Skipping Lucky and Evasion?

If I skip Lucky and Evasion in SR, those are the AoE defense, what is really going to kill me?

I'm doing a BS/SR toon and I'd really like to get a few more powers from the pools. I don't really see a lot of AoE in the game. Freak Tanks, sure, but how much damage could they really do?

Alot of attacks happen to be pbaoe, targeted aoe etc. Much more than you realize and it will get worse as you level. You likely confuse various melee or ranged looking powers for being melee/ranged when they are really AoE.

SR is a hungry secondary, you really want to take 7-8 of the powers from it.

Also skipping Lucky and Evasion will lower your scaling resistances and defense debuff resistance.

As Lohenien mentioned, you're not only losing AoE defense but also losing DDR. I've started to list factions that get significantly harder with no AoE def and lack of capped DDR, but then realised it'd probably be faster to name the few factions against which AoE def and/or capped DDR doesn't improve your survivability...

In other words, you will be truly self-gimping yourself should you decide to go that route. If you want a positional defense set that has more powers that are "skippable" go with shields.

Well, rats. But it's what I assumed. Getting the extra pool powers was a luxury anyway. Teammates can forget me teleporting them to the door, that's for sure.

taxi is not a scrappers job. If you were going for those powers, I would suggest making tp your travel power. If you were going to sacrifice anything from SR the only 2 that I would ever think about skipping would be quickness and elude. If you are going for softcap, elude is kinda redundant. Quickness is great to get a god attack chain going, but not an absolute necessity.

Well, assuming the Devs are still doing the heavy data mining that supposedly drives periodic adjustments, if Elude has been rendered redundant they'll eventually notice and maybe decide to do something about it.

I still carry it on my soft-capped MA/SR 50 mostly out of nostalgia for the good old days of perma-elude, but I very rarely ever click on it; if I'm hosed without it already its not going to make a difference. If I somehow managed to get completely DEF debuffed into an unworkable place or somehow got END drained badly it would probably make the difference, but otherwise its just a mule for another I/0 set...and even then I could carry the same load on one of the positional toggles (where the recharge aspect of the set would be wasted, but oh well).


As far as AoE is concerned...just to reenforce whats already been said, you can't afford to not have it. AoE damage tends to be lower on average but it's more prevalent than is obvious from animations alone. Before I had Evasion when I went down it was usually either from AoE or non-positional Psi (or, you know, just getting into scrapper lock mode and going down swinging because I was too aggressive for my own good). Mixed message aside, seriously, AoE DEF is needed.

Throw me in the "elude won't be changed" camp.

I just finished leveling an SR to 50 (a brute, but still pretty comparable), and was reminded of what a pain it is to level up. Near the end, when you get softcapped, its a different story, obviously, but that is true of any powerset.

But the set basically only has defense and you need almost every power to make the set survivable, with a tier nine that really is redundant, and it comes late in the game, at the only point when you usually don't even need extra defense. With IO's that now allow any secondary to get very high defense numbers, sr is really at a disadvantage imo.

To make sr more competitive, I'd suggest one or more of the following changes. Adjust the tier nine into something more useful, possibly offering other forms of mitigation rather than just more defense. Lower the sets end costs. Lower the number of powers required to make the set survivable, atm you pretty much require 7. Maybe combine the ranged and aoe toggles into one, which would improve the end costs of the set substantially and maybe a new power could be added to give the set a bit more layered mitigation like pretty much every other competing set.

As far as Elude goes, I'd like to see scaling resists added to it like the auto powers get. It would help in those situations when defense is failing, for whatever reason (Enemies with high accuracy attacks, like Total Focus or Knockout Blow. Man Statesman hurts when he hits with that). It would allow you to get higher levels of resistance earlier, where they may actually mean a difference between life and debt against hard hitting attacks.

I think that those attacks are the reason defense fails, in this game. Yeah, it's great if you don't get hit, but higher ranking enemies get accuracy bonuses, and if they use an attack that naturally has higher than base accuracy, it's even worse. Sure, you can floor their to hit values to 5%, but if they have 120% accuracy, it goes up to an 11% chance to be smacked down, and with no resistance and enough attacks coming at you, you will get hit and you will get hit hard. A bad streak against hits like that can easily 2-shot you. It's been consistently happening to me on my NW. Just about every downgraded AV (IE, I'm fighting them as EBs, but they have AV level abilities) has managed to kill me at least once. Very frustrating, as my friends in the RO global channel could attest to.

Personally, I'd like to see SR get some minor resistances in the auto powers that are always there and are unenhanceable. For instance, most auto powers offer 7.5% resistance to whatever they are geared for. Giving SR and similar sets even 5% unehanceable resistance, from the start, to combine with whatever scaling resistance they get, would help a lot with defense failure.