Defense Based Armor Sets

Why do defense based armor sets have clicky mezz / status protections whilst everything else gets toggle protections?

Ice Armor and Energy Aura are defense sets with toggle mez protection.

If you're asking why Super Reflexes, Shield Defense and Ninjutsu have click mez protection...So they don't have to run a separate toggle? I mean, SR already has enough toggles, as does SD. Ninjtutsu? I dunno.

Perhaps it's for uniqueness so they play differently? One advantage I find is, if you get drained of endurance (none of those sets have resist to -end/-recovery) and all your toggles are dropped, you can still run away because you won't get mezzed.

Maybe it has something to do with the concept? SR/SD/Nin might (thematically) have to actively dodge/break away from holds and immobilizes while sets like Invulnerability or Fire tend to simply immune/burn them innately with their powers.

Way back in the day, before powers got suppressed instead of toggled off when you got held, Practiced Brawler was superior to toggle-based mez protection. It self stacks, so so you can have extra-high-mag protection depending on your recharge slotting, and if you got held through your protection (say by a dominator in PvP), it keeps right on proctecting. That was a bigger deal when it was possible to de-toggle.

I do wonder why they don't change all status protection powers to be toggles instead of click powers. The only case I know of off the top of my head where doublestacking your mez prot click power is beneficial is Shield for the extra DDR, and I don't see why they would want people to do that.

I would love it if they were all changed to toggles, as I hate the constant interruption and needing to be mindful if when it's ready to activate, if it comes up during a fight as I tend to queue my next attack while one is casting. But I suspect that if it's even on any list of changes to be made, it's so far down it'll never be done.

Click Mez protections have their benefits and their drawbacks, like anything else. They all cost much less endurance than the toggle counterparts, and they will not be shut off if you are endurance drained.

They do have a weakness to -recharge, but I doubt that's prevalent enough for many players to worry about. They also time and presence of mind to activate.

I'd say they're worth it.

Throw two recharge IOs in there, set it to auto, and pretend it's a toggle. Problem solved.

Back when the activation rooted you when casting Practiced Brawler, you'd see my scrapper flying through the city at the run speed cap, only to pause every thirty seconds or so for a fist pump. Must've looked quite silly to the civilians.

I moderately dislike click mez powers.

This is why I have an Invuln Scrapper and an EA brute. It seems that positional defense sets get clickies, all others get toggles.

I personally like to be affected by mez every now and then. It's why I don't put Practiced Brawler/Active Defense on auto, I just bind them to a button close to my movement keys.

Kind of like on my Electric Armor Brute, it's nice to, every now and again, get thrown back by a KB power while you're jumping, if only to remind you that the effect is there and appreciate that you have said mez protection. With toggles, it's set it and forget it to the extreme. Makes you lazy, really. You switch to a squishy character and suddenly you feel overwhelmed

This was before my time, so maybe I'm mistaken; I don't have first-hand experience with this.

By my understanding, most, if not all, of the toggles in armor sets used to exclusive with each other, much like Granite is with the other toggles in its set. Basically, you had to choose what type of attacks you wanted to be protected from, because you couldn't run all the toggles at once. It was changed fairly early, possibly in Alpha or Beta, before the game's release.

While things were still that way, click mez protect would have been vastly superior, because you could activate your mez protect, while still running a different toggle, while toggling on mez protect on the other sets would detoggle your other defenses.

The devs should make clicky mez protect function like a Break Free. That way both classes of mez protect would once again have something that makes them "clearly" better than the other.

I mildly dislike click mez protection, but I'll admit that they are superior to toggle mez protection in some circumstances. Double-stacking the mez protection in shield defense gives extra DDR for example, and in some cases double-stacking the mez protection will protect you from things that mag 10 protection won't. Rommy's rez in the ITF is the best example of this I can think of.

My main issue with click mez protection is that characters that have it generally have at least one other power (hasten) that I'd like to set on auto-fire, so I have to remember to click something, and it gets on my nerves. The issue would be fixed for me if they would either let us set more powers (preferably at least 3 to make my ss/shield brute happy) to auto-fire or make click mez protection act like a breakfree, so you can use it if you get mezzed to get out.

I actually did not remember that all of Fire's mez protection was in Burn.

I've played with binds like that in the past, and unfortunately they drove me nuts because moving would cancel queued powers. Otherwise I'd use this too.

I've been thinking about changing my "target & follow" bind to include click mez protection. For an */SR, that would mean...

/bind tilde "target_enemy_near$$follow$$powexec_name Practiced Brawler"