The Quality of Your Items Are All that Matters in Path of Exile
Everything in the game is determined by your stats, and your goal in this game is to make those stats as high as you can get them. Dodging and avoiding aren’t very skill based/reaction time based, instead they are based on attack speed/cast speed and movement speed. Most people have decent enough reaction times to click their movement skill in time. However whether you take damage or not is fully determined by how high your attack speed and/or movement speed are. Do you want to poe currency buy? If you do, you can visit U4GM to have more guides and methods about this.
As a result of this, the quality of your items are all that matters in this game, which makes good items more expensive and more chase.
And this is exactly what GGG wants. This game is locked behind items by design. Items are the single big carrot-on-a-stick of this game.
“Dodging” does exist, although it’s more of a precautions avoidance. You basically have to learn every single boss and memorize their attack patterns. Once you’ve done a boss 20 times you will know when to back off and when to attack. As a result, the end game bosses are made very inaccessible to the majority of players because they come with a very significant cost towards even trying them. Most players do not posses the wealth to buy the shaper sets required to learn how the fight works.
Again, this is fully intended. This is how they try to keep end-game exclusive.
In a hypothetical where they would make these changes, the game would feel infinitely less clunky and frustrating to play, which is good.
However, as a result dodging also becomes much easier, which places more emphasis on player skill and reaction times (again, good in my opinion), however it will decrease the player’s reliance on item power and thereby impact the economy.
It will also make boss fights much easier to complete in less tries, because dodging based on reaction time is actually a thing, making end game more accessible and their respective items less valuable.
In my personal opinion, I’d say that trade-off is well worth it. I’m actually getting pretty tired of the clunky combat system in this game and the artificial gating of everything. I would love my skill to be rewarded instead of my ability to purchase items from poe.trade.