Werner

Yeah, we wondered the same thing in the earlier thread. We don't know. Murdok surely knows, but I don't think noticed the question. Seems to me that, like any other toggle, it would detoggle in a full endurance crash. I would guess you hit it immediately following the crash (edit: well, a blue inspiration, then it). You probably have at least a couple seconds to react. They probably won't kill you instantly, and any damage will heal back during Hibernate. And really, the recharge isn't QUITE good enough because you need to toggle on Elude before Hibernate drops, and it has a long cast time. So you'll have a rough moment or two at the beginning or the end. Probably best to have it at the beginning so that you're at full strength coming out of Hibernate.

That's what most people seem to think. But if that's what the devs are after, then raising to hit and making defense debuffs more common is the wrong way to solve that problem. As indicated, Super Reflexes and to a lesser extent Shield Defense have a lot of room to get much higher defense than we play with today. So defense sets would remain at the new soft cap if there's a new soft cap, and keep their 90%+ mitigation and 95% defense debuff resistance, generally at the expense of damage output and utility powers.

It's the survivability of resistance sets that would suffer. Right now, the reason they're competitive with the defense sets is that you can add so much defense to them. However, they have little to no defense debuff resistance, which is already a big hole in their mitigation. And if the soft cap is raised significantly higher than today, their defense would become increasingly meaningless, and their average mitigation level (at the top end) would plummet in comparison to the defense sets.

This assumes no further changes to what we have access to, of course. I haven't even been playing I20 beta, or paying attention to what people say about it.

Yes, you DO in fact need to be the tiniest smidge short of the recharge cap for that. What I didn't realize, and I don't think most people realize, is that I19 makes that POSSIBLE. So that we're not discussing hypotheticals, here's the build. It isn't mine; it's Murdok's. Well, very close to Murdok's live build, just with a few tweaks by me (and adding billions and billions to the cost).

My Katana/Dark is on Victory, but as far as seeing it in action, these are videos from the I17 version of my build:

Double Rikti War Zone Challenge

11 Praetorians in a Row - no temps, no insps, no deaths

And yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the capped DDR on Shield Defense goes away. There are actually two bugs involved as best I can tell, fixing either one of which would probably remove the capped DDR on most Shield Defense builds. But maybe they'll never be fixed, or they're considered features instead of bugs. I don't pay attention to or try to guess dev intent. I just play the game as it actually exists.

912,345,678!

And since I can see what's coming a mile away...

902,006,673!

Hah! Stopped THAT in its...

Uh...

Did I just outbid myself?

*hangs head in shame*

I wouldn't think unusualness would prevent the game from counting you as the high bidder if you are. You should be fine.

Postagulous claims to have gone from 80% defense to -40% instantly. I said I got hit with a 50% debuff in an instant at one point. Taking into account that instantly is an obvious exaggeration for "very very fast", do you think we're both lying about that?

I'll also point out that when they do their defensive thing and are suddenly very hard to hit, that 80% defense can drop quickly even without being hit, and may be just the can opener they need to crack our defense open and push us into cascading defense failure.

So let's assume we're telling the truth and that Scrappers without any or without much defense debuff resistance can suffer from catastrophic cascading defense failure quite quickly, and now we're sitting deep in the negatives surrounded by a couple Cimeroran bosses, several lieutenants, and a ton of minions. Can we kill our way out with no other response? Well, how much time do we have?

Well, kind of averaging Dark Armor and Willpower, let's say we have about 50% smashing/lethal resistance and about 2000 hit points. That's effectively about 4000 hit points. Now, how fast is this large crowd putting out damage, since nearly every attack is now hitting us? I'm totally guessing, but let's say 800 DPS, a figure I could TRIVIALLY survive when not debuffed without even touching my heal. It wouldn't surprise me if the number is even higher than that.

Now instead I have five seconds to kill the crowd. On a mostly single-target primary, while using the low-damage Divine Avalanche.

Not happening.

Yes, Dark Regeneration will buy me a few more seconds if I time it properly, but it's not going to be enough. Willpower doesn't even have that.

You CAN survive, but just standing there and killing your way out of it with no other response isn't going to do it on a Katana/Dark or a Katana/Willpower. It is important that you know as soon as possible that it's happening, and that you react as quickly as possible by perhaps either popping a lot of purples and maybe oranges and greens or just getting away from them for long enough for the debuffs to wear off.

Now, what about your Fire/Fire/Pyre Tanker? Well, you're probably sitting at 75% smashing/lethal resistance and, what, 2400 hit points or so? That's effectively about 9600 hit points. You have 12 seconds to kill the crowd on an AoE character with two build ups, Burn, Fire Sword Circle, and Fire Ball. Your heal will buy you maybe four more seconds. You're quickly going to just be facing two bosses, I'd think. They might take longer, but you can probably hold out at that point? I still don't see it being trivial if you do nothing else, but I'll believe you can do it.

An orange or two, though, puts you at 90% resistance and effectively 24000 hit points with 30 seconds to finish the spawn. That should be pretty trivial, particularly with the heal.

In this case, once defense is deep in the red, the Tanker is both much hardier and is putting out significantly more damage.

Well, the incarnate system has "forced" me to. I've now been on two ITFs and an Apex on pick up groups. *shudder* OK, honestly, it wasn't that bad. One ITF I might even describe as good - steam roll killing almost everything for shards. Nobody on the team said a word until about halfway through the entire task force. Less talking. More killing. Perfect.

With much lower resistance and hit points, some Scrappers can go from soft capped to negative defense to dead in the space of a handful of seconds. You can't generally outkill that. You have to fix it in other ways, and fast.

Ahhhhhh. See the simple things I don't know?

Why wouldn't you want your super stunner to rez? They come back without many hit points, and you get just as much XP for defeating them the second time. Yay rez!

Yeah, I think that's a great thread despite the builds being out of date. As I recall, it does a good job of discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the combination and this approach to building a sword/Dark, and also how the build plays in general, and what it's capable of. Not everyone likes it (one person hated it and regretted doing a respec into this approach), and there are acknowledged weaknesses, particularly on a budget build. But it's my favorite toon right now, and I consider it my main these days.

Defense debuffs are kryptonite, though hitting soft cap with one hit of Divine Avalanche seems to be helping compared to my previous build that required two. Managed to get through an ITF unscathed.

I just logged on my Martial Arts/Fiery Aura, and it was definitely ticking every 2 seconds instead of every second. And it looks like I was getting the listed damage (I got slightly more, but I think Herders have negative resistance to fire?), which bumped up to level 50 (I'm 26) matches up to what Mids' reports. So I'm now fairly certain that Mids' is reporting the per tick damage for at least the power itself. That implies that it's calculating the proc damage wrong in this case.

Well, let's see...

Procs only have a chance to fire every 10 seconds.

The Armageddon proc would on average do 33% * 107.09 = 35.3397 damage every 10 seconds, or 3.53397 DPS.

A regular proc would on average do 20% * 71.75 / 10 = 1.435 DPS.

With no ED, a straight damage SO does 33.3% * 13.76 = 4.58208 damage every 2 seconds, or 2.29104 DPS.

At the ED cap, a straight damage SO does 15% of that, or 0.343656 DPS.

Mids is disagreeing with my numbers, though. It's saying that the proc damage DPS I calculated is per tick, not per second (twice per tick). I think it's wrong though? Or does it tick every second? It's every other second right?

So while I'd probably put the Armageddon proc and set elsewhere, it does appear to do more damage than a straight damage SO. But the straight damage SO is better than a proc. Assuming I got that right.