Arcanaville

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Many good guides or analyses set a new bar for those that follow them, but I don't think it's reasonable to hope for this kind of a feat to be repeated.

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There are other posters that have attempted similar comparisons. Starsman has looked at things with somewhat less depth, but across all the melee sets instead of just scrappers. He's currently attempting a more in-depth analysis, I understand (and I understand even more how much effort that takes). Circeus has looked at much more situationally applicable circumstances for tankers in the past, and his work (based partially on Havok's old spreadsheets, if I remember correctly) actually formed the basis for getting Ice tankers fixed. Hard to match that accomplishment.

In the european forums, there's a poster Dr Rock that has a program that automates some of the calculations that form the basis of this analysis; an interesting tool I didn't have the patience to write (in a way anyone else would find especially useful to use). He also has certain perspectives on comparing the performance of various mitigation sets.

I'd say there are points of disagreement I've had with each and every one of these posters in terms of certain specifics of their analyses, or their extrapolated conclusions, but I would recommend all of their prior analyses as both interesting, and informative reads, although many of the threads that encapsulated them may no longer exist on the forums.

If there's a unique thing I've contributed in the various threads that lead to these analyses pieces, I think its that I've laid bare all of my thought process involved in all of the calculations, all of the judgement calls, and all of the qualitative comparisons. Its longish, but I hope if you're willing to plow through it, you get a sense for the whys of what I do, even more than the whats of what I do.

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Q8: I've heard Luck inspirations are even more uber now.

A8: You heard right. Because there is, in a sense, an effective limit on how much Defense will do anything at all (45%), two (small) lucks will automatically do as much as any amount of Defense you can stack on top of yourself by any other means. Two Lucks = Max Possible Defense, barring tohit buffs and Defense Debuffs.


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I have a quibble with this answer.

First off, the text on the inspirations has always been misleading. The magnitude of defense buff has now been confirmed at around 11% (which jibes with my own experience). Four of these then give you around 45% protection, which is about the defense cap.

What I believe the devs mean by the text is that a small luck gives you 25% damage mitigation - not defense buff. This is easier to for the lay-person to understand, but was confusing for the people doing math. The same numbers apply to yellow inspirations, so they balance (although the tohit rules are different, so the effects in PvE are different).

So to answer the question, are lucks more uber, the answer is mostly yes (you can max your defenses with only four lucks, no matter what you fight) but also no (the max defense is not as much damage mitigation as it used to be, because higher level critters have more accuracy).

Perhaps you've already addressed this - it's a long thread and I didn't comb the whole thing - but you might want to edit the original post.

- Kris

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This was written long before I tested luck inspirations (I was the one who first discovered the discrepancy between the labels and the values of luck inspirations; see this thread for the details).

And it was nothing like mistaking mitigation for pure defense: they are just plain mislabelled, as the values for the higher level inspirations makes clear (they are not simply half-value). And don't even get me started on insights: they appear to have been set by a random number generator.

I haven't updated this guide to reflect the new information, although the basic idea is still valid: lucks, like all forms of defense, are strengthened in effectiveness in I7. Just replace "two (small) lucks" with "four (small) lucks."

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See. This is what I would have done.

1. Clear extraneous wolves.
2. Leave mission; talk to Tina refill whatever inspirations I used up.
3. Approach Shadow Hunter. Pop three lucks.
4. Keep DA stacked.
5. Use Recon for when he gets through. Keep DP and IH in reserve in case random number generator is not happy with me that day. Otherwise refresh lucks every 60 seconds.
6. Fight should take 2-4 min. So make sure you have 12 lucks. Remaining inspirations should have been enrages.

I would not bother to use any of the accolades, especially Geas since it debuffs defense.

Like Nemo said, preparation is the key here. When I say that MoG is unnecessary that means that sometimes you have to take a minute or so to prepare and plan. There is no reason to go into an EB fight in an open air mission without inspirations.

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I have no fundamental disagreement with your statement. But my question is, if MoG is an "unnecessary" power given this, name a necessary power (for a given set).

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Or, prove me wrong: find a situation where an SR scrapper would use Elude, where I could not avoid using Elude by preparing in advance with inspirations. Or find a situation where you would use unstoppable, that I couldn't eliminate the need for it with suitable inspirations.

