BunnyAnomaly

That's an easily refuted example because the first person is taking incoming 200 DPS and the second person is taking incoming 1818 DPS. Of course the second person gets more from the mitigation. 5% of 1818 is larger than 5% of 200.

If the first person was taking incoming 1818 DPS then adding 0.5% defence would also lower it by the same amount.

If you go below 1 in magnitude then it is simply knockdown instead of knockback.

I love this idea! Hopefully it would be a -knockback of very very high magnitude so it isn't taking up more than a single slot. It would satisfy a LOT of people (some energy blasters, SS Handclap are the first things that spring to mind)

There is Kick in the build, active, with the 100% recharge proc on it. It gives the illusion of high recharge but doesn't really have it.

I thought this was a pretty good reason...

Few minor corrections though the general feel of what you say I agree with 100%:

SD has a damage debuff to opponents.

SD also gets within a whisker of soft cap on everything with just SOs. Same as Granite, depending on if you call Granite Armour a panic power

Technically true from the top of my head, but Dark armour has three (damage, fear, disorient, all have a mag4 taunt in them)

Ice has capped resistance to cold and so-so to poor resistance to fire.

I think you are 100% correct, thank you!

It's a shame it doesn't affect recovery. I had later tested it and malta could not drain me when I hit but a few with Consume, but things like the Mu I fought (when I was scratching my head wondering what was going on) would zero out my recovery and that would bring me down very very fast.

...please can we get recovery resistance added Devs?

Well it wouldn't have to be a 'duplicate' set of anything. If it is possible for the devs to make one of the existing blast sets with gun animations then that would also satisfy my suggestion I don't mind much how it's done, but it is something missing from this game that I would love to see.

The same amount of minuteness.

I've already shown they provide the same amount of mitigation wherever added, so I'll bow out now. I said you were misleading and that your statistics lacked intellectual honesty and your knickers got into a massive knot.

I used 44.9% to 45% as the example as that's what you got from just using LOTG as a set. As I showed earlier there is 0.0% difference with Enzymes.

Let's say there's a 1000 damage hit coming at you.

1000 * (50-defence score%)/100

Your expected damage with 44.9% vs 45% defence:

1000 * 0.05 = 50
1000 * 0.051 = 51

Your expected damage with 0% vs 0.1% defence:

1000 * 0.5 = 500
1000 * 0.501 = 501

As you can see, adding 0.1% defence to "near soft cap" and "to absolutely no defence" both provides the same amount of mitigation. In this example, it is a mere 1 point of damage. Now you can say that 51/50 is 2% more damage, and that 501/500 is 0.02%, and so it is more important for the first example... but... would you feel that this is misleading when they mitigate the same damage?

May I enquire what defence your /SR brute has? Is he/she over the 45% soft cap? Because if so, it's quite probable that in the absence of debuffs there is quite literally no difference to performance in mitigation between a 50 and a 25 LOTG Global/Def IO.

Regardless of numbers you use, it provides 0.1% mitigation. It was for illustrative purposes only, feel free to submit your own numbers and see that the difference in mitigated damage is not 10%. If you survived with ~0.1% of your life at the end ( so uh... for a 2000 hp brute, that's 2hp), then you can thank using the 50 IO. Otherwise, it didn't matter. Assuming the damage is distributed continually.

This here is exactly what I was talking about intellectual honesty. What you have written may technically be true but it is expressed in such a way as to bamboozle anyone who doesn't have a respectable grasp of statistics and to me that is not honest at all.

Let's see why. The problem has been shown before by Rodion but I will highlight it once more.

Compared versus actual received damage this is true. However, against incoming damage, it is false. 0.4% defence provides the same quantity of mitigation wherever and however it is applied. If you are going from 0% to 0.4%, it mitigates 0.4%. When from 44.6% to 45%, it mitigates 0.4%. If you were to undergo any sustained attack and calculated the mitigation provided, they are equal. Losing 0.4% defence means you are hit by an additional 1 in 250 attacks, whichever way you may choose to express it.

