Anyone concerned that the abundance of IO softcap defense builds will cause blowback?

I have been thinking about this lately. The sheer number of builds by AT's of all types that focus on defense as a priority will cause a blowback down the line with TF's. AV's and mobs that will basically blow through defense. Unlike many defense based powersets, there is no defense debuff resistance on these toons which I believe is going to be an issue for many.

I see many builds that focus on defense. Yet many of these builds I see often have inadequate slotting in other places giving up things like damage. accuracy etc etc just to get to the " softcap ".

I was talking to a friend who was helping one of his SG mates with a build and his mate was so focused on getting to the " softcap " that he wasnt seeing that his toon lacked accuracy and damage in critical areas. I said its good to try and build in defense where you can but if you make that the main thing if you run into something that ignores or debuffs your defense you arent really built to do what you are supposed to do in the first place.

This is what started this train of thought for me and I wonder if others have had the same thought as well.

We're already starting to see this with the new incarnate TFs. Battle Maiden has very little trouble hitting soft-capped characters.

Really though, a big part of the problem is that the current IO sets allow for building high defense, but building high resistance isn't nearly as easy. I'm not sure what the thinking was with this and I'm not even sure if they plan on releasing more IO sets (I haven't heard the slightest hint regarding this) so building RES will always be difficult.

I wondered the same thing a while back when I first started reading about 'perma-elude' builds on the scrapper forums. But I don't know how they would change things to compensate without breaking defensive sets like Super Reflexes, Shield Defense etc. They could lower the buffs from IO sets, but I think that would cost them a lot of customers.

There is already a lot of defense debuffs in the game, but they have to land in order to take effect.

It was expected and has already happened; you only have to look at the amount of defence debuff and +tohit thrown around in the two incarnate TFs to see that.

Defence debuffs do have to hit, but they are starting to get spread around the types a bit more, praetorian clockwork at least seems to have one major aoe/energy debuff, bypassing the common ranged and s/l softcaps nicely. Getting capped defence to multiple vectors is a lot harder than a single facet.

Yes and no.

No, there won't be a significant amount of blowback in the existing content. The number of players with builds that are defensively soft-capped are still a minority among the playerbase. As far as it has been indicated, there are no plans by the Paragon Studios staff to have another global-defense-modification sweep through the non-Incarnate level content. Partly that is because a variety of power-sets, such as Cold Domination, Force-Field, and Empathy can already put a number of builds on SO's into defensive soft-cap, and any defense or accuracy based changes to the non-Incarnate content would cause significant collateral damage to the casual players; e.g. the majority of the paying player base.

One of the other problems the developers face is that there are a number of existing powersets in the game that only offer defensive protections: Energy Aura, Super Reflexes, and Ice Armor. Any global modifications to Defense, Accuracy, or To-Hit modifiers would wind up targeting these power-sets as much as targeting players who have defensive soft-caps through IO sets.

Nope, not concerned at all.

As already pointed out by others there's already content being added that counters it to a degree. We also had DE and Rruullaarruu in the game already for high level characters, and level 54 enemies have less difficulty hitting through the softcap anyway. While i have several characters that are softcapped they don't rely on it alone to survive. i'll just adapt my tactics to compensate for getting hit more often. My softcapped characters already tend to keep some oranges handy for facing enemies likely to get through their defense.

I'm not concerned at all. If they change it, I'll adapt and improve. I do hope that if they actually change how +Def from IOs work it won't be a change of ED's magnitude. It would cost them so many customers it would hurt those that stay in more ways than diminishing their set bonuses...

I'd actually like to see def devalued somehow. Make it so that there're fewer clear cut decisions in regard to res v def v regen.

Interesting. I havent played any of the new TF's yet. Good to know. This is what I expected, that things will start blowing through defenses.

My fear was another GDF.

