Arcanaville

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Alright, if you want errors...

Something else that's been around for a while (even the previous incarnation of CoD), Unyielding states it has a 4% defense debuff when in game it is a 3.75% defense debuff. Is that a rounding error?

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Its a rounding error. I've suggested to RT a correction for all magnitude numbers that ultimately display as percentages: it seems that all values are first rounded to the nearest hundredth, but that truncates percentages to the nearest whole number due to the way they are represented.

You'll see this in a lot of places that numbers directly convert into percentages. For example, it appears all defiance buffs are rounded to nearest whole percent as well.

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Also, while powers like Dull Pain are temporary in duration, +health bonuses from inventions, accolades, and passive powers like HPT are all effectively permanent in nature: there is no "stretching and healing" aspect of them in any practical sense.

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You escaped half my reply with that last statement, but we still have the "increased regeneration" (that i know remains a steady percentage but the game shows me an increased HP per second value instead.

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I'm curious to know if you perceive the same thing to be true when blasters were given a health increase circa I5? Do you perceive them as being under a persistent regeneration buff since then, or is the perception tied primarily to the effects of powers.

For that matter, do you see the act of levelling to convey a health increase and a regeneration increase as well, or is there something about "normal" max health that is perceptually different from "buffed" max health, even if the buff never changes.

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As for the "two kinds of..." thing, although I myself compare HP buffs to resistance constantly, I dont really categorize them in the same pool. Actually, as far as "feeling" and concept goes, it feels more green (heal based) to me. I guess it comes from HP buffs consisging really of:

A HP per second boost
Modification of your HP bar
Additional HPs "healing you" (as you know you do get an heal that is as large as the hp buff in percentage of your remaining health)

Sure, this all just ends up stretching your hp, and as noted, I treat it by as resistance but only because of it's simplicity, analyzing it any other way is a nightmare.

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Actually, that's not what +health does. +health increases MaxHealth, which automatically scales remaining health to be the same percentage. It doesn't have any health per second boost, because regeneration is actually computed relative to MaxHealth in the first place.

Also, while powers like Dull Pain are temporary in duration, +health bonuses from inventions, accolades, and passive powers like HPT are all effectively permanent in nature: there is no "stretching and healing" aspect of them in any practical sense.


+Health is a form of damage resistance simply because for a given value of resistance and +health (I always make the disclaimer, and then someone always fails to read it and bring up issues that ignore it) +Res and +Health are indistinguishable unless you read the combat chat numbers. The game itself is mathematically invariant to them.

Or to put it another way, I could redesign the game in such a way as to eliminate the +health mechanic completely, and replace it with a non-stacking resistance one that worked exactly like resistance does now. I'd have to get creative with stacking mechanics, but such a game would be indistinguishable in terms of performance: absolutely no combat situation would change in any way.

Whenever such a mathematical invariance occurs, I feel free to consider the two mechanisms identical within the context boundaries specified. Basically, +health is the same thing as resistance because both can be used to get the same effect: increased resilience to damage. The primary differences between them are situational, and not mechanical (for example, +health can't be typed). In terms of damage mitigation, both deliver the same end goal.

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Just a head's up for everyone, we're going to be buckling down to get Issue 12 done...so you may see a lull in redname activity on the forums for a bit. Might not get as many immediate responses to PMs...mailboxes will probably fill up...posts demanding immediate answers will undoubtedly go unanswered

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Meanwhile, the world's seals, left alone by the busy devs, are able to multiply in record numbers. The massive seal population becomes emboldened, and starts encroaching on cities across the globe with newfound confidence. Soon seals take over the planet and become the dominant life-form, eclipsing mankind. Humanity becomes extinct, and a rain of seals is visited upon the earth the likes of which has not been seen since the early 1800s.

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Since the backstory of the Hollows is that is sort of a "war zone" where the villains have taken over, and the heroes are only now just beginning to attempt to take it back, I wonder if any thought was put into having at least some designated areas of the zone spawn "hot spots" like Sirens does, with lots of heroes fighting lots of villains.

One thing about Sirens hotspots: if you want to allow players to experience large fights, but are afraid that the spawn will just wipe out most solo players and teams that come across it, making a giant villain spawn and then having it aggro a giant hero NPC spawn allows players to jump in and "take on" a very large group, while only drawing some of the actual aggro. In a sense, Sirens hotspots are self-scaling fights that can be appropriate to any team of almost any size.

