Absolute_Zer0

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Just get granite armor for any serious tanking, and ignore those extra armors. (unless you want to use crystal vs sappers).

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Uhm, what about lvls 1-31? Besides, I thought the devs didn't like one power invalidating the rest of the set (i.e., perma-unstoppable)?

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As for the forcefield anology, just find a forcefield that helps you dodge lethal attacks.

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I think you missed the point, but perhaps not. You seem to agree that there is no point in stacking defenses, as the fire defense provides no benefit against mixed damage. Isolated non-lethal/smash damage types are rare enough, and generally used infrequently enough before the mobs come rushing blindly into HTH (where they become mixed damage type in combo with lethal/smashing), that taking, using, and certainly devoting slots to any of them would seem a misdirected effort. Compare this to weave, which would indeed increase my lethal defense, and still provide defense to damage of all non L/S types, as uncommon as they are. Much like provoke was previously better than taunt, now weave is better than a lot of the sub-powers in the set because it will still help in mixed damage situations.

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Edited: Maybe you meant that I only get to use the higher +RES against its appropriate damage type, and the other damage comes through completely un-resisted??? That is undesirable. However, its a strawman arguement.

There is only one TOHIT roll with an attack, regardless of how many damage types it does. Your comparison is only valid if multiple-damage type attacks had individual TOHIT rolls for each portion of their damage. That hardly makes any sense.

I swing at your exposed throat with a flaming club. It does smashing/lethal. I hit with the smashing damage, crushing your windpipe, ensuring a swift and painful death without a trach. I roll to see if the fire hits you, somehow managing to do no damage from the fire whatsoever.

Attacks with multiple-damage types have a single, unified TOHIT roll for a simple reason: ITS ONE ATTACK.

Applicable RES works separately on each damage type in an attack because there are multiple damage types coming in. If I got to apply my highest +RES across the entire attack, even better for me.

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This is actually what I was saying. Forget the fact that you've just brought real world logic into a discussion about super heroes , and the fact that I don't really know what strawman argument is , but let me explain my point. DA is fortunate to have defenses/resistances to multiple damage types in the same power. Some of us don't have that advantage. My stone tank requires a different power for protection from lethal/smash, energy/negative, fire/cold, and psi attacks. You get many wrapped up in single powers. So under the new defense rules, IF I slot up many powers with many slots, I'll get good protection from single-type damage attacks at the cost of up to 4 powers and 24 slots. Unfortunately against combo-type attacks, I now only get to use the defense for one power, making the other power choice in that combo-pack and all of its slots completely useless. There is absolutely no benefit to have the secondary defense, despite the attack being up to 50% of the overall damage type that power is designed to protect against. Instead you get no protection. This compares to a situation in which one would only get to use one of two resistances, not both. If the rules invalidated one of your powers, especially if you had to devote a whole power choice and numerous slots to gaining resistance to that damage type (instead of the pleasant combo packs DA gives), it would not seem desirable either. I'm a little disappointed that most of my secondary defenses are going to be frequently invalidated by my superior smash/lethal defense. So much so that I would never slot up my secondary defenses, and will probably get rid of them all to pick up and slot up weave. It still stacks with smash/lethal, and still provides similar protection to fire/cold, energy/negative, and psi single type attacks that it would normally take 3 powers to get. Suddenly a pool power has become more appealing than 3 of my standard powers, because it still stacks effectively.

So back to your flaming stick analogy, and pseudo-real world logic..... Let's say I am super agile (defense vs. lethal), and had some force field that surrounded me by a super-cooled layer of air (protection vs. fire). If I were shot by a fireball (fire/lethal), why would I not have an equal chance to either avoid the damage by being agile enough to dodge it, OR having the forcefield deflect it. Under the current rules, I now get no protection from my force field because I am too agile. That makes no sense. The force field is still there. It still should protect me. Instead I am only protected as well as if someone had just thrown a rock at me (lethal only). Might as well turn that force field off.... which I probably will (just burning endurance anyway).

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If you have 50% defense against smash, and 25% energy, under the previous system you'd have 75% defense against the attack which equates to 75% defense against smashing and 75% defense against energy since the entire attack either hits or misses.

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I probably would agree that this really doesn't make sense either. If I still played my blaster, I might actually realize that this hurts just about every blaster out there. They were getting free defense to the cold portions of my attacks!

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In the current system, you get the higher of the two numbers (50%) against the entire attack so you effectively get 50% defense vs. Smash, and 50% defense vs. energy. It's not as desirable as before, but this seems to make a lot more sense.

If they were to consider the single attack as two separate attacks, then you'd get 50% defense against the smash component, and 25% defense against the energy component. This you definitely don't want to happen.

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Certainly this would make me less effective (much more so), but it would make it useful to run multiple defenses and devote slots to them all. Currently i would never slot up any typed defense except smash/lethal, and psi (cause I can!). This is probably part of the reason some scrappers can tank pretty effectively (they took our jobs! ), because they only need to have great defense to one damage type to be protected against most attacks. I might actually be for a split defense system, but it would likely require a slight upward adjustment in baseline defense numbers to make it work.

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If you have 40% Lethal defense, and 20% fire defense, and are hit by a fire/lethal attack, you get the higher of the two applied: you get 40% defense, even if the attack is 99% fire damage and 1% lethal.

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I'm not sure this is really a logical way for it to be dealt with in the first place. At least I survived 32 levels with prestacking rock armor by itself for this very reason.

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Fire Sword is 62.12% fire. If you get hit for a 100 damage fire sword attack from an even con minion, the defense character mentioned has a 10% chance to get hit-- therefore taking 10% damage over time, which averages to 10 damage per attack.

