What of Resistance?

Did not read the whole thread, but was looking at some of this the other night myself and I came to the opposite conclusion.

1.) Any AT can pretty much softcap through pool powers, APPs (alot of squishies get a basic armour), and set bonuses. So resistance characters have a advantage.

My Invul scrapper has 25-30% defenses (BEFORE Invincibilty). Also has 70% SL and 30-40% energy and element resists. Jumping into a big mob will softcap my defense AND what little does get through, gets reduced further my resists. With Siphon life (dark melee) and the heal globals in health, health, and regen bonuses, he heals back good too. He is a good all-around.

Defenese based sets are one-trick wonders, and have no way to mitigate the 5% that will still come in when soft capped.

For clarity's sake I am not calling for across the board buffs. I'm just saying that would be preferable to what was suggested earlier, which was reworking the entire defense system we have. If we were starting from zero, maybe it could be done better. But take a long hard look at PVP if you want to see what happens when we decide to build anew something that basically works already. Not that I mind new PvP. I didn't mind old PvP either. But I can't find anyone who thinks the changes have grown the PvP audiance. I'm not looking to repeat that sort of thing in regulal game play.

I'm just saying look, we enjoy a wonderful diversity of options in this game. I can't think of an MMO that has such variety in it's classes. But if you start smashing down the outliers, then you sort of push people who want to perform at the peak of the game's challenges down very narrow roads. It's a path just as harmful to our wonderfully diverse game as power creep would be.

Obviously, the decisions about Defense were well thought out, and have been for a long time. If they weren't, there is just no way they would have made VEATS the way they are, for example. A couple of them can soft cap an entire team without even using IOs. Clearly, defense is working the way they want it to. And again, there are more than a few enemies that just utterly ignore it, so I think it's okay if it is very good aside from those kryptonite mobs.

The real problem is that it's so much easier to cover yourself when only dealing with three positions for defense, rather than having to use typed resistance, which requires a much broader amount of protection, and has less options. I agree with people's assesments that in general, resistance is undervalued. I'd like to see it made better regardless of what happens to defense. I think that way back when this was all designed there was the thought that since resistance was less vulnerable to the vagaries of the RNG, that it's consistancy would balance it out against the randomness that defense offers. I don't believe however that it played out that way, just that someone thought it would.

I really think in this specific scenario a boost to resistance is called for. Or at least far more called for than a nerf to defense. And I should point out that I have and play characters at the far outliers of both types of protection, and I do enjoy and do well with both of them.

I'd like to start by reaffirming that I doubt that the devs wish to revisit defensive scaling at this point in time, and that there are compelling reasons for them not to do so. However, there's something in what you said that kind of poked me right in the eye.

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Originally Posted by Blood Spectre But if you start smashing down the outliers, then you sort of push people who want to perform at the peak of the game's challenges down very narrow roads.

Isn't an outlier, by definition, a narrow road to a performance peak? Hammering down outliers creates a broad, flat performance band that doesn't privilege one particular choice above others.

Let me be clear that I don't have any objection to optimizing play, and I don't have a problem with performance disparities created by intelligent choices. What I do think is unhealthy is when certain choices lock you completely out of certain bands of performance, no matter what choices you make from then on, especially if those choices are irrevocable and frequently made in a state of ignorance as to their consequences. Since the alternative to this basically amounts to "you should have read the forums before you rolled your first character" and/or "you should never roll this combo, even if you like the sets, because it will always suck", I don't think it's an unreasonable line to draw.

(I also note that this line does not translate to "everybody should be able to solo at +4/x8 or nobody should". What it does mean is that any AT/set combo should have some route into a high performance band, whether that be via soloing, teams, or some other context. There are several ways in which this goal is arguably undermined - a few that spring immediately to mind are the supremacy of AoE over ST, the ongoing issues with offense/defense/assist specialist ATs who may or may not be overpaying for their specialties, the design of the Mastermind AT as a complete team in miniature, etcetera.)

The only way I think they could make Defense less effective without hampering gameplay to a huge degree is to cap defense to 40% (though, let the extra beyond that eat up debuffs) on Scrappers and Brutes and 35% on everything else while simultaneous introducing a lot more and bigger resistance bonuses into sets. This would allow current build tweakers to get the same levels of mitigation by layering defense and offer different paths for other toons. I don't think increasing Scrappers' resistance cap would hurt either. In fact, I wouldn't be opposed to Tanks getting theirs bumped up to 95% to match the mitigation of 45% defense.

