Official Thread for Defense Scaling Changes
By
Alexio_DeAmore,
Posted on: 2006-05-01 13:40 in Developers' Corner
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Make that AV +5 and his final accuracy is 95% (bounded from 100%)
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I was not under the impression that accuracy was ever capped. Capping (or bounding, whichever name you prefer) only applied in two places I thought:
1) After the addition/subtraction of baseToHit, Defense and ToHit Buffs/Debuffs.
2) To the final chance to hit, after everything else has been applied.
Which would mean a +5 AV had a full +100% accuracy (x2, meaning a floored 10% chance to hit). Incidentally, do we know for certain if it is treated as two separate accruacy buffs (1.5 (AV) * 1.5 (Level) = 2.25, floored 11.25%) or one combined buff (1 + (0.5 + 0.5) = 2.0, floored 10.0%)?
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The confusion (my fault) was that I was struggling for a term for the final, this is their chance to hit you number.
As for your question, I believe the accuracy mods are additive. I would swear that I read that somewhere, but that might have been in my fevered imagination. 
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You've read that several times, a couple by red names. The definitive one was by pohsyb, who gave an example that added them up.
Then, after carefully discussing it with him, he explicitly told me that was an error, and accuracy buffs are all multiplicative, a fact that's in my Guide to Defense, and he gave me specific permission to state as such.
In other words, if you are fighting a +2 AV in I7, he gets a 1.2 acc bonus for being +2, and a 1.5 acc bonus for being an AV, and his net to hit on you will be 1.2 x 1.5 x (50% - YourDefense). Similarly, if you are attacking with a Katana attack, you have a 1.05 acc bonus (the weapon draw bonus) and if you have two-slot acc, thats 1.66 acc (enhancements are themselves added up), and your net tohit is 1.05 x 1.66 x (75% - CritterDefense).
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Doesn't MoG provide like 70% resists as well as insane defense?
so really you're getting hit 100% more often only means 30% more dmg total.
take that down to playing normal foes and (not +5 AV's) and you're only taking 15% more dmg than before. (assuming 7.5% floor for even of near level critters). My opinion on that is that it's not game breaking.
Let's put things into perspective though, SR scrappers get 20% resistance from their passives to go along with their defense.
It's the combination of resist and defense that makes MoG great.
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The only problem with that logic is you're neglecting the fact that the 70+% resists from MoG come combined with a reduction of MaxHP to 25% of base.
Taking 30% damage into a HP pool of 25% is a net REDUCTION in survivability. We can add a resist enhancement to bring that up to 75% resists (taking 25% damage into your 25% HP pool) to make the net resist effect a wash... woo!
Kam
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The floor is no longer 5%. It's now 10% of the foe's base accuracy. So 6.5% for a +0 boss, 7.5% for a +0 AV, and so on, up to 9.5% "cap" on the floor.
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Ok so we have yet another stealth nerf? Awesome.
Yes, I know that this has been mentioned in random threads in the last few months. I also know that 99.9% of the player base did not read those threads. The devs listed the changes that came with I7. This wasn't listed anywhere. You know what that's called? A stealth nerf.....something they claim to "NEVER" do.......yet we have like 5 in every single issue lol.
Oh well......let's wait a month...maybe a developer will actually make a reply. Usually takes about that long.
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If you want to call it a stealth nerf, then fine, but its not a stealth nerf for I7. Its actually a stealth nerf for I4 that no one noticed.
The "new floor" is not a consequence of the I7 scaler, its a consequence of the fact that the tohit equation now performs an intermediate floor. Instead of just flooring the entire thing to 5%, it now floors the intermediate sum (BaseToHit + ToHitBuffs - ToHitDebuffs - Defense + DefenseBuffs) before accuracy is factored in, and then again after. As a result, the lowest that intermediate number can ever be is 5%, and therefore the actual "worst case" accuracy is always going to be 5% x NetAccuracy. If NetAccuracy is more than 1.0, worst case accuracy will always be higher than 5%.