When I read the dev diary, it seems that one aspect of the zone that you're trying to preserve is the "danger-factor" while balancing that against the spawns being at least credibly interesting and entertaining to fight. That can be difficult when the participants are low level players: there is a lot of variability in player skill and performance in those levels. This seems to be a great way to do that, and to give new players a "playground" that throws them into combat that, if sometimes lethal, is at least entertainingly lethal (I have to say, whenever I get bored, I take one of my scrappers for a spin in Sirens and try to flip the zone: fighting while surrounded by fifty other combattants tends to be more fun than killing mission boss #23,571).

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I remind you that there is no explicit "balance" reason for disallowing defense (as specifically defined as attack avoidance) to have the same net damage mitigation strength as any other damage mitigation mechanism, provided that secondary effect avoidance is properly counterbalanced situationally. The only reason for specifically singling out defense is psychological.

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My point on "not allowing anyone to avoid everything" comes from the perspective that, if both are supposed to be balanced, how comes everyone can reach 45 def (that equates 90% resistance) but non tanker/brutes can only achieve 75% resistance? Should they not also be capped at 37.5 final defense (after all tohit buffs and debuffs are calculated)? I'm thinking back to a point you mentioned in another thread about "allowing players to build a character around the concept of never getting hit." Currently, this game gives you that ability, I don't think you should ever have that ability.

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That's a separate issue (and more complicated in CoH than it necessarily needs to be): you mentioned preferential limits closer to 20% avoidance, which is very far away from this problem.

In CoH, there's actually two kinds of resistance, its just that most people don't see it that way. There's +RES, and there's +Health. And very often, sets that are designed to be "intrinsicly tough to damage" have both. An Invuln scrapper, for example, doesn't cap out at 75% resistive damage mitigation. They cap out at 75% resistance but their archetypal caps actually limit them to a total resistive damage mitigation of 86% (75% maximum resistance, 1.80 maximum +health). Its *harder* to consistently get to 86% for invuln than it is for SR to get to 90%, but that's not a cap issue.

If there were, oh, say two kinds of defense, just like there were two kinds of resistance, then this would be a more blatant problem. But with defense sets having only one option for defense, but resistance sets not only having two options for resistance but often getting them both as well, this is a much more complex issue in CoH.

I'm suprised this isn't discussed more: there are two kinds of (self buff) effects that equate to "damage resilience" in CoH (+RES, +Health), and there are two kinds of effects that equate to "health recovery" (+regen, heal), and there are even two kinds of effects that equate to "becoming more accurate (+Tohit, +Acc), but only one kind of attack evasion (+DEF). I find that interesting.

(This epiphany of sorts occured while I was writing the simulator I used for my latest scrapper comparisons, back in I6, and actually is what prompted me to revisit this mechanical suggestion).

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Now, here is a thing I dont like to think: just as its balance breaking to allow players to make Superman (that never feels pain) it would also be broken to make the Batman that never gets hit because of his uber reflexes. Specially, I think that something like invincibility (that arguably is used to emulate a different "feel") should do the oposite: the most foes some one has on him, the most likely they all will hit reliably because they are encumbering your ability to dodge.

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I remind you that there is no explicit "balance" reason for disallowing defense (as specifically defined as attack avoidance) to have the same net damage mitigation strength as any other damage mitigation mechanism, provided that secondary effect avoidance is properly counterbalanced situationally. The only reason for specifically singling out defense is psychological.

Also, invincibility is not conceptualized as "defense as in evasion" but rather "defense as in deflection." Attacks bounce off, having zero effect. It was supposed to be, in effect, a form of "Defensive Rage."


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As for "unbreakable" in CoH, the engine and powers provide for the ability to add powers that break status effects. If Castle wanted, Practiced Brawler could be activated while under status, same with any toggle. The thing he cant do is make status not detogle powers.

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There's no actual mechanism for "breaking" a status effect in CoH. The only way to "break" a status effect is to temporarily override its magnitude. If you do, you'll be freed from its effects so long as that situation lasts.

However, there is no way I'm aware of to actively break a hold that's on you now, without also making you immune to any additional holds (separate from stacking). If you are under a mag 3 hold, and you apply a mag 4 protection to holds to yourself, you are freed from the hold. But the actual hold remains on you: if the protection fades, the hold is reinstated (I'm ignoring suppression for simplicity here).

