Dark Melee & Soft Cap

There is a question that has been bothering me and I wanted to get a solid answer on. I know that the soft cap for Defense is set to 45%. Everything will have at least a 5% chance to hit you. What I am wanting to know is, if you were soft cap on your Defenses and strike the target with a Dark Melee attack (which provides a accuracy debuff I believe). Would the debuff matter? or could it drop the 5% lower?

It will not matter. After all defense and tohit effects are calculated, everything is forced to be between 5% and 95%. While some enemies will have a greater than 5% chanceto hit due to accuracy, no combination will ever drop the chance below 5% or above 95%.

Thanks for clearing it up.

Where that debuff really helps is when you are not "essentially" soft-capped.

I have seen a DM character reduce an AV down to "whiff" status by hitting it with a fully slotted Touch of Fear every time it cycled. Funny as heck.

ToF base stats : 1.32s cast, 8s rech, -11.25 tohit for 20s.

At the recharge cap (+400%), that's one ToF every (1.32 + 1.6) = 2.92s, for a total stack of 20 / 2.92 = 6.84 ToFs. Has to be rounded down to 6.
Slotted up, each ToF does -(11.25 * 1.55) = -17.44 tohit.
With AV resistance to debuffs (85%), assuming level 50 characters fighting a level 50 AV, we're looking at 6 * -17.44 * 0.15 = 15.7% debuff.

Suffice to say... That's a heavily skewed scenario towards the scrapper (recharge cap isn't attainable without lots of external buffs), and yet the debuff is still barely better than what a single luck insp would give you. You'd have to have significant other debuffs or defense buffs for the AV to be reduced to whiff status. It's really not worth it for a DM character to gut his DPS for such a tiny debuff.