Everyone is pretty spot on about the defense. It's not to difficult to get your s/l to 30 percent and the change is quite noticable. I have a fire/fire sitting at 41 % to s/l and 33% to melee and even WITH a purple pill (he has tough and weave slotted as well) he's no where near as survivable as my soft capped to type invul/dm (he's the closest I've seen to unkillable) or soft capped to position SD/dm. I really had to adjust my expections of this secondary.
Originally, I was curious how an IO'd resist set would do compared to a defense based set. What I found was without defense debuff resists (which they won't get), resist based scapper sets will never approach the tanker survival levels that the defense and layered mitigation based sets do. Defense debuffs are everywhere and resist based secondaries get hit by everything. They need something though. For example, my status protection drops much more frequently on my fire compared to invul and SD.
