How do you feel about avoidance in combat?
I am designing a MMO and I am in the middle of designing combat and damage calculations. For context I am designing slower tab target style of combat where the the bulk skill expression comes from strategic decisions rather than reacting quickly.
I am curious how in this type of environment people feel about the concept of avoidance where you have a random chance of avoid/resisting an attack. My current design philosophy is to have a little RNG as possible as my goal is to emphasize tactics and strategy and in many cases RNG in this environment feels bad since it never feels good to make the right decision and not get rewarded. My current idea for the implementation of playstyles where characters look to avoid attacks rather than just mitigating them is to give these characters a suit of abilities that have windows of 100% avoidance and then use cooldown reduction/refresh mechanics to allow paths of skillful play to allow a player to avoid more.
However avoidance mechanics are very common in many MMOs and I want to make sure before I turn my back on something that I know exactly what I may be missing out on so i wanted to get some opinions of players on their feelings of avoidance mechanics. Is this a core mechanic that a game wont feel right without it or is it just something we have endured because every MMO just has it?