Poppycock!

Poppycock. From the Dutch "pappekak," meaning "soft crap." Used in a sentence: "I have achieved the Defense soft crap."

Yeah, this is one of those posts. But bear with me! (-:

The way people were raving and celebrating about Defense and the soft cap thereof, I figured it must be something totally awesome and worth investing lots of resources into and making considerable sacrifices to achieve. Indeed, when I used the Luck Inspirations in tough battles on my Resistance-based characters, I noticed a huge increase in survivability, so I figured hey, why the heck not?

Insert Stalker, the one Archetype I wasn't really looking forward to due to the low base HP and melee-centric combat that had "repeated faceplant" written all over it. I decided that if I was ever going to like that kind of a character, I would be better off with Defense than Resistance. Remembering my brief experience with Energy Aura on a Brute, I said "ick" and went straight for Ninjitsu, with its self heal and area-effect placate.

Lemme tell ya, that high damage output is fun times. In a couple hours from the time of this post, the character will be 2 weeks old and I got it to level 50 earlier tonight. Fully slotted with IOs to the point where I actually planned out the Defense bonuses for a change (I usually frankenslot entire builds), the character is rather survivable and tons of fun to play. Definitely in my top 3.

But even so, I made the right call with the self heal (and to a lesser but nonetheless significant extent, the placate). Even when my Defense values to all positions are in the triple digits (with external buffs, mind you), I get repeated hits from multiple enemies due to the 5%-95% probability clamp they put on the hit chance calculation. I don't have a lot of HP, so individual hits from stronger targets hurt quite a bit, let alone multiple hits. That button exists as an emergency stopgap to top off the green bar before something bad happens. And when worse comes to worse, I can just tell the enemies to leave me alone for a bit.

So having been there myself, this is what I learned...

Defense for the sake of Defense is an unreliable source of protection with a 5% forced rate of failure. In cases where that's all you have (see: Energy Aura), you wind up in situations where the best you have is, from time to time, totally worthless and you're at the mercy of your enemies as they take you down. Defense works great with other things like heals, but by itself it's flawed from the outset.

Resistance, on the other hand, has a steady effectiveness and continues doing its job 100% of the time without ever letting you down just because the game thinks the enemy deserves a break. Defense on top of Resistance is a convenience and quite invigorating, as are heals and such, but Resistance still does its job when it's left alone.

The moral of the story is: Resistance > Defense. ♥♥♥

Your observations are similar to mine. Basically, defense isn't better on a stalker than resistance due to the low HP. This is why Nin is well regarded for its toys + heal not necessarily because of its defense. But the edge defense has over resistance for stalkers, is the ability to go back into hide again (especially in a team setting). But that doesn't really matter anymore as stalker crit depends on the vicinity of the teammates, and the number of them as well.

EA's defense isn't what makes it stand out for stalkers either (especially given that it is typed defense), as the ability to use energy drain, and Overload that defines the set. Still EA has less tools to work with than Nin, so no surprise Nin is thought to be superior.

tldr; Basically defense/resistance doesn't matter for stalkers due to low HP as it is the tools a set has that determines success or failure.

For a stalker, Defense > Resistance.

Why?

With large amounts of defense you can reliably pull off Placate + AS in the middle of combat. With resistance and no defense, enemies you have NOT placated will still be able to hit you and interrupt your AS. Softcapped defense enables you to AS something in teh middle of a big fight without having to worry about it getting interrupted on you.

Yep pretty much. Defense is nice for characters who lack any sort of protection (i.e. squishies) simply because it is much easier to build up than resistances. However even with the softcap Defense alone cannot compete with layered protection.

My Defender is softcapped but against enemies with damage types other than Smashing, Lethal and Energy (which my epic shield protects against) Defense alone is a risky protection.

Defense=Resistance, in my book.

Pros for def:

-Easier to build towards and the "cap" on all ATs is higher than resistance caps.
-Inbuilt debuff and mez protection: if they can't hit you, they don't mez/debuff you

(people underestimate the power of this second one, by the by. /SR may have no -end or -recov resistance, but still laughs at Mu, Carnies and Malta)

Pros for Resist:

-Reliable incoming damage.
-Resist debuffs are quite rare, and resist resists resist debuffs anyway.

It goes without saying that layered protections > pure protections, due to the way each layer multiplies the effectiveness of the others, of course.

Your evaluation of resist>def might be accurate if it were possible to get capped resist to virtually everything as easy as it is to do with def. To make a fairer comparison you need to look at 1resist vs 4def, which is much closer to the ratio you get in the actual game.