This intermediate floor/ceiling was put in shortly after the arenas went live, but wasn't really explicitly noted as a change. A lot of people testing acc back then performed tests that straddled the time between when the intermediate bounds wasn't in, and when it was in, which certainly created puzzling results (it almost certainly messed up some of mine).
What I7 does do is trade tohit buffs for accuracy buffs, so more villains will be affected more strongly by the intermediate floors. But even now in I7, you can't "floor" a Malta Gunslinger LT to 5%: the best you can do is 10%, because they have +100% accuracy (2.0). Thats right now, on live.
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Actually, the fact that the floor for more accurate critters is now higher than it was previously has been discussed on the boards for a while now. While the patch notes don't spell this out, it isn't new information.
That said, I'll rework the text and add it to the list. You are correct that it should have been in there.
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Well, if this is a decision that it is "working as intended", that is fine. As others have pointed out, "I'm taking twice as much damage!!!" isn't telling all the story, if you're being plinked for 10 HP out of 1000 four times, instead of only two. If there is a problem with individual powers (like MoG) then they can be tweaked.
I'll go ahead and repeat my previous suggestion on the subject, though. If I understand what's happening, a 5% "floor" on to hit is being applied when the "to hit" part of the equation is calculated, and then again when the "accuracy" part of the equation is calculated. I'm quite sure I remember some redname (maybe Positron) saying it was calculated twice.
I understand the reason for the first floor operation, of course, you don't want the to hit to go negative and then apply an accuracy modifier that would have the opposite effect. Why not floor it -- the first time -- at 1%, though, instead of 5%? The second calculation, and thus the total still floors at 5%, just like before, but a Boss or AV can't get above that 5% unless he has like 500% Accuracy.
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Doesn't MoG provide like 70% resists as well as insane defense?
so really you're getting hit 100% more often only means 30% more dmg total.
take that down to playing normal foes and (not +5 AV's) and you're only taking 15% more dmg than before. (assuming 7.5% floor for even of near level critters). My opinion on that is that it's not game breaking.
Let's put things into perspective though, SR scrappers get 20% resistance from their passives to go along with their defense.
It's the combination of resist and defense that makes MoG great.
Overload would be crazy in the hands of a regen, who could stack dull pain with overload for large total hit points... thereby buffing all regen powers plus having insane defense.
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MoG is a net resistance debuff not a buff. It needs to be slotted to get it even with everything but Psi, where it remains an effective 400% debuff to Psi.
The City of Heroes Community is a special one and I will always look fondly on my times arguing, discussing and playing with you all. Thanks and thanks to the developers for a special experience.
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Love the new 'deflected' instead of 'miss'.
Actual onscreen evidence of FF buffs etc having an effect.
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Wow! They really did this? Woot, as they say!
Now I wonder if it only applies to Defense buffs put on you, or if Ice Armor will see the "deflected" text. Or Super Reflexes will? (I would expect the latter would be a bug, or unintended side effect)
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Love the new 'deflected' instead of 'miss'.
Actual onscreen evidence of FF buffs etc having an effect.
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Wow! They really did this? Woot, as they say!
Now I wonder if it only applies to Defense buffs put on you, or if Ice Armor will see the "deflected" text. Or Super Reflexes will? (I would expect the latter would be a bug, or unintended side effect)
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Yes, it does apply to Ice Armor. I saw this when I was doing a little testing this morning.
At a high-level, as a DM/EA, my heads-up or one-on-one survivability appears to be moderately better.
Also, I appear to be taking slightly fewer hits from ranged foes and/or those foes out of THD reach.
FWIW, this is about what I expected with the change.
Oh, and LB bosses are still pretty much as tough as they are live.
Repeat Offenders
Few questions have I. Others have probably asked, but until I have time to search all the way through;
Do these defense scalings affect monsters as well players? If so, there are several things that need to be 'tweaked' to be more defeatable.
Hamidon - Major defense versus everything, hard to imagine it's hide being even tougher.
