Avoidance, high initiative and crit chance reduction on the "long run" actualy have the same effeciency as comparable high wounds, thougness, armor/resist and damage reduction... but in the short run they are much more volatile.
What I mean is that LUCK play a considerable role with avoidance in short fight or against burst combo.
To give an example;
with a 30% avoidance (i'm using effective avoidance for easy of explanation so take it as 30% after all calculation are done) and a 10% reduced chance to be crit against a 30% crit chance you would have an AVARAGE 70 hit landing out of 100 with only 14 of them being crit.
BUT when it come to smaller sample of hit, let say 10, than the values become volatile.
The AVARAGE would be 7 hit and 1,4 crit... but you can't get HALF a crit... so it is eitehr 2 or 1... what more with such short numbers of hit the possibility of the actual result diverging from the avarage is quite high.
You may end up suffering only 5 hit with 1 or no crit, or you may end up sufferingo 8 or 9 hit with 3 or 4 crit... those are values that fall without problem into the expected deviation of the avarage calculated over a small sample...
If you lower the number even more (for example the BW/Sorc ST burst combo that land 4-5 hit in a single timestamp) than the volatility is even more pronunced you may actualy end up with just one avoidance (or even 0) and 3 crit, or you may land 3 avoidance with 0 crit completely defusing the combo.
Another point affected by RNG is WHICH skill would actualy turn out to be a HIT and Crit... using the previous example of BW/Sorc burst combo the diffeence between avoiding a FB and getting a critted ignite tick and aviding the ignite while getting a critt FB is pretty dramatic.
So while it's ture that alternative to high HP do exist it also true that the way they perform is sustantially different, high HP/damage reduction give you a steady form of survival that you can somehow "depend on" and plan for, avoidance and crit reduce give you a survival that may end up being overperforming sometime and underperforming other time...
Certainly if you were able to stuck BOTH kind of survival that will turn into an endless fight (higher HP/damage reduction would translate in more hit required that would in turn translate into higher number of check for avoidance, resulting in avarage values becoming more consitent with effective number of avoidance thus reducing chance of "bad luck" affecting your survival).
That is why I, by no mean, hope for HP being simply increased on general level... on the other end the ability to chose between wich form of survival one whant to aim toward is a completely different matter... unfortunately some avoidance is INBOUND on most defensive gear (if you want to go for tough/wound centered equip you will most likely turn out to get equip that also have avoidance/crit reduce and that are so balanced in their effective stat by those avoidance values), on the other end if you want to "avoid" avoidance item you end up with your HP/damage reduction being (almost) completely dependant on talis while the item themselves provide little in those regards.
Now with all this said if you ask me for a solution... I have none that is easy to implement... but not being able to formulate a solution doesn't mean that the problem desn't exist ^^