In fact, the only scrapper tier 9 you can't actually replicate with inspirations in full is Soul Transfer.

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Sure, no problem. Beside the defense, Elude gives's 34.6% resistance to defense debuffing, a 50% run speed increase, some additional Jump and 100% endurance recovery. So to get Elude you need:

12 Lucks; 12 CaBs

That gives you the defense and the endurance. Oh darnit. There's a defense debuffer. Oh wait: YOU HAVE ELUDE!! With Elude and your toggles and passives, you have a 97% resistance to defense debuffing. Hmm... Lucks don't do that. I know, Positron beat the crap out of my EM/FA the first time using lucks.

Oh who's that over there. Darn. Speed debuffer. My regen's moving like their on acid. Oh, your Elude guys gets a clicky +speed +jump. WoW. Where's my inspiration for that.

Oh and one other thing. You notice how I have 12 Lucks and 12 CaBs up there. Guess what? You can only hold 20 inspirations!!!111lol11!!

As for Unstoppable you need more Break Frees than you can carry to match its mez protection. It's true for MoG as well, but Unstoppable doesn't debuff you to damage types you're normally strong against.

Your biases are showing, Arcana.

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I don't see a situation in there.

For an SR scrapper to get I7 Elude's defense only requires 2 lucks per minute, not four. With four, you can drop toggles, and those CaBs are much less necessary. If you're going to count CaBs, then you should in fact count the number of break frees required to equal MoG's additional mez protection during its running time (about 2-3 per minute), not dismiss them out of hand.

I normally don't count things like running and jumping boosts for the same reason I don't count quick recovery itself when comparing damage mitigation: too complex to give it a fair look. I think when I drop the run speed boosts SR gets and the endurance recovery that regen gets when I look at both sets, I'm not being especially biased against regen when I do. Ditto the tohit bonuses in invincibility.

Don't even get me started on the defense debuff resistance.


And the same disingenous biases led me to calculate in a more precise way just how much MoG is underpowered. So I guess its only disingenously biased when I disagree about *how* MoG is underpowered, not when I state *the degree* to which Mog is underpowered.


Now that you mention Positron, I was on a team with a regen stalker that was forced to go MoG against him. High damage + regen debuffing. Granted, that was a stalker, not a scrapper, but you're suggesting lucks would not have been reasonable against him. MoG's very high base defense allowed the defense debuffs to be absorbed even though they were not resisted: replicating that would have taken about seven or eight lucks per minute at least.

I don't actually consider it an especially meaningful thing to be able to come up with a single example of where MoG is useful, so I don't usually mention it, but it does satisfy your criteria of a case where MoG was inherently useful: against a high order defense debuffing, regeneration debuffing, opponent. Under those circumstances, the best protection is ultrahigh defense, sufficiently high to work in the face of severe debuffing.

Even Elude (even Elude + toggles + passives) don't go quite that high.


As an aside, MoG's defense (71.25% according to Prima) implies a base scale of 9.5, or 95% defense at AT modifier 0.100 (which scrappers do not have, but at one time did). MoG's defense number appears to be a fossil of a time when someone probably really didn't understand how their own game engine worked, and thought 95% defense is what you needed to guarantee a 5% floored attacker. Which strongly implies that the power has never been properly balanced for effect: its just been tweaked here and there, but may have serious design flaws frozen into it just because the original designer of the power made significant mechanical errors.

The side-effect of being unable to be resistance buffed is probably just one of those side effects that is probably unintended, and makes the side effects of the power much more severe than they are supposed to be. Possibly a good case for suggesting that MoG was originally supposed to turn off *enhanced* healing, but not actual *base* healing, but that was too complicated to do initially, and the thought was that that was numerically unimportant. *IF* its a design error, its a much more important one than they probably assumed.

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Give me a situation, a real game situation where I would use MoG. I'll plan around it. Yes, I'll use inspirations often time, but who cares because that's part of our powers as well.

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That's an impossible hurdle to overcome. The regeneration set plus the proper combination of inspirations is essentially invulnerable.

Its so impossible a hurdle to overcome, its not even restricted to the regeneration set. When my dark armor needs it, she *buys* Elude from the nearest contact, and solos EBs basically with just mez protection. So do my blasters. The fact that every power including Elude can be trivialized with inspirations makes the argument worthless to me.

