1 def = 2 res...Really?

Toughness? WEAVE will add more defense. Tough adds resistances on the way. And yes, both at once will add more of an endurance drain, but they'll add to survivability.

Since your a /da I was assuming you meant resistance instead of defense. Especially since the only defense /da has baked in is from the stealth power. Quite the chore to get 40% with 3.75% being your baseline.

I'm a huge fan of the partial soft cap.......anything over about 32 to cover with a small purple. Easy to keep inspirations around these days.

I think you've taken what I said too seriously. As the quote train above should make clear, I was adding damage to the list of layered defenses, where it very much does help keep you alive, a fact any Fire/Fire Tanker can demonstrate. I'm not claiming damage alone will let you tank Lord Recluse. But then, I guess if the game offered ENOUGH damage, you could just one-shot him and go home. It's really only because the most severe threats tend to be built to survive enormous amounts of damage, and the game won't let you wield that much damage, that it is inadequate.

Your argument is a bit like if I came into a layered mitigation discussion, focused on just the passive regen from Health, and aggressively kept pointing out it won't keep you alive. It won't -- by itself.

Depends on the secondary i have my spines/da sitting at 42% s/l if I wanted i could get to 45% with the pvp IO =3%

MA can soft cap s/l pretty darn easy even with that 3.5% from COD

Kinetic Combats put soft-capping s/l within the reach of almost anything with enough melee attacks. The theoretical rule of five cap on KC's s/l set bonuses is an astounding 18.75% defense and you don't even need to slot full sets to get it.

Lots of my HVM money has been going toward throwing KCs on every character I own with melee attacks lately. Not just the DEF, but you get a pretty good HP boost too.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

My response to you was intended to be a supplemental statement, not an argument, my apologies if it came across differently. I only brought it up then because I do see a lot of people interpreting things like that as 'Well, killing them fast should be better than thinking up ways to not die, then'

My response to airhammer was due to his contesting my statement, not aimed at you specifically.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

The biggest part of the problem in those days was that blasters were encouraged to get as close to death as possible to leverage the old defiance. Blasters, to this day, are still based on the philosophy that killing it quickly negates damage.

It's even easier for DA tanks. I just put together a DA/SS build for someone looking for a build soft-capped to S/L/E/NE. No PvP IOs required.

I think we'd see a lot more of these builds too, if Kin Combats weren't so expensive.

Moved some, replaced some... Lost some, gain some......
Got you S/L/E/N softcap with 12 KB prot and no PvP IOs

"Get as much as you can" would be my guess. My DM/Regen scrapper has a regen rate of 2.33%, or 19.61 hit points per second. And that seems to be enough to be immortal against 2 even level average damage foes. 3 to 4 foes if I put reconstruction on auto fire. Not too much I can do to improve my standard regen rate anymore either. Already have Health, Fast Healing, and Integration 3 slotted with SO levels of enhancements. Can get the Body Mastery pool, but that's about it.

This basically. High regen coupled with other sources of mitigation increases survivability enormously, but it doesn't function quite the same as defense and resistance.
Regeneration based survival usually has a rather binary nature: either the damage per second can't outpace your regen and you'll never be defeated, or you're defeated in seconds.

Like the old saying about the original Regeneration powerset used to go: "Being Regen Scrapper is a lot like snowboarding: you either look awesome or you're dead."

The problem was actually that you really had to know what you were doing to fully leverage Defiance 1.0, and even if you did not flirt with death while using it that just meant you didn't benefit from it, which put you back to square one (I did fine with it, but I've been playing blasters since release, and blapping for most of those years. Also, I knew to keep as many oranges running as possible).

The biggest difference between D1 and D2 has nothing to do with the damage buff mechanics, or even that there is a damage buff at all, in my opinion. Its that you can shoot through mez on your tier 1/2 attacks (and tier 1 secondary). I believe that saves more blaster lives than anything else.

The thing about getting low is that even if you survive, its only good once. Unless you have an Emp following you around to reset you, you can't really get low often and see that damage buff, because you can't start the next fight in that condition and consistently expect to survive (again, unless you are a very experienced player that has insps on the twitchy finger).


One of the things I'm trying out in my experimental I19 build for my Energy/Energy is to go back to ranged blasting, take both bolt and blast (I respeced out of bolt years ago when I made my I9 build, because back then it sucked big time) and slot them both with Force Feedback procs (actually, I have them slotted in torrent and explosive blast also). That, plus a build with a lot of global speed, and I can almost just cycle bolt and blast constantly (bolt, blast, and torrent are almost a complete chain, and probably will be in the final build). When you can cycle bolt and blast almost continuously, mez becomes much less of a problem. It drops my defensive toggles, but hardly dents my offense, and with it my offensive (kb) mitigation.

Eden was fixed few issues back. You cannot substitute ambrosia with lucks anymore.

Yes you can, if you're lucky. Took my softcapped Fort through it a month at most ago, completely forgot about ambrosia during the final battle, and, despite being in melee range the entire time, never took a hit.