Tank type AVs (Infernal, Brawler, Siege, Shadowhunter, Diabolique, etc.)
Many of the 'boss' type critters with already strong defenses like; Trolls, Frostfire, Pumicites, Vaz, Tsoo, Skyraiders, Malta, Devoured Earth, and Carnival of Souls.
Pets (like the guns Malta Engineers drop), as well as cairns, and swarms.
Simple solution is this, the higher the defense, the less health they require. High Health (hundreds of thousands) + Uncapped Defense = ugly problems.
The toughest part is not in attacking, but maintaining the attack long enough to wittle them down. If their defense is even higher (and many scrappers damage is way down) team wipes could be far more numerous.
Just want to be prepared in either way. Thanks in advance for your help.
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I understand the reason for the first floor operation, of course, you don't want the to hit to go negative and then apply an accuracy modifier that would have the opposite effect. Why not floor it -- the first time -- at 1%, though, instead of 5%? The second calculation, and thus the total still floors at 5%, just like before, but a Boss or AV can't get above that 5% unless he has like 500% Accuracy.
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Having fought forever on a dozen fronts for something basically like the I7 scaler change, I can offer this perspective, take it for whatever its worth.
The reason for the I7 scaler change in the first place is an issue of fairness. Defense and Resistance work differently, and more important its good that they work differently. The purpose to the I7 scaler is not to make them work the same. But the game had a weird way of creating critters of higher Rank (LTs, Bosses) and higher level than you. The devs wanted these things to be more accurate, so they hit you more often. That's fine, but what they did at the beginning of time is gave them higher base tohit. Minions had 50%, bosses had 75% (in I6, 65%). Higher level things also got higher tohit: +5% per level (to +5, then it goes up even faster).
That creates a problem for Defense, because now, "higher accuracy" things don't just hit more often, they hit Defense sets disproportionately more often than non-Defense sets. The big question was, was that intentional? Were ATs that relied on Defense deliberately supposed to be less effective than ATs that didn't rely on Defense when fighting Bosses, or higher level critters?
There's no good reason for that answer to be "yes" - *all* Bosses weren't created to be "Defense bypassers" but that's what they did.
The problem was that its fine to make Bosses more accurate in the sense of hitting more often. But they had two ways to do that: hand out tohit increases, or hand out accuracy increases. At the beginning of time, they picked the wrong one.
Its important to note that the I7 "Defense" Scaler does not change how Defense works at all. It changes how the more "accurate" critters become more accurate. Its really a misnomer: it should be called the I7 Critter Accuracy Scaler.
Ok, so we get the I7 Scaler so that Defense doesn't fall apart against high level things, or higher ranked things. Now, if a Defense set and a Resistance set are roughly tied against minions, they should be (more or less) tied in performance against +3 minions, or +2 Bosses. But that's not quite true.
Theoretically, you can stack enough Defense to do *more than* floor your target. Against an even level minion, 45% defense gives you 90% mitigation, and more Defense does nothing (its a form of pseudo cap). However, what happens against a +2 AV? If the intermediate floor didn't exist, a high Defense set could floor *that* to 5% also. But a +2 AV has a base 90% tohit on things without Defense. Flooring to 5% is 94% mitigation - better than against minions.
It would be hypocritical to ask for Defense to scale as well as Resistance for all low values of Defense, and to scale consistently better than Resistance for all high values of Defense. Therefore, the intermediate floor acts to ensure that Defense is never more effective against higher Rank and higher Level critters than it is against even minions - the level of accuracy that Defense is calibrated against.
If this causes certain powers to work less well than intended, then the powers should be changed, not the intermediate floor (although, I've suggested certain modifications to the intermediate floor for other reasons unrelated to this one). It probably hurts MoG more than MoG should be hurt. It might, or might not, hurt Elude more than it should. It depends. But its not because the "new floor" is an unintended consequence of the I7 scaler (and as I said earlier, it isn't a consequence of the I7 scaler at all, but a change made a long time ago that few people took notice of). The "new floors" is both a deliberate, and necessary, feature of the tohit mechanics to make sure Defense doesn't suddenly gain an unwarranted advantage over Resistance in the tohit formula.