Firstly, here, I'd like us to move away from 0.4%. I expressed in my first post that this is not a logical number but one arrived at only in the total absence of ED. It is the most extreme difference possible, but it is not a rational difference. Why?

It is a dominant strategy to build to at least the ED cap, as it provides more returns/slot than any other way. If you want defence, build to the ED cap. Being under the cap is a dominated strategy because you will be expending more slots elsewhere to receive the defence you could have just by slotting it 'normally'.

Now to provide some examples. I'll use a Shield Defence scrapper here, with Deflection (their main melee defence toggle) the power of choice.

2 Enzymes + LOTG 50: 17.9%
2 Enzymes + LOTG 25: 17.9%

LOTG set (Def, Def/End, Def/Rech, Global/Def) 50: 17.8%
LOTG set (Def, Def/End, Def/Rech, Global/Def) 50: 17.7%

In the first example, there's no difference to 1 decimal place. On my /SD scrapper, that's the way I slot mine.

In the second example, there's a 0.1% difference. Now, we need to make some bold assumptions here before we explore what differences are even felt. The reason they are bold assumptions is that your own argument attempts to highlight the significance of the difference and then goes ahead by making no attempt to close this difference. To me, that's not a logical argument at all. If you were truly concerned about the impact, you would presumably make this up elsewhere - the difficulty of which is going to be highly build dependent and also will rely upon your own personal views of the trade off. Because we can't view each others personal wants from a build, let's pretend that it was impossibly to find another 0.1% in a build. What really happens?

Let's assume there's a continual stream of attacks that so happen to attack that particular defence you have sacrificed the 0.1% on. For sake of argument, it's 500 damage per second (DPS). Now we are looking at some serious damage if there's no mitigation at all in play. A squishy will die in very short order from this (250 DPS with no defence, so.. 4 seconds = 1000 damage, 8 seconds = likely death).

What happens if you can reduce this incoming damage to a 5% hit chance, versus the 5.1% hit chance?

At 45% defence, you are taking 25 DPS.

At 44.9% defence, you are taking 25.5 DPS.

Over the course of a full 10 minutes of attack, this sums to a paltry 300 damage. To put that another way, of the original 500 damage you would take, the difference is 0.5, so you mitigate a grand total of 0.1% with 0.1% more defence - as I have elaborated above.

This is where I believe the "10%" is not an intellectually honest answer. It does not display the reality (that it is significantly less than 0.4%, as I have written since the very beginning), nor does it reflect the real terms of difference. It is, to restate, also inconsistent throughout your argument when you say that 0.4% mitigates less than 0.4%.


Disclaimer: This was hard to write without sounding rude, take my apologies on it first up...

I'm not interested in you putting words into the mouth of others here. Perhaps they feel this way, perhaps they don't, but it really is irrelevant as it doesn't validate an argument. As a side tangent, this game is so spectacularly easy and so utterly skill deprived that it generally is just the (loudest/most prolific posters/most prone to present their achievements to others) that achieve such 'titles'. For all you know, you could be talking to anyone who has done exactly the same but hasn't felt the urge to tell the forums about it. Even if you were or are speaking to someone like that, it doesn't necessarily make them right!

The decisions about what to aim for are going to be the individual preferences about what someone wants, so an argument along these lines is difficult to resolve. However, you would have seen by now what a 0.1% difference actually means in the defense score.

You wrote something that is to me highly misleading. You furthered that by writing something that is untrue, that 0.4% applied to 0% defence provides less mitigation than adding 0.4% to 44.6%. They in fact mitigate the same quantity of damage. A lot of your other argument appeals to this concept of 10% damage.

No it's like they are building a bigger engine for free but you are complaining that you don't also get free leather upholstery. Your example doesn't fit because there's nothing that costs you anything at all to be compensated for.

except...

and that it is generally considered good practice to build over the soft cap to account for defence debuffs.