Whether or not to raise your evade skills are one of the most frequently asked questions of new players to AO (and some veterans as well!). This guide will explain in as much as it can (as the exact calculations are not known to anyone other then the programers!) what they can do to help you on your travels.

Evades are a set of skills found in your 'SPEED' tab on your skill selection. There are three evade skills that can be raised. We will deal with the specifics of each in a little bit. These skills effect the chances of a mob hitting you, and the chance of that mob doing a critcial hit. Whether they actually effect how much damage a hit does is open to debate. Your ACs effect the amount of damage much more then your evades.

Best advice is always to keep your ACs as high as you can in the first place! A good rough guide is that for normal hunting of mobs your armour ratings should be at least your current level x 20.

If your ACs are at or around the level mentioned above you will notice that mobs seem to do either their minimum damage (which will vary from mob to mob) or a critcial hit. For example at level 100 a mob will probably do around 100 pts damage as it's minimum. A mobs critical hit can vary depending on the type of damage it is doing and the weapon type it's using. This is where the types of evades come into play:

If you look at the description for any weapon you will see which of the evades it uses to calculate hits. Mobs hits are calculated in exactly the same way.

Dodge Ranged
This is the evade that is used when the attacker is using most types of ranged attack. This is the most common type of attack you will be faced with. If you feel you only have the IP to raise one evade, raise this one.

Evade Close Combat
This is the evade used to calculate melee hits and martial arts attacks.

Duck Explosion
This is used very little in player v mob combat, but can be useful in PvP as it is used for several of the lines of shotguns in AO. Mobs will very rarely use this type of attack against you.

What is know is that hits are calculated as a check against the attack rating of the attacker and the defence rating of the target. Whilst you can see your attack rating on your hud you cannot see your defence rating. It's a hidden statistic.

Evades are based 50% on Agility, 20% on Intelligence and 30% on Sense. That means you will roughly get 1 pt in evades for every 8 spent in agility, every 16 in Intelligence and every 14 in Sense (those are rough calculations and will vary based on your breed / profession)

Well, given the confusion with ACs as mentioned above, players have long debated the worth of evades and what I am explaining here is purely from my own observations in game, and those of other gamers / feedback on boards.

Under level 50 the effect of evades is negliable. Once over though you can notice a marked difference.

If a player fights a mob and hasn't raised their evades damage will go something like this:

Mob score a critical hit
Mob score a critical hit
Mob score a critical hit
Mob hits for it's minimum damage
Mob score a critical hit
Mob score a critical hit
Mob score a critical hit
Mob hits for it's minimum damage

Now if you have raised your evades, it's more like this.

Mob hits for it's minimum damage
Mob hits for it's minimum damage
Mob hits for it's minimum damage
Mob hits for it's minimum damage
Mob hits for it's minimum damage
Mob score a critical hit
Mob hits for it's minimum damage
Mob hits for it's minimum damage
Mob hits for it's minimum damage

Remember that AC is important, if a mob is doing variable damage against you, its more then likely you need to work on raising your Armour Class as well as your evades. Once you see one of the above patterns developing, then you're probably on target and will start to see the real beneift of raiding your evades.

If you are still sceptical try raising one of the two main evades and then notice the difference in the damage type you raised.

Bear in mind that these are only really visible against high green / yellow mobs. If you try to always do orange / red mobs you probably get high end damage all the time anyway. Likewise if you constantly team, the mobs drop so quickly that your evades are much harder to judge. To get a true picture try a solo mission at 50%-75%, you will truely see that they do make a difference when you can see the damage clearly as you can in that situation.

My personal advice would be to raise these skill, espcially if you solo a lot.

If you actively PvP, or want to, you will need to max these three skills whenever possible. No question, no debate, raise them! Players you will fight are more powerful then the mobs and adopt tactics that are designed to exploit weaknesses in players skills. Many PvPers use shotguns so the Duck Explosions skill becomes vital. Due to scopes and nanos players also crit much more regularly then mobs so be warned!

As I said earlier, I or no-one else outside Funcom can prove this one way or other, all I can do is say that as a player of AO since launch I believe that they are very helpful to a successful character, and vital in PvP.

This guide was kindly provided by Sillirion!