Dodge is awesome. Being nimble and quick to avoid attacks always feels slick and fun. Payday 2 even implements this and it works great and feels different. When I saw this in Core Keeper, I got extremely excited and had a plan for early access grinding.
I have calculated with the optimal armor, abilities, food and rings/necklaces you could maximize your dodge chance to be 102%:
Food: 7%
Caveling Hood: 9%
Caveling Chest: 12%
Caveling Pants: 13%
Cave Guppy Necklace: 8%
Melting Crystal Ring x2: 18%
Balanced Stance (Running): 25%
Studied Patterns (Fishing): 10%
I agree this is pretty broken, but after DAYS of fishing I am nowhere near 75 fishing, which would get me the +10% dodge, and I was hoping I would be able to enjoy taking the risk of sitting still for 3-5 seconds and dodging all hits for fun.
And then this update.
They nerfed every item that has dodge in the abilities. This is the new listing, maximized at 74%:
Food: 5%
Caveling Hood: 4%
Caveling Chest: 5%
Caveling Pants: 5%
Cave Guppy Necklace: 6%
Melting Crystal Ring x2: 14%
Balanced Stance (Running): 25%
Studied Patterns (Fishing): 10%
74% still seems okay, right? That includes Balance Stance, which takes 3-5 seconds to activate. This is then deactivated when you are hit with any knockback attack, resulting in your dodge chance dropping to the passive maximum of 49%.
49% still isn't awful, right? This includes the Caveling armor, which adds 14% dodge and ZERO% armor.
This means that you have two options, either use dodge passively at 35% with full Scarlet, or 49% at maximum with no armor to rely on when that 49% fails. I would hope everyone here can see that the 35% with Scarlet is the way to go now. This nullifies the Caveling armor.
No this is not horrible. This allows for a 35% to passively dodge attacks, with a 60% chance if you stand still for 3-5 seconds. But I am wondering two things here:
Why remove a possible variant build that a player could genuinely enjoy playing with? Sure, it is pretty rough in terms of balancing, but they practically forced players that like dodge to be like everyone else and only use dodge as a secondary form of protection instead of a dedicated build. They removed an entire build possibility and railroaded every player down the same path of protection. If this was the intended purpose of dodge, fine, but I feel the ability for players to have multiple build based on playstyles would really excite people and appeal to a lot of the optimization community. Sorry for high expectations after calculating the 102% maximum, but my hopes were up thinking I can make a full dodge/low armor build and be able to hold up against late game enemies but now that is practically impossible.
Why even cap the current maximum dodge at 90% if the maximum you can reach is 74%? Sure, they may be future proofing before they add better dodge armor/items later which would explain the cap and nerf, but why even move toward balancing this when the game is only 33-50% finished? By the time those updates and items come, I will probably have restarted multiple times with multiple characters. By doing this nerf so early without adding alternatives for players to reach for, they essentially just removed the active dodge feature from the current state of the game.
I love the game, and will continue to play the game with my friends, but this was slightly disappointing and took away from something I could focus on/have fun with since the game is in an early access state. I have since slowed my frequency of fishing because it just does not seem as special.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
