Skip Elude in the SR set? Why or why not?

I am one of those people that feels like he is in a foreign country when you guys start talking about soft caps and throwing numbers around. I WANT to understand... Can anyone explain it to me?

No kidding just about every T9 has gotten long in tooth and needs to be rebalanced.

Read the guide to defense in Arcanaville's signature block.

Ok, I will, thank you very much, guys. I love this community!

I just hope the guide is written for an infant to understand... :P

Well...MMO players are human beings after all.

It's somewhat understandable, but you still need the experience of getting your SR scrapper clock cleaned by Nemisis minions getting Vengence buffs from their dead Lts. My experience is that you've got to read/study a bit on the forums and Paragon Wiki, but you've also just got to go do it (sue me Nike, I dare you).

I'm 18 months into the game with my first toon, a DB/SR scrapper, and I'm still learning from doing.

And yet there was a recent thread in this forum subsection where posters were complaining that the ability of other sets to Softcap with IOs (most notably /Shield) steals much of /SR's thunder.

1. That's a vague and incomplete summary of what happened in that thread. Most of that thread was people who believe that in the power endgame, SR loses its thunder to Shield, not in most of the rest of the game.

2. The forums aren't the rule, moreso the exception. People who come to the scrapper forums are those who want to go that extra distance to make their characters unkillable; but at the same time you see a lot of newer players who are just looking for build advice.

There's some truth to it, but SR still has a few advantages in that area.


Firstly, SR's DDR is huge. You have high DEF under ideal situtations, and you mostly keep it even against debuffers.


Secondly, its relatively easy to softcap with SR without skewing your build unduly.


Thirdly, though they are often overlooked and go unremarked upon the scaling resists in the Autos do make you more survivable if the RNG puts some hate on you, which is a bit of a safety net. Granted, hybrid sets that have both DEF and RES have that same safety net all the time.


Quickness isn't omg amazing, but it is nice. A couple of other sets get the equivalent now, but its still a nice perk.

Practiced Brawler is either like or dislike based on preference, but it does offer very good status protection for an upfront flat END cost rather than a constant slow leeching toggle. Granted it used to be better when toggle drops were more common, but it's solid.

Until you hit real softcap, Elude gives you temp softcap from level 38 until whenever you get your build stable for key fights. Long before I softcapped, I took down a lot of bad guys on the power of Elude.


For me, SR is weak in the early game, curves up into a good place in the middle game, spikes in the endgame. However, other top-end builds in the endgame are over all stronger based on IO investment, utility, and various mitigation strategies.

Whenever I do an SR build I never "run" tough. I just put the +3def Steadfast in it and turn it off... let the set bonus do its thing.

When scrappers argue about performance, they are almost never talking about performance related to anything remotely near where the game's PvE content is balanced around. Most long time Scrapper forum posters understand that.

Its true that because SR focuses almost exclusively on defense, if other sets can soft cap they will then have an advantage over SR which now has less orthogonal protections to beef up. But at that point, we're talking about high end min/maxing, not powerset balancing. Whether every set should present the same ultra-high end opportunties to the min/max player is a separate debate, and one completely disconnected from normal game balance.

If anything, this *might* become an interesting topic in I19 when the Incarnate system launches. Otherwise its mostly just the way Scrappers roll. The Scrapper forum has been talking about min/max performance issues since almost the beginning. Its historically been the focus of many min/max discussions, even occasionally ones that aren't specifically related to Scrappers.

I run FF, FS, Evasion, Tough, Weave and CJ at all times. That 17% or so dam-res to S/L that tough provides stacks too nicely on the passive scaling dam-res for me to give up.

Same and I'm constantly converting blues to oranges and yellows and 'other' (depending a bit on what I am fighting atm) as well as running sprint for movement and stealth. A soft capped /SR running 20-40% resistance+tough+scaling resistance from the auto's is one hard target to take down.

The what? O.o

DDR matters, but it matters MUCH less than defense, particularly with the ability to choose which enemy groups you spend most of your time fighting. I describe my soft-capped Katana/Dark (and accurately I believe) as my most survivable Scrapper, even though defense debuffs are a serious Achilles Heel. I monitor my defense and base defense. When base defense goes red, that's my trigger to VERY quickly do SOMETHING - either stacking more Divine Avalanche or popping one or more purples. It's manageable outside of extreme cases. I almost never die from cascading defense failure unless I'm intentionally practicing with cascading defense failure. But I won't deny that it's an issue that you have to have a way of addressing.

