macskull

Well, you can't get PvP IOs with merit rewards because PvP IOs are supposed to be recipes you get from PvPing (gaining merits is not PvPing, obviously). However, this means that the only way to get PvP IOs is on the market or by getting them as a drop, which is not the case for any other recipes than purples. Still think turning PvP rep into "PvP merits" which could be redeemed for random rolls or recipe purchases would be a nice addition there, but that's neither here nor there.

PvP IOs are a special case, even, because they only drop off other players, who are generally trying to avoid dying and at the same time are trying to kill you (NPCs do the same thing but obviously players are better at it). In a balanced PvP scenario, it shouldn't be "both sides racking up kills against each other," it should be "both sides having a fairly low score." In essence the PvP IO drop rate suffers during good PvP combat. Then there's the "drop is tied to rep" thing, which PvE drops aren't restricted by, and then there's the paradox with farming: the drops were tied to rep to prevent rampant arena farming like the kind which happened from I14 to I15, but it's still possible to farm these. People farm them because the drop rate is so low, and because a good drop can sell for hundreds of millions of inf, but Castle says they won't raise the drop rate because they're too easily farmable. (wtf?)

That's because drop tables are weighted common -> uncommon -> rare -> very rare. Simply put, more common IOs drop than set IOs because they're, well, common. Set IOs are supposed to be rarer (and hence, more expensive) in theory but it doesn't always work that way in practice.

Then the options would become "buy set IOs, or replace SOs every 5 levels." I like having generic IOs available because it means I can buy enhancements once without having to spend a lot, especially if it's a character I may not be playing often.

This is the boat I'm in. I'll probably transfer inf off of characters before switching sides so I don't "lose" any of it, and will have large enough inf stockpiles on both sides where it won't really be anything more than an annoyance.

DDR caps at 95% (no idea why Mids doesn't account for this, as it's generally good about accounting for hard caps). As far as I'm aware, SR is the only set that can reach that regularly, and if I'm not mistaken they can do it with only SO slotting. Shields can get close when stacking Active Defense (more if they use the Hami trick), but they can't maintain 95%. So let's say you're on an SR with 48% defense and are hit with a -10% debuff. That debuff would have to stack six times over its duration (a few seconds for most NPC powers) in order to even bring you down to 45%, which is incredibly unlikely. An SR is much, much more likely to die due to lucky hits getting through than cascading defense failure, except in the case of unresisted debuffs, which are rare among NPCs and nonexistent (post-I13) among players.

Maybe we'll get some in I17!

As one of the people who was involved in the mentioned discussion, I've gotta stick my head in and say that I wasn't claiming "defense without DDR is useless," but rather that it's simply prone to cascading defense failure much moreso than defense that's got DDR along with it. While I am not disagreeing with your numbers (I think it's a good analysis of the situation), and I know from personal experience that softcapped defense without DDR is really really nice (hello, RSF and STF runs with Colds and Bubblers stacking crazy amounts of +def on the whole team), it's worth pointing out that a non-defense-based build whose player decides to build for defense (i.e. a Fiery Aura character building for the smash/lethal softcap) will sometimes have to sacrifice other build goals to get that defense, and should enough defense debuffs stack, that portion of their build will have been invalidated entirely.

lololololol

Okay, I'd love to see Deveron playing MW2.

Warburg on Freedom at least was decently popular before I13. I'd say it's more due to the level of the zone than it being free-for-all.

Can tell you right now if you're making a second build for PvP, you're going to want to make it a Bane, as Crabs really aren't all that good in PvP.