Or, prove me wrong: find a situation where an SR scrapper would use Elude, where I could not avoid using Elude by preparing in advance with inspirations. Or find a situation where you would use unstoppable, that I couldn't eliminate the need for it with suitable inspirations.

In fact, the only scrapper tier 9 you can't actually replicate with inspirations in full is Soul Transfer.

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Replicate, or exceed.

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Interestingly enough, +rech makes more sense for Regen than defense every will.

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Yep, increased health makes more sense for regen, increased endurance recovery makes more sense for regen, and now increased speed makes more sense for regen than any other set. It won't be long before increased damage makes more sense for regen, increased accuracy makes more sense for regen, and increased perception makes more sense for regen. I'm sure there's an issue of Wolverine that backs that up.

All passives, of course, because attention deficit disorder also makes more sense for regen. I'm sure there's an issue of Wolverine that backs that up also.

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Give me a situation, a real game situation where I would use MoG. I'll plan around it. Yes, I'll use inspirations often time, but who cares because that's part of our powers as well.

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That's an impossible hurdle to overcome. The regeneration set plus the proper combination of inspirations is essentially invulnerable.

Its so impossible a hurdle to overcome, its not even restricted to the regeneration set. When my dark armor needs it, she *buys* Elude from the nearest contact, and solos EBs basically with just mez protection. So do my blasters. The fact that every power including Elude can be trivialized with inspirations makes the argument worthless to me.

Or, prove me wrong: find a situation where an SR scrapper would use Elude, where I could not avoid using Elude by preparing in advance with inspirations. Or find a situation where you would use unstoppable, that I couldn't eliminate the need for it with suitable inspirations.

In fact, the only scrapper tier 9 you can't actually replicate with inspirations in full is Soul Transfer.

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Play one, from level 1 to 50 and then return here and make that suggestion... you won't.

I have a level 50 Regen. I suggest the power, and in fact the entire set, be left as is.

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But then, venture hasn't hardly ever met a nerf he didn't like.

Imagine, if you will, Elude was left as is...except:

1) You had no defense to PSI or Toxic (even with your other toggles/passives)
2) You took 400% damage from Psi
3) You couldn't regen for 3 minutes.

Honestly, the only change I would make to MoG, is leave everything the same except:

Your HP are now at 25% and ALL of your healing is based off of that number (recon, DP, regen rate, inspirations). You're still left vulnerable to Psi, toxic falling damage, but you can't be whittled to death by a patch of caltrops.

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If it meant the rest of the set would finally be balanced to have the same strength as regen1-8, I would take it right now. I can even tell you what the numbers should be.


Now imagine regen with:

* quick recovery eliminated
* dull pain eliminated
* healing does not work against AoE attacks until level 35
* everything that currently debuffs defense now debuffs regeneration also


Eat *those* adjustments and you too can have Elude.

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One more thing about that. I think every power has to stand on its own merits because the way our character advancement system works, it DOES need to stand on its own. There is a player asking whether he or she should get Tough or MoG on the Scrapper forums. Even a lot of MoG defenders say get Tough. A power that's always there for you is a better choice than a power you'll hardly use.

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There is an artificial distinction being made here. You say each power should be judged "alone" but on that basis, tough sucks for scrappers: its numbers are way too low.

Its useful to regen only when stacked on top of the rest of the regeneration set: resistance mitigation amplifies regeneration, and that's what makes it useful (it arguably provides *more* benefit to regen scrappers than even invuln because of that fact).

The artificial distinction being made here is between allowing tough to be judged stacked on top of regeneration, to heighten its net overall benefit, but not judging MoG's strengths and weaknesses relative to the rest of the set. It has strengths the rest of the set lacks: that is what is being counterbalanced against the weaknesses it has (that the rest of the set also lacks).

Saying MoG should be judged alone, without regard for the unique benefits it offers to regeneration (its incremental benefits would be much lower to SR say, that already has defense), but judging tough based on how it stacks with +regen, is an arbitrary decision.

That tough "works all the time" and MoG doesn't is a valid, but subjective reason for choosing one power over the other. The same would be true for unstoppable.

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I have a question about this statement and your math:

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BaseToHit + ToHitBuffs

So if your base tohit is 75%, and you use or receive a 60% tohit buff, your modified tohit becomes:

0.75 + 0.60 = 1.35 = 135%

Note that this is higher than 100%: see tohit floors and tohit ceilings below.