In multi-billion influence min/max builds, sure. That's where a lot of the vocal forum population spends their time, and I was one of the people complaining. But it's where almost nobody on average spends their time, so borders on irrelevant to the game overall.

Tough is very worth running. One thing SR needs for better survivability is to be able to better survive a string of bad luck. Tough helps in that department, as does adding hit points.

I assume we're talking about the resistance:defense ratio. As a rule of thumb, two points of resistance is "equal" to one point of defense. Like many rules of thumb, it's overly simplistic, usually slightly misleading, and in edge cases highly misleading. Still, it's probably better than knowing nothing at all when trying to make resistance vs. defense decisions. And frankly, I think the 45% number is even MORE benign. It might not be the whole picture, but if you know that one thing, even if you don't understand all the exceptions and subtleties, I think you're way ahead of most people.

But maybe I just haven't seen and I'm not guessing how rules of thumb like this are being misunderstood and abused.

The 2:1 I'm referring to is the same one you're thinking about, and it was heavily abused. I can think of at least three separate ways:

1. People assumed this worked as an incremental rule. In other words, they assumed that if 2X resistance = X defense in total that meant it was safe to assume that adding Y defense to a build was the same thing as adding 2Y resistance to a build. So adding 5% defense is like adding 10% resistance. But the rule only works for absolute totals when it works at all, not incrementally. Adding 5% defense to something that has nothing is the same as adding 10% resistance. But adding 5% defense to an SR scrapper is worth way more than adding 10% resistance.

2. People assumed (and some still do) that this was a balancing rule. So they would compare powers and say that if (for example) SR is allowed to have 5.625% passives, then Invuln should be allowed to have 11.25% resistance passives to be "fair." Ignoring typing, stacking, powerset balance issues, and the fact that passives and toggles aren't even balanced that way even within the same kind of mitigation: all defense toggles don't have the same value, all resistance passives don't have the same value.

2a. Corollary: A lot of people still think this means resistance inspirations are broken.

3. People assumed (and some still do) that this should be a design rule and apply to critter debuffs.


Its true that these days a lot more forum readers are mechanics-savvy, and are less likely to fall into such traps, but I think the 45% rule is starting to reach players less aware, and they are falling into the same kinds of traps: that 45% is the "target" you should reach for (ignoring defense debuffs which will knock you off the floor), or that nothing has higher tohit (ignoring pets and turrets, and also sometimes tohit buffs which are more plentiful on the red side than the blue side: something that catches new red-side players off guard sometimes). And while it took a lot of effort to correct this misconception, I'm starting to see a slight uptick in people who don't know all the background and believe that 45% knocks you down to the tohit floor of 5% not aware of the effects of accuracy on the tohit "floor."

(I just picked this version of the same sentiment by several posters- because I liked it best)

I wonder at this point of view in general.

The game seems set up around people taking advantage of Inventions, they are your ultimate rewards for Task Forces - for Story Arcs, etc. They have missions to teach you the system, the whole in game economy is built around inventions. Random Recipe and Salvage drops, and so on.

Obviously the idea is that eventually players will use them more. Not that players will use them less.

Yet there is this contention that a full IO build is something only a tiny group of players aspire to.

Isn't that a curious thing? Is the game so easy that people dont "need" IO's? Or the in game information isn't clear enough (Maybe because its all text in a decreasingly text based gaming culture) ?

While I can fully understand the Idea of not balancing the game, or powersets around IO's... Wouldn't ideally it be balanced around both Casual AND "Elite" builds.

By way of example - If Elude in this case had +regen instead of +recovery, with no other changes ...

Wouldn't it then benefit BOTH the SO builds AND the IO Softcap builds?

Well, Quickness, not needing Hamidon enhancements to get capped DDR, and being substantially cheaper to soft-cap would be three reasons to pick SR. Even those of us that do dabble in Inventions can still flinch at putting hundreds of millions of inf into a character, especially if it's an alt.

They are!

At least, until they start providing resistance to drains and debuffs. Then they'll be good -- still worse than a Luck numerically, BUT you can pop one after you're debuffed.

And because not every powerset goes with Shields.

