Bit of curiosity

Don't got the time to quibble about every point, but I'll comment on this.

The game should not, is not and will not be balanced on the difficulty slider being put to maximum solo. So did I miss that point? No, but I'm not shortsighted enough to think it is *the* point to be made here.

Secondly, that a blaster, a dom or whoever is tanking for this team is moot because the OP is talking about 'resistance' and 'defense', not 'armor sets'. The point wasn't who got maximum benefit but that defense (and -ToHit) is far more common than resistance. So even if you bring your 'whatever AT' with 25% def and 50% resist vs your 45% def character, the one with resistance will always be on top because teamed, both with have the enemy's hit chance floored more often than not.

Of course it's not balanced that way. However if you are comparing performance, you compare it at the edge of what is possible. You also don't compare things which are walkthroughs. If I am comparing how A works vs, B, I compare only A and B. Then I compare them up to the thresholds of where A and B fail. That is the actual measure of comparative performance. You are trying to base an argument on tossing additional uncontrolled factors into the mix which makes for a lousy experiment.

Wow, that point really did buzz right over your head. On a well buffed team, you don't need defenses. I've run on superteams of all kinetics defenders or controllers and we steamrolled everything in our path. Was it because of resistance armor sets? Um, no.

Look, proffering the case of 'resistance is superior on a well buffed team' is like saying a Kia will outrun a BMW as long as it's on a rocket sled. Well gosh, really? Is the sky blue too? The point you fail to accede is that on one of those teams, you don't need personal defenses at all.

But even if we are on said teams, say you get separated or have a lazy buffer. What happens then when the defense buffing starts to slide? The resistance builds will fold a lost faster than the softcapped defense builds because the latter is actually tough solo rather than only when propped up.

Take a speed ITF for example. For maximum speed the party breaks up to solo the shards in the second mission. There is no resistance build short of granite(which is not only resistance of course) which can survive the crowd around the shards. I've seen many softcapped defense builds pull it off.

You need seem to understand that's were not taking about random PUG level performance here. That's pretty much moot. I'm talking the limits of what is possible in respective defense methods, and positional defense is clearly superior.

Now I certainly grant that in your select case that someone with resistance who ends up on a team with a large pile of defense buffing that is consistent will be somewhat superior to a softcapped defense build. I do, however, note that it is moot and not really relevant to a discussion of the comparative strengths of the sets since it relies on external factors.

Though since you wish to not discuss the edges of high performance, how about we discuss the low end? Let's talk just SOs and no set bonuses. In that case the pure resistance sets are pure resistance, and the positional defense sets are pure defense. (I'll address mixed bag later). Since, as you say, there is tons of defense buffs floating around out there (manuevers, Fortitude, bubblers, ice shields, SoAs) then the defense builds will easily get softcapped. For example an SR brute without even weave can be softcapped easily by only 15% defense. A single crab or bane can do that. The brute then gets a reduction in incoming damage from 40% to 10%. That's a 75% reduction. Mr FA brute to his left on the same team with the SoA gets a whole 30% reduction in his incoming damage. He starts out before the buff taking 65% of the damage, which goes down to 45% of incoming damage(over four times as much). Not bad, but not even close to the defense build. Sure, more defense doesn't help the SR build, but make it a SD build starting around 23% defense and they will surely enjoy that defensive environment and hand out the pain freely. Now granted, if we assume there is lots of defense on that team, the positional defense builds will get past benefit and eventually you will see the resistance build pass. Let's figure out when that occurs- 65%/(1-x)= 10%. Here x = ~84% which translates to a 42% defense. So to make that FA brute have comparable mitigation to the softcapped positional brute, you practically have to softcap all the way with the buffs.

Ah, this topic.


Not really. First of all, its important to eliminate some ambiguity here. "Defense" and "Resistance" are game mechanics. To ask if there is an issue with the effectiveness of each is not asking a quantitative question, like are sturdies weaker than lucks. Its asking if the very mechanics of defense predispose it to be stronger or weaker than resistance. And I don't think it does in a way that is problematic.

Defense is probabilistic. Resistance is deterministic. Defense increases avoidance, which nullifies all effects of attacks. (Damage) Resistance attenuates damage, which ignores non-damaging effects of attacks. What we want from these two game mechanics is not equivalence but orthogonality. In other words, we want them to be different, to work different, to provide differences in experience.

Its interesting how no one (or almost no one) asks "is Regeneration weaker than Defense?" Regeneration is so radically different in mechanics from Defense that I think the question tends to get pre-empted. Of course Regeneration isn't stronger or weaker, its just different. Really high regeneration is going to be stronger than low Defense, and really high Defense is going to be stronger than low Regeneration. In the middle, its situational. But at least most of us knows that its not about Defense or Regen, its about how much of each you have.

