gloomy marlin
Armor and MS have options to work with early on (MS less so, but it can be done sparingly), but Dodge feels like bait early because it scales so severely with gear levels and lines. I'd like to see something that incentivizes building dodge early, but deliberately becomes obsolete as the player levels up.
Just as an example, here's what I imagine a runeword or keystone would look like:
- Your minimum dodge starts at x% (40%? 50%? idk what a safe number would be so I refrain from suggesting one). This value does not scale with ANY external modifiers, nor can it be converted to armor/MS by the relevant conversion nodes.
- The above value decreases by y for every player level (turns to 0 at level 65-70)
- You have half effectiveness of all sources of increased/more dodge %.
- The above value improves by z% every player level, until there is no penalty (again, around lv65-70, maybe earlier)
- You gain 0 defenses from a piece of armor if it is not a dodge/dodge-hybrid armor base (this prevents taking it as an early cheese point and then, say, focusing full armor as a cheap defensive double-dip)
Yes this is most likely waaaaay too wordy, but it's the only elegant solution I can think of to make players incentivized to actually play dodge in the early levels, then pivot to dodge + armor at a less abrupt pace. What it is currently, is ignoring dodge until like level 85+ when you have good augments and gear, then going full dodge and taking dodge-to-armor conversion all at once. It makes sense for ppl familiar with ARPGs and PoE to hard pivot a build like that, because they're used to that level of long-term planning, but it's also not a mentality I see often in CTE2 - rather, people just ignore dodge entirely because it's too much work. Seems a bit of a shame, so this solution is what I have in mind.
barren gate