What of Resistance?

And why is that? Because there are more defensive pools available to stack all that defense on top. Off course, lack of resist bonuses help. Caps are an issue, true, but even if they did not exist the issue would still be there.

Check your math really quick, Stars. I'm sure this is just an honest mistake.

I'm not sure how this is a response to what I said, which was a response to you pointing out that defense would always benefit a defense user more than a resistance user. Any resistance user who can hit the softcap, even probably just to the melee position, has much more going on against that position at least than a (typical) defense user does. They can get the same max benefit as the defense user (at least to capped positions) and still have their resistances underneath. (I say typicial because the typical "defense" powersets don't have strong base resists going on.)

I think you just made an honest flub which I thought you would see as soon as I quoted you. I was wrong.

I said:
You responded with:
The thing is, I am right. And so are you, in part of your statement.
Look at your ratios:
25 def = 50 res
45 def = 90 res
2 def = 1 res (this is where you make the mistake)
that last one should be
1 def = 2 res

You reversed the order you wrote the ratios, and I think that confused you. Sorry I wasn't clear originally, I was just trying to be humorous.

To further discuss the point, you mention that they were designed as if it was 1 def = 1 res. While in the back end mechanics that is kind of true, in the actual implementation, the defense bonuses are generally higher than the resist bonuses. I do not know if they average out to be twice as high, but I wasn't trying to be exact, but merely demonstrating that I thought it might have been better had the defense bonuses been lower than the resist bonuses.

The RES bonuses also aren't smoothed out like the DEF bonuses. DEF bonuses all follow a pattern now:

1) +S/L DEF, +melee
2) +E/N DEF, +ranged
3) +F/C DEF, +AoE

RES bonuses are still random and non-linked. A set may only give smash (Kinetic Crash), or cold (Winter's Gift), or negative (Scirroco's Dervish). Some are linked, but all of them should be, and the values should be doubled.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

OK went back and looked through it all and see what I did... no clue how I did it, my brain was thinking 1 def = 2 res and my brain kept telling me you wrote the opposite to that... long day at work i guess...

But the reason they are higher is not because they think they are worth more, but instead because they think it was not so dangerous to spread defense and gave the larger defense bonuses more often than the larger resist bonuses.

It is important to know the distinction of what the base values are because when the devs assign these things they tend to think in magnitudes not final values (they balance the final values but thats not what they think)

First they define what a small defense bonus is. then they define what a small resist bonus is. Then they do tiny versions of these.

Once all these are created they start handing them out but they hand them out based on what they understand or think is less risky to hand out, the fact that they give the small defense more often than the small resist, and almost always hand out tiny resists, is because they just think it's not a good idea to be giving away so much resist and figure the penalties of handing defense everywhere will make it not such a bad idea to hand that out.

Again, why does this matter? Because you have two battles to fight, one would be whether or not it's ok to hand out more resist bonuses, the other is that the existing resist bonuses are too weak in value compared to the defense ones. You could in theory aim for the second goal and may get lucky and get a global resist bonus buff as a result.

To be honest, though, if I was to make things "fair" I'd just go out and turn every single primary/secondary/epic/ppp defense granting power and convert it into an elusivity equivalent power. Elusivity does not stack on top of defense, it is not weak to -def although has equal weakness against -elusivity (that is nowhere in PvE) and it's not vulnerable to tohit buffs.

The result is that your only sources of defense will be pool powers, external buffs and set bonuses. At this point it's not so easy to softcap defense and defense stacking is equally beneficial to both, resist and "defense" (now elusive) sets.

It would be considered a nerf by many, but it would be a bit more fair and balanced.

That's an unfairness, yes, but you got to ponder if it's a good idea to go spreading that amount of resistance around just because they already made the same sin with defense. One wrong does not justify another, after all.

The only resist bonus you see handed out like candy is Psi resistance, and this is somethng nearly no one has natively AND is also a very rare damage type to encounter in PvE. This leads me to think that should the devs ever start handing more resistance they will not hand out smash/lethal resistance too freely as it's way too common of a damage type and also is available to all in a pool power making it even more dangerous to hand out. At least when they hand defense they know all pools that grant defense do so for all damage types so all defenses are at the same risk margin.

I think changing the RES bonuses would be a step in the right direction. Even if that was done, it would still be pretty hard to pick up any good RES bonuses. There are no bonuses or uniques that give RES to everything, unlike DEF. And the RES bonues that do exist are few and far between. I can't make any build without getting a bunch of DEF bonuses, but no build I make ends up having much more than a sprinkling of energy/negative RES. Even if the bonuses were coupled and doubled, you'd still have to go pretty far out of your way to get S/L RES (like knockback sets), and probably wouldn't even be able to get more than +20% max, and that may be a stretch.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Well, to be fair, there is one, but good luck getting it. (It has a defensive analogue too, and both IOs give +3% to their respective mitigation.]

Firstly, there is not a single set that relies solely on defense, so that issue is completely moot across the mitigation board. Resist and defense sets all have layers of mitigation.

Isn't that the point of this thread? Why is it more beneficial for a toon to stack defense when it already has 35-41% resistance to most dammage types, and no defense at all?

Saying in one post that resistance and defense are much more potent as their values increase, and then stating that it's better to stack defense from 0% upwards on a resist based toon solely through IOs and Pool Powers illuminates the whole point of this thread. Defense bonuses are too high and too frequent, resist bonuses are too low and too infrequent in the IO system-- as well as for inspirations and pool powers.

And of course defense stacks well with Invulnerability-- it's has an incredibly potent defense skill that scales with the amount of enemies nearby.

How about just a purple unique that eliminates the supression from attacking completely. That would be a fun one to track the prices on the market for.

