Which Defense to aim for?

I have a fire/fire/mu brute that I use for farming and to help some unfortunate too s past minor leveling hurdles. Right now she has about 32% melee defense. I'm going to respec her soon and try to get that higher, but which defense should I aim for? Is Smashing/lethal or melee better for this character?

I do run regular missions and task forces with her. Right now I'm running snowmen, not sure which farm I'll run layer (not sure how she'll fair in TV or demonboat).

Smashing/lethal ends up blockin most melee and alot of ranged as most attacks have a smash/lethal.component.

i second the s/l defense

If you're farming, I second having zero defense (pop some purples if need be) 90% fire resists and Healing Flames on a 10 second timer.

I have a build that caps S/L, but I think I'll leave it at 30% melee. Looking at the fire farms, it doesn't seem that the attacks (mainly Scorch and Breath of Fire that I've seen) are all fire with no other adder. I'm afraid if I specced into S/L I'd actually have to work or pay attention in the farms...lol

To expand on what Claws said:

Not only will the machine guns eat up the Melee defense that's working against the other guys (but not the gunners), it's an all-round defense debuff, meaning that your Ranged and Lethal defenses (which are likely 0-15%) are going to drop to 0% and then negative values really quickly. Negative defense DOES increase an enemy's chance to hit you.

I'd say about 75% of the attacks that debuff defense are Lethal (Swords, guns, some other weapons), and about 20% are Energy based (Mostly radiation). The remainder are psi and oddball attacks like that one Bane mace attack (which would be stopped by S/L def).

S/L defense is going to provide "Fake Defense Debuff Resistance" the same way it gets "Fake Mez Protect" for squishies: It stops a lot of the attacks that carry the debuff from hitting. Yes, you'll be more vulnerable to Cascading Defense Failure than a character with DDR, but you'll have Damage Resistance to fall back on, and in larger amounts than any defense based character can get.

If you're never leaving AE and just farming fire enemies, as others have said, the defense is superfluous. But if you actually use the character outside AE, S/L if FAR superior to just Melee.

I'll chime in with some actual experiences to give context to what claws and roderick are saying. I have an elec/elec which also has no defense debuff resist. I built poorly (for melee defense instead of s/l) because at the time titanium armor were cheaper than reactive armor and I had two sets of touch of death lying around but no kinetic combats. I have 32% melee defense and 16% s/l. (well in truth, I didn't "build" for anything, I just slotted what I had and what was cheap and poof, there I was. No actual planning went into the character)

I can handle big groups of council no problem. Their gunners do hit my defenses but not enough to actually stop me. I have from time to time gone negative against them but only for less than a second. Typically I'm down into the mid teens instead of the thirty's. However, against certain spawns with lotsof ranged enemies and few melee types, I do get killed. Against longbow (who have way more guns) I go negative and then those -res grenades make me toast almost instantly. Malta, PPD, Cimerorans it's a slaughter even as low as 0/x4, they just own me.

Against CoT, I rarely dip below 20% defense, so I run newspaper missions vs them, farm the Code Merlin arc, run their tip missions etc at +1/x8 no worries.

So I have a very small group of enemies I can take on. Against those I do just fine. But the character is definitely not a generalist. S/L is flat out superior if you can build for it.

So i should flip flop my numbers then from reading the above posts? I have +50% melee def and 39% s/l def on my fire/stone tank (should go 39 melee and 50 s/l)