I’ll get straight to the point - Dodge seems a bit wonky to me. At 6 dodge, I am untouchable; at 12 dodge (from being unencumbered) I am consistently beaten to hell by basic military zombies, and can barely land a hit in return.
Is there something I’m doing wrong? Is Dodge just not very good? Should I focus on armoring up instead?
The problem with dodging is that it tends to fail when you need it the most:
On top of that, keeping low torso encumbrance usually means that you don’t have much carrying capacity — which in turn usually means that you might not have optimal tools for every situation.
All in all, I would say that just keeping your distance is the best way to avoid damage, second comes good armor, third comes dodging.
Tamior is pretty much right. Dodging also doesn’t work against ranged attacks, further limiting its usefulness. That being said I like to have a dodge of at least three and favor martial arts with grab breaks for melee characters. I still rely on armor predominantly, but the main thing to avoid is pain and getting surrounded. Always have an exit strategy and be ready to run if the situation gets sour.
i found the best thing to prevent damage in melee, is gear with blocking ability, like the shields or some weapons and a MA with synergy with dodging, like fencing.
It depends on how you play really but pretty much what everyones said, dodge is sort of decent as a secondary defence but especially since the changes to stamina it’s value has dropped off quite a bit.
The value of armour with high defence stats and coverage has gone up since it doesn’t require stamina to protect you but both dodge and block do, worst case scenarios you can pass time to get some breath back.
Seems logical…to a degree. How can you anticipate the intent of another being that would shoot you? Unless you have that covered. You would be shot rather easy. Unless of course you could have line of sight implemented in game ala UnReal World. But Kevin mentioned a long time ago(pretty sure, bad memory) this was not going to happen. Soooo…you would have to make a work around. Such as a CBM that works like a tank addon in real life, that detects sudden ordinance in bound and fires what amounts to as a shotgun blast at it to explode whatever it is inbound.
The CBM could in theory work similar and instead of the shot blast(which would explode you with the ordinance lol), the triggered response would be a reflex to your muscles to get out of the way. Which…would then run a check to see if you have Wired Reflexes CBM(dex buff CBM) or take a severe amount of instant damage from the physical stress. Seriously. It would be like a instant car crash at 100mph to avoid such firearms or explosive projectiles. But better than the explosion? I dunno. I would not wanna deal with that pain lol
Haven’t you ever seen the matrix ?
How much… doge 
Yeah, I made that suggestion a few years ago and it came down to each turn was yadda seconds and we assume we are always looking around, and it would be tedious to play cataclysm with that feature due to all the dangers. He was definitely right.
Noooooo! How about ZERO DOGE! 
As an option it would be nice. But I also understand the reason for not implementing it. Although there are some far more egregious tedium as of late. Such is the examine counter tops–>menu–>click more crap…
That REALLY needs to go back to just looking at the damn items on a table =(
(option for it is fine…just not as a default you can’t turn off)
I just use g->direction to counter top. Sometimes only g if there are no other items nearby.
True…but it was around for years and now a silly menu that is not even useful unless specifically crafting. Meanwhile the rest of the game is examining stuff. I dunno if I even want to grab something, hence examine list(sorry…as in the pick up items list).