But I think people get suckered into thinking that doesn't apply to Defense and Resistance, because they *seem* to work kind of the same. So people think Defense and Resistance are just two variations of a single thing. But that's not true. Defense and Resistance are as different as Resistance and Regeneration: they only look the same when you use average algebra to quantify them, focusing solely on damage.

So no, I don't think there is an issue between Resistance, the game mechanic, and Defense, the game mechanic.


No, for similar reasons as above. There are mitigation limits to defense related to the tohit floors and ceilings. That mitigation limit is 90%, the same as the maximum resistance ceiling for player archetypes (i.e. tankers). Now, its true that other archetypes, like say blasters, can achieve 90% mitigation with defense but only 75% mitigation with resistance, but I don't see that as a problem. Game mechanics have no right to fairness. "Resistance" has no lobby with a right to complain in that situation. Its players that have a right to fairness, and by extension, gameplay choices themselves have to be presented fairly. So archetypes need to be fair. Mechanics do not.

One more thing: while resistance ceilings vary by archetype, defense mitigation ceilings vary by situation. Assuming no tohit buffs, the defense mitigation ceiling is 90% until attacker accuracy exceeds 90% When attacker accuracy exceeds 90%, your best case defensive mitigation drops below 90%. An example will best illustrate the point.

Suppose something with +90% accuracy were to attack you. Without any defense, he would have a 95% chance to hit (50 * 1.9). With 45% defense or better ("soft capped defense") he'd be reduced to 5 * 1.9 = 9.5% chance, or one tenth his chances without those defenses. That's what it means to say your defenses are reducing his chance to hit by 90%, or that your defenses have 90% damage mitigation.

But what if its a Gunslinger, and he has +100% accuracy. Well, without defenses his tohit would be 50% * 2.0 = 100%, but he is bound by the 95% tohit ceiling, so its still 95%. With your soft capped defenses, he's reduced to 5% * 2.0 = 10%. But now, you aren't reducing his chances by 90%: you're reducing them by 89.5%. Your effective mitigation is slightly lower. And that's a hypothetical Gunslinger minion, which don't normally exist. A Gunslinger boss would have 1.3 rank accuracy on top of +100% gunslinger accuracy, or 1.3 * 2.0 = 2.6 accuracy total (+160%). Now, the best you can do is 5% * 2.6 = 13%, which is 86.3% damage mitigation (1 - 13/95). Against a +3 Gunslinger Boss, the best you can do is 82.2% damage mitigation. That's blasters, scrappers, tankers, everybody.

This is a consequence of the I7 changes to critter accuracy intended to better normalize defense. Prior to I7, the *opposite* situation would occur. Against even minions, the best that defense could do was 90% mitigation. But against a +5 Boss, the best you could do is still reduce tohit to 5%, against a critter that would have had a 95% chance to hit you, which is 94.7% mitigation - better than 90%. That's why perma-elude was all that back then: the mechanics allowed Perma-Elude to exceed 90% mitigation against the higher level stuff Scrappers used to fight back in the day.


No. See above.


Maybe. There is so much defensive possibilities that its at the point where the ultra-high end of building (relative to the average player) can trivialize defensive sets, by nearly replicating their strength or even their best case outcomes on non-defensive sets. And as I said above, game mechanics have no right to fairness, but powersets and archetypes do, because they are presented as fair choices to the players. I actually advocated dialing back defense bonuses in the invention system as a result. But keep in mind: I don't care if players can buy a lot of defense: I only care they can buy enough to trivialize defense sets. You cannot do that with resistance or regeneration (although you can come close with regen). Increasing the amount of resistance in things like the invention system would not make things "more fair" in my eyes, it would add another problem.

Converting the defense in the invention system to Elusivity, which doesn't stack with conventional defense, would partially address this problem, by the way.


Yes. But see above. Creating that opportunity creates a separate design problem.


No.


Neither, which is the reason I answered no. The point to having defense and resistance is that they are different game mechanics. There's no point in having two mitigation mechanics that work the same way. That's a waste of design space.


Sometimes. As was mentioned elsewhere, some situations specifically negate or mute the benefits of defense, such as Lord Recluse in the STF. Defense has weaknesses Resistance doesn't, such as cascade failure under debuffing (if you do not have sizeable defense debuff resistance) or high tohit buffs (which have no defense against them except ultra-high defense that is almost impossible to achieve without defender buffing or Elude) such as what you find in DE eminators (quartz). And unless you have extremely high levels of defense, even small tohit buffs like what you find in tactics (Bank guard LTs have tactics, for example) or Build Up (more on the red side than blue side, but critters have it) can significantly reduce the effectiveness of moderate amounts of defense or bring you right off the soft floor. And there are things that have higher than 50% base tohit and are explicitly intended to be problematic to defense users: pets and turrets have 75% base tohit, which is like having +25% tohit all the time. And certain newer critters being introduced into the game have a special 64% base tohit, usually but not always related to Praetorians. Against these attackers, defense of a given value would be weaker than normal, relative to resistance of a given value.


