Why don't you ever hear of cascading resist failure?

Anyone who's ever played a defense based set has run into cascading defense failure. Even Super Reflexes can suffer from it.

As I understand it, resistance resists resist debuffs. In my mind, this should be a worse protection than DDR, since a character with 45% defense and 95% DDR that got debuffed to 25% defense will still have the full resistance to future debuffs. But a character with resistance - no matter what the starting value - will have less resistance to future debuffs with each that lands. Furthermore, the defense based character has a chance to completely avoid the debuff, whereas the resist based character will likely take every hit aimed at them.

So why isn't cascading resist failure a horror of the magnitude of cascading defense failure? Are resist debuffs typically smaller than defense debuffs? Found less often? Shorter duration (and thus harder to stack)? Or does it happen just as often, but is less noticed because most resist sets come with a heal and/or regeneration power (and sometimes even a rez)?

My guess would be the rarity of -res. -Def is incredibly common, with quite a few enemies having multiple -def attacks. Cimerorans, for example. Effing Cimerorans...

Yeah, what Demo said. -res is pretty rare on enemy attacks. Where you will see huge amounts of -res is facing large spawns of Wailers. They get nasty.

That said, I'm not sure if something like the Wailers case would technically be cascading failure. My understanding of the phrase is that its cascading because each debuff makes the successive ones more likely to land. Getting your resistance debuffed wouldn't make more resist debuffs more likely to land, if anything it would make them more effective. It doesn't work that way though, because AFAIK resistance debuffs always work off your undebuffed resists.

Edit: Info here, bottom section

Defense failure is caused because every time your defense is reduced, the next debuff is more likely to hit (because you have less defense) until you have no defense left. That is why it is called "cascading."

A handful of longbow nullifiers can take anyone's resistance below 0. It is not a cascade though, more of a blunt trauma. Losing resistance does not increase your chance of losing more resistance. It is impossible to have a cascading resist failure by definition.

There's over 50 powers in the game that Debuff Defense.
Heck, there are entire POWERSETS devoted to Debuffing Defense (Assault Rifle, Peacebringers, Broadsword AND Katana ... just to name a few)!



Resistance Debuffs?
There's maybe all of a dozen powers (or so) that Debuff Resistance. And Resistances inherently resist Resistance Debuffing ... which is why "cascading Resistance failure" is something of a non-sequitur.



Which is *really weird* since there are more protection schemes that rely on Resistance than rely on Defense by Powerset ... and yet it is always Defense, with its extremely delicate "balance" (ie. softcapped) without which Defense crumbles like a house of cards with NOTHING to fall back on that has counters for it handed out like candy at a commercial promotion gig.

Suffice to say, Defense based powersets have more than their fair share of Kryptonite in this game ... and the Devs keep adding more and more to that list all the time.

I mean, you'd think that Broadsword and maybe Axe would be RESISTANCE Debuffing powersets, designed to defeat protective armor(s) (such as Invulnerability, for example) ... but no ... that would run afoul of the Cottage Rule.

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

A little off topic but not much, the reason behind the huge amount of defense debuffs vs resistance debuffs is because of how easy it is to get more defense. Either through IOs, power pools, team buffs, whatever, it's very very easy to get and stack and become godlike.

This of course also dips it's toe into why there's so much +defense but next to no +resistance in IO bonuses, if there was just as much +resistance there'd have to be an ingame counter to make up for it, unresistable -resistance, higher damage etc. Even if they don't (supposedly) take IOs into consideration when testing new content, it'd be silly not to consider it for balance.

It's easier to balance defense from all it's counters (higher base tohit, +accuracy/tohit powers, -def attacks) which have little effect to other forms of protection. To balance resistance in much the same way it'd require things which would have a greater effect against other protection types, or just characters in general (higher damage, unresistable damage, stacking and/or unresistable -resistance).

These days there's a few resist counters in the game too. More and more stuff is being flagged as unresistible or hammering elements most armor sets aren't strong against (lots of fire, energy, toxic, and psi being thrown around. Only dark resists them all, and not very much.)

If resistance debuffs were resisted by current resistance, then yes, you'd get a kind of cascade, with resistance debuffs increasing exponentially as they stack.

But resistance debuffs are definitely resisted by base resistance. That's why Hamidon refuses to just die already, no matter how many Sleets, Freezing Rains, Tar Patches, Enervating Fields, Acid Mortars, Poisons, Trick Arrows, Sonic Stuff, and Kinky Fire Whips fifty raiders throw at it. It's also why those green mitos get vaporized so fast under those same debuffs when their base resistance drops.

However, that isn't to say that resistance debuffs are useless in high-resist scenarios.

In fact, in a case like the hamidon raid, they might be more valuable.

Because of the way they are resisted, X percentage points of resistance debuff always increase your damage by X percentage points.

Even against 90% resist, applying 100% -resist to bring it to 80 increases your damage by 100%. Applying 200% to bring it to 70 increases it by 200%. And so on.

Normally, you can only apply -400% resistance to something, because that's the resist floor. +400% damage, or quintuple damage.

However, something with high resists means it never REACHES that floor. It takes -4900% resist debuff to floor someone with 90% resists. And when you do, you're dealing 4900% more damage to them than you otherwise would. Even if you never reach that number, each sonic/sonic defender can toss out -100% each easily against an even-con target, and that's just using 2 of their attacks in a chain.

This creates the opportunity for resistance debuff stacking to sharply increase the output of leagues and teams in certain situations.

Oh, I agree, I wouldn't dream of doing a Hamidon raid without resistance debuffs, no matter how they're resisted. When I say I wish Hamidon would hurry up and die already I mean, like, within my four-second blapper attention--

*distracted* Ooh, there's a healer thread around that corner. *goes to get more aggro*

I guess the other thought I have on this is:

Cascading Def: The reason it's such a shock is that you don't get hit much
with high def initially. After a few debuffs though, everyone hits you, so you
really get a ramped effect that is very noticeable.

Resistance: You were always getting hit the same number of times anyway.
It just doesn't hurt as much. The -res debuffs really just increase damage
taken.

So, in that sense, it doesn't feel like a ramped up effect from nobody hitting
to everyone hitting. They were all hitting previously, so things feel "typical"
until you realize you're taking way more damage than usual (or, you end
up dead because you *didn't* realize that).

Either way, with Resist, it doesn't *feel* like a cascade effect at the time.


Regards,
4

For an amusing side discussion, while resistance debuffs are resisted by the original resistance value, damage debuffing is resisted by current resistance. Because both effects are talked about as "resisted by resistance" this may cause some confusion.

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It has been a long time since I last cared about these things, but I do seem to remember -res debuffs work off your current resistances, not the buffed/unbuffed values