The resistance character has a 40% resistance to 37.88 damage, and a 20% resistance to 62.12 damage. When he gets hit, he takes .6 * 37.88 + .8 * 62.12 = 72.42 damage.

He also has a 50% chance to get hit, so he takes half of that over time, or 36.212 damage per attack.

So, the resistance character is taking 3.6 times the damage the defense character is.


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First of all, 40% resistance is equal to 20% defense, not 40% defense. The ratio is 2:1. We must compare apples to apples. Getting hit 1/2 as often equals taking 1/2 damage from each attack. The above defense hero is based on defenses twice as powerful as the resistance hero's resistances. So of course he'll be damaged less often.

Comparing apples to apples, a character with 20% defense to lethal, 10% fire defense will be hit 30% of the time, taking full damage each time, which is 30 points of damage per attack. Compared to 36.2 points per attack for the resistance character, this is only a 17% difference, not a 360% difference. Still defense is better, but not much. Bump fire defense to 20% and resistance to fire in this scenario up to 40%, and they are equal in damage per second. You have to slot up all your resistances to make them useful, defense requires only slotting of lethal/smash, as the other damage types are rare enough in pure attacks (usually they're mixed) to make it inefficient to devote a great number of slots to them. And now untyped defense become more valuable, as they still stack with all defenses. I need to find a way to pick up weave and six slot it fast!

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Stacking armors never meant that your DEF from two different powers would ADD together. It meant that you could run two or more armor toggles at the same time, when you could not previously.

How does this screw you?

Let say you have 3 different armors (no clue if these are real)

SMash/Lethal
Energy/Fire
Cold

Lets say each adds +35 DEF to those attack types. Prior to stacking armors, you could have ONE of these running at a time. You'd get the bonus against a Smashing attack, but not Cold, for instance.

Now, you can run all three and have a DEF bonus against them all. What you can't do is this:

A combined SMASHING/COLD attack will no longer add your SMASHING DEF and COLD DEF together for purposes of determining your total defense. You will get the higher of the two. Before Stacking Armors, you'd only have gotten one or the other anyway, as you could only run one at a time (except if an armor was smash/cold specific)

Your complaint would be like my Dark Armor scrapper saying:

Stacking armors SUCKS. Now I can run all three +RES toggles simultaneously, but if I take a smashing/fire attack, my +RES against them isn't ADDED together, and that SUCKS!!!!! Stacking armor SUCKS!!!!!! Down with the DEVS!!!!!


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Well, resistances do still stack against mixed damage type attacks. You still get your full resistances to each component of the attack, mixed or not. Defenses no longer work that way. Now a hero with both lethal and cold defense has no better protection from a mixed attack than a person with just lethal defense, despite using a power designed to protect against cold attacks. Since most single type attacks are ranged, followed quickly by most mobs coming into hth where they have mixed damage, it makes use of the stackability situational, whereas resistance is useful in both of these situations. A more appropriate analogy might be that if you had that dark scrapper hit by fire/lethal attack, you now only get to use the highest resistance to the attack, not both. You'd get to use either lethal or fire resistance, whichever is higher, never both. This is what is happening to defense. Not very desirable.

I'd even be for an attenuated secondary defense against mixed attacks (like a fraction of the value of the lesser defense added to the value of the greater defense), just to make a person with defense to both damage types better than someone with defense to only one of the attack's damage type.

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* Rooted with END Recovery: I had it for a while. It was one of the reasons I made my Stoner in the first place and it was awesome to have less END troubles at the cost of being stuck to the ground. 6-slotted it was truly great. When they ner-- I mean 'bug fixed' Rooted and changed it from END to health recovery, it met with tons of resistance from the small Stone community on the boards, and for good reason. The overwhelming cry was 'but I didn't NEED more health!' and it still holds true.

Anyway, geko posted plenty on the change at the time and said that no toggle will EVER give you more END than it uses, so we can forget about them doing that to Rooted.


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Perhaps they would give consderation to giving rooted some kind of effect like conserve power? Decreased endurance cost for other powers while rooted. Even if this is a small reduction, it would probably make a difference. Due to all the toggles, stone has been a constant battle with endurance drain, even with stamina 6 slotted.

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I heard once that Rooted could actually be overcome if you get enough speed enhancers somewhere, somehow. I don't how true this is though...

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Our ulti-power, Granite, allows you to resist your own self-root. This much has been confirmed by several tanks.

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I just reached 32 today and picked up granite armor. (I'm quite pleased after the let-down that was blizzard...my only other level 32 power.) At first I was so happy that I could use rooted and amble around in GA. Then I copied my tune over to the test server to see what kind of punishment I could take. Suprise, suprise.... on test root now makes even GA immobile. This is likely the way it will be post-issue 3. With increased Mez protection coming in issue 3, I suspect rooted will be for situational heals anyways, not status protection, so probably not a big deal.

Slightly off topic, but I haven't seen many posts involving this many stone tanks.....so here goes. Why is there a -dmg penalty to granite armor? Isn't slowing the rate of recharge enough damage mitigation to prevent us from becoming too uber? This seems especially crucial given the changes to the way tanks will hold aggro in issue 3. My understanding is that the designers hope to have tanks keep aggro by using their attacks, and not just provoke. The new "hate"/aggro value will be based on the amount of damage done. With GA, and it's -Dmg and -Recharge, it seems that we will become second rate aggro managers compared to other tanks. Add to this the -speed, we won't be able to effectively run around smacking the stragglers to pull off aggro from our team. Any insights into this?