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Do these defense scalings affect monsters as well players?
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Positron, Castle, Pohsyb, anybody else I might have mentioned it to in the past? I might have been joking before, but consider this my formal petition to change the name of this thing from the I7 Defense Scaler, to the I7 Critter Accuracy Scaler. It is going to be a lot easier explaining to everyone how the change to critter accuracy will help defense sets, than it will be explaining for the next six months *what* this change affects.
I know I'm not supposed to petition the devs in the forums, but this is a special case situation where I think a large chunk of the player base is about to get really confused about what's going on (in spite of fifty billion forum posts about it).
* This change does not affect Defense at all. Its a misnomer.
* This change does not alter any Player power, at all
* This change does not alter any critter power, at all
* This change does not, and cannot affect Player accuracy in any way
* This change does not, and cannot affect PvP in any way
* This change only affects Critter Accuracy. Only Critters are affected. If it doesn't have a Player directly controlling it, its a Critter.
* In I6, different critters had different Base tohit, based on Rank (LT, Boss) and Level Difference. In I7, Players have base 75% tohit, unless they are attacking another player, in which case they have base 50% tohit. Everything else has base 50%, period.
* In I7, instead of getting higher Base tohit, critters will now get Accuracy Bonuses instead, for all Ranks, and for all level differences up to +5 (beyond +5, they will start to get tohit bonuses again).
* Accuracy Bonuses are different from tohit increases in that tohit increases just add to Base tohit. Accuracy is multiplied after all tohit and defense is factored in. Accuracy is fair to Defense, relative to Resistance.
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Ok arcana answer this.....
Will slotting MoG and Elude with ANY defense enhancements be a waste with I7? From what we understood, just using those powers without any slots would give you the maximum defense you could possibly have, so slotting them with defense would do absolutely NOTHING.
Is that really the case? If so, perhaps the devs need to take away the ability to slot them with defense?
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Ok arcana answer this.....
Will slotting MoG and Elude with ANY defense enhancements be a waste with I7? From what we understood, just using those powers without any slots would give you the maximum defense you could possibly have, so slotting them with defense would do absolutely NOTHING.
Is that really the case? If so, perhaps the devs need to take away the ability to slot them with defense?
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Well they do help against defense debuffs since MoG has no defense debuff resistance. But since MoG is at least in the 70% range it already has plenty of room before it's debuffed to 45%.
The City of Heroes Community is a special one and I will always look fondly on my times arguing, discussing and playing with you all. Thanks and thanks to the developers for a special experience.
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Sweet! This is very welcome news. Now it just makes being an EA Brute that much more fun! Perhaps now I can play on a difficulty higher than the lowest... I was always a little miffed how Resistance worked against everything equally (95% resistance to damage is 95% resistance to any damage; it doesn't get reduced except by debuff) while Defense could be debuffed AND reduced by a simple advantage in levels. Sounds cool, I'll get to testing it as soon as this patcher gets done.
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My EM/EA brute was running on relentless since the early 20's and I solo'ed almost my entire way to 40. Are you guys sure you're building your toons right? Overload was a beautiful thing at 38, but only made it that much more fun for me. It was definitely doable before then with a good build.
On test, I'm experiencing good things... this heightens my enjoyment further. Thanks devs... 
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Ok arcana answer this.....
Will slotting MoG and Elude with ANY defense enhancements be a waste with I7? From what we understood, just using those powers without any slots would give you the maximum defense you could possibly have, so slotting them with defense would do absolutely NOTHING.
Is that really the case? If so, perhaps the devs need to take away the ability to slot them with defense?
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Slotting defense in either Elude or MoG will help counter high tohit buffs in PvP. In PvE, there are very few tohit buffs high enough to overwhelm either (DE quartz eminators would be one). And as EvilGeko said, it also helps with defense debuffs. MoG has no protection from defense debuffs, and SR has something they call defense debuff resistance but seems to have the same effect on defense debuffs as prayer does.
