What of Resistance?

Actually, it's still quite clear-cut; the math is just more complex.

That depends. Specifically, it depends on how much of each mitigation type you already have. Whichever you have more of may make a big difference in which one helps your survival more.

The devs have always seemed loathe to allow people who already have DR get a lot more. In contrast, they seem comparatively willing to let people who have no defense get a fair bit of it, and a people who have a lot of it get a lot more. All you have to do is look at defensive vs. resistance set bonuses in IOs to get a feel for that.

This is supposition, I've always figured this is because DR "always works" in the sense that there's no random behavior involved in its mitigation, while even being defense capped you can still get slapped silly if the RNG doesn't come down on your side.

Not only that, but it's much easier and more frequently broken through by things like def debuffs and tohit buffs. Autohit powers(Romulous' Nictus, Chill of the Night) are more common than unresistible damage (Manticore's Teleport Arrow).

Agreed.

EDIT: Dangit...forgot to add the "No, there are no current plans on changing this." anti-hyteria disclaimer.

A very few are marked Ignore Resistance. The vast majority are Resisted, however.

So...wait. You agree that there are far too many options for Defense from set bonuses, but aren't going to change it?

May I ask why? Or at least can you tell us why there are far fewer options for Resistance?

This interests me as well.

Edit: More specifically i'm interested in why resistance options are far more limited.

My guess would be that it is either his personal opinion that there are too many options for defense which is not necessarily shared by his colleagues, or that he feels that there should have been less of that sort of thing from the very beginning but now reducing those would constitute a major nerf to far too many characters.

Most certainly, which is why I'd like to see orange pills increased.

The effect of a single small purple for Ninjitsu, Energy Aura, Ice Armor, Super Reflexes, Invulnerability, Shield Defense, et. al. is far more potent than a large orange pill on ELA, Dark Armor, and Fire Armor.

Defense sets that I play are able to buy more mitigation from the store than my resist toons can get randomly from killing bosses. That's absurd.

Example: Manticore's Teleport Arrow (may be wrong but I think the knockback and damage are both non-resistible)

I think he just wanted to make sure people know he is not planning on nerfing IO defense.

I would not be so sure about GR content being loaded with ToHit and -def, though.

A bit of both.

does this mean that there will be efforts to add pump 4 and pump 5 resist buffs to upcoming IO sets? Or will that just get a Shut up Sai?

Defense sets that you play can likely achieve more average mitigation from their defense powers than your resist characters can get from their resists alone. This comparison is largely only valid within the same AT, and isn't counting things like attacks that bypass either, such as "positionless" attacks against SR or Psi against Invulnerability.

My point was that defense is pretty much allowed to achieve higher heights, period. The whole thing with DR inspirations is just a manifestation of that.

Fundamentally, your "resist toons" (which are actually not really existent now Electric Armor has a heal/regen power) have the same access to +defense as everyone else. If you aren't nuts about how they perform you can always slather defense all over them. Indeed, Defense and +regen or a self heal stack very nicely with solid resists. Just ask my Invuln Scrapper!

I don't know if this is the reason they consider important, but if it's unwise to have "too much" of one, it's even worse to allow both to have "too much" available. If you have easy access to high defense and high DR, you drive everyone's net mitigation up multiplicatively.

If they had to make just one of them widely available, I actually prefer they made it defense. Positional defense always just comes down to three positions, while even after the recent set bonus pairing, resistance still comes down to five categories (L/S, F/C, E/N, Psi and Toxic). Even if they oddly combined Psi and Toxic into one category, positional defense would win out on ease of build.

Also, more characters have access to more sources of positional defense, even if they don't have mitigation powers in their powersets. Things like Hover/CJ, Weave, various PBAoE buff powers like Steamy Mist and Bubbles. There are a lot of places that have defense already. (It seems likely that removing or reducing that existing defense to make room for +defense set bonuses would be received extremely poorly by those who do not use IOs.)

So for the sake my own characters, I prefer that defense be the one there's "too much" of. Even if they are characters who depend on a lot of resistance in their powersets.

The important set bonuses to increase are the +movement ones. They should all be bumped up by 50%.

(Hey, its important to me... )

I always thought they should add half the resistance value of all the others to each resist bonus.

If something gives 1.88% Res to Fire/Cold, it should give 0.94% Res to all the others.

I was amazed when they did that (to a limited extent) with Defense, since defense was already ubiquitous, but as an Inv player, I do appreciate that they did it.

I am still moderately confused how 1 Def = 2 Res, but all the set bonuses seem to be designed as if that formula was inverted.

You got it the wrong way, it's 1 Res = 2 Def (25 def is like having 50% resist, 45 def is like having 90% resist, etc.)

Looking at IOs magnitudes, I think the issue is precisely that this was not accounted for. If you look at a Tiny Smash/Lethal resist bonus is magnitude .0063 and a Tiny Smash/Lethal defense bonus is also .0063. Both use the Ones multiplier, though, and I think thats the biggest issue.

For all we know about balance, to be fair, the resist bonuses should be twice as strong as the defensive equivalent.

That is besides the point that they handed over way more def bonuses than resist bonuses.

No matter how you paint it fact is that defense benefits defense sets much more than it will ever benefit a resist or heal based set.

Invuln is mostly a defense set. It has some resistance (specially for smash/lethal) but it's mostly defense.

Whoever made the set bonuses for defense and resistance went to the same school as you.

That depends entirely on how much defense you can get, and what AT you are.

With the right builds on a non-tanker, you can potentially achieve higher defense mitigation than any amount of resistance will ever give you, because of the lower resistance cap.

Not sure why you say that, set bonuses were designed on a fashion that assumes 1 def = 1 resist.

The amount of distributed defense, though, shows that whoever designed it (it may not necessarily be Castle) also figured that handing out defense was less dangerous than handing out resistance.

To an extent it's true. If a blaster caps defense, but gets hit by a single -def attack, the cascading failure will likely negate it all. A foe with any to-hit buffs also would eat through that defense as if it was not there.

With resistance, well, it's an inherent nature of resistance to resist resistance debuffs and other than irresistible damage nothing pierces through resist.

In the other hand, resistance tends to cover for part of mixed attacks, while defense can mitigate the full attack if it just happens to contain the type. But it does sound less dangerous to hand out a lot of def bonuses than hand out resist bonuses.

The problem really comes when builds that already relied on defense and therefore had defense debuff resistance, stack all this extra defense on top of their defenses. The entire defense debuff hole is null against these builds.

There are other reasons the devs hand out more def than resist when they do, example being in inspirations. The reason is that extremely low amounts of defense may amount to an intangible difference while even 5% resistance will make a tangible (albeit insignificant) difference on every blow. This was an old logic the devs used, though, and after GDN seemed to have been abandoned (look how weak pool defenses are.)