hit would help with the more groundbreaking levels of hit, as shown by Rendar on post #1.

Maybe having things like max evade/hit buff cap at 30 would help as well, as both sides would get nerfed so it would bring the higher end evade/hit and lower end evade/hit together. (I still have nightmares of reaching negative hit as a newplayer.)

TLDR: I do think Dev has done a lot for evade, look at smoke/light tiles not stacking anymore! There's no perfect solution but we're all free to give our own take on it, mine aligns with Rendar's post, I do believe flanking is a bit much.

[Poruku]

Yeah no you're right, I apologize for my earlier comments, I was unfairly harsh and pessimistic due to an unrelated situation.

Anyway yeah flanking definitely needs some kind of nerf since it's too high.

Personally I think the minmaxing of weapon components and weapon/torso quality is also an annoying part of the equation. The issue is that a difference of 10 hit or evade can make or break a fight. The current system requires you to push on every button to have even a chance, while for most other metrics (like +2 damage) it's only a small difference. You build could also go from 220 hit to 250 if you make the right choices. It's a really volatile system where a small difference makes a huge difference so even after countless patch notes it will still feel unfair to many players, especially those who aren't in the top.

That's why I prefer to suggest an overhaul to evade that would allow a +10 hit/evade to not make or break a whole playstyle. Instead, it should be a system that sees evade and hit on a spectrum, with some luck but more consistency. We could have for instance a system where someone with 210 hit versus 210 evade would still be able to damage the enemy, just doing less damage from a scaling glancing DR. Make glancing more prevalent and consistent, make on-hits play well with evade (for instance if you glance and you have on-hit damage, why not have the on-hit damage reduced instead of negated), and allow archetypes with 217 hit or 194 evade to exist competitively because their number isn't completely invalidated by bigger number.

Until we fix this fundamental problem, it's gonna be a lot of work to balance something that can't truly be balanced