Wadizit

I have a 50+3 dark armor stalker I have been playing a lot recently, so maybe I can help.

My defenses are 40%, not quite softcapped, but combined with the -tohit from cloak of fear, it is more than enough for practical purposes. My resists are something like 55% S/L, 40% neg, 35% fire/cold, 50% psi, 20% energy. For a stalker, it is surprisingly resilient. The recent buff to HP values helped a lot in this area. I can charge into groups of enemies in itrials or x8 missions in astoria and usually stand up nearly as well as the brutes and to a lesser extent tankers around me.

The big problem for dark armor though, and most non-def specific sets, is that endgame mobs in astoria can absolutely trash your defenses. Nearly every enemy has some sort of stupid -def debuff, half of which are auto hit, and most of which stack many, many times. Without the resistance to def debuffs that are inherent to ninjutsu or super reflexes, my defenses will drop extremely rapidly against certain enemies. For dark armor specifically, the ancients or elders of sorrow of the pantheon are especially brutal, because their radiation blast attacks have massive def debuff numbers and dark is already pretty weak against energy in general. I can roll through x8 missions in astoria with ease until I run into a group with 2 or more ancients of sorrow, and then I get flattened in seconds when they land their lame -20% defense debuffs. I imagine electric armor would have a MUCH easier time with this.

Plus dark regen on stalkers takes a stupidly long time to activate, seriously, the ingame tooltip, mids, and everywhere else says 1.17seconds, but it is NOWHERE near this fast. It is closer to 3 seconds, which I'm not sure is a bug or not. I could swear that the same exact power on my elec/dark brute casts in LESS than half the time, but I digress.

As far as itrials go, resists make you a lot tougher when half of the enemies have 70% hitrates vs. 45% defense. Unfortunately, a very large portion of these enemies hit with energy damage, which is dark armor's big weakness.

Anyway, to summarize - resist based stalkers are pretty good now, I would say they are tougher in general than def based stalkers, assuming you can softcap defenses on top of your resists, but if you want to roll one, I would recommend electric armor if only because of how much endgame content has enemies which do energy damage.