Dear developers, please revert to the old dodge system

[YummyMyTummy]

Hello fellow sad cavelings and developers,

I've been motivated to fish endlessly for nearly a week trying to get the final 10% dodge only to discover that I am now 41% dodge short from getting full protection.

This is really disappointing to me because I have been looking forward to getting to 100% dodge for a very long time.

Frankly I simply don't see what was the problem with the old dodge system. I don't have 100% dodge when I move and need to eat food to reach 100% dodge. So in actuality, I don't have "full protection" if I would like to engage in combat while moving and would have to manage my buffs timer accordingly.

Regarding the 90% dodge cap, I was at 92% dodge with food and I still died. Yup.

With the caveling gears, I already have low health due to the lack of armor stats and when 20 larva that can kill you in 2 hits attack you in the dark, you died. It is ~ 1/10 chance that you get hit but I still died.... many times. It is even worse when you fight the mold zombies.

Ultimately, I was willing to give up health, movement speed, mining benefit, fishing for countless hours solely on the purpose that one day I might be able to dodge all incoming attack while standing. So it sucks when it is no longer there and truly makes me feel a lost of purpose in the game. Having the old dodge stats adds armors variety to the game instead of solely relying on the newest strongest armor with a trade off that makes the game fun and unique.

So please bring it back. Or cavelings sad.

Thank you,

A sad caveling

[AI Sin || SinNoAria]

Yeah, I spent easily 80 hours just getting the dodge build set up. I felt it was balanced by a few things:

Preparation: You needed an insanely high amount of preparation in raising skill levels and farming for gear to even make the build possible. In my case, it was over 80 hours combined. (20-60 hours just for the fishing for the necklace).

Armor durability: You lost armor even if you dodged. This could be mitigated by the skill for durability, but not completely prevented. If your armor broke, you lost your dodge.
Immobile: You can't move. If you move, you have to wait a few seconds before your dodge returns.T his turned you into an immobile turret, which means...
Weapon durability: If you run out of weapon durability, you are going to be in for a bad time trying to repair your gear between attacks, especially since you can't move.
Food: You needed to fish for the food and cook it. This meant you needed to keep your food buffs up. (What might have been more fair would have been if the dodge food duration was decreased to 20 seconds instead of a complete nerf)
No armor*: You had no armor with the build. Your build relied entirely on dodge, so you had to maintain your dodge or you'd die. There was an alternate build that you could run that did give you a minor amount of armor at the cost of lower base dodge.
Minimal health bonus: You had only a small health bonus with the build. Again, the build relied entirely on dodge.

No set bonuses: You don't get any other bonus from gear. Because ALL your gear slots are needed to get 100% dodge. You at most can change backpacks and offhand, but really you are going to be running a lantern for the glow or a shield to block while you wait for invincibility to kick in.
Limited skill selection: You had to have all the key skills, which limits the choices of skills that the player has.
Not entirely invincible. Things like acid could still hurt you.

There were other drawbacks, but those were the main checks.


My opinion is that instead of removing it entirely, make it harder to maintain:
1) Make it so that to get perfect dodge, you need to recraft the caveling set, but when you recraft it, it gives you -max hp (say -33% per piece for a total of -99% max hp for the set, though that could be abused for the low hp bonus, -hp already exists) and has reduced durability, say 50, or increased durability loss. This changes the set to be even more reliant on repairs. The set could also reduce damage dealt per piece, making the set require more resources. This could even be a set bonus where wearing the entire set is required to get the armor effects.
2) Make dodge food have reduced duration to 20 seconds base. This means that the player would need to fish more to maintain the build, turning it into a more preparation based build.
3) Chance the standing dodge skill so that it activates at 2 seconds of standing still, but stacks every few ticks until it caps. Or have it activate with a longer delay. This gives the player a longer period where they aren't entirely invincible, which plays into making the build based around planning.

Other possibilities/alternatives:
1) Said dodge armor mentioned previously in 1 above could have the same requirement as 3 above in that you have to stand still. So instead of having direct perfect dodge, it could be that it increases the max stacks of standing still dodge or it could just require several seconds of standing still.
2) Make it so that in addition to the dodge to 100% also requires a potion in addition to food. Said potion could even have an effect where the buff is removed on movement or again, requires time to activate.
3) As an alternative to making the standing dodge effect take longer, attacking could decrease your dodge. This would make timing your attacks more important. As another possibility, if we were to go by the buffs, attacking could remove 10 stacks of the standing still buff and count as moving for the purpose of increasing the stacks after.
Edit: 4) Make it so that gear caps at 55% dodge, so with the skills, it is a 90% cap, with the best food available, it is 100% (thus requiring more work to hit 100% because only epic dodge food will work).