The game actually does have a theoretical way to "break" all mezzes that are on you at this instant, without also conferring protection to additional mezzes simultaneously, but it is prevented from working in practice. Theoretically speaking, the devs could create a power that granted you 100,000,000% resistance to holds, for one half second. That would instantly reduce the duration of any hold you were under to zero (well, any hold whose duration was less than a day and a half, anyway) and "break" those holds. You'd still be vulnerable to additional holds immediately afterwards (again, ignoring suppression).

This wouldn't work because the game enforces mez resistance caps that would make such a power not do what it was designed to do. But I think theoretically without those caps it would work.


With regard to toggles. Its literally true Castle cannot make toggles immune to mez detoggling. But if he were crazy or an insomniac, there are other things he could do for most toggles. He could make them decay, rather than switch off, for example.

(How? Take Temporary Invulnerability. It currently provides 30% s/l resistance. As a toggle, it "ticks" every 0.5 seconds, which is also the tick interval for its endurance costs. The buff that it provides lasts 0.75 seconds and is set to replace/overwrite itself. If it instead self-buffed 10% resistance with duration 7 seconds, 10% resistance with duration 5 seconds, and 10% resistance with 1 second duration, then when the toggle was either turned off or detoggled, the resistance would decay in stages rather than suddenly switch off. But multiply that by every defensive toggle that exists, and that's a lot of spreadsheet work)

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Basically, under this system, all of evasion's qualitative advantages (especially higher econdary effect avoidance) are eliminated, but its remaining qualitative disadvantages remain in force. How would you propose to deal with that, if at all?

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I have thought about that, one thing that has crossed my mind is that the defense would also apply to "secondary effects" either in partial or binary form. Example, your hitroll made you avoid 40% of a punch that disorients you, you also resist 40% of the duration of this disorient, if i was to go for non-binary form.

A binary version could split the chances into certain 50/50 threshold, where if your roll means you lower your damage by 50% you entirely avoid the secondary effect. This, off course, is an assumption that attacks would actually have such a thing as secondary effects on such a system.

Also, I would not use toggle systems that can get de-toggled by status effects. I really dislike the total shutdown caused by the infliction of status effects or endurance drain.

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Its certainly interesting: basically damage resistance would resist damage, and not secondary effects. Defense would variably resist damage, and also resist secondary effects. What I find interesting about this approach is that its equivalent (or looking like its converging rapidly) to a game system in which damage is random (i.e. "Xd6-style" damage, albeit more complex), and the only things that exist are damage resistance (possibly of a more complex nature), and effects resistance. There is no actual concept of evasion as actual avoidance.

There's no reason why it wouldn't work, but while it solves the problem of not frustrating people with missing too often, it essentially does so by eliminating the ability to make actual things that can avoid getting hit (which logically is the only real way to do that, when you come right down to it).

Don't even get me started on unbreakable (short of expiration) binary status effects. Possibly *the* single worst design decision in all of CoH.

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Okay, Arcana, I have an idea. I don't know if you've already addressed this, but here it is.

Give any self +ToHit an equal an opposite -Dmg effect to caster. This would still allow for superteaming- after all, 8 players running Tactics would be buffed 8 times and debuffed once. This also means that people would have to use ToHit buffs strategically- running fully-slotted FA would strip an SO off your damage, and the utterly cracked "LOLdefense" combo of PB+BU+AIM would absolutely fry your damage output.

What do you think?

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I would have done it at the beginning of time: I think its a good idea. Today, however, there'd be a lot of opposition to that sort of nerf.

There's also the problem that the devs often coupled tohit with damage intentionally, like Build Up, or Fortitude, and applying a damage debuff wouldn't just be applying a debuff, you'd have to reverse out the buff also for the sort of thing to be effective, which would be a dramatic change.

I don't think it was a good idea for the devs to make a lot of ways to simultaneously boost tohit and damage: under those circumstances, its *always* a good idea to just keep buying more tohit, since its always packaged with something else that's also good (tactics, which doesn't buff damage, buffs perception instead, which is a double-whammy on stalkers in PvP, since perception and tohit buff are packaged together, its an especially valuable, and thus common, power to have).

In PvE, tohit/dmg powers are great toys. But they are not so good in PvP. And by coupling those two, in both PvE and PvP, it eliminates the requirement to make a choice: be more accurate, or hit harder. Often, you get both simultaneously. Reducing the number of choices that players have to make isn't a good thing in the powers system of CoH, when those choices are one of the few choices players actually get to make.

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I’m the guy that helps the Team track down hard to find Bugs. I also give first impressions on features and provide suggestions on how to make the game better or more fun. My job was once explained to me as “to make sure the game is fun”.