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If it was a 60% buff, shouldn't the math look like this?
0.75 * 1.60 = 1.20 = 120%


Because by your math, from 75 to 135 equals an 80% increase, not 60.

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If the devs and the game itself used mathematical terminology correctly, you'd be right. However, both the devs personally and the game descriptions themselves will use the term "percent increase" to mean both "percent increase" and "percentage point increase."

A tohit buff is expressed in percentage points: a "60% tohit buff" means a "60 percentage point increase in base tohit." That is what that statement is trying to get across. When we colloquially say tohit buffs are "additive" what we mean is that they are percentage point increases, as opposed to accuracy buffs, which are true percent increases (multiplicative).

Technically, tohit buffs should be referred to as "X point buffs" instead of "X percent buffs" but a discussion of the mathematical train wreck that exists throughout the game engine is a very lengthy discussion unto itself.

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So I really do want to know, what makes MoG a good power. What makes it's benefits outweight it's penalties. Can it's benefits truely be used more often than it's penalties.

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Its benefits are not supposed to necessarily outweigh its own deficts: its benefits are supposed to outweigh regeneration's deficits. The presumption that a power's advantages should outweigh its disadvantages presumes something strange: it presumes people will use the power randomly, without concern for its strengths and weaknessess. The power's strength determines how useful it is: its weaknessess determine how often its going to be useful. Saying MoG's strengths don't outweigh its weaknessess is like saying a pizza coupon's $5 off doesn't outweigh its limitation that its only good on Sundays: you're not supposed to compare those two things directly like that, and you're being silly when you do.

Its therefore specifically useful in the areas defense is more useful than regeneration in general: usually heavy (non-defense) debuffing environments. What makes it a good power? It offers the *choice* of switching to a high defense stance, which defers most secondary effects (like debuffs) when debuffing is more dangerous than pure damage. What is heavily discounted by most people who think MoG is totally worthless is the fact that that choice is inherently valuable. Its not always the case that MoG is the *better* choice: in fact, it usually is not. But no other scrapper set actually gets a chance to have its full strength by level 28, and then on top of that a significantly strong 38 power that has *none* of the intrinsic sets' weaknessess. Even if its only useful one time in a hundred, that is one time in a hundred no other scrapper (or melee set, really) gets. In any other protection set, this would be universally seen as a benefit: its often not in the regen set because the rest of the set is so powerful already.


A legitimate argument that MoG is flawed is comparing its overall performance during its situationally useful windows. There, we're talking about its defensive strength, and its lack of regeneration, as part of its *overall* total strength, not a "strength vs weakness" issue. Its one of the reasons I originally calculated, then claimed, that MoG lasts too long (and suggested a proper running time for it: about 120 seconds, depending on certain factors). I also agree (and was saying long ago) that another inherent design error (in my opinion) with MoG is that it locks out *all* external buffing, not just regeneration (which its designed to do). MoG scrappers cannot be effectively defense or resistance buffed, on top of being unable to be regeneratively buffed or healed, which does not appear to be explicitly intentional, but a nasty side effect of the power's mechanics.

I just don't think it is bad for the same reasons as others do (specifically, the charge that it has no net benefit whatsoever), which is significant when it comes to suggesting fixes. I might think it needs fixing, but I tend to disagree with 99% of all suggestions for fixing it, mostly because they tend to be significantly unbalanced.

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You know that whatever you say I can give you a way to do it better.

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Mostly, by claiming regen scrappers can always keep enough lucks around to substitute for MoG. But the level of lucks required to do that, if SR scrappers and Invuln scrappers kept them also, would largely eliminate the usefulness of Elude and Unstoppable as well.

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1. I think you mean four lucks, not two. It takes four lucks to floor, not two, because they are half the strength they are labelled as.

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No, I said you need four lucks to match the defense of MoG, but when I refer to two it's that 25% defense (two lucks) PLUS your normal regen powers > MoG.

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I suppose then it depends on what you're comparing to. If you're comparing to pure damage mitigation over time, you don't even need the two lucks to exceed MoG. On the other hand, for sufficiently small burst damage time windows, MoG will exceed two lucks + regen (I think its somewhere around 30 seconds). To equal its protection against secondary effects, you need all four.

