UberGuy

There is no myth. Your thesis is flawed.

Assume I have a character with some amount of defense. At that level of defense, whatever it is, I can find a number of some given foe, that, on average, will never kill me. (I might still die if a large number of them manage to hit me at once.)

Now I add defense. I add enough defense to halve the average rate of damage that lands on my character. By definition, I can now survive, on average, twice as many of my chosen type of foe.

We understand that the math of defense means that it is easier to halve the average DPS that lands on a character the closer we are to the "soft cap".

If I go from 40 defense to 45 defense, I halve the amount of average DPS I am suffering, which again means I can double the number of foes I can survive. To do this starting at zero defense I require an additional 25 points of defense. Therefore, 5 points of defense is more valuable starting at 40 than 5 points starting at zero.

The absolute contribution is practically meaningless to the application of how we play the game. The relative contribution is more applicable.

It's not quite on topic, but a related and much more minor request...

Please modify the DE Monsters to not drop little "tier 1" inspirations? It just seems so anti-climactic to get little (non-EoE) inspirations off of them.

If they made such a change they would dramatically increase the overall supply of stuff that drops off of mobs, including purples. After all, the shard drop approach multiplies the average number of drops by the number of people on the team. That means it's an average drop rate increase across the game equal to the average team size. For purples of course that would be teams fighting level 50+ foes.

That's fine if that's what the devs want, but here's something to think about. If the devs don't want the aggregate rate to go up that much, they would reduce the per mob drop probability by the same proportion. If they did that, it would our solo drop rates negatively.

Shards can work like this with no balance impact not just because they're new, but because they're bind on pick-up. That's another possible outcome to consider. The devs might be willing to make invention drops multiply by team size while retaining current rates if they were more tightly bound to who gets them.

I'm really don't like or dislike our current drop rate, but the real question is: what do the devs think of it?

I wouldn't categorize WP as a defense set.

Mathematically, when you say you are primarily concerned with having the endurance to defeat something without regard to time*, what you want to optimize is damage per endurance, often referred to as DPE. The problem with your original build is that you slotted heavily for endurance but neglected damage. This is a mistake, because you're missing out on doubling up the benefits of both. You can only benefit effectively from 3 damage or 3 endurance SOs, but you can have the DPE benefit of up thee of each.

Damage for a power is BaseDam*(1+DamageEnhancement). Endurance cost for a power is BaseEndCost /(1+EndurenceEnhancement).

Since DPE is damage/end, that means the DPE with enhancements is:
BaseDam/BaseEndCost*(1+DamageEnhancement)*(1+EndurenceEnha ncement).

So you've get to multiply the benefit of the endurance and damage slotting together for DPE.

You can't ignore accuracy here, because accuracy affects average damage, which must therefore affect average DPE.

The reason that IOs are the optimal solution for DPE here is that they allow much more than six slots worth of SO-strength slotting in six (or often just five) slots. You can usually easily approach 3 SOs worth of damage, two SOs worth of endurance, and 1.5 to 2 SOs of both accuracy and recharge.

* Of course, most players do care about time to victory, and this means that damage slotting is the priority, because it improves both DPE and DPS. Increased DPS has the benefit of reducing the time the enemy gets to deal damage to you, affecting how likely you are to win for a given health recovery rate. This is why most SO builds have 3 damage slotted, but only one or two end reducers. The ability of IOs to add accuracy in six slots improves DPS as well.

IMO, all Stalker builds are tight because of the extra, essentially mandatory powers in the primary. (Placate and AS.) Hide is clearly extra also, but the power that Hide replaces is usually fully/partially rolled into some other power, while you often still want enough regular primary powers to fill out an attack chain in addition to Placate and AS.

I agree that SR is something of the poster boy for tight builds. Invul is close behind.

OK, just ran it on my Dark Dark Defender, solo at +2/x4 no AVs. I totally crushed Trapdoor. I was surprised - I creamed him on my 1st solo Incarnate run on a Scrapper, but a friend of mine had some trouble with an SO'd Fire/Fire Tanker. I figured my well-IO'd Defender would be somewhere in betweeen, but it was actually closer to my Scrapper. I died once to a spawn of +3 Arachnos+Council who hit me with a web grenade while I was right above them in one of those vertical shafts.

I died once to a +2 Rikti ambush because I tried to wait out a stun rather than use a BF.

I did this while on phone calls, and I had to stop playing at a point where the Rikti portals had already spawned. As a result, each one had about 3x the aggro cap on it by the time I was able to poke them. I killed every summoned Rikti around one portal closest to the side the player approaches from. That cleared a visible path to the EBs.

I snipe pulled Holtz, and basically cleaned her clock. She landed Curse of Weariness on me once, but I was prepared and had a Cursebreaker on hand. (I learned about that trick when I ran the arc on my Scrapper.)

I died once to the Honoree because he stunned me. I could have broken free, but I sort of wanted to see just how stunarrific he was, and he kept restunning me and took me out after about 5 attacks. (He missed with some.) I was quite surprised to discover that his ranged energy blast attacks had stun chances attached. I had expected that I could avoid most of that by trapping him on the floor with Tar Patch and hovering above him. After using a couple of smaller BFs I went for broke and used a Tier 3 "Escape" brand BF. They last 3 minutes. This resulted in the satisfyingly climactic outcome that I became stunned while the Honoree was suffering my damage DoTs, which happened to push his HP to the level that he surrendered moments after my Escape expired.

The only inspirations I used were the BFs. Clearly, I am not so foolish as to think all other squishies operate with the benefit of the mitigation levels a Dark Defender has, but I felt this was appropriate for "epic" content against a squishie. Especially given the settings I played it on.

Edit: The full powerset list for the character is Dark Miasma/Dark Blast/Power Mastery.

The only reason this mission was insanely hard for me was because I ran it on no less than +2/x4 and that many Malta at once (as in the stacked ambushes, not x4 spawns) will debuff your defense into the floor unless you're softcapped and have lots of DDR.

I regularly dismissed it, but only because I didn't want to lower my settings.

I'm glad there's an arc to unlock this. I am glad we can't unlock it with most of the TFs that we could unlock it with in Beta. Of all of them, Hamidon seems on the right scale, but has nothing to do with the lore of the Well. I like the game's mechanics to be linked to the lore - there are ways that can be over done (see lackey syndrome in CoV) but I like the idea, and think this is a reasonable implementation thereof.

I actually liked the arc. I am fairly surprised to see such distaste for it. I thought it was a good read, and when I think that, I mostly don't care how many "go click the contact" missions there are, unless one or more of them are in the outer reaches of some far-flung zone.

One of my best friends in real life plays the game, and he's an incorrigible farmer, someone who never badges unless there's a combat-valuable accolade power involved. He ran the arc carefully the first time through and told me over voice comms that he liked it and felt they put a lot of thought into the story, which took me by surprise.

Am I enthused to need to run the arc on every 50? No. But I don't really mind, either.

Chalk me up as yet another who misunderstood what was being delivered, was excited about what I thought it was and am disappointed about what it actually is. (I too like that it's more tip missions. I was just more excited about what I thought it was going to be.)