I was 90% done writing this post and I hit Back, losing all of it. Grrr... Let's try this again... this time, with Notepad!

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Originally Posted by BlackBellatrix I know that with Adrenalin Boost and the RAs, on my Empathy duo, I get past the recovery cap but when I Nuke, it treats as if it takes the amount of recovery off my whole buff amount rather than just my Cap.

I said could to emphasize that I could be wrong. Since I don't know how it is implemented, it could go either way. Until this knowledge is made available to us, we can't jump to conclusions about how it would work. It's a very real concern.

(I just thought of a way to test it, followed by the realization it wouldn't work due to diminishing returns in PvP. D'oh!)

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Originally Posted by BlackBellatrix I'm not sure that's neccessarily a bad thing but I could be wrong in terms of what the new expansion will bring for challenging content. I know releases has said that our end game characters will be able to get even MORE powerful so hopefully they come out with my challenge. My Fire/Kin with soft-capped S/L defense is much more sturdy than I think his role as a 'support' character would neccessitate. I know my Archery/MM Blaster will have little to worry about when I soft cap his Ranged Defense as well.

As I mentioned before, a character dropping from 45% def to 40% def would require 50% res to achieve the same mitigation as before. That means for the cost of 1 power (CJ) and 1 IO (Steadfast) you'd need to get +50% res. I highly doubt the devs would ever make it that easy to stack that much resistance. Remember, characters dropping from 45% to 35% would need 75% res. (To make things worse, it would make some sets unable to attain the same mitigation. Invuln, for example, would be pretty badly hit by this. It could require as much as 85% s/l res.)

Further, just because you'd have the same mitigation doesn't mean it would be identical in gameplay. One big example I can think of off the top of my head is debuff admitance. A character would be looking to soak up two to three times as many end drains, slows, etc. The worst of all of them would be def debuffs (which would make cascade failure much more of a problem) and mezzes (that would normally be deflected).

(There was something else, but I can't remember what it is. )

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Originally Posted by BlackBellatrix I just consider it more minor than other potential changes like removing/reducing IO set bonuses or raising the native hit chance of mobs. I do think Res caps for the ATs should be more like 95% for Tankers, the current 90% or even 85% for Brutes and 85% for Scrappers, if they do add more Res bonuses.

Okay, it would be a minor change to make, but the implications on gameplay would be anything but minor.

Again, I vehemently disagree with raising the res caps due to the non-linear way def/res scale in this game. It's just asking for trouble.

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Originally Posted by BlackBellatrix Doh! I feel so retarded.

Don't worry about it - defense mechanics aren't exactly intuitive.

Yeah, I've never been a fan of including the mob 50% base hit chance. I consider their miss rate as baked into their average damage delivery. I like to express damage mitigation as how much of what is delivered you actually mitigate or cancel, which means it doesn't include that 50% chance, because that's part of the delivery.

It may be worthwhile to consider the way defense and resistance scale in terms of equivalent regeneration, which scales linearly. That is, when you add +100% to your regen rate, you can hold steady against twice as much incoming damage as before, and can survive twice as long against any fixed amount of incoming damage greater than your hold-steady point. Below about 25% defense or 50% regeneration, +def and +res compare poorly with +regen; after that point, things go through the roof. Note that resistance from powers tends not to reach 50% resistance to most damage types, while defense from powers quite regularly goes well above the 25% point.

Of course, as res debuffs are resisted by resistance, resistance fails linearly while defense fails exponentially (even worse than that, in fact, as reduced defense increases your exposure to further defense debuffs).

It would be interesting if the developers had started from a position of choosing an equivalent regeneration cap and then balancing power curves around that cap. This would have had many effects on the resulting game, the most obvious of which is that it would be possible to design balanced encounters (that is, encounters that would be equally difficult to overcome via any combination of passive mitigation) that no character could possibly survive on any amount of passive mitigation, such that active mitigation through healing, mez, positioning, debuffs etcetera would be necessary in certain situations. It would surely be a very different game.