Edited typo
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Few questions have I. Others have probably asked, but until I have time to search all the way through;
Do these defense scalings affect monsters as well players? If so, there are several things that need to be 'tweaked' to be more defeatable.
Hamidon - Major defense versus everything, hard to imagine it's hide being even tougher.
Tank type AVs (Infernal, Brawler, Siege, Shadowhunter, Diabolique, etc.)
Many of the 'boss' type critters with already strong defenses like; Trolls, Frostfire, Pumicites, Vaz, Tsoo, Skyraiders, Malta, Devoured Earth, and Carnival of Souls.
Pets (like the guns Malta Engineers drop), as well as cairns, and swarms.
Simple solution is this, the higher the defense, the less health they require. High Health (hundreds of thousands) + Uncapped Defense = ugly problems.
The toughest part is not in attacking, but maintaining the attack long enough to wittle them down. If their defense is even higher (and many scrappers damage is way down) team wipes could be far more numerous.
Just want to be prepared in either way. Thanks in advance for your help.
[/ QUOTE ]hamidon does not have much defece at all.it is very easy to hit him.however he takes next to no damage from pretty much anything.he also has a butload of health and a scary regen rate.
i dont imagine this will change hammy all that much.
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Do these defense scalings affect monsters as well players?
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Positron, Castle, Pohsyb, anybody else I might have mentioned it to in the past? I might have been joking before, but consider this my formal petition to change the name of this thing from the I7 Defense Scaler, to the I7 Critter Accuracy Scaler. It is going to be a lot easier explaining to everyone how the change to critter accuracy will help defense sets, than it will be explaining for the next six months *what* this change affects.
I know I'm not supposed to petition the devs in the forums, but this is a special case situation where I think a large chunk of the player base is about to get really confused about what's going on (in spite of fifty billion forum posts about it).
* This change does not affect Defense at all. Its a misnomer.
* This change does not alter any Player power, at all
* This change does not alter any critter power, at all
* This change does not, and cannot affect Player accuracy in any way
* This change does not, and cannot affect PvP in any way
* This change only affects Critter Accuracy. Only Critters are affected. If it doesn't have a Player directly controlling it, its a Critter.
* In I6, different critters had different Base tohit, based on Rank (LT, Boss) and Level Difference. In I7, Players have base 75% tohit, unless they are attacking another player, in which case they have base 50% tohit. Everything else has base 50%, period.
* In I7, instead of getting higher Base tohit, critters will now get Accuracy Bonuses instead, for all Ranks, and for all level differences up to +5 (beyond +5, they will start to get tohit bonuses again).
* Accuracy Bonuses are different from tohit increases in that tohit increases just add to Base tohit. Accuracy is multiplied after all tohit and defense is factored in. Accuracy is fair to Defense, relative to Resistance.
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I think you've earned the right.
But in case you get booted, can I have all your Hami-Os??
Repeat Offenders
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Few questions have I. Others have probably asked, but until I have time to search all the way through;
Do these defense scalings affect monsters as well players? If so, there are several things that need to be 'tweaked' to be more defeatable.
Hamidon - Major defense versus everything, hard to imagine it's hide being even tougher.
Tank type AVs (Infernal, Brawler, Siege, Shadowhunter, Diabolique, etc.)
Many of the 'boss' type critters with already strong defenses like; Trolls, Frostfire, Pumicites, Vaz, Tsoo, Skyraiders, Malta, Devoured Earth, and Carnival of Souls.
Pets (like the guns Malta Engineers drop), as well as cairns, and swarms.
Simple solution is this, the higher the defense, the less health they require. High Health (hundreds of thousands) + Uncapped Defense = ugly problems.
The toughest part is not in attacking, but maintaining the attack long enough to wittle them down. If their defense is even higher (and many scrappers damage is way down) team wipes could be far more numerous.
