Presently, the dodge mechanic works sort of like a reverse distraction. Rather than distracting your opponent causing them to reduce their damage (something that can be cleansed) – dodge offers the opportunity for your creature to take less damage from opponent moves.

For a long time (through patch 1.8) that mechanic gave you a 50% chance to dodge 100% of the damage done. This led to some frustrating results. Some creatures would dodge attack after attack in a sheer RNG streak, and it was infuriating.

Later on, counters to dodge arose but they still left a bad taste in a player’s mouth. While you could use nullify to get rid of a dodge, and later definite strike to clear a dodge and hit for sure (breaking armor and shields as well), dinosaurs with these moves were hard to level to the extent that it mattered immediately.

When dodge was further changed to have a 50/50 chance to negate 66% of damage – people started removing dodgers from their teams. Often dodge dinos had lower health, and getting hit no matter what was also hard for moves that ONLY dodge. Evasive Stance for instance became a move that most people didn’t even bother to use as it could be a wasted turn. Getting hit for 100% of damage on one turn and 33% of damage on the second might be enough to kill a dino before it could even do anything besides evade.

But now, Ludia is making yet another dodge change and it looks to have an impact.