True but once you know how to use the market to your advantage price is merely a formality. It might take you a month or two more but the end result would be a character that is superior in just about every aspect.

That is a good point, and makes me wish BaBs would figure out a way around that issue. I can't imagine how a Katana or Claws/Shield character. Both would probably easily smash the 300dps mark.

Yes, the game IS so easy that you don't need IOs. I suspect the vast majority just level up their characters with whatever comes to hand, then retire. Of the people who like playing their 50s, probably a lot of them aspire to good IOs, but probably very few people understand things like how to soft cap defense and cap defense debuff resistance on a Shield Defense character, which is what makes it (in my opinion) stomp a bit on Super Reflexes. Very few people have the budget to do it, even if they understand how. So the percentage of Shield players in game that are running soft-capped builds with capped DDR is probably minuscule.

Yes, that would be the ideal. But as a dev, I'm going to spend most of my balancing effort on the perhaps 99% of players that don't have multi-billion level 50 min/max builds, not on the 1% of players that do. Even with that in mind, I think they've done a very good job of balancing for the 1% of players as well. But it isn't and shouldn't be their focus.

Yes, but it could easily be argued that this would be overpowered. Super Reflexes is already an EXCELLENT set, and Elude probably provides good benefit already for the vast majority of players, all those people who haven't already built for 45% defense to all. You don't buff good powers in excellent sets just because the powergamers find that power largely useless (which brings us back to the 99% vs. 1% idea). You buff the powers and sets that are lagging, like what they did with Fiery Aura and Martial Arts.

I wouldn't say "easily". My DPS template builds put Dark Melee at 253 DPS with saturated Soul Drain, and Katana at 242. Katana will benefit more from the AAO buff, but I think it will just be in the same neighborhood, not be smashing records. Or we could compare to Broad Sword. I have Broad Sword at 212 DPS. The Pylon thread has BS/Shield at 236. Scale that up and you have 269 DPS. Let's call it upper 200s, possibly hitting 300 DPS on a dedicated DPS build that we probably won't see outside of the test server. But I haven't done any calculations specific to Katana/Shield, so I could be wrong.

Claws I think is even less likely to make a mark. I have it at 226 DPS, that that's with a bunch of Follow Up stacking, which means it won't benefit as much from the AAO buff. I'm guessing mid 200s, nothing special. Still, that's great DPS, plus all the fun attack options of Claws, plus Shield Charge. I bet it would be a hoot to play.

"The game" isn't balanced around anything. That's a colloquialism that creates traps like this. Once you get more specific, these questions tend to evaporate.

The difficulty of critters relative to their reward and commonality is balanced around mostly SO builds, and to some degree on average slotting patterns in the game. It has to be, because a critter cannot get stronger based on how strong the player is. If a critter is made to be of a particular level of difficulty, it will be harder against players weaker and easier against players that are stronger. That's unavoidable. So you have to pick a target: the PvE experience can't really be "balanced" around two entirely different power levels. The difficulty slider is there to help smooth this out: stronger players can call up higher difficulty. But that's not the same thing as "balancing" the game around two different levels of power. Even without the difficulty slider, players with more power can just go fight more stuff, although they will probably have to do it in hazard zones rather than instanced missions. And they will earn more rewards.

Individual powersets *are* balanced around both low and high levels of slotting to some degree, but its a different kind of "balancing." In general, the devs try to make sure that no powerset exceeds certain (very high) levels of performance regardless of slotting opportunties, and also the devs try - with less success - to make sure all powersets have similar but not necessarily identical levels of opportunities to benefit from high-end power enhancement opportunities.

But the devs explicitly do not attempt to make sure that every powerset will end up with the same level of performance after min/maxing to the greatest possible degree. First because they honestly don't care all that much, and second because the amount of work that would be required would be extremely high for minimal benefit, and thirdly because given the tools available to them attempting to do so would almost certainly ripple down to the lower levels of performance in undesirable and unnecessary ways (some players think that already happens now, but they are almost always wrong about that perception).


Balancing is not a "thing." Balancing is a term that collectively represents dozens of different individual things the devs do to moderate, constrain, normalize, or target performance. A while back I described the basics of PvE balancing and also listed over a dozen things the devs do that are technically "balancing" and Castle suggested publicly that even that list was incomplete.