That's part of what makes MoG complicated: for the same reasons its tricky to compare regeneration to mitigation, its (of course) going to be tricky to compare regen's regeneration against MoG's mitigation, especially because its heal to full is of variable benefit (you obviously don't get the full value of that unless you're really really lucky).


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Its not a strong argument for change.

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Not arguing for a change here. Geko doesn't want MoG changed now. I'm just putting this out here so we can link to it when people say, "What's wrong with MoG?"

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Fair enough: saying something is worse than inspirations doesn't imply its broken, because so few things are better than inspirations.

I'm not going to argue that MoG doesn't have problems, but I will point out a couple of corrections:

1. I think you mean four lucks, not two. It takes four lucks to floor, not two, because they are half the strength they are labelled as.

2. Under "Is MoG any good" I would probably suggest that specific instances where its good are:

a. Severe debuffing situations, especially slows and -regen

Essentially, while MoG is, over the three minute run time, inferior to the rest of the regen set under optimal conditions, it can be stronger than the rest of the regen set when the regen scrapper is debuffed enough to reduce the effectiveness of the regen powers to less than what MoG provides.

b. Very low health, reconstruction and dull pain not available to provide quick heal.

MoG does heal to full in a relatively short period of time, even compared to instant healing, if click heals are unavailable and damage appears to be clearly outracing conventional regeneration. In fact, this is often (but not exclusively) seen in conjunction with a) above.


Finally, its not a good idea to suggest that anything is intrinsicly bad just because inspirations are better. Inspirations are better than almost everything, and apparently deliberately so. Inspirations are better than build up (just one small rage gives better damage over time than build up does), better than unstoppable (resistance to all, and resistance to teleport), and even better than Elude (inspirations are def(all) which means they protect against non-positionally typed psionics, unlike Elude). Its not a strong argument for change.

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You forget that even though they still have 22% chance to hit you, one minor purple can cancel that.

Two minor purples can cancel minion even con from hitting you unless under that 5% margin.

It's easy to cap with inspirations. And if you don't like that, then take weave.

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I'm not sure what you're replying to, or what you're trying to say exactly, but you should at least know that luck inspirations are mislabelled: lucks are half the strength they are labelled with.

No, that's not a guess.

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I bet there's some UBER SECRET spot the devs use just to be cool... like you talk to a fire hidrent or type in a certian command or something... like go into a telephone booth and type /superman or something... and it gives you XP for lvl 50 I swear game developers do this all the time, I know I would if i was a game developer...

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When we play on the development servers or Training Room, sure... but when we play on Live servers even we dont get any special commands or cheats. We level up just like the rest of you... I know I will be on with my Dominator a bunch this weekend.

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I don’t believe this is 100% true, I was on once not to long ago when CuppaJo made an appearance for a super group costume contest that one of the SG’s arraigned.
She logged on as a level 1 Fire/Fire blaster and then suddenly she was an untrained level 50.
So there is a /code to level.

As to what it is good luck ever finding out.

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I'm sure there are codes for them to zone in as special characters. And I've certainly seen GMs exercise very interesting control over the environment.

But I think Positron is saying when they actually *play* on the live servers, they don't explicitly use special level up codes. Its probably like the difference between logging in as a normal user, and logging in as root.


In fact, since they can create special characters for special events, and can test anything they want on their internal servers and the test server, why would they even need such a code when they play conventionally?

Two things:

First, I was rereading this again, and I happened to notice a weird anomaly that perhaps only someone who actually writes these things might notice, but nowhere in your original guide to taunt do you say what taunt actually *does*. Heh, we all know, but it seemed an odd omission.

Second: do we really know what taunt does? I was doing some tests with my fire tanker in Brickstown recently, and I happened on a couple of crey. I believe one was a crey crisis, and one was a crey eliminator. In any case, like many such pairs in bricks, as soon as I attacked, one fought back and one ran. I taunted the runner, and he stopped running. While I fought the other one (I believe the crisis unit), I happened to notice that the runner (the eliminator) had stopped running, but wasn't attacking.

Over a significant period of time, I discovered that if I left him alone, he would eventually run away, if I kept taunting him, he would stay, but he never attacked, unless I myself ran into melee range, whereupon he would begin to melee me for a while. But if I moved out of melee range, or he did, he would make no attempt to return to melee range to attack: he would just stand there, and eventually (presumably when taunt wore off) run away.