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This is the sort of job description I really think you need to ease into. Saying "I track down bugs and provide the inside voice for new features" is about as hazardous as saying, oh, lets say "hi; I make powers animations: you guys wouldn't happen to have any suggestions regarding that, would you?"

Before you know it, you'll be up at two am posting that dammit, dark melee's accuracy isn't broken, and writing twelve page FAQs on Oil Slick Arrow. I would recommend learning from BaB, and rewriting your job description as "I get snacks for the design team, and don't understand english real good."

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If you would find fighting foes with 75% evasion as fun as fighting foes with 75% resistance, then you are in a rare minority. Most players would hate it.

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This brings up an interesting point that came up in my "anti-criticals" thread. If you are going to allow for mitigation values as high as 75% or even higher, then an "evasion" mechanic where attackers don't actually miss, but rather usually hit for less, is not trivial to make in a way that doesn't totally trivialize the mechanic.

Picture character A with 75% (constant) resistance. In your "everyone always hits by default" game he gets hit by every single swing, but for only 25% damage.

Character B, who is 75% evasive, also gets hit at least most of the time, but for less. How do you propose to deliver damage to Character B such that he gets the same 25% total overall damage, without looking very much like Character A. What does the damage formula look like for the 75% evasive character in this case? How much variance can you really have? And what about 80% mitigation, or 90%?

And lets say that however you engineer the damage formula, you engineer the secondary effects formula in a comparable way. That means on average, both the resistance character and the defensive character get hit by the exact same amount of damage, and the exact same amount of secondary effects. Sounds good, except that when literally *everything* is balanced that way, the only thing left is the fact that the defensive character experiences higher variability in damage, and that is a survival penalty. Basically, under this system, all of evasion's qualitative advantages (especially higher econdary effect avoidance) are eliminated, but its remaining qualitative disadvantages remain in force. How would you propose to deal with that, if at all?

It seems that the Evasion mechanic is being asked to sacrifice a lot just for the sake of allowing people to hit all the time. Enough to make me wonder, in all seriousness, what its purpose for existence would even be in such a game. It could never be a featured defensive mitigation mechanism due to its relative underperformance, and an entire class of character concepts would automatically be barred from existing in such a game.

Can you make a superhero game and say, by fiat, that you've decided to side with the people who always want to hit, therefore anyone who wants to be missed, this is not your game?


Before I went there, I would go to almost *any* lengths to alter the game mechanics to allow true evasion. I'd make the act of dodging an attack interrupt offense; I'd make the act of avoiding an attack cost extra endurance or power for that moment; I'd make the attack root the defender that has to dodge it. Anything before eliminating evasion as a game mechanic.

For me, saying that evasion is too troublesome for the people it annoys is like saying ranged attacks are too troublesome for the people it annoys. It is really that fundamentally jarring to me to consider a game based on superpowers that doesn't intrinsicly have a way to avoid getting hit by an attack.

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Every AT gains at least 1 powerset -- Masterminds only get a Secondary, no new Primary. Brutes get 2 new Primaries, and 1 secondary. Everyone else gets 1 Primary and 1 Secondary.

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Wait... blasters too? Blaster support sets, like mastermind primaries, are unique. You'd have to build an entirely new set.

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Energy Melee is kind of an exception to that. Maybe Blasters'll get a port from a Dom secondary?

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My guess is that they will adapt psionic assault into a blaster secondary, if they are planning on adding a psionic blast primary.

A little bit of tweaking is going to be necessary. For example, any secondary that stalkers get will obviously have to have Hide added, and any primary they get will have to make room for an Assassin's strike.

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Vanguard has been examining the recent Rikti Invasions and has discovered a pattern in the Rikti Ground Troop Invasion.

During the second phase of the invasion, the Rikti check to see if more of their Invaders are required every 6 seconds.

The Rikti find out how many Invaders are currently on the ground. If that number is less than 100 and less than 3 times the number of players in the zone, the drop ships look for likely places to teleport more Invaders.

To find likely targets for the Invaders, the Rikti pick a hero or villain at random from all those in the zone. If that person is not moving faster than a sprint, at more than 20% health, are not under cover, within 100ft of the ground and are not within 300ft of the hospital, this person is a good target. The invaders will pick up to 5 unique player targets in each search period.