Just want to be prepared in either way. Thanks in advance for your help.
[/ QUOTE ]hamidon does not have much defece at all.it is very easy to hit him.however he takes next to no damage from pretty much anything.he also has a butload of health and a scary regen rate.
i dont imagine this will change hammy all that much.
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Actually, for the record just about all the things listed above do not have "high" Defense. Many have significant Resistance, though.
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hamidon does not have much defece at all.it is very easy to hit him.however he takes next to no damage from pretty much anything.he also has a butload of health and a scary regen rate.
i dont imagine this will change hammy all that much.
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But that's not the reason it won't change Hami all that much. It's because this change only affects critters' accuracies, not our defense. It has no bearing on how hard it will be to hit a critter, regardless of whether it has defense or not. I'll second Arcana's petition - the name is going to be very misleading for a lot of people who don't obsessively post about (Arcana) or read about (me) these changes.
Though, one thing that might be interesting is depending on Hami's acc numbers, defense based sets may be able to make Hami miss once in a while now. That is, if they even changed his numbers, he may just have insanely high to-hit and acc regardless.
I still say that MoG needs to be changed to properly represent what Regeneration is and how it feels during play.
MoG should reflect an enhanced version of what the set currently offers and have most of its current design removed.
MoG: click power, should last 3 minutes on 10 (or maybe 12 min timer).
Only able to be activated when at 15% or less health, and provides an instantaneous 50% heal. Which is enhanceable by heal enhancements based on sched B scale.
1000% regen, enhanceable on sched B scale.
25% base resist to all (-psi since Devs don't like Psi resist too much, but it should stay in really) - enhanceable.
High magnitude protection from status effects.
150% base endurance recovery- enhanceable.
Drawbacks:
MoG negates any other form of regeneration, healing, and endurance recovery powers including passives, others within the /Regen set, and outside buffs.
After the power expires, you drop to 10% hp and 0 endurance, and cannot regain endurance or be healed for a breif period (10 seconds?).
Now MoG would never have to be discussed in a Defense scaling thread ever again 
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hamidon does not have much defece at all.it is very easy to hit him.however he takes next to no damage from pretty much anything.he also has a butload of health and a scary regen rate.
i dont imagine this will change hammy all that much.
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But that's not the reason it won't change Hami all that much. It's because this change only affects critters' accuracies, not our defense. It has no bearing on how hard it will be to hit a critter, regardless of whether it has defense or not. I'll second Arcana's petition - the name is going to be very misleading for a lot of people who don't obsessively post about (Arcana) or read about (me) these changes.
Though, one thing that might be interesting is depending on Hami's acc numbers, defense based sets may be able to make Hami miss once in a while now. That is, if they even changed his numbers, he may just have insanely high to-hit and acc regardless.
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Nope. Hamidon's attacks are untyped - meaning, no "smash/lethal etc" and ALSO no "melee, ranged, AoE" typing. This means no typed defense of *any* kind works against it, including super reflexes defenses, which are "typed" in terms of m/r/aoe.
Theoretically speaking, only "base defense" would work against Hamidon (the almost legendary "defense to all" defense) but I have no idea if any powers at the moment possess base defense (at one time, it was rumored that Elude did, as well as PFF, and Fortitude. I have no idea if any of that is true).
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Ah. I thought that the "untyped" referred to smashing vs. lethal vs. fire, etc. I didn't know it also applied to melee vs ranged vs aoe. Though part of me says there's something wrong with that. Hami's attack is very obviously AoE (many a raid wiped out by gaining Hami aggro).
What about Mito attacks? Are they untyped too, since they're Hamidon class?
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Slotting defense in either Elude or MoG will help counter high tohit buffs in PvP. In PvE, there are very few tohit buffs high enough to overwhelm either (DE quartz eminators would be one). And as EvilGeko said, it also helps with defense debuffs. MoG has no protection from defense debuffs, and SR has something they call defense debuff resistance but seems to have the same effect on defense debuffs as prayer does.