These were I believe even con LTs. I was not using burn. Taunt was overriding the run away AI, but not causing the critter to actually really want to attack.

Which brings up an interesting question: bug or not, is it possible for a mob to be aggroed enough to *want* to attack (and therefore not run away), but not aggroed enough to want to actually *do* anything about it, like attempt to approach?

And why would a crey eliminator choose only to use melee attacks? I wonder now if it was because I had blazing aura running: somehow, I wonder if taunt overrided the run, but it was BA that was actually causing the eliminator to attack, almost as if it were feared.

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Stealth will provide -perception and 1.875% defense**. With 3* SO DefBuf: 2.9%. The defense**
is twice that when not attacking, being attacked or clicking an object (Blasters 1.75%,
Controller/Mastermind 2.25%, Tanker/Defender: 2.5%, Others: 2.125%)

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The phrasing on this bit confused me. Is Stealth with 3 SO's providing a defbuff of 2.9% during combat & glowie clicking, and 5.8% during movement?

Thanks for all the figuring you've put into this guide!

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Its apparently 3.75% defense unslotted, 5.85% defense 3-slotted, but half of that suppresses when stealth suppresses (when you attack, or are hit by an attack).

So, yes.

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It makes me think that they thought of only 8 powers, but had to fill in 9 tiers. So... let's subtract DEF here (UY) and put it over here (TH), to tone down the potential DEF provided by Invinc. Viola! 9 powers!

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Unyielding was originally Unyielding Stance and it had no -DEF component. It did, however, make you immobile. This was incredibly unpopular and it was decided to remove that penalty. At that point, the -DEF was added to replace the Immobilize penalty.

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How about changing the -DEF for +Slow? Any other ideas anyone?

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The proper "penalty" is to remove the -DEF in unyielding, and remove the initial defense in invincibility. That's really what the -DEF is there for anyway: to prevent invincibility from scaling too high. Prior to 28, Invuln tankers and scrappers would not have the penalty, and above 28 with invincibility they would basically be right back to where they are now. Its a low level buff but a neutral high level change.

The only difference would be a lower toxic penalty (which I don't think is supposed to be there conceptually) and a lower psionic penalty (which I don't think is that big of a deal: if they wanted Invuln tankers and scrappers to not have such covering protection, they wouldn't have buffed dull pain in the first place; the dull pain buff basically overrides the psionic -DEF in unyielding if you slot DP).

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If I'm reading things correctly, slotting a third Defense enhancment in your passives provides less than a 1% bonus to each form of defense. Is that really necessary?

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The last slot slotted in the passives that increase SR defenses from about 29.5% to 30.4% defense is an incremental damage mitigation boost of about 4.6%. I.e. someone with the slot takes 4.6% less damage than someone without it.

Does about 5% less damage matter? Depends on who you ask, really.

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If you want to talk equations

a = b
and ED+Global Defense nerfs gets
(a/2) = (b/2)

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Except, as I said many times when it happened, neither the GDF, nor ED, nor the combination of both, had that effect, in even remotely gross terms. Its trivially easy to demonstrate that regardless of whether you think the sets are balanced now, or were balanced then, they were all affected differently by ED and the GDF, because of how the sets are constructed (talking about the damage mitigation sets that existed at the time: scrapper secondaries and tanker primaries).

It isn't even true that the scrapper version of Invuln was hit identically to the tanker version of Invuln, because of how damage mitigation works. They weren't even hit similarly between different damage types. In other words, the relationship between Invuln tankers and Invuln scrappers in terms of true damage mitigation was different after I5/ED, than in I4. Its impossible for the debuff to have been balanced in I4, and also in I5, except by incredible coincidence.

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The only thing that can make the reaction worse is when you say something like "a little nerf" and then you make a major reduction.

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Or like when you say there's gonna be no more nerfs to powers ...

Then cut all enhancement effectiveness by half ???



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Key words highlighted. They were technically right.

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Yes, because of all those non-power uses for enhancements. I mean, it's not as if affecting how enhancements work has any bearing on powers...

Anyone who can argue with a straight face that ED was not a sweeping nerf to all powersets is not someone I'd ever choose to believe on any matter.

