Back After Five Years, need some help

What you're hearing might be an abbreviation of this, "It is better to have smashing/lethal defense soft-capped than to have melee defense soft-capped." I think that IS the forum consensus, and one I agree with. But anyone who abbreviates that to "typed defense is better than positional defense" probably doesn't understand how defense works in the game. Typed defense is neither better nor worse than positional defense. The game doesn't care which you have - it just applies whichever one is higher.

In practice, whether typed or positional defense is better tends to depend on what your secondary comes with. Dark Armor supplies a tiny amount of both, so that doesn't decide anything. Parry supplies large amounts of lethal and melee defense. The trouble with the lethal defense is that you can only get set bonuses for smashing AND lethal. So if you want to boost your smashing defense up to high levels, you end up with lethal defense much higher than is normally needed. But hey, that gives you the option to use Parry or not depending on the situation, and some enemies have higher than normal to hit, and so require higher than normal defense. That's when Parry will be very useful. Basically, Broad Sword/Dark Armor doesn't really demand one approach or the other, and either can be viable.

Demodos's build is better for defense than you're seeing. Fire, cold and psionic damage aren't going to go against typed defense because positional defense is better or equal. So you're really looking at 33.3% minimum defense (melee or ranged) against anything but fire, cold or psionic AoEs. That's a pretty small portion of the damage you'll typically face. And the vast majority of damage is going to be going up against either 43.6% or 44.2% defense.

45% defense is referred to as the soft cap. Most enemies in the game have 50% to hit, and 5% to hit is the minimum the game allows. So defense over 45% defense doesn't help against most enemies in the game. Also, as you approach 45% defense, survivability increases drastically. So you might hear things that sounds like "soft cap or go home". That's an exaggeration to be sure, but there's a kernel of truth to it. These days, you might hear that called the old soft cap, though. In the new incarnate content, all (?) of the enemies have 64% to hit (and sometimes higher) instead. So now it requires 59% defense or more to make yourself as unhittable as possible. So we might refer to 59% defense as the new soft cap, or the incarnate soft cap. I'm not sure we've settled on the terminology yet. As you might imagine, this is MUCH more difficult to achieve, so it's important that your build have something to fall back on. In Desmodos's build, you hit the new soft cap to lethal damage with a single Parry, and to melee with two Parries. Then as Dark Armor, you have good resistance and a huge heal to fall back on. Mine does fine in incarnate content. I'm sure Desmodos's does too.

Resistances tend to be simpler than defense. Damage is damage, so there's none of that worry about what the to hit of the enemy is. It is also difficult to boost resistance meaningfully with set bonuses. Therefore, the rule of thumb tends to be simpler - slot your resistance powers decently and call it good. Oh, and pick up Tough. I'm pretty much of the opinion that nearly every build should have Tough (and Weave, but that's not resistance).

Even if I personally love the challenge of soft-capping anything and everything, yeah, it's not always the best approach. I started a thread recently involving a soft-capped Katana/Regeneration build, looking for improvements. As the community started poking at it, defense quickly dropped to the lower 30s, and calculated survivability went up the whole way. Defense isn't everything.

For a long time, conventional wisdom was "layer your defenses". You want everything - some defense, some resistance, some hit points, some healing, and so on. Focus on getting more layers, better layers. During this time, I think I could say that I was an advocate for a more extreme approach, the approach of soft-capping defense, even at the cost of other layers (but ideally with other layers left intact). There were solid numerical reasons for this suggestion in many cases. But things now have shifted perhaps too far in the other direction. It seems like everyone now "knows" that for best survivability, you soft cap defense no matter what the cost. That's also the wrong answer in many cases. The cost DOES matter. I think the forum regulars realize that and have probably always realized that, and there are a lot of people advocating a more balanced approach these days, at least on sets that don't provide a lot of defense (such as Dark Armor). I think some of that is a result of the incarnate content and the new soft cap of 59% simply being unattainable in many cases.

Anyway, we're still adapting to the new incarnate content and abilities. Our advice may shift in some unexpected direction moving foward, and it'll probaby take a while before we're confident in our recommendations again. That said, I'm very happy with the performance of my Katana/Dark with the incarnate abilities against the incarnate content, and feel no pressure at all to respec to something better. I'm not even sure what "better" would be.

