Rage favors resistance toons over def

Whether the fact that EA has a heal (highly contributive though variable with number of nearby targets) and endurance drain (virtually useless for mitigation) accounts for the fact that it has only marginally more DDR than Invuln is probably up to debate. Does the fact that EA has a heal on a 60 second base recharge really make up for the fact that EA has both lower defenses, lower resistances, and lower DDR? Energy Drain is a pretty decent heal (though that depends heavily on the number of targets around) but EA is still pretty dependent on defense as its primary mechanism of survivability.

From what we can tell from the general placement of DDR, the varying quantities are given out to sets in rough equivalence to the amount of defense they have natively, and therefore, if we operate under the assumption that all sets are balanced, DDR would similarly scale with the amount of native defense that each set has.

Of course, as you probably know, I'm an advocate of Castle being substantially more liberal with debuff resistances than he has shown a predilection for being, so anything I say here is probably going to show that prejudice rather strongly, not to mention that I, personally, believe that EA is still a bit too weak even after the Energy Drain improvement (I'd love to see Conserve Power get the Energize treatment and have it be turned into a 20 second 7.5% +def or 25% +res buff on a 180 second timer with the token end redux still there to prevent breaking the cottage rule; adding a little bit of energy damage to nearby enemies would also be an interesting addition but not entirely necessary).

Actually, it will affect them in a roughly identical manner. Sets with a lot of defense suffer a proportionately larger decrease in survivability when affected by a defense debuff as a resistance based set affected by an identical defense debuff. The reason for this is that mitigation from defense (and resistance) increases as you get more defense. Reducing 45% defense to 40% defense results in a doubling of incoming damage whereas reducing 0% defense to -5% defense results in a 10% increase in incoming damage. If the defense debuff were resistable, each set would, for the most part, be affected in a roughly identical manner thanks to the way Castle has allocated DDR.

If you're aiming for each of them receiving roughly the same level of decreased survivability on a percentage scale, then the answer is likely yes, with an acceptable degree of variance (though EA might be a bit of an outlier... I need to get a hold of Arcana's defense spreadsheet again so I can play with those numbers...).