[Mr Fantastic]

The best dodge you have is your own movement around enemies attacks. I have zero dodge and cleaned all content so far with no issues.

Although !00% dodge should be fine, as long as enemies also have extra hit chance that nullify some of that. Ofc dodge builds should also have much lower HP than a tanky build without any dodge.

[RonEmpire]

100% dodge is a bit broken don't you think?

While it was fun to chase it and try to create a 100% dodge build. It's not very balanced.

Current game has 90% dodge cap which is extremely generous still.

While you might not be able to reach 90% with the current in game equipment, it's still early access and I'm sure new gear pieces will come out for you to reach that.

[Soren]

Armour has a cap as well. 300 armour versus 150 armour do the same thing in most situations. The Corrupt Shaman deals like 30-40 irregardless of 150 armour or 300 armour. I think armour can only reduce 75% of incoming damage at most.

This 75% number also includes boss damage reduction. You can get that stat to 62% max if I remember correctly. Well, it matters not if armour already reduced it down to it's minimum anyway.

The only damage reduction that goes beyond the cap is shielding. As that is applied after base damage. So perhaps armour mixed with dodging is far more effective than either armour focused builds or dodging focused builds.

[AI Sin || SinNoAria]

Almost nobody that says dodge is too OP seems to want to explain why they think it is too OP.

The thing is that with the armor cap, that is all you need. Armor and maybe a shield if you want to go the face tank route. That gives you room to have bonuses like +damage, +crit, etc. You have higher hp, take less damage, and have more freedom with skills. You can combine it with hp on hit and melee spd to drain hp about as fast as you lose it, possibly faster. (Just tested an hp on hit vampire build and yep, I recover hp faster than I lose it, though it forces me to melee. Then again, the strongest two weapons in the game are melee, so...).

With dodge, you are completely reliant on the dodge because it is all you have. You can't take the feather because you can't move. You can technically take the shield, but realistically, a dodge build probably won't as they won't have any glow aside from a lantern and food.

Armor build can use things like food and potions to stay alive. Dodge build basically only has the option of entering dodge mode.

That is why I think it could be balanced pretty easily by making dodge builds stricter. Reduce your attack power and max hp (or perhaps just increase damage taken), increase your durability loss or reduce the durability of dodge gear so that you can't just stay in invincibility forever, etc.

We already have Azeos, for example, as a partial counter because his healing can overwhelm your dps depending on RNG (he places obstacles that block range attacks and those obstacles heal him. Dodge builds basically can't move, so depending on RNG, you can end up unable to kill Azeos while he slowly whittles you down).

You could have bosses with effects like a decay pool that leeches durability from your armor, reflect phases where it is immune to melee/range and reflects such damage back towards the attacker as direct damage, etc. Perhaps you have a boss that creates mazes each time you hit it, so you have to move around to attack it again, whether by picking through the maze or navigating it. Maybe a boss will have a red light/green light system where if you stand still during green, you start taking damage. If you move during red, you start taking damage. (Not literal red/green light because colorblindness, mind you. More like Darumasan is here).

There are many ways that bosses could be built around making dodge builds do extra work instead of just nerfing it. The build is already a bit weaker in the mold dungeon because of how many enemies spawn in there, which forces you to be extra careful about durability.

TL;DR

Dodge build isn't the most broken build. My new non-dodge vampire build is more broken because I won't die, am not 100% reliant on my armor and food, have more freedom of how to build, and is just as hard to kill if not harder. And takes less work to get going although it takes more work to see the potential.

Instead of a nerf, they could have made monsters with counters, which would have added variety to the game.

[DJDiceZ]

Yeah no, way too OP.

[Lazy Dog Daddy]

Get over this nerf pls ... unless you want them to NEVER add more dodge buffs or items in game for the next 2 big updates ... sure its fine now , but when you can constantly gain 100% dodge , it will become an issue . Might has well fix it now by adding a cap :)

Edit: Imagine next 2 biomes , you can either stick with current setup to get 100% dodge or live with the nerf and get that 90% by using decent/good gear from new updates(think mana/land/power cheating in card games , think ahead)