Arcanaville

Its actually similar to the build I'm playing around with now:

AHA!

I finally worked out what the heck the OP was thinking when they wrote this. It took a while of contemplating it and reverse engineering the thought process.

It comes down to this: the OP makes a critical mistake right up front in terms of what people believe. The OP has heard the phrase that defense gets stronger the more you have, and then made a leap none of us has ever made before. The OP tried to figure out a relationship between defense and regeneration, and compared a given level of defense to a given level of regeneration for different starting points of defense. The OP believes, I think, that if the "myth" were true, then as you started with higher levels of defense, the incremental amount of defense would be worth increasingly larger amounts of regeneration. In other words, if 5% defense is equal to X regen starting from zero, it should be worth more regen if you start from 25% defense, say.

But the problem is that, as most number crunchers know, both defense and resistance amplify the benefits of regeneration. So as you stack defense on top of defense, each time you do the value of that defense increases, but the value of regeneration you're comparing to also increases in value in direct proportion, so they stay equal.

The OP thinks that the "myth" states that if you have enough defense, eventually an incremental amount more will be better than all other alternatives and that's not true. No one states that. The "myth" only states that the value of 5% defense is higher if you start at 25% than if you start at zero. To prove this we need to avoid comparing to standards that themselves shift around, and look at the actual net change in survivability.

If the OP thinks there are people out there that are saying things like "near the soft cap, defense is worth more than any amount of regeneration" then that's false If I was at 40% defense, I would take +400% regen over +5% defense. That's an easy choice. But I would take +5% defense over just +50% regen, because the former doubles my survivability while the latter increases it by only 50% (or less, if I start with slotted Health). The break even point, if you have slotted health, is about +180% regen.

The thing is, we're basically *never* in a position to choose between five percent more defense and +180% more regeneration starting from 40% defense**. So when someone asks "I have 40% defense, should I get 5% more or get some regen" we usually just say "go for the soft cap" because there's probably no way the alternative amount of regen they might be able to get could be comparable to what that level of defense equates to. But if someone offered me toggle instant healing instead of that last five points, I'm taking the regen. The "mythical models" actually do a great job of telling you which to go for most of the time, in that most people would tend to do what the models imply is the better choice.

Ask any SR (defensive) min/maxer, though, and they'll tell you that right after hitting the soft cap, the next thing they go for is health recovery: +regen bonuses or aid self or both. Because at the soft cap, regen bonuses that don't mean much to low mitigation characters mean everything to high ones. When I add a +10% regen bonus to my blaster, that increases recovery by about 30 health per minute. Interesting, but for the most part that is a downtime reducer, and allows me to move from spawn to spawn faster without starting ever lower in the hole. For my soft-capped SR, its not much more: about 35 health per minute. But because I have 90% damage mitigation most of the time, that allows me to erase the equivalent of about 350 points of incoming damage per minute. Per bonus. Five of them equal 1750 damage per minute of incoming damage I can recover from. That's a minion or two that get erased by those bonuses. On average. Because critters die (assuming you're trying to kill them), unless you are in a heavily AoE dominated setting, critters tend to be around attacking you only about half the time (think: start with five critters, then as you kill them that count drops to four, then three, then two...). Erasing two minions on average is actually like making three or four of them disappear in average combat. Just from those bonuses. Slotted health can make another five or six go away. The combination can make a whole even level Boss vanish when operating under soft cap conditions (assuming you're fighting more than one, and if you're driving a soft-capped scrapper, I'm guessing you are).

Basically, the OP seems to be arguing against a position no one takes. That fact is just hidden among some strange math.


** On the other hand, we are in a position to trade about 9% defense for 400% regen starting from 33%. That's basically the trade that Ninjitsu makes and it does fairly well with that trade. Fully slotted, reconstruction (Kuji-in Sha) is equivalent to about +400% regen, which compensates for a lot of defense. And you can still soft-cap Ninjitsu if you try hard enough.

From a strict numerical efficiency standpoint, the most efficient thing to do is to slot *equally* accuracy and damage unless or until one of them hits a cap and you lose the benefit of one of them. Which is generally going to be accuracy slotting.

So, if you are fighting even con critters without defense (above level 20) your base tohit is 75%. Slotting one even SO will increase that to 75 * 1.33 = 99.75% which is capped to 95% tohit. So more than one doesn't help, and so you should slot one acc and one damage if you have two slots, and then more damage if you have more slots, if you are talking about SOs.

If you happen to be level 20 and no longer benefiting from beginners luck tohit bonuses, but still slotting DOs, then you should slot 1acc1dmg if you have 2 slots, 2acc/2dmg if you have 4 slots, and then more damage if you have more slots.

But as Jade_Dragon mentions, this depends on base tohit. If you are fighting +2s constantly, then your base tohit will be 56%. You can benefit by up to two full SOs worth of enhancement (about). Technically, best efficiency slotting at that point is 2acc/2dmg, and then more damage, unless you have tohit bonuses.