Yeah. I'd look for gaps in performance between powersets and try to address them, either in intrinsic strength or in general development opportunity. But I would leave the mechanics of Defense and Resistance alone in general (I proposed Elusivity not to address strength concerns in defense sets, but stacking concerns, which is a separate issue).


Technically, the logical question is what is special about Defense and Resistance that is deserving of a balance pass between those two mechanics. There are five standard defensive mitigation mechanisms: Defense, Resistance, Regeneration, Healing, +Health. Six if you count positional and typed defense as separate mechanisms. So what makes Defense and Resistance special that they need to be equalized between each other, but not Regeneration, or +Health? Why can't I buy 75% damage mitigation with +Health, if I can with Resistance? If we have to be "fair" to "Resistance" why shouldn't we be fair to +Health?

The answer, of course, is that its much more obvious that +Health is intended to be different, that Regeneration is intended to be different, that Healing is intended to be different. Well, Defense and Resistance are intended to be different, and what matters is not how they work, but how much of each you are given or decide to buy. That needs to be quantitatively balanced when possible, and qualitatively balanced when necessary. But not be made equivalent. You actually want each mechanism to work as differently as possible. If that makes them harder to balance quantitatively, so be it. That's the game designer's job.

In that case, my Dark Armor Tanker is paradoxical. Carnies, Council, Malta, Circle of Thorns (save for stacked -ToHit), Rikti (as long as there are corners), Arachnos (though they're a bit rougher)... pretty much everything but Cimerorans, really. It clears x8+2 (with bosses) before it starts to break a bit of a sweat (without any Defense buffs--not even Cloak of Darkness), but according to you, such a character can't exist.

Well, either paradoxical, or you're blowing hot air. One of the two.

I should point out that among the melee defense sets, there is no true "resistance focused powerset." At one time, there was a genuinely Defense-focused powerset: SR. Its still primarily only defense, but the scaling resistances blur the point. At one time, Ice Armor was almost all Defense, but not quite. And until not long ago, Electric Armor was the "all resistance" set, but it now has a significant heal (significant enough to blur the point the greater degree than the scaling resistances do for SR). Separate from that, however, *none* of the powersets traditionally called "resistance sets" are resistance only: all of them have either sizable defense, healing, or regeneration in sufficient magnitude to make them only partially focused on resistance. That includes Dark Armor, Invulnerability, Fiery Aura, and Granite (stone) Armor.

And I've found that there are many situations where Dark Armor beats soft-capped SR unless SR also has either aid self or highly invention-boosted regeneration. Soft-capping alone is great, especially in high-order debuffing situations (barring cascade failure) but resistance + healing tends to beat soft-capping alone so long as its not recharge-debuffed to the point of nullifying the heal (on the other hand, soft-capping plus healing tends to be better most of the time, outside of cascade failure and tohit buffs, or ultra-spike damage situations where you can be essentially one-shotted without resistances).

My experience tends to be that Dark Armor isn't often killed directly: it either runs out of endurance, gets recharge-debuffed to the point Dark Regeneration is taken away, or gets tohit debuffed to the point that DR can't hit anything. Then its killed.

Check check and check. Sometimes I get a little too frisky and actually take on too much incoming damage, but it's usually one of these three situations if I fall.

And when I do fall, it is awesome. I occasionally do it on purpose for a free refill.

Though I would like to point out that AVs of nearly every sort other than Psionic will be dealing too much spike damage to stay standing with just a single target to heal off of.

Or maybe it could be that DA is not really focused on resistance, but mez? I consider the main resistance focused sets FA and ElA. They are resistance with heals and little more (FA has damage output, while ElA has endurance drain, but it's not really enough to keep alive).

Fixt.

No, that would be the "regeneration should have more regen and less heals, because it's called Re-gen-er-a-shun, not Clik-Heal-ing" posts.


He collects those. He prints them out and stuffs them into a pillow and then every quarter he gets a stick and turns it into a pinata. The author of the first PM to fall out after Castle's sustained blindfolded swinging gets a free perk pack code. The rest are incinerated. The PMs, I mean, not the players. Although I've never actually clarified that, and subscribership does tend to dip a bit in September.

Again, not going to waste time quibbling with you, doc. But try to reply to the main stuff.

I never came in here saying softcapped defense is inferior to resistance or mixed mitigation. No, having softcapped defense is great for anyone and, relatively, it's *easy* to softcap that than it is to get a sizable amount of resistance or other mitigation values. In that respect, someone with high values in mitigation other than defense 'win out' ('win out' meaning pushing performance at the very edge) because defense (and -ToHit) is so common. Because if you're at the edge of performance, popping lots of lucks is nice but you'll need greens for when those hits inevitably get through. Popping some lucks and ruggeds to stack with a moderate portion of resistance on your side is *better* in that you probably need fewer greens.

