Do different defence add up?

Nearly all attacks have at least two types. There are some attacks that do no not have a positional component.

edit: What Aett_Thorn said

And the fear from dark miasma has only the Negitive attack vector.
Also, damage types do not decide the attack types, although they generally match up. You could make a melee/fire vector attack that was ranged and delt only cold if you wanted to. In practice, though, we get things like Fireball, AOE/fire attack that deals smashing/fire damage.

Darn it, I thought I was being general by saying "at least". But of course you are right. Psionic attacks often don't have a Positional component for the very reason I gave. (You could overcome an intended weakness against Psionic with a Positional defense)

When the game first went live it worked that way for both PCs and NPCs. This was not good from a balance perspective. Attacks tagged with multiple vectors would have a much lower chance of hitting than attacks tagged with one against a target with multiple defense types. The clearest example i recall from back then was Energy Blasters (most attacks are tagged smashing and energy) fighting Sky Raiders with Force Field Generators out. So effectively Sky Raiders would generally have twice the defense against an Energy Blaster's attacks when compared to a Fire Blaster's attacks. When the Devs fixed defense stacking so it worked more fairly it ended up making the Force Fields buffs do almost nothing for Super Reflexes using characters. A lot of systems were wonky at launch and were subsequently corrected as the post launch Dev team learned more about how the systems had been built, and this was all before GDR and ED were even implemented, but that's a subject for another thread.

The current system is far more balanced and logical.

Yeah, that's the reason why Force Fields is both Smashing/Lethal in Deflection Shield and Fire/Cold/Energy/Negative in Insulation Shield, and Melee in Deflection Shield and Ranged and AoE in Insulation Shield. Originally it was just the former, but didn't stack with SR's Positional defenses.

Also, that's why the Pool Defenses (like Combat Jumping) are both "All Types" and Melee, Ranged and AoE. There will always be something that stacks with your other armors, if applicable.

Honestly, I think it would have been better if Defense had only Position, so Resistances would protect against the various types. But that would have been problematic with Ice Armor and Stone Armor, which needed different defense levels against different attack types, and Invulnerability, which needed that hole against Psionics in Invincibility.

Yeah, but it was funny that it took them a while to realize the defense fix had hosed the utility of Force Fields for supporting SR users. i'm not sure anymore, but i vaguely recall that Arcanaville was the one who ran and posted the tests that confirmed this flaw for FF. Of course this was back when Jack was still in charge and adamant that the best way to maintain balance was to hide as much of the game's numbers as possible from the average player, because the best way to choose and slot powers was from a position of near total ignorance. 0.o

The current Dev team may not be perfect, but they listen and respond far better than used to be the case.

Yeah. You'd think, actually, that an obvious solution would be to add the greatest Positional Defense to the greatest Typed Defense. Then you wouldn't have two Types like Smashing and Energy stacking, but at the same time Smashing Defense would stack with Ranged Defense against a ranged Smashing attack.

As long as no Defense power gave you BOTH Positional and Typed, it would work fine. (And of course, now most of them DO) I'm guessing, though, that the engine didn't support that solution.

Your example also confused me. I think you meant to say Energy Blast is Smashing and Energy, not Smashing and Lethal. The Force Field Generators would not have had any Ranged Defense back then, but they would have had equal Defense to Smashing and Energy, doubling the Def if it stacked.

Yup, smashing and energy is what i meant. Corrected.

I can't take credit for this one. Someone else mentioned it on the forums first. What's funny is that I knew about this problem for a long, long, long time and never bothered to mention it except in passing because I thought that was just how it was intended to be. Back in the day I used to team my MA/SR with an Ill/FF controller a lot, and she would often remind me to flip off my toggle(s) to save endurance because really, we knew that while bubbled they weren't doing much of anything.

It was when this started to be discussed and Jack started implying this *wasn't* supposed to be that I immediately jumped in and started pointing out that these stacking problems existed pretty much everywhere, including the power pool powers. Ironically and somewhat humorously in retrospect I mention this very problem in an early version of my guide to defense just in passing, and apparently no one noticed or bothered to question me on it. I removed it in the version just prior to when the discussion flared up on the forums. But I consider this one to be the biggest duh-moment of my time here.