I expect to see a few more using -def debuffs rather than just the +tohit options. -def is not nearly as hard on /SR or /Shield since they have debuff resistance and builds who only use IOs do not. The Cims are a good example of new-ish content that makes it harder but not impossible on merely IO-based defense.

I also expect more challenges like the battle maiden fight where attacks are total balancers (IE autohit irresistable). No build has any advantage over any other against the fire patches. With the exception of some earth builds being at a disadvantage due to the speed penalties.


And I agree with Je Saist in that I'm pretty sure the Alpha Slot was deliberately designed to support builds with innate powers over those with IO-based bonuses.

good stuff Arcanaville. Thanks.

Personally i never worry about the soft cap to that extreme. I have characters that are there. Some that get close and many that are somewhere in the middle.

My concern is when I see blasters that should peak out at around 95% damage hovering around 70-80% because of their build but they are at the soft cap. I find myself asking.. whats going to happen when you face that foe that isnt phased by your defense? Do you have the tools to defeat your enemy?

The thing I'm worried about with the prevalence of +def isn't the impact of any potential nerf on squishies/res based sets/etc that are softcapping with IOs, but the impact on *regular* defense based characters. They're already starting down a very bad path, in my opinion, with the way they're handling this.

Buffing base tohit, autohit damage powers, and providing powers that grant tohit buffs are bad ways to counter the IO defense builds, because they penalize true defense builds even more than they do the ones who don't have any defense by default. If you add enough of the above elements to challenge, say, a dark tank who softcapped his defenses, you're going to absolutely *slaughter* any super reflexes/shield/ice/energy aura/etc character, since they have very little else to fall back on. If those sort of defense counters become widespread, especially in the endgame, it'll actually push people even *more* toward the non-defense based sets that can be IO softcapped, because your defense will still serve as a buffer against the enemy buffs and you still have the entire rest of your primary and secondary to fall back on. Meanwhile, people with SR, ice, EA, etc are all playing with one powerset tied behind their backs. I have a MA/SR that's been sitting around as a lowbie for more than a year in search of a build I like. With inherent fitness freeing up so many power choices I've finally found a satisfactory build and have been planning to level her, but now I'm not sure I want to bother if I'm going to get to the end game and find that I essentially have no secondary again.

In my opinion the way to handle this is *not* with tohit buffs or autohit damage, but with a combination of carefully tuned defense debuffs and tweaks to the actual defense based sets. For starters, we need more defense debuffs that are keyed to odd positions/types that most non defense-based characters don't cap. Edana mentioned that praetorian clocks have a debuff typed energy/AoE, which is a good example of what I was thinking of.

Secondly, the disparity between defense debuff resistance in defense sets and the inherent nature of resist debuff resistance in res sets needs to be fixed. Every single defense based armor set should have at least as much debuff resistance as the mitigation its armors provide, like resistance sets do - in other words, unless the set already lives over this line, every single armorset power that provides defense should also provide twice as much (enhanceable) defense debuff resistance.

Finally, with that adjustment in place, the 'generic' counter to IO defense builds should be autohit but relatively small in magnitude defense debuffs, preferably as toggles so that they can be made to follow the 'one active at a time' AI rule. If high level enemies that are designed to counter defense have a (say) 5-10% autohit AoE defense debuff, actual softcapped defense characters would barely notice - their DDR would reduce it down to a couple percent at most, which they ought to have enough of a cushion to absorb. Soft-capped squishies/res based characters, on the other hand, would have their softcap stripped away, opening them to cascading defense failure from more mundane debuffs (which should also be present).

Not every high level encounter should have this sort of setup, of course, but if they want to counter IO defense builds *this* is how they should do it rather than by dropping in tohit shenanigans/autohit damage that also splatters all of the characters who actually are *supposed* to get mitigation from defense.

I don't see any "abundance" of softcapped builds ingame, if anything they're very rare.

There's a lot of talk about it on the forums, but remember that forumgoers represent a very small percentage of the players across the 10 servers