When a good target has been located, the Rikti count the number of their Invaders within 30ft of the target and assign a threat rating to each Invader. Minions Rikti are worth 0.33 point, Lieutenants are worth 0.75 points, Bosses are worth 1.5 points and Heavies are worth 3 points. The threat ratings of all the Rikti Invaders within 30ft of the target are added together to get the current Invader Threat in the area for this target.

Then they count the number of players within 30ft of the target and this number is used as the current Human Threat in the area for this target.

If the Rikti Threat is less than the Human Threat, Rikti Invader reinforcements are sent to the area around the target.

If the Human Threat is greater than 6 times the Invader Threat and there are already some Invaders in the area, the Rikti will send in Heavy Assault suits. They will send one suit if the Invader Threat is less than 1 suit, otherwise, they will send 2 suits.

If they did not send Heavies, they will check to see if the Human Threat is greater than 4 times the Invader Threat. In this case, they will send an amount equal to the difference between the Human Threat and the Invader Threat divided by two up to a max of 4 units. These units may be Chief Soldiers, Chief Mesmerists, Rikti Priests, Rikti Monkeys, Drones, Conscripts, Infantry, Guardians, Headman Gunman or Chief Mentalists.

If they still have not sent troops, they will send an amount equal to the difference between the Human Threat and the Invader Threat up to a max of 8 units. These units may be Rikti Monkeys, Drones, Infantry, Conscripts, Guardians, Headman Gunman or Chief Mentalists.

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Ar'kana: Rikti Invasion Strike Force Transport Coordinator: Disavowed.

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Is there no way to scotch-tape some values about colors into the power system, so that when the Bone Daddy calls the hit-by-fireball animation, it pulls the custom colors along with the damage (or other) values? Because, obviously the powers system should be grabbing values from the player about damage enhancement values, etc....

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BaB didn't come right out and say this, so I will. BaB is giving players a peek into the mechanics of the animation system, in terms of what it does, and how he uses what it does to make things work. Take for example the issue of customized weapons. BaB is saying that the way they made custom weapons work is by eliminating the weapon from the attack animations and adding them as costume items. In effect, they leveraged already existing abilities of the game animation system in an originally unintended way to make them work.

Notice what BaB *isn't* saying. He isn't saying that they added code to make custom weapons "work." And I don't think they did. Because code changes to the actual animation engine are massively more difficult than anything BaB has described in terms of all of their current customization efforts. Or rather, I should say massively more difficult for BaB. Because he's not a programmer, and therefore cannot make any such changes at all. For BaB, there is the difficult (i.e. leveraging the various animation capabilities of the engine to perform certain sequences of actions), the time-consuming (changing the definitions of all the powers effects to some new thing that uses a different system, assuming some different system was implemented), and the impossible (altering the behavior of the animation engine).

At the moment, my guess is that much as right now there isn't a lot of extra resources available to make powers, separate from Castle, there isn't a lot of resources available to make code changes to the animation engine. So even if BaB wanted to pursue powers customization options on his own initiative, the only options available to him are ones that do not involve altering the way the game processes animations. He can attempt to use them in different ways, but the moment anyone says "all it would take is to add a flag that..." or "is there a way to take this information, and insert it over here..." they are already beyond the limits of what's currently possible for the dev team at the moment.

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If i was to make a game from scratch there would be no missing at all. "Defense" or superreflexibility or whatever would be based not around avoiding being hit but avoiding taking full damage randomly, in other words: in my game defense/avoidance would be a random resistance mechanic that could be countered by higher accuracy.

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How would you implement that in a game that also had randomized damage (which CoH does not)? I've always felt that making attacks always do a specific, fixed amount of damage (rather than a randomized level of damage, ala "3d6") was too much of an oversimplification: it actually encourages paper min/maxing of damage, because damage becomes trivially predictable.

I can think of several ways to do it, I'm just asking which way you would.

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Forgive me if this was already asked, but would Def and Anti-Accuracy need separate enhancements?

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I would assume that if this type of mechanic was ever added to the game, defense enhancements would be designed to boost both, much like +Heal enhancements currently boost +health, +heal, and +regeneration powers. None of those are connected to each other in the game, but because they are conceptually related, a single enhancement boosts all of them.

Its worth noting that Defense enhancements are already "composite" enhancements. They are specifically coded to boost BaseDefense, Smashing_Defense, Lethal_Defense, Fire_Defense ... you get the idea. Adding Elusivity/AntiAccuracy boosting ability would not be an especially weird feature to add to Defense enhancements.

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Instead of Defense and Anti-Accuracy/Elusivity, name them Defense and Defence.

