Quick Question about defense.

44.6 is what it is. You'll get hit 8% more then if you had 45% defense. Is that enough to solo av's and pylons? Yes, if you have aid self and some +hp... you need +hp and a heal (or really really good regen... or insperations) at 45%, too.

Pylons happen to fire ranged attacks only, so ranged defense is all you need for them. For AV's you'd need melee and AoE defense also.

Only you can really answer that. But the correct way to look at it is that most things you will attack have base 50% chance to hit. So 44.6% defense means they will only have 5.4% chance to hit you. The best you can do is go down to 5.0. So you're being hit 5.4/5.0 = 1.08 times more often than the best possible defense you can get - i.e. 8% more. You should always evaluate defense by looking at the amount of damage incoming, not the amount of damage being avoided, because that's the damage that will kill you.

Also keep in mind that some things debuff defense. Even people who soft cap will often try for some extra buffer to deal with debuffing. Things with moderate resistance to defense debuffing will often try for as much as possible above the soft cap if they can get it, because under debuffing they are likely to lose several points of defense. If you happen to be SR, then you're likely to have massive defense debuffing and only need a couple of points of defense to hedge against all but the highest levels of debuffing.