Damage Reduction vs Evade

[KracKils]

I apologize in advance if this has already been done as I thought I had seen a thread for this before but didn't find it with search or from digging back a few weeks.

Recently I've seen some conversations leaning towards damage reduction and was wanting to find out why. My most recent highest run was 17k+ and i normally run lvl 10 Karuta armor x6 with one purple gem each and double on nurse and thief (n/t/dm/dm/dm/dm most of the time, sometimes replace a dm with xx). Evade runs +47% - +58% with this setup and has worked well for me. That's with the evade pet Sly.

Any info in regards to damage reduction including equipment choices and reasoning would be appreciated. Damage reflection doesn't seem like a great option even if it pisses me off in arena lol.

[stylez]

You can get up to 87% DR with Skull Blade, Ossein Armor, Shield of the Divine, Silver Necklace, and Cliff the DR Pet. Instead of taking a 10k damage hit, you take 1300. So each HP increase you get from your class relic takes you much further than it otherwise would. You additionally don't need to take a Nurse with you, freeing up a slot for an extra damage dealer, which also takes you further.

[Handoiron]

Damage reduction reduces every hit you take. Evasion only reduces The hit's you're lucky enough to evade.

You can't possibly get 100% evasion so eventually it's "useless" because someone is getting hit.

I'd guess that if you get to the point where ambushes can 1 hit kill someone, your best bet is to stack as much damage reduction and health as possible and have evasion as your secondary defense.

[Lark]

If I remember aright, Reddit says evasion is better for clear speed but damage reduction can save your butt when you do get hit. Faster runs or longer runs, take your pick.
I'm trying a new setup after hitting 20K - Back Protectors, Karutas, etc. - to see if a speed build outperformed an essence build. So far it's about the same in essence per hour (& half the gold), but there's still a lot of room for tuning with all the mistakes I made changing over.

[KracKils]

You lose gem slots with Skull Blade and Shield of the Divine though, quite a bit of attack as well. Don't know if Skull Bash can back attack as Laser can but I expect laser will be balanced soon if other skills can't back attack also.

[sf_hope]

Skull blade active can back attack, The best chars to use evade gear on are Junkies and Thieves because they get innate evade. Junkie has 8%, thief has 6%.

You can get up to 82% evade on a thief and 84% evade on a junkie....it's fun to try out once in a while with 6 junkies or thieves or a mix just to see how far they can go with that much evade lol

[KracKils]

It's looking like damage reduction caps at +90%. If I remove a pendant from DM it brings it down to 87%. XX maxes out at +44% damage reduction with three pendants but misses out on alot of hp from losing back protectors.

[stylez]

Originally posted by KracKils:

You lose gem slots with Skull Blade and Shield of the Divine though, quite a bit of attack as well. Don't know if Skull Bash can back attack as Laser can but I expect laser will be balanced soon if other skills can't back attack also.

I haven't bothered with looking at clear speed because I let the game run in the background 24/7 -- whether I complete 10k floors or 15k floors in a given amount of time really doesn't matter to me. I simply want my party to run as long as possible without having to touch the game. I'm also only at floor 100k, so maybe the strat has to change as you get deeper, I dunno. This is all just my personal reasoning for DR.

Relics level infinitely, so +x% damage or HP from gems and gear becomes less important than what you gain from relics. When an ambush can OHK you, your amount of damage becomes irrelevant. And where ambushes cannot be prevented completely, it's just a matter of time before RNG slaps you. So the choices are:

• tank the full damage, relying on XX to prevent OHK & include a Nurse to recover;
  
• take the evade gamble and hope RNG works in your favor at each ambush (and maybe include XX+N as a fallback when you lose the gamble);
  
• reduce the damage by 87-90%, enabling your chars to survive multiple ambushes in a run, relying on faeries and auto-regen to heal you between ambushes -- XX+N are optional at this point, freeing up 2 party slots for, effectively, +200% damage.

[KracKils]

Good info everyone. Thanks for the input. Switched over to damage reduction. Really looking forward to additional changes and content being added to game to further meta like this.

[Necroshine]

Originally posted by KracKils:

It's looking like damage reduction caps at +90%. If I remove a pendant from DM it brings it down to 87%. XX maxes out at +44% damage reduction with three pendants but misses out on alot of hp from losing back protectors.

I have a team on 90% DR right now with 4 Dark Mages and 2 Healers. I probably shouldn't die for awhile lol. I'm on level 12k for the first time and nothing is even hitting me bad enough to matter at all. 12 hours in (started from lvl 1 like I always do) and I don't see an end in sight any time soon. DR is pretty OP imo. To really strong enemies the Healers add burn damage and DMs add poison damage. The team is amazing so far....