Electric Armour and the Soft cap

Electric Armor and SOFTCAPPING your defense
Electric Armour has some of the best resistance’s in the game. Has the potential to hit almost 90% resisted to smashing and lethal and will hit the hard cap of Energy resistance (a very important factor in the incarnate content).
Standard resistance with 3 standard Invention Origin is as follows

Smashing: 79.2%

Lethal: 79.2%

Fire: 55.5%

Cold: 55.5%

Energy: 90%

Negative energy: 41.7%

Psionic: 55.5%

Toxic: 0%

1. this means for pure smashing and lethal damage types you will receive 20.8% of the enemies maximum output
2. you receive for pure fire, ice and Psionic you receive 44.5% of its full effect
3. 10% of pure energy attacks
4. 58.3% damage received from pure negative energy
5. 100% damage taken from toxic




What Does Resistance mean for an ELA?
But even with these very high resistances an Electric tank won’t cut it in the end game content. You will dominate the early levels but once you head into the 40’s and beyond, you will find that there is a paradigm shift where you will need more mitigation from your build other than resistance, so we need to start looking out how we can incorporate defence and other forms of mitigation. ELA has absolutely no powers that offer defence in its power makeup. It is a pure resistance machine, which is great because that means we as the player have some of the best resistances in the game. BUT resistances aren’t enough!!!! Sure you can take the big hits and power on but what if your fighting someone that hits really hard??? Someone like Reichsman or Bobcat. Bobcat as of current can hit my ELA at 88% S/L resists for 600 damage, so imagine if I get 4 times in a row (which is likely to happen if I’m a lead tank in the Tinmage task force taunting her) that’s a wopping 2400 hp taken out of my life bar.
Since ELA has not got a power that buffs your base hp (we have a power that buffs regeneration instead) you are really stuck with 2000 to 2400 hp, which is not a lot by many tanks standards. So 4 attacks from bobcat at 90% resistance is still death to an ELA tank.




That’s Bad Right?
No it’s not bad it’s actually a good thing. Because since we have been blessed with such strong resistances we can utilize the power pools and Crafted IO’s to push our defense from 0% to 32.5 or 45%. By incorperating the softcap we are able to increase our survivability to almost limitless.



Why are these numbers significant?
Well the softcap works like this.
At birth of your toon every enemy has 50% chance to hit you, as we attain more defense that 50% decreases. So for example we can get 32.5% defense and the chance of a enemy to hit you has dropped from 50% to 17% chance to hit you. If we are able to get to 45% defense, than we have dropped their chance of hitting us from 50% to 5%. Even though we can still increase our defense above 45% it will not matter due to the fact that the chance to