S/L vs Melee

I usually see tanks/brutes/scrappers trying to softcap defence for smashing/leathal attacks. My thought is that softcapping melee would be better though. I know that most of the melee attacks are S/L but there are a few things in the game that use other types of melee based attacks (some of the Crey agents use energy attacks for example), so I was thinking that slotting IOs for melee would be as good if not better and it would certainly be cheaper since the Kinetic Combat set usually sells for around 200 million each. The KC set also seems to be the only way to reach the sofcap for S/L.

On a side note when using Mids hero builder and trying out various sets I seem to be getting wierd def totals. If I put in the Multistrike set (1.875 melee def) on my aoe attacks it shows me at 35% melee def, but if I swap to the Obliteration set (3.75 melee def it actually shows my melee def going down to 31.4% melee def when by all rights it should be going up to about 40%.

I dont really worry about it. My current Biuld is sitting at 40% S/L and 36% Melee.

Due to how the bonus are handed out, Biulding for ether is going to give you solid Def for the other. S/L is just so much more useful over all your better biulding for it as a primary vs just Melee. (which would still net you a solid S/L Def).

The single most important criteria for determining the sort of defense bonuses to look for is what, if any, kind of defense your primary has already; IIRC all but three tank primaries have at least some defense of one kind or another.

Assuming that you're playing a set that has no inherent defense, or has some to both typed and positional defense, (which is true of Dark's Cloak of Darkness) there are a couple of advantages to typed defense. One is that S/L damage is a much larger proportion of the total damage in the game than melee. So if you can only or are only going to increase one position or pair of types, then S/L will be more worthwhile. Also, typed defense bonuses like S/L as a rule require fewer enhancements in a set; 3-4 is most common compared to 5 or 6 for positional bonuses.

On the other hand, if you can get melee/ranged/AoE to the soft-cap, it will cover the vast majority of attacks in the game. Soft-capping S/L/E/NE/F/C defense will still leave you vulnerable to pure Psi and Toxic attacks. Psi and Toxic damage are very rare, but still, one advantage of positional defense is that most of those attacks will be covered.

Hope that helps!

EDIT: Regarding the problem you're having with defense bonuses in Mid's; most likely you've hit the "rule of 5" for 3.75% bonuses. Check the "Sets and Bonuses" window to be sure. If that's not it, post your build and we can probably figure out what's causing it.

actually i agree that melee is important...this is why my fire/fire tank is soft capped in both s/l defense (45.10) AND melee defense ( also 45.10)

ranged and aoe isnt really as much an issue to a tanker imho

2 words i dont like when talking about tankers and builds is "almost" and "mostly" and their usually spread out by people with holes in thier builds.this is why i pretty much tank on everything.i just cant trust that the tanker i see also believes in almosts and mostly

Thank you for the info about the differences between going after S/L and melee. For now I will probably stick with softcapping melee and getting S/L close to the 32% mark. My tank is my alt as I spend most of my time as a blaster and I just cant see atm spending around 4 billion on an alt to have him decked out. Should the price of the Kinetic Combat set ever come down or I deside to make tanking my primary role in this game I would look into capping S/L. I would also probably role another type of tank that is more well rounded in the tanking dept, with some builtin def other than weave (current tank is a fire/fire tank).