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Which of course will be shortened in powers descriptions to +Def and +def.

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Someone get EvilGeko in here.

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The OP has made a reasoned and sensible post and I can do nothing more than agree. Well written sir, I applaud you.

I think it's clear that there is only one response that makes sense:

Buff Regen.

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Its pretty clear from the analysis that Regen needs more defense and resistance.

So the only logical solution is to swap Instant Healing for Lucky.

Regen is buffed and SR gets a small amount of healing. Everybody happy.

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Of course, Regen is so lucky that when we got Lucky it would come with all of the defense and scaling resists of Agile, Dodge and Lucky from the SR set.

Then Arcanaville would cry.

And the EvilGeko would collect her tears, chill them and toast the wisdom of Castle.

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That's revenge that is best served cold, not tears. Tears are a room temperature beverage.

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Someone get EvilGeko in here.

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The OP has made a reasoned and sensible post and I can do nothing more than agree. Well written sir, I applaud you.

I think it's clear that there is only one response that makes sense:

Buff Regen.

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Its pretty clear from the analysis that Regen needs more defense and resistance.

So the only logical solution is to swap Instant Healing for Lucky.

Regen is buffed and SR gets a small amount of healing. Everybody happy.

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Who's Power is great at lvl 1? huh? EVERY ONE takes damage at the beginning, SR doesn't have enough DEF to not get hit, Invuln doesn't have enough resist to take a lot of dmg... so every one will be getting hit and taking damage. So people will be sitting there resting and suddenly, what is that regen doing?... 0_0 he is at full health, how can this be. "Because", says the regen "I have Fast Healing, while you guys can take 50 dmg and reduce it to 45 dmg with your resists, I on the other hand, take 50 dmg, and in two seconds, I regened 5.25 back because I got lucky my last 7 second healing tick was five seconds ago. Then I popped two respites when you guys weren't looking."

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Scenario adjusted to match actual in-game performance.

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Ineffective- Not producing desired effect. Lacking in force and adequacy. (The effects are there, just not in the desired amounts)

Useless- of no use; not serving the purpose or any purpose; unavailing or futile. (There is no effect. No difference is made by the subject)

See the difference between the two now?

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If you are attempting to split the hair between a powerset that produces no effect of any value, and one that literally produces no effect, you're going to be talking to yourself. That's a complete waste of my time.

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Weaker does not mean useless. Try harder.

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Ineffective does tends to mean useless.

Come back when you've published a dictionary to the language of your home planet, and maybe I'll reexamine your point.

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In the two posts you linked, the first shows a flat cap at 50 on defense at 1.75.

The second link shows 2 caps at 50, based on AT, of 2.0038 and 2.2505.

The only tohit cap listed for 50 is 2.0035.

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The first post shows the tohit caps for everyone, and the defense caps for all archetypes not listed in post two: defense caps are archetype-specific.

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Wouldn't it be an easy fix for PvP to put into place tohit and defense caps of 100%?

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I don't know if "fix" is the right word. It would set a situation at the ceiling that might be the desired behavior, but that still leaves every other situation (like, say, in Siren's Call without external buffing) still not functioning as desired.

Basically, you'd make Elude and triple-stacked bubbles work "correctly" and everything else is still where we are now.

Its a pretty involved discussion as to whether the caps should be a lot lower than they are, given the current actual range of valid final tohit numbers (i.e. 5% - 95%).

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All that aside, at what point does the OP say that one should not take /DA as a secondary as it is useless?

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Here:

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The goal is to prevent anyone from ever considering playing the set for any reason than concept, or the fact they -want- the game to be difficult.

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and here:

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If you, after reading the guide, still have a desire to play Dark Armor, please post any questions and I will try to convince you why this is a bad idea.

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and here:

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Of course, when referring to Dark Armor as overall weak and [u]ineffective[u] for Brutes, you have to look at the powers available to the Brute in question.

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And that's just in the OP.

Both tohit and defense are supposed to obey hard caps, just like damage. Just like damage, the caps are different for different archetypes, but unlike damage (more like mez protection) they scale with level. At level 50, the tohit and defense caps are between 175% and 225% depending on archetype.

If you want to know the exact values, see this post and this post.

And defense and tohit are supposed to obey independent caps. This is completely different from the bounds enforced in the tohit algorithm, where the FINAL tohit and INTERIM tohit (before accuracy) are restricted to between 5% and 95%. These caps on tohit and defense refer to literal caps on the maximum value those two attributes can have.