/SR, (well not *solely* but I dont find the scaling rez as potent as my next point) and to throw it in the mix: what do you think of health bonuses (total hp) in the scope of increased resistance insofar as you can then take more damage, and they are reasonably abundant in set bonuses. On my dm/sr, I try to max it to make up for relative lack of rez. Seems to work well.

There would be no challenge to track the price of that IO. It would always sell for 2 billion, never 1 inf less, because nothing can sell for more than 2 billion. It would create a huge advantage in PVP.

At least until all four PvPers get one.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Same, I recently created a Dark/Elec scrapper for a weekly team night and was playing around in mids for a build. I realized now why I haven't played a resistance based toon in a few years and why my last 4 scrappers have been SR

LOL i was thinking the exact same thing, but substitute 2 for 4.

I could be so off base here, but I figured the fact that both the +res(all) and +def(all) IOs in the PvP sets being the same value informed us that the devs are much more comfortable nowadays with people having massive amounts of defense but not having massive amounts of DR, and why DR is so hard to come by in IO sets. Extreme defense, being subject to the random number generator, can outlast granite tanks at times, or be killed as fast as an /afk blaster, and the RNG is harder to game than a capped DR toon would be imo, and what I could imagine the opinion of the devs to be. Though Castle's response might be interpreted to contradict what I've always assumed about this subject.

Well, in the formative days of the game, Resistance was obscenely overpowered. This was due partly to defense being mechanically gimpy - it didn't properly adjust for enemies above minion status, or for higher level enemies, so you needed a *TON* of defense to be equivalent to a relatively easily acquired amount of resistance. It was also partly due to two resistance-heavy sets, Invulnerability and Fiery Aura, actually functioning mostly properly at the beginning, while most of the defense based sets were burdened with horribly flawed mechanics like exclusive armors and powers strictly inferior to pool powers. It wouldn't shock me to discover that there is some lingering mentality remaining among the devs that makes them very leery of potentially bringing resistance based sets back up, especially given that one of the two big winners of the old days, Invulnerability, is still quite awesome thanks to layered protections.

Looking back on those old days, it's kind of cool to see how far the game has come. Even the bad sets actually work properly these days, for example.

Hehe, looking WAY back to the days where my inv/em tank's biggest threat was not hitting ET because of the AOE melee would actually kill me on a map herd

Yup. Invulnerability tanks with perma-unstoppable were pretty good back then.

I've found that Tough + passive resistance at low HP is invaluable on my SR Brute.

As far as +hp goes, I find it solid when stacked with regeneration. It's not so hot when stacked in isolation with resistance. Interestingly, defense sets seem to have solid pairing of +hp and +regen at slots 2 and 3-- even within the same set. This is a great boon for defense builders.

I do like how damage resistance IO sets grant more mez resistance across the board. From a design perspective, it was ingenious-- acknowledging that damage resistance is affected by stacking mez far more that defense sets. The values are probably too low, aside from the 7.5% mez resist all (which SHOULD grant damage resistance, just as the 7.5% recharge LotG grants defense as well as its global bonus).

Maybe you were thinking now that just about every AT can achieve mitigation at or near tanker levels, yet have a much higher damage potential and/or better buffs/debuffs, why exactly should anyone play a tanker anymore?

At least, that's what I was thinking the other day as I was trying to catch up with where the game has gone since I last played and noticed posts about soft-capping defense and soloing AVs in just about every AT forum.

Actually, no. Set bonuses seem to have affected the envy that each of the specialist ATs have for the other two, and all of them have for the generalists, not one bit in either direction.

Maybe someone else mentioned this, but perhaps +Defense buffs are given out so freely on IO set bonuses is that there are so many Defense debuffs in the game.

I regularly monitor important stats with the Real Numbers monitor, and started watching defense recently. I noticed that many enemy groups have at least one mob with some kind of Defense debuff attack: defense goes down when you fight Crey, CoT, Arachnos, Council, and so on.

Guns, swords, radiation, Quicksand, etc., all debuff defense. Several of the defense debuffs also require no to hit (Quicksand, Radiation Infection). There are damage resistance debuffs out there (sonics, tar patch, Enervating Field), but they are less frequent. They are also very nasty when used against characters with no damage resistance, so they tend to be less prevalent.

While it's true that someone with soft-capped defense is hard to hit in the first place, you just need one lucky hit (or Quicksand or RI) to start a terrible defense cascade failure. Characters that depend on defense alone can die very quickly.

I'm not saying that there isn't an imbalance between Defense and Damage Resistance as it stands now, but it's easy to see how the devs could justify giving out lots of Defense bonuses considering how many Defense debuffs there are.

Most of the -DEF debuffs are in the low levels, which is really weird to me. Not that they don't exist all the way up through Malta and Knives.

But DEF "resists" -DEF in a roundabout way. It allows you to dodge it in the first place. Resistance is more susceptible to -RES, since it will hit a lot more often. DEF still has its cascading failure of course.

The biggest bonus is that DEF also allows you to dodge all other effects as well. If you have DEF, you get hit by -RECH debuffs less often. You get hit by holds, stuns, and sleeps less often. You get hit by slows, -RES, and -recovery debuffs less often. RES buffs don't do any of those things.

RES might be more "reliable," but there are a lot of advantages to defense, least of all being able to have effectively 95% mitigation to all damage on a squishy. Something tanks can't even generally maintain all the time.

My widow only dies to "bad luck," which usually only happens when she fights AVs or other very high-damage enemies. It's worth noting that those enemies would kill her just as fast, if not faster (since the most she'd be able to get would be 85% RES), if she was RES-based. And she'd get debuffed a lot more often too.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.