And by the way, my understanding is that the multiple-type defense stacking behavior was a bug, and never intentional. Or possibly intentional on the part of the original programmer, but not in keeping with the design intent of the game engine. But its difficult to be certain, because there's strong evidence that at the beginning of time no two game developers had exactly the same understanding of how defense and tohit worked or was supposed to work. We were still learning things about what the game engine was programmed to do as late as Issue 8.

Ahhh, back in the day, when Arcanaville was just as smart but didn't have the audacity to speak up and make our game better.

Nah, we're talking about Issue 4ish or so, and I was already a loud mouth by then. Its more that I was still getting a handle on the intent and deep mechanics of the tohit system. This was approximately the same era when Stargazer posted her conclusions about accuracy mechanics which was a big hole in our understanding of the tohit system until that point.

Intent was extremely difficult to deduce until after I4 and I5 when the devs started opening up some of their balance thinking surrounding melee defenses, perma powers, and the GDN. And communication lines got much better frankly when Castle joined the crew and particularly when he became open to questions in CoV beta (although other developers such as pohsyb also became more chatty around the same time - its pohsyb that acted as my sounding board to work out the details of the tohit algorithm and the changes within I7).

I'm sure Castle still has nightmares where he hears the words "so we're thinking of making something called 'archetype representatives' you interested?"

The hard limit for defense is archetype based, just like the resistance cap. Except since defense is a buff, it can exceed the limits of what is *useful*. For most archetypes the defense cap is somewhere out around 200%, plus or minus. But since the base tohit of most even con critters is 50%, anything more than 45% defense doesn't help in those situations, because you cannot reduce the intermediate tohit value to less than 5%, the "floor."

So 45% is considered the "soft cap" to defense. Soft, because you can get more, and it can help sometimes - when the critter's tohit is higher (pets, turrets, and some special critters), when the critter has tohit buffs (Rularuu eye balls, bank guard LTs, some red side AVs with Build Up, etc), or when the critters have defense debuffs (which will lower your defense, meaning having more than 45% allows for a "buffer" against those debuffs).

The hard cap, on the other hand, is something you're not likely to see very often, because its very high. Although it also scales by level, so its possible to hit it at very low combat levels with a lot of buffs, but still you're not likely to see it often.


Good time to mention that the soft cap or the soft floor as its also called only allows you to reduce *intermediate* tohit to 5% and no lower. Its called the intermediate tohit because its multiplied by Accuracy afterwards, so the final value is potentially higher than that. That intermediate floor didn't always exist, but it was discovered in I3 (I4 testing) that in situations with high defense, specifically PvP, you could have enough defense to drive someone's tohit *negative*. If you did that, Accuracy wouldn't help such a person: stacking more accuracy would only make that negative number more negative. So they introduced the intermediate floor, so that Accuracy couldn't be made absolutely worthless with enough defense. You can't use defense to drive tohit negative anymore, and as a result accuracy always has a positive effect for the attacker.

So the tohit "floor" isn't really 5%, the intermediate floor is 5%. The final tohit floor is sometimes 5%, and sometimes higher for higher accuracy critters. Note: this isn't unfair to defense. The maximum mitigation from resistance for players is 90% (less for most archetypes). So you'd think that the best you could do with defense is 90% also. But for a critter that hits 50% of the time normally, 90% mitigation drops him to 5%. And for a critter that normally hits 75% of the time, its 7.5%. But in the old days, a high defense player could drop something like a high level AV that had 90% tohit all the way down to 5%, which is a net damage mitigation of 94.4%. That's what made perma-Elude much more powerful back then. Today, best you can do is 90%, which means the "floor" for a critter is usually one tenth their normal chance to hit, which is not always 5 percent.

oh I c

So if I fight even con I newed only 45% def to soft cap. But I would need more if I'm fighitng +1 mobs?

also how do I get my defeence resistance up? Can I get it from items or is it my powersets only? I got /shield and I think it only gives like 10/20% resistance and seems like it's not doing anything

The soft cap is good for enemies up to +5 to your level. Enemies up to this point will get a bonus to accuracy, but will still have their to hit floored. At +6 and higher, they start to get a to hit bonus as well and extra defense beyond the soft cap will start to be taken into account.