Now have both characters pop a luck and a rugged (something easily obtainable and accessible in those rough spots). Your SR Brute is already softcapped and gets a moderate bonus to resistance while your Fire Brute is now defense capped with even more resistance put toward that cap (plus those extras like extra damage).

The point is, IMO regarding fairness of distribution of resistance vs defense, I think the balance is there. Those sets with great amount of defense already are easier to cap while sets with great amounts of resistance cannot (or without a lot of sacrifice) at least not without help. However, I guess saying that, it might be unfair that non-defensive sets can cap defense and keep all their benefits (like END management or damage) while those defense focused sets only get the benefit of 'ease to cap'.

In short, doc, check your reading comprehension. I'm not claiming softcapped defense loses, just softcapped defense is obtainable while capped resists aren't often (or never outside of stacked buffs).

No. The major difference is that it is far easier to build for defense than resistance (Weave? Defense +all. Combat Jumping? Defense +all. Tough? Resist +smashing & lethal.) so we end up seeing defense being the general source of patching up a character's shortcomings. If the set bonuses for resistance didn't suck so badly, you might see alternative builds.

There are counters being put in place more and more often. While you're obviously not going to self-Soft Cap in Praetoria, a lot of what those mobs do and are capable of are clearly a sign of things to come. So no, I don't see a problem.

Huh? Well, if you're talking about protection against resistance debuffs (which are incredibly rare for mobs to have, sadly), that's a part of the mechanics behind resistance in that it protects itself against debuffs. Yeah, I suppose it's not the same as outright avoiding the debuff but oh well. In general, the resist sets do have additional debuff protection (Dark Armor's Murky Cloud) but it tends to be centralized with their mez protection (Rooted, Static Shield, etc.). Though it does occur in auto resistance powers as well (Temperature Protection, Invuln's entire set, etc.).

See response to #1. Yes, I believe that the resistance bonuses are pretty awful (just as a comparison point, if the silly conversion is used, the existence of Kinetic Combat's stacking +3.75% smash/lethal defense should imply a stacking +7.5% smash/lethal resistance bonus exists somewhere) and don't really mean anything except in the most extreme cases (someone using Stone Armor wanting to be silly and cap their resist to mostly everything while in Granite).

You won't see me turning down Sonic Resonance or Thermal shield buffs. +Resistance is great.

In IOs? Yes. In the general game? No. And don't ask leading questions.

The only other grievance I personally have is that Sonic Dispersion doesn't have psionic resistance when it really should.

This assumes a problem I haven't acknowledged as existing. No answer.

It's situational. Additionally, having one or the other isn't an advantage. You're best off maximizing both.

Normalize +resistance set bonuses in IOs (possibly reducing the total number of available bonuses, doing something like making the bonuses into +Lethal/Negative/Cold, +Smash/Fire/Energy, +Toxic/Psychic to reduce the overly dispersed nature of the bonuses).

You should have called DOOOM at least once, possibly including the use of the term "F2P" as well, just to be sure.

You keep talking about defense with just SR in mind, try taking those on with an EA brute. I also wouldn't count the resists on EA for much, just the + 3 defense IO, they are minor and tend to be skipable. SR has more resists the EA does in the end.

Just to point out all those groups, except howlers, that have res debuffs also have def debuffs. They also tend to come in faster, and hurt non SR defense sets since they don't have max resists to def debuffs.


On the OP, it depends on what you look at, type defense tends to be equal to or a little worst then resists. Positional defense tends to be better since it is easier to cap, with SR well ahead with it's debuff protection and resists. Though since most of what makes defense easier to use comes from IO's, and since the game is not balanced around IO's it's WAI.

1. No. Both are desirable. (Though IO sets mix that up.)
2. No.
3. Yes. Perhaps it should get inherent mez or debuff resistance.
4. Yes due to how so few IO sets (and power pools) provide res vs. the more common def. That could be read as an advantage to EITHER type. Resistance sets can get both with enough def bonuses, while defense sets can reach high defense much more easily.
5. Well, if we're talking 2 points of res instead of 1 point of def in set bonuses, and they had some mez and debuff resistance inherent, yes they would be just as desirable.
6. Yes, by adding mez and debuff resistance or perhaps a chance to block them.
7. Buffs only.
8. Depends upon your set. Defense is much better to non-melee ATs due to its inherent ability to stop mez and debuffs, but I think a melee AT is probably best with a resistance set if they can afford tons of IOs.
9. Yes, by adding mez and debuff resistance or perhaps a chance to block them. Also buff the inspirations that grant resistance.
10. PVP, but that could be a whole other topic.

The circle is now complete.