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Question: if, prior to the devs making HOs 50/50, they announced a "buff to all power sets was coming" would that have been the truth, a lie, or just misleading.

It seems to me that if increasing the maximum possible slotting capability is not a universal buff to all sets, but reducing the maximum possible slotting capability is a universal nerf to all sets, then we're talking much more about psychology than objective reality.

Keep in mind, I'm the one who made the "mentioning it in the hallway" comment so I'm on record as thinking this was bad form right from the start. Just saying, I wonder if this is less about the devs being consistent and not misleading, and more about the devs not seeming to realize just how fragile credibility actually is.

I.e. "technically right" is usually not the goal when you're attempting to gain the trust of the people you're communicating with.

There is no specific toxic-typed defense in the game (its a game engine omission: no defense can literally be typed toxic, although positional defenses will defend against toxic attacks if they are also positionally typed).

So Invincibility and Tough Hide are really s/l/f/c/e/n. All the damage types that you can have defense against at all except psi.


Weave is not base defense: weave is defense to smash/lethal/fire/cold/energy/negative/psi/melee/ranged/AoE. The difference is subtle, perhaps, but weave is typed, not base defense.

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An almost dead Blaster breaking mez isn't going to be able to pull a team's fanny out of the fire

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The almost dead blaster wouldn't mind it if he or she could pull their own fanny out of the fire, though. One issue with defiance is: hit by damage, do more damage in return; hit by mez, stand there looking stupid with +500% damage and no way to shoot back. The mez vulnerability of blasters should make them vulnerable to mez, but that should be counterbalanced by the desire to design defiance to be useful when it needs to be. There's no point in it being useful when it doesn't need to be.

My guess is that because so much dominator damage is melee ranged, the devs wanted to ensure that when a dominator triggers domination, they can jump into the middle of the fight and be effective: they temporarily become control-blappers. Since mez is more plentiful at short range, mez protection is a reasonable addition to keep domination effective (and to boost dominator damage output while its up, which seems to be its purpose).

A similar case can be made for defiance: its designed to give a tiered step-ladder of performance. At the very least, as a blaster transitions from one step of performance to the next lower (stronger) level, I would think they should have some opportunity to break a controlling mez so they can use that additional offensive firepower.

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May or may not be relevant, given that I7 is (and has been for some time) out. However, I've noted that my Broadsword/SR scrapper has been getting hammered badly for awhile now.

I believe I'm rather abnormal for SR, since I just have the toggles (no Agile, Dodge, or Lucky) for basic defenses. I often team with a blaster, and we not-infrequently start off with me jumping in the middle of a group to draw aggro. While fighting Malta this evening, I found that I would often be dropped to half health by the time my second attack finished. Fights with a couple Lieutenants in them pushed me to use Elude several times. This would be fine, except with groups of about 6 (generally even- or +1-con enemies) at a time, every mob had a couple of lieutenants.

Maybe I'm getting sloppy, or maybe I just need to throw Parry into the mix more often to deal with changes in defense calculations. However, browsing Statesman's article on Defense debuffs seemed to indicate that at certain levels (like +1) minions have a slightly higher hit rate than before.

I've been running at Tenacious because I like fighting actual bosses for the main bad guy in a mission, but I may go back to my pre-I7 setting of Rugged for fewer villains at higher levels. (That's always been somewhat easier in my book anyway.)

Anyway, that's my bit.

Sorry I couldn't provide more specific info,

Rigol
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Rial, BS/SR Scrapper 50 (Virtue)
Kineticist, Kinetic/Dark Defender 34 (Champion)

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1. If you only have the toggles, and not the passives (all of them), your level of protection is about half of an SR scrapper that takes everything (i.e. you eat about twice as much damage on average).

2. I'm not sure which Statesman article you're referring to exactly, but I would be careful about taking any such calculations as gospel without carefully reading the entire thread the calculations appeared in.

3. Nothing under +5 hits you more frequently in I7 than I6: nothing. I say "you" since its theoretically possible for someone to get hit more often by *something* in I7 than I6, but it ain't you (if you were a blaster running unslotted maneuvers or less only for defense, you *might* be getting hit a little more frequently by +1 and higher bosses and AVs in I7 than I6 - not that you're going to notice the slight difference).