Hopefully me blathering on is useful instead of tiresome. My Katana/Dark is my favorite character, and defense and survivability are a favorite topic of mine.

He

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze I hate to be the bringer of bad news... but Willpower sucks!!! you're better off rolling a regen

I think that's a perfectly reasonable plan. Some people seem to want other people to figure everything out and make their own build, but I see no problem with grabbing someone else's good build if all you want to do is to PLAY something great.

The main problem I see with that build cost-wise is the inclusion of a Gladiator's Armor +3%. Those are 2 billion influence on the market, and you have to be lucky to get one, because everyone else wants one too and is willing to pay it. The only fast way to get one is to buy it off market, and last time I paid any attention, that means 2.5 billion. I doubt the whole rest of the build will run you that much. Probably more like 1 billion for the rest of the build (as long as you have the Hamios in it - I didn't check), then 2 billion for that one IO.

So here's what I'd suggest, and this applies even if you find you have the influence - buy everything but that one IO, and leave the slot empty. Then run tip missions. Endless tip missions. I believe the Gladiator's Armor costs 30 alignment merits, which is I think 330 missions across a minimum of 60 active days of playing. You MIGHT have enough influence for it just from selling your Hamios, but you'll seriously be very, very solid without it. You'll probably notice the difference when you add it, but it's not going to be night and day. Oh, and that'll give you time to see if you like the build before slotting the final, most expensive piece. I'll be very surprised if you don't like it, though.

Well, I suppose there is the accuracy issue. No Tactics, no Kismet unique - it's just not built for fighting significantly uplevel enemies. If you like fighting enemies three or four levels higher than you, that could be an issue.

I should let Desmodos address this, but here's a quick partial fix. Since we're over the cap on 1.25% energy/negative defense bonuses, we can afford to lose a Cleaving Blow set with no effect on defense. Let's say that we drop them from Death Shroud and replace them with Multi-Strike acc/dam/end and dam/end. Take the extra slot, add it to Combat Jumping, and put in a Kismet +6% accuracy. It won't make a huge difference, but it'll help. It gets you over 95% accuracy fighting +2s, and 87%+ fighting +3s. Once you get your alpha slot to tier 3, you'll never face more than +3s. So that'll probably have to do. I'm not sure how to add more accuracy without more significant build changes.

It is 30 "AMerits" (Alignment Merits; oh, you'll have to get used to the several new forms of in-game currency). However, it shouldn't take you that long, if you're really committed to it.

You can run 5 Tip Missions a day, and after every 10th mission, you get an Alignment Mission which rewards you with one Alignment Merit. So you can get 1 AMerit every other day this way. Also, you can, once every 18 hours (I believe; might be 20 or even 24), exchange 50 Reward Merits (the ones you get from Task Forces, Story Arcs, defeating Giant Monsters, etc.) plus 20 million Influence for 1 AMerit. So if you're borderline obsessive, you can gain 3 AMerits every other day (Day 1: 50 Merit/20M Inf Swap, 5 Tips; Day 2: 50 Merit/20M Inf Swap, 5 Tips + Alignment Mission), netting you 30 AMerits in 15 days.

Alternatively, there's the market. There are a number of guides out there which detail how to turn a profit with the market system. Additionally, the Market & Inventions sub-forum acts as a sort of "secondary market" for the higher end IOs. You'll see one or two posts a week from people looking to sell the very expensive IOs, so if you have the Inf on hand, that's another good way to get what you need/want.

EDIT: whoops, forgot to give you the "cheat sheet" for gaining 50 Merits a day...check out the Flashback System. My personal favorite arc to run is the Freakshow War; 33 Merits for about 35-55 minutes of work. Then you can fill in the other 17 with one or two of the others.

I'm doing this by scanning the build thread, or people post their build elsewhere. I'm ok with grabbing a build if the powers are close enough to what I want and I trust the poster who did the build.

For the OP, here's a couple of links to look at.

Enhancements Sets It list all of the IO sets in the game.

Enhancement values This gives the actual values of enhancements based on their level and now many aspects they buff. The chart is towards the bottom.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.