The Tavern

Evasion is soft capped at 30, according to the wiki:

http://crawl.chaosforge.org/Evasion



That is, after 30 evasion it's not really worth it to gain more points in dodging. What annoys me is that this is completely invisible and obscure, and seems to exist for no reason except to spite spriggans, which aren't even that good to begin with. I'm sure most players didn't even know this!

I propose either indicating it in game, or removing the soft cap. Seriously, why is it completely hidden that evasion is much less useful after 30?

Disagree with spriggans not being good, agree with removing both the ev stepdown and the dex stepdown, rebalancing as necessary, for game clarity reasons.

How would you rebalance? Just by lowering everyone's Dodging aptitude?

Lots of ways you could do it. Dropping apts, increasing armor penalty to evasion, making the benefit of the non-stepdowned portion of dex lower. Depending on how you do it some characters get a little better and some get a little worse but game balance overall shouldnt be too affected. I'm fine with high dex characters being a little better as long as there are still tradeoffs to make.

Maybe the devs are worried about extreme edge cases like Octopodes wearing the Ring of Phasing on the macabre finger necklace and 8 rings of evasion on its tentacles with maxed Dodging and Jiyva-adjusted stats heavily in favor of DEX? Though I think that even in the extremely rare case where that's actually possible, the player would be sacrificing enough power in other areas that I wouldn't be concerned even with a smooth EV curve, particularly when there are a variety of threats that ignore EV entirely.

And isn't there a flat 5% minimum chance to hit no matter how high EV is?

If people want to invest that much into evasion, I say let them. It's worth mentioning it'd be an indirect Chei buff, but I don't really think it's going ruin the game if chei characters get +3 EV by the time they have 2 runes.

Yes:
I don't agree with the OP's premise here, TBH. The stepdown function is not particularly harsh.

I think the issue here isn't so much that it's harsh as that it's obscure.

The OP describes it as "not really worth it to gain more points in dodging", and "much less useful after 30". That suggests harshness to me.

As for obscurity, I didn't know about this particular effect nor the cap of 5% on hit/miss chances, but I'd expect _something_ of that nature. Crawl's full of these stepdown functions when you get really good at something. I can't see knowing it really affecting my games.

Well the OP can speak for themself. I was aware of the 5% rule; but while the game indeed has plenty of stepdown functions I'm unsure what purpose they serve that isn't served better by the well-known diminishing returns from XP investment (which can be made harsher if need be).