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Ok so if a person doesn't do any PvP, there's really no reason to slot either one, right? Because I can't really think of any serious defense debuffs in PvE, other than MAYBE DE quartz, but those are really rare).
Well.....at least that saves some slots.
Just so you know, you don't have to explain this to me in such detail. I'm quite sure I understand all the mathematics involved.
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Theoretically, you can stack enough Defense to do *more than* floor your target. Against an even level minion, 45% defense gives you 90% mitigation, and more Defense does nothing (its a form of pseudo cap). However, what happens against a +2 AV? If the intermediate floor didn't exist, a high Defense set could floor *that* to 5% also. But a +2 AV has a base 90% tohit on things without Defense. Flooring to 5% is 94% mitigation - better than against minions.
It would be hypocritical to ask for Defense to scale as well as Resistance for all low values of Defense, and to scale consistently better than Resistance for all high values of Defense. Therefore, the intermediate floor acts to ensure that Defense is never more effective against higher Rank and higher Level critters than it is against even minions - the level of accuracy that Defense is calibrated against.
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A good point, and one I had not considered. I merely assumed that since the original to hit was flooring at 5%, that was 90% damage mitigation for the hit. But since as you say the chance to hit normally is much HIGHER than 50%, the mitigation of THAT damage is also higher.
The question is, does the player base CARE that this is "not fair"? Is it more important that Defense and Resistance be "bashed to fit" the exact same parameters, or is the 5% to hit floor the 5% to hit floor, and not, "5% sometimes and not 5% other times"? Remember that we are not talking about a hard cap, as you said yourself. 45% Defense will protect against an AV or a Minion the exact same amount, since it does NOT floor the AV's to hit, and never would. 50% Defense, however, is no more useful than 45% against a Minion, but might give a bit more protection against an AV.
As I said, if this is "working as intended", then fine. However, Def and Res do not work the same, and don't cap the same. You can't really compare the "soft" cap of to hit to the "hard" cap of Resistance, as there are so many other things that can effect to hit, like debuffs. Plus, as you said in an earlier post, the "intermediate" floor check was only added in I4 to prevent the very problem I pointed out, of to hit going negative. If you look at the to hit equation as a single operation and not a means of balancing damage mitigation, maybe the proper answer is to floor it at an absolute 5% to hit.
I'm reminded of another similar issue, that I'm still not very sure about. I think that low level foes are supposed to have a penalty, instead of a bonus like high level foes do. This penalty, under I6 and previous, would obviously offer greater protection to Defense-based sets, at least up to the point where to hit is floored. For instance, if you have a foe in I6 with a -5% to hit penalty, and had 40% Defense, you would floor his to hit, for an 88.89% mitigation of damage. That's more than the 80% you would expect. And of course, I found that to be the case when playing my SR Scrapper, I was quite good at taking out huge numbers of greens and greys.
If I am correct, though, the original equation is still being used in I7, if the foe is lower level than you. Only higher level foes have been changed. I think I remember a dev saying that. If not, then obviously Defense-based sets will be hit more often by lower level foes, but the damage mitigation should be no worse than Resistance. OTOH, if I'm right, Def still has an advantage over Res. Against foes that do not give a lot of XP, but technically there is an imbalance.
Or is there not a penalty for low level MOBs? I'm not really sure, although I believe that buffs and debuffs are not resisted, and in fact are not resisted but increased, instead of reduced as with higher level foes.
Doesn't MoG provide like 70% resists as well as insane defense?
so really you're getting hit 100% more often only means 30% more dmg total.
take that down to playing normal foes and (not +5 AV's) and you're only taking 15% more dmg than before. (assuming 7.5% floor for even of near level critters). My opinion on that is that it's not game breaking.
Let's put things into perspective though, SR scrappers get 20% resistance from their passives to go along with their defense.
It's the combination of resist and defense that makes MoG great.
Overload would be crazy in the hands of a regen, who could stack dull pain with overload for large total hit points... thereby buffing all regen powers plus having insane defense.