What of Resistance?

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.

It's funny you post this today. Just last night I was pouring through Mids trying to figure out the best new solo character to make when it occured to me that, unless I planned on spending on defense bonus IO's, that I would be playing sub-par to what I could be doing. I originnaly tried making a mids build for every tank armor type just to see what I liked best and could only come up with two real conslussions. Keep in mind I am not some numbers-guru for this game, I only know what I see.

Shield Defense: Offers massive damage bonuses and is able to pretty easily soft-cap melee. For a lot more money can soft-cap all three positional stats.

Willpower: Offers massive regen bonuses and has the same soft-cap situation as Shield Defense.

None of the other armor sets seem...I dunno...as nice after doing the numbers. Resistance based sets are better at lower level, but they pale in comparison to defense at high level. On the other hand, any AT can soft-cap all their defenses now for the right amount of money so it pretty much comes down to how much you really need tanks. I will still personally play a tank mostly for the great taunt and the 1000+ boost to HP, but really any AT can tank now it seems, assuming the player has the money needed to invest in the IO's to do it.

Conclusion? There's far too much defense available from Set bonuses.

There are 3 advantages of resistance that I know of:

1. Resistance always works, and is entirely predictable. No getting unlucky like defense sets.

2. Resistance provides resistance to resistance debuffs.

3. Defense buffs are fairly common in this game, whereas resistance buffs are rare (in particular sonics are super rare). This means that on many teams I run with, the whole team is at the defense soft cap, so resistance is more useful. This is particularly true on villains due to VEATs.

There's another advantage for resistance, if you consider what tohit buffs do to defense.

By nature I believe defense should be numerically more powerful than resistance, because resistance is always a fixed value and you'll get the same expected performance from it everytime ; meanwhile, defense will inevitably fail you at some point.

This isn't getting into individual powerset balance or IOs, just my opinion on the mechanics.

If you can build around 30%ish positional defenses on a resistance based toon (Fire/Dark/Elec Armor), which isn't terribly difficult, popping a small purple inspiration will make you a god, even in the toughest of encounters (STF, RSF, etc).

Sounds like that's the 'new' thing to do, too

It's my opinion that defense is only super god mode on characters that can achieve huge amounts of defense debuff res. Only a handful of sets can do that, with only protective powersets providing significant amounts on specific ATs.

Resistance offers solid performance, is hard to debuff, always works and is usually on sets that provide some kind of other mitigation, be it healing, regen, controls, or any combination therein.

I agree that +res is unfairly shafted in IO set bonuses. I agree that soft-capped defenses is amazing. I have a /shield scrap that is nigh unstoppable by anything short of defense debuffing AVs. Generally speaking though, I find res and def in normal play to be fairly well balanced. Def just peaks higher thanks to IOs. Res, on the other hand, starts out better and has a smoother leveling curve as opposed to def. It takes up until SO levels and like 8 power picks before SR even begins to show potential. Shields pretty much SUCKS defensively until you can get SOs and enough slots to fully slot all of your defense, and even then it's still pretty crappy until you can take pool powers where it improves. Of course it's a god once you're capped, but it still has fairly low def res unless you have enough recharge to stack the click power, take a toggle that does nothing for you other than some def res and use HOs to cheat your way to capped def res. Get one good debuff on you though, and you can say hello to defense cascade failure. Something a res set would almost never have to worry about.

I was thinking about this today.

I would really like to see more resistance based set bonuses.

I have an MA/SR scrapper at 50 with soft-capped positional defense and no resistance, and an MA/DA scrapper at 50 with moderate resistances but no defense.

What I find, and what I've always found, is that resistance (even 90% resistance) without defense gets whittled down steadily, unless there's additional mitigation (AoE fear, for example).

Pure defense, without resistance, can handle a handful of foes but any more than that and the 100%-damage attacks that do get through can cause a sudden and alarming drop in hps; I must always watch the health bar of a pure defense character.

I would say that my MA/DA scrapper is the more survivable, because of the mitigation from two auras that cause fear and stun. Without the auras, I would say that they are about even in survivability -- or rather, it would be fair to say that the soft-capped defense scrapper would be the better survivor 50% of the time.

The devs don't like furnishing ways to boost resistance, and I base this on watching the alterations to the invulnerability powerset over the years. Invuln tanks cannot significantly increase the 35% elemental resistance of the set using IO set bonuses.

Perhaps unpredictable incoming damage based on defense mitigation is more like dice rolling, while resistance is simple subtraction. The luck element is missing from resistance, and perhaps that's perceived as less fun.

I remember at the Very Beginning of this game that invuln tanks could be built up to be 100% resistant to all but psionics. Damage output was so awful for tanks back then (except for fire tanks) that I think invuln tanks deserved to be utterly invulnerable.

I got this idea from a thread currently in S&I forums, but in addition to any new sets including resist bonuses all the debt protection set bonuses should be removed and replaced with resist bonuses. Debt is meaningless at this point in the game and I feel we need more resist bonuses.

Mitigation? Soft caps? Guys, please, I don't read the forums for "rocket science", I read it for information. And while I DID understand what's being said, some people won't. So for the sake of those seeking information, enlightenment, and ways to build a better beast, make it a little easier for them to understand what your saying. And I agree; get rid of debt-protection in favor of +res. I'm well past caring about how much debt I have

If there were two things I'd like to see it would be:

-A higher resistance cap for most classes (scrapper 85,offensive squishies 80)
I say this because hitting the resistance cap of 75% means little to high level enemies, who basically go from killing you in one hit to killing you in 4 (which is very little time difference in an 8 man spawn). The res cap at 90 is high survivability, but it may be even more overpowered than the defense soft cap due to stability were it easy to achieve for everyone.

-IO's with higher resistance bonuses of more varied types, or with even higher bonuses but only to single damage types. (the goal being achievable resistance capping given enough money.)

I'm not sure how this would actually effect things though, as it stands defense sets benefit hugely from defense bonuses, and the resistance sets also benefit greatly from defense bonuses.

Perhaps something that would help resistance defense sets atleast would be generalized mez RESISTANCE to make up for the constant onslaught of debuffs a resistance based melee faces.