SpittingTrashcan

Scrappers (and Brutes) are currently sitting in the power-building sweet spot - they have a good offensive base and moderate mitigation. IOs provide enough additional survivability to handle as much challenge as it is profitable to handle. They can't solo GMs, yes, but then that's not actually a useful thing to be able to do from a rewards-maximization perspective.

I think that in the distant future, we will look on I16 as the golden age of the Scrapper (and Brute).

I saw a drawing of a spitting trashcan once, and it appealed to me. I use it as my handle wherever I go, because it's almost never claimed.

The problem with making Stone a ten-power set is that BaB cannot do it. Not even if Castle helps. It'd require heavy engine changes, and that means much, much more effort than is likely to occur between now and I16 release.

Well, that's one problem. The other problem is that everyone who isn't Stone Armor would immediately scream "Where's MY tenth power?!"

So, yeah. Not realistic by any stretch of the imagination.

I think that at the time I am writing this message, a fair number of your potential testers are at work or at school and thus unable to access either these forums or the Titan forums. I expect interest will pick up in a few hours.

Everybody knows what's great about Defense, but let's make a list...

1. The mitigation from Defense scales better than linearly. The more Defense you have, the more additional damage you will avoid by getting more Defense.
2. The Defense softcap is well below the defense hardcap for all archetypes, so it is possible to reach maximum protection - 90% damage mitigation - through Defense on all archetypes.
3. Defense protects against secondary effects of attacks - if an attack does not hit, none of its effects apply. That means Defense protects against mez, debuffs (including Defense debuffs), and end drain as well as damage.
4. There are lots of ways to get more Defense. In addition to several mitigation sets that provide Defense, there are many IOs and set bonuses that provide significant Defense.
5. There are ten Defense types: Smashing Lethal Fire Cold Energy Negative Psi Melee Ranged AoE. The vast majority of attacks in the game carry at least one of Melee, Ranged, or AoE, and a large number also carry at least one of Smashing, Lethal, Fire, Cold, Energy, or Negative. All Defense set bonuses apply to some degree to both the first three and the last six. Thus, whatever Defense you may have, it is easy to build Defense to protect you against most attacks.

How does Resistance compare on these measures?

1. Resistance scales the same way as Defense does. Going from 80% resistance to 90% resistance provides the same twofold increase in survivability that going from 40% defense to 45% defense does. Or at least it does when this is achievable - see below.
2. The Resistance hardcap is 90% for exactly two ATs. Every other AT cannot achieve the same level of mitigation through Resistance that they can through Defense.
3. Resistance does not prevent attacks from connecting, and it does not offer any protection against secondary effects, with one exception: resistance resists resistance debuffs (and, due to an extremely obscure quirk of code, damage debuffs).
4. There are not as many ways to improve Resistance. A fair number of mitigation sets provide some measure of Resistance, but usually nowhere near the levels available for Defense. Despite the fact that a percentage point of Defense offers the same increase in mitigation as two percentage points of Resistance, Resistance set bonuses are multipliers on the same base values as Defense set bonuses (see here).
5. There are eight Resistance types: Smashing Lethal Fire Cold Energy Negative Psi Toxic. While Defense protects against an attack if it matches at least one of the incoming attack's type flags, Resistance only protects against damage that exactly matches its damage type flag. Overall, a large chunk of incoming damage is either Smashing or Lethal, but set bonuses to Smashing and Lethal resistance are extremely rare. Resistance bonuses come singly where Defense set bonuses come in groups of two elemental and one positional type.

So, in summary:
- Defense is more useful than Resistance - it can be softcapped on all ATs and protects against secondary effects.
- Defense is easier to obtain than Resistance - it has plentiful availability through set bonuses and buffs.

My tentative conclusion is that, at some point in the development of the game before the introduction of IOs, the developers arrived at the same conclusion I have - that Defense is more broadly useful than Resistance - and thus when designing set bonuses, they made a deliberate decision to grant more Defense than Resistance. The results of this decision have been interesting, to say the least - the widespread distribution of powerful mitigation tools has lifted vulnerable ATs to respectable toughness, moderately tough ATs to extreme toughness, and extremely tough ATs to... where they already were. Top level builds lean towards ATs with high inherent offense and moderate inherent mitigation, knowing that mitigation can be increased to any desired level while offense cannot.

Where am I going with this? I'm not entirely sure. I would be interested in comments and alternative analyses, though.

There are three classes of AT in the game now.

Class I: Generalists. Generalists solo well and can also contribute to teams. Class I is: Brute, Controller, Corruptor, Dominator, Mastermind, Scrapper.

Class II: Specialists. Specialists are much stronger in one aspect than any other AT in the game. They are therefore weaker in some other aspect than most comparable ATs. This makes them more difficult to solo, but excellent on teams that cover their weakness. Class II is: Blaster, Defender, Tanker (the "Holy Trinity" of standard MMO design).

Class III: Soloists. Soloists are excellent alone, but the qualities which make them excellent soloers are at best deprecated and at worst actively problematic on teams. Class III is: Stalker.

Defenders, as a class II AT, are by design always going to be inferior alone. There is no balanced way to improve their solo performance, other than getting rid of them and bringing Corruptors heroside. And they're still better than Stalkers, who cannot be made useful on teams at all.

And that's my poke at the hornets' nest for today...

I'd like to come down more strongly in the revision camp, but there's a question I need to ask first. Is there going to be code in such that power geometry respects the physique slider?

To see what I mean by this, try creating a Female Spines/ with the physique slider as thin as it can go, and then a Huge Spines/ with the physique slider as fat as it can go. Note that the Spines are "anchored" in the same points around the skeleton of the character regardless of the physique settings, so that the spines appear to project much further from the thin female than from the bulky huge. As another example of this behavior, consider that the female Rock Armor geometry has to be bulky enough in the chest to accommodate a chest slider set all the way to the right.

If the geometry of the new Granite armor acts in this way, then at least one of two things would be true - either a sufficiently bulky character would swallow up the geometry within its own geometry, or the geometry would be sufficiently thick to accommodate any build - which means, in particular, the biggest possible build. It might be possible for that to look good, but I'd be much more in the revision camp if the new Granite geometry was capable of respecting the physique settings. That said, the current Granite doesn't even respect the gender or height selections, so any change that did would still be a step up in my opinion.

A point of note: Stun is very much not an AoE stun. It is a ST mag 3 stun with minimal damage.

Carry on.

They work fine together.

Diablo II.

EDIT: To clarify, Diablo II generated random maps, and if it was considered a bad game because of this, that'd be news to me. I certainly liked it a lot.

Monstrous hands with the Wrap texture.
Enforcer gloves, Robotic Large gloves, Vanguard gloves. I love big gloves.
The Reaper face detail, with the Long Scarf cape or the Single Shoulder Tattered cape.
The Sinister top, but just for the upper arms.
Roman segmented chestpiece and shoulders. I would love a segmented tech armor.
The Slacks pants.
Valkyrie boots.
Sinister boots.

Weird. That hasn't been my experience at all.

Well, carry on.