Hopeling

PPM is an average, not an upper limit. At 1.5 PPM, it still could go off 6 times in a minute (and in fact it's more likely to do so than the 20% version). It could go off zero times.

I'm sure it might sound odd at first. Many things do. The 10-second timer for procs in auto/toggle powers sounds odd the first time you hear about it.

You've already quoted the post that gives the general overview of the changes. PPM procs are explained here: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/PPM

If you have specific questions, I'm happy to help, but for the general overview I don't know what to tell you other than to direct you to Synapse's posts in this thread.

Yes. It's pretty easy to check with a power analyzer, if you're curious.

There's a decent argument to be made for the benefit of layered defenses, since it's more robust against one layer failing, and can get more benefit from buffs. But in terms of average damage taken, everybody is equally vulnerable to resist debuffs. -20% res means you take 20% more damage than you took without the debuff, no matter how much resist you had in the first place (unless you were beyond the resist cap and the debuff just ate some of your over-the-cap padding, in which case the resist-based character is affected proportionally *less*).

For large sample sizes (thousands of hits), yes. For small sample sizes (a few dozen hits), no - getting zero crits out of 40 attacks isn't even noteworthy, and it certainly doesn't violate design principles (unless the designer fundamentally failed to understand what randomness is). Same for getting 10 crits out of 40 attacks.

Getting zero crits out of 4,000 attacks would be noteworthy and a problem if it happens with any frequency at all, but it should be borderline impossible for that to actually happen, unless something is broken somewhere.

Yep. To state that another way, 1.5 PPM gives it a 25% chance to proc every 10 seconds.

Don't be absurd, that's...

...that would be...

...actually, that would be pretty awesome.

I should get around to updating, user-friendlifying, and sigging my i24 spreadsheet at some point. Before i24, preferably...

Edit: I'm not actually sure if Doublehit's PPM was increased in i24 as I had assumed it would be. It's not in the patch notes, so probably not.

I already included that back in post #9

I've got Mids builds for them, the slots for the new sets are just empty currently. I can post the builds if you really want, but the point isn't "I have an awesome build" - I planned, respecced, and slotted each build in under an hour. They're basically rough drafts, not masterpieces I'm just trying to illustrate the kind of things that can be done with the set bonus changes.

A power that does -50% doesn't necessarily reduce incoming damage by half, depending on relative level and the target's resistances, but if the target is debuffed such that it's getting -50% after applying those things, then it'll reduce damage by half. Oh, and unless the target also has damage buffs. Bleh, caveats. Always makin' stuff complicated.

Or were you referring to something else?

And yeah, defense wins across the board on granularity in general, for average performance. But that's not really -dmg favoring defense, but the mechanics favoring defense at a more basic level. Although I think, in practice, the effect of granularity tends to be swallowed by other factors, not least of them the inherently unreliable nature of defense.

With the same 2000 hp, 50% resist/25% defense, and a -20% damage debuff, but an attacker that deals 900 damage instead of 1000, the resist-based character will take 450 per hit, and will die in 5 hits. With the debuff, he'll take 360 per hit, and will die in 6 hits. The debuff bought him one extra hit before death.
The defense-based character dies in 3 hits with or without the debuff. The debuff provides him with no benefit at all.
Similar things happen at 1500 damage, or 650 damage, or 370 damage, or 320 damage, or 282 damage, or any of arbitrarily many other possible values. There's a whole bunch of intervals on which resist gets more benefit from the debuff, even just for the specific res/def/debuff values in this example. All you're really doing here is looking at the graph of
y = 2*ceil(2000/(.5*.8*x)) - 2*ceil(2000/(.5*x))
compared to the graph of
y = 4*ceil(2000/(.8*x)) - 4*ceil(2000/x)
...and neither graph is consistently above the other.
And for small hits, the difference of a fraction of an attack of overkill is swallowed into negligibility.

Also, realistically, enemies that can 2-shot you usually have more than one attack, and their attacks do not usually all deal the same damage. And very far from every enemy can 2-shot a character with 2000 health. And you're very often fighting multiple enemies (of multiple types, each with multiple attacks of different strengths) anyway, so reading too far into exactly how many of a specific attack you can survive is not very illustrative.

Reducing the enemy's damage by 20% means they deal 20% less damage. The granularity of attacks can matter, but doesn't consistently favor one over the other.
Well sure, yeah. It's yet another layer to get mitigation from. But -dmg doesn't have any special bonus when combined with resist, is all I'm saying; a -50% damage debuff reduces incoming damage by half, no matter how much resistance you have. Having 90% resist and 90% -dmg prevents 99% of incoming damage, but so does softcapped defense and 90% -dmg.