Adeon Hawkwood

Yeah me to. I'm really, really hoping that I can make tough characters using resistance slotting. I'm not holding out much hope that it will be viable for characters that don't already have good resistances though.

For the same reason they didn't add it to powers like Soul Drain, Power Boost or Build Up. The sustain powers are all ones that were pretty marginal so adding the sustain makes them more desirable. Adding it to powers that everyone already loves (like Targeting Drone) wouldn't encourage more use of Blaster Secondaries. Something to remember about cloaking Device is that despite the people talking about how much they like it at the end of the day it isn't really that much better than Stealth. It's a neat power but it's very unlikely someone will take Devices just for Cloaking Device. Well with the sustain changes that is no longer true, Devices has the only Sustain that is both a toggle (and thus low maintenance) and won't aggro enemies, the stealth feature is just a nice bonus. Every other sustain either aggros nearby enemies or is a click power 9or both).

Yeah, but we shouldn't rub it in

No, I'm saying that I don't believe that it will be worth it for a Blaster to build for resistance as opposed to Defense.

I'm not sure. I mean you can make an argument that except for Energy all of the sustain powers have situations where they can't be used. Admittedly Devices has a stronger weakness than most but there will be cases where a Blaster can't use their sustain for all secondaries except Energy.

Beta starting today was mentioned in the Coffee talk

The problem I have with this argument is the general problem of Defense versus Resistance. Defenses (even typed defenses) work against a much larger range of powers than resistances do.

Compare the values of soft-capped Ranged Defense for a Blaster against capped S/L Resistances. Now obviously the S/L Resistance Blaster is going to be tough against enemy groups that deal S/L Damage but against other groups he basically has nothing. Now conversely soft-capped Ranged defense works against any group irregardless of damage type.

I don't think that there is an easy fix for this but it really feels like building Resistance on a squishy character is a fools game, you either end up with a character that strong against one pair of damage types and very weak everywhere else or a character that's pretty weak everywhere.

Personally I would love it if the shields that squishy characters get in their epics were changed to provide resistance to all or all-but-psionic (possibly with the total numbers reduced to avoid upsetting melee characters). Then I would feel that I had a decent foundation to build IO resistances on.

No all nukes become crashless when they showed it off originally Nova was the one they used as an example.

Here's the problem I have with it. I think that it's going to make melee characters even more overpowered while not really providing a viable alternative for ranged characters. This is partly because Melee characters already have Defense or Resistance to stack it while ranged characters don't (or at least not to the same degree) and also due to how the sets were originally designed. The Melee damage sets almost all have Immobilization Resistance in their second set bonus while this was pretty much usless to melee characters before in I24 they'll all be picking up a chunk of resistance without needing to lose any of their existing defense or recharge bonuses.

I can sort of see the pairing of Damage Resistance and Status Resistance as an attempt to make it useful to ranged characters but I don't think that it's going to be that valuable compared to the standard defense build.

EDIT: Ok, more thinking about this. I have an Cold/Ice/Soul Defender. He actually has pretty decent resistances to everything except psionic already. With this change it might actually be worth giving him a resistance-based build.

Nope you've got it correct, you're just slightly misunderstanding what I meant by "set bonus name".

In the example you give of Doctored Wounds and Obliteration both sets give you a buff called a "Moderate Recharge Time Bonus" (or something like that, I forget the exact name). Since the set bonus provided by both sets has the same it will only stack up to five times.

Now conversely the bonus provided by the Luck of the Gambler IO (and indeed all global buff IOs) has a unique name, in this case something like "Luck of the Gambler: Recharge Speed Bonus" so you can only have it five times. But since it has a different name it is counted separately from the generic "Huge Recharge Time Bonus" (which also provides 7.5% recharge) from sets such as Panacea, or Basilisk's Gaze.

I hope that clears it up.

EDIT:
Indeed that is a concern and one that I suspect may come up. A good thing to do is to look at what the devs did when they changed the Defense bonuses. Prior to the change there were a total of 13 types of Defense set bonuses each of which came in 7 sizes (for a total of 91 possible defense set bonuses). When they made the change they reduced the total number of set bonus types to 7 and each bonus was changed to the corresponding one. For example Ranged Def bonuses became Ranged/Pos/Neg Energy Def bonuses while Negative Energy Defense Bonuses became Pos/Neg Energy/Ranged Def bonuses (note that the different name makes it a different bonus for Rule of Fives).

Now the way I interpret Synapse's Post when this change goes through we will likely have four types of resistance bonuses (for a total of 28 different names including sizes):
<Size> Smashing/Lethal/Mez Resistance Bonus
<Size> Fire/Cold/Mez Resistance Bonus
<Size> Energy/Negative Energy/Mez Resistance Bonus
<Size> Toxic/Psionic/Mez Resistance Bonus

Now obviously this is very, very much guesswork but based on how they did the Defense change and the information Synapse has released this is the "logical' way for them to do it.

Yeah I think this is the key question. I picked 20% as a target above but I'll fully admit that it was pretty much pulled out of my ***.

Now consider Purples there are 7 sets that currently provide a Fire/Cold Resistance and a Toxic resistance bonus. Let's assume that these become a Fire/Cold/Status Resistance and a Toxic/Psionic/Status Resistance bonus as implied by Synapse's post.

Suppose someone stacked five of these sets (not a bad idea for most Dominators and a lot of other characters could do it) what resistances should they get? They are effectively getting 20X the base damage resistance set bonus for F/C/T/P and 40X the base status resistance set bonus.

If we assume a 1.25% resistance base that works out to 25% F/C/T/P resistance and 50% status resistance. Is that reasonable? It's hard to say, 25% Defense is theoretically a 50% damage reduction but it's more fragile than Resistance. On the other hand adding 25% F/C/T/P to an Invulnerability Tanker is a pretty impressive benefit.

I'll send you some inf later (not in-game at the moment) .

According to the wiki the Mez Resistance Cap is quite a bit higher than 50%:
http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Limits...ect_Resistance

I'll admit I haven't read Venture's reviews but the term "Idiot Ball" does not mean that the author is an idiot. It means that the writing is making the character's act like idiots. While it can potentially be used as an insult (since it is generally taken as a sign of poor writing) it is also a valid criticism, especially in AE arcs where my character is the hero. Writing an arc where my character is carrying the idiot ball is not going to endear it to me (and in fact this very criticism has been leveled at several of the official story arcs in the game).

Reference:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IdiotBall