Could a kind sould please explain soft cap and hard cap to me?

I'd rather have more information than be missing some crucial piece someone decided wasn't important because it might hurt my widdle brain. Nine times out of ten I'm just going to be asking about it later anyway.

Like I said, it is widely established that the defense softcap is 45%, and the reason it's soft and not hard is because there are a handful of situations (as I stated in my original answer, barring defense buffs and/or enemies with increased to-hit) where it won't effectively cap your defenses. What is this crucial piece information that, acording to your widdle brain, I left out?

The turrets and pets.

The part you're getting pissy someone had the audacity to throw in. How dare someone try to out-helpful you!

But how can they be "buffed" if they've in fact been NERFED(!) twice?

Actually, it's a soft not hard cap because the game will allow it to go higher than that, but there is (often) no benefit. It doesn't matter if there was never a situation in the game where 45% didn't floor your enemies' to-hit chance, the fact that the game would let you increase it beyond that makes it a soft cap.

Which qualifies as "enemies with increased to-hit"

Thank you for playing sir, you may be welcomed back when you actually have something useful to contribute.

That's actually not why its called the defense soft cap. The term "soft cap" has actually been used for a very long time to refer to situations where more can be useful, but beyond a certain point there is a sudden dramatic shift downward in how useful more is. With defense specifically due to the fact that tohit from critters was variable, there wasn't an easy way to describe defense limits like there was with resistance caps. We used to say there was no cap on defense, because no matter how much defense you had, more could theoretically always be better (out to the limits of how much defense you could likely acquire). So even back in '04 and '05 people were referring to a "soft cap" for defense which basically meant, relative to a very specific set of circumstances, that level of defense would drop you to the tohit floor**. But it was extremely situational, given how many variables could affect this. But it was the only way to be able to answer players' questions on the forums.

But no matter what the circumstances, one specific loophole would always get you: defense debuffs. So we all (i.e. the people who discussed this stuff knowledgeably back then) knew that no matter how much defense you had, you could always be debuffed off of the tohit floor. Resistance debuffs didn't really exist back then, so this was only true for defense. So we used to say: this much defense is more or less the soft cap for a given general situation***, and more is good for protecting you from defense debuffs.

When the I7 critter accuracy scaler change occured, the situation simplified radically. Now, you didn't have to specify situation quite so arbitrarily, because you could now say "for minions, LTs, Bosses, and AVs, from even con to +5, the defense soft cap is 45% defense. BUT more is better because of defense debuffs."

That was the common way to describe defense post-I7. The phrase "soft cap" was always used to refer to the fact that defense was subject to situational effects that other mitigation wasn't (at least back then), and it solidified after the I7 changes to specifically refer to the fact that defense was very likely to be debuffed. Not rarely or uncommonly, but frequently. At least unless you had extremely high defense debuff resistance, and even then a point or two above 45% is still considered a reasonable cushion for soft-cappers.

The term "soft-cap" was never commonly used to refer to the fact that 45% defense was almost always good enough. Its actually the reverse: its always been historically used to caution people that exactly 45% is almost never good enough to stay at the floor. But how much *more* you want above 45% is subjective, and thus "soft."


And that is why this is not just a question of semantics. The very term "soft-cap" is supposed to be a reminder to tell people that 45% defense is never enough to stay on the floor, and that the situations where this won't be true are extremely common. Even an SR scrapper with 95% debuff resistance is going to want to be at 46%, say, just to provide enough cushion to stay above the tohit floor under the influence of debuffing; more if they intend to encounter massive numbers of high-order debuffers. How much more depends on the powerset and the situation. Without this warning, even if you discount pets, even if you discount turrets, even if you discount tohit buffing, you'll *still* find yourself getting knocked off the floor, and *often* due to the incredibly common nature of defense debuffs in the game. This is an important fact for people interested in building to the "soft cap" to know: 45% is a very arbitrary target in City of Heroes. You still have to think about how you intend to use it. Whereas 90% resistance doesn't have nearly the same requirement to think very hard about it.

The soft cap is soft because almost everyone can benefit from at least a little more than that in real-world circumstances. But how much more depends on what you do, which is why that's the initial point of discussion, and why we can't specify any better without knowing more details. And this has always been the way the term soft-cap has been canonically used: to refer to this situational aspect to defensive benefit limits.


** We used to say "drop to the tohit floor of 5%" because we all assumed you could always reduce tohit to that level. We collectively learned that wasn't true between I4 and I5 when Stargazer first figured out via testing that accuracy was multiplicative, and I incorporated that into my defense testings and realized that this meant some critters had enhanced accuracy that made it impossible to floor them to 5% - Gunslingers was my canonical example from I5, which have intrinsic 2.0 accuracy and thus cannot be lowered below 10% tohit - even before the I7 changes which make the number even higher due to rank bonuses.

*** "General situation." We used to talk about how much defense you would need to floor a mission of +3s, for example. Which, in I2, would be 85% unless an AV was going to show up. But that was only true if you were not debuffed. Thus, the need to say 85% is good enough for +3s, barring debuffs. That is, we used to say this to within the limits with which we knew the numbers, which was pretty accurately for critters back then.

... stay at the floor over a fight? A TF? A mission? A career?

I'm guessing she meant random fights. So many enemies have to-hit debuffs in this game that expecting to stay at 45% defense at all times is unrealistic(unless you're /SR or possibly /SD).

Which is then followed up with "What enemies have increased To-Hit?" or "are there any specific enemies with enhanced To-Hit I need to watch out for?" and then Arcanaville or someone else posts about it as you are too busy acting like a child pretending he's on a gameshow, because that's what you think grown-ups do.