Evasion and deflection newb needing help

Evasion works on a curve. The higher your evasion, the more you need to increase your evasion chance.

Deflection is just a chance to reduce the damage you take if you get hit. The default is 40% damage reduction.

If you have 70% evasion, with 50% deflection chance, on the 30% occasion you get hit, it has a 50% chance of reducing that damage by the default 40% (this is modifiable from nodes on the tree).

Keep in mind that evasion in POE2 is entropy based, meaning that the more hits you dodge, the more likely you'll get hit eventually. So, you could say it's not true evasion, more so pseudo evasion.

That's why deflection rating is extremely important to survivability in full evasion builds.

You can get deflection rating from the skill tree, and from all evasion armor pieces (including es/eva) in the form of "gain x% of evasion as deflection rating."

If you're curious about the ES vs other defense layers, its because ES is a pool like max life, unlike armor and evasion. This means any ES scaling you have is immediately effective and reliable. You can take bigger hits with full ES.

Unfortunately, armor and evasion have to rely on the health pool, which has little to no max life scaling in the tree.

So you see some players run es/eva to up their effective health pool as much as possible, and high end builds can run stuff like 80% eva with 60% deflection rating, with 46% damage reduction on deflected hits, while maintaining a 6k ES pool.

I have roughly 75% evasion and deflection, with deflection taking off 49% of damage, and I am extremely tanky. I don't die unless I fuck up vs a boss.

I also have maxed res, plus the Pathfinder evasion res node that I admit I don't fully understand lol. But since they introduced deflection this combo has been extremely strong imo and ime. Does require a number of nodes on the tree but considering I am taking a large number of poison nodes too, I would say it's not disruptive.

Edit - I have es on my helmet since I can easily reach the relavent node, and I decided to get some on my boots because es+ev boots didn't drop my evasion down much but the 130 or so es does a lot for me with all the es nodes I have. My chest is full es but I don't have the relevant node, takes too much investment and since pf can now branch off the witch starting spot you can get more es that way based on my numbers. (might check this again due to the jewel spot but... I really don't think it's worth it)

Lots use the unique chest, hyrri? I think, but I needed resists and also for some reason I just don't like the notion that I lose the bonus when I get hit, because I'm pretty sure you take little pot shots a lot they just don't end up mattering, but with that chest it'd lower your evasion a bunch. But it's the obvious way to go if you can spare the resists (I need unique gloves and prefer headhunter to hyrris since I'm having zero issue atm surviving anyway)

Sorry for the ramble lol, if you want a pob or anything I can link when I get home.

I'd like it to feel as durable as a ES or leech build.

It won't. The nature of EV only build is you'll die randomly occasionally.

There's always the risk of no evade, no deflect, oneshot. I experienced that enough that I invested heavily into ES/evasion/deflect hybrid and been a lot less frustrated since.

https://poe.ninja/poe2/builds/vaal/character/deez__Strawz-7689/Breath_of_Jennifer?i=0&search=name%3DBreath_

Here’s my oil grenade pathfinder, mostly ev/defl with some armour, pob says I can get just over 100k ehp with windancer and triggered passive nodes

Pathfinder does have the ascendency node that’s gives elemental reduction based on evasion, like the armour elemental reduction, so you can get 90% reduced elemental hit damage with enough evasion

the accuracy part of your post is about the enemy. for example, if you blind enemies, they have lower accuracy, making your evasion more potent.

The evasion/deflect rating in tooltip is calculated off base accuracy for a monster at your level capping at 82 - 2114 accuracy. From the dive I did into accuracy numbers uniques seem to have a 2x accuracy monster modifiers, so blind and blind effect seem extremely important.

I stacked up to 95% deflect in an armour stacker, so it’s very obvious when a deflect did or did not occur. I did a lot of limit testing on xesht because he has a lot of unblockable attacks and 95% deflect feels like 85% in reality. It just is not as reliable as you’d hope and is definitely not an absolute damage mitigation layer, and should be treated as such. Unless you can get to 99% + blind, i’d go with some energy shield to give you a lot more protection against 1 shots.