[2024] Evade / dodge roll as an ability + share cd with traversal skills

Because the goal is to slightly increase battlefield repositioning potential, not give a significant increase to overall traversal speed. Reducing the cooldown on traversal skills would have the intended effect but would also have an unintended downside. This does not share that downside. We also would prefer to have the option of taking a traversal skill or not continue to be an option. It would also require dramatic changes to each traversal skill which would result in the removal of many mechanics that people really enjoyed. I also think that it is a step towards having each ability slot being categorized. If you ever played D3 before you realized that you could put any skill on any slot if you changed your settings, the build restrictions were just savage. It was just a couple days for me but I almost just quit the game over that. Evade is very clearly positioned as not one of your primary abilities and I think that is necessary for it to work long term.

We didn’t make this change because of any other game doing it. I know that might be hard to believe, but we frequently will say in design meetings that it doesn’t matter what they are doing.

I mean, you technically always were in that position, we can add whatever we want really. I do think that would be pretty silly on our part though. I’m not sure how this changes what could be. If it makes you feel any better, we have no plans to do that.

Movement speed scaling is there for 2 reasons. First, because without it, you can get to a point where walking would be faster and that would make the ability obsolete and pointless at top tier content and that’s just a waste. Second, and this applies to CDR too, because we are always on the lookout for ways to make your gearing choices matter.

We are adding interactions with uniques and skill nodes in the future because it would be kinda silly to release Evade with them and then never add more. Having fixed mods that we never update or change is just a bad idea for an evolving gameplay environment like ours. In case I misunderstood that question and you are instead suggesting that the concept of having Evade interact with your gear at all is a bad idea, we think it’s a good idea because it allows us to have the ability progress as you level. It also gives us ways to make Evade be mechanically unique per class in select situations.

I hope that helped to better communicated the reasoning and logic behind this decision.

We are aware the not everyone will enjoy this mechanic (just like every other mechanic in the game really). As usual, I ask that people try it out before making summary judgment on it and also as usual, we will be keeping an eye out after it launches for feedback on it.

Also just as a note, we’re really trying to push the term Evade instead of Dodge because it doesn’t actually grant i-frames and we are also trying to avoid the term roll because it implies that you’ll have the old mage or the heavily armored sentinel rolling, which they won’t. We also already have a mechanic called Dodge in the game and we don’t want them to be conflated.

OK, let’s get into it. Before I get too far, the specific details on exact timings, speed, cooldown, interactions and everything else is still very much up for adjustments and will almost guaranteed change between now and 1.1 launch. The start of my Evade description post starts by saying that these are the details for the version that we are doing internal testing on. It still has to go through that and to our CT program before it gets a 1.1 launch version. So, lots of stuff here will see adjustments between now and then. All I can describe is the version that we are testing now.

I believe Evade is currently slightly faster than walking. However, if the goal is the optimize, spamming Evade between packs is not necessarily going to be any better. I have been testing this out a bunch and I have consistently posted slower times on echoes when I use Evade as a traversal skill. Having it as a tool to quickly reposition in combat saves more time for me than spamming it between packs. So in the current version it could theoretically very slightly increase traversal speed but at least in my case is less optimal overall if used as such.

We like that traversal abilities such as Teleport, Transplant, Lunge, etc are optional. If the evade button were to be dedicated as a traversal skill then there would be no upside to not taking one. Currently the upside is that you get the opportunity cost of taking one back. (I think there was some miscommunication on this one but I’m not sure which one of us didn’t understand the other).

The original suggestion that I was responding to with this one was talking about significantly reducing the cooldown of traversal skills at the same time. That’s the main part that would spark dramatic changes. However, among other things, some traversal skills have damage components. If we are making it a dedicated ability slot then those would each need to be at the very least examined and probably more likely replaced with new nodes. Just for the record, this is not a traversal skill, it’s just a movement skill. I think you might be just using the term as a “I’m expecting to have to use it to get from back to pack” way but just in case, it doesn’t have a traversal tag.

Ahh yes but we aren’t and it is a different beast when looking at a character with how it goes together and players.

We try very hard to ignore what other companies are doing when designing the game itself. The most frequent thing we do talk about other games is once we’ve got something we want to do, we might say “uhh is that too similar to game x?” Of course we get influenced by the other games we play. That’s just the nature of doing anything creative and ARPGs are the games that we all play the most. I think that we probably got an influx of community requests for this because other games are doing it but that only gets an idea back to the table, it has to stand on its own once it gets there.

Yup that looks like me (ekimarcher on reddit) but that doesn’t contradict the point I was making with that text I just posted. I think it actually helps it. We aren’t prepared to lock anything in or out. We always look to see what the best changes we can make are for the game right now. There are features that I’ve tried to get through a design meeting for years that I have to tell players no all the time for. This is actually one that I was pushing against but my point is that the game is always evolving and it will continue to. I think that’s a really good thing.

I’m so confused by this point. Yes? Why is that a bad thing? No reason why not, it will? I feel like this one has a miscommunication on it too and again, I’m not sure who isn’t understanding who but I think I don’t understand. [hypothetical example disclaimer] Like, if we added a unique Sentinel Relic in 1.1 that had to stat, +5% chance to release a flame arc each second per Evade charge while using Warpath. Isn’t that an interesting interaction on an item that can be used in a build? (ok, I just made that up but it sounds kinda cool, needs some workshopping I know)

Evade is nowhere remotely close to the power level of other traversal skills so it won’t directly compete with their design space.

And it’s fine that we disagree on this. Unless the CTs really dislikes it, I think it’s very likely that it will get added in a pretty similar way to how it is now. But that doesn’t mean it will stay exactly the same. I think we’ve proven pretty clearly that we aren’t afraid the adapt when needed. I know it can sometimes feel like you’re shouting into the void but we do collect and discuss the feedback that we get. We have a meeting scheduled next week specifically to discuss the feedback from the roadmap (mostly Evade) announcement.

I understand that you are used to dodge roll being the term and it’s hard to change that in a discussion but if you can, I’d really appreciate it if we can use Evade instead of Dodge or Roll. It does look like people have latched onto the term more than we expected. We probably should have just said Evade. It’s not like I’m going to delete a post because someone uses dodge or not but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable ask to use Evade.

Well, I’m very happy to report that is not the case at all. The vast majority do not fall into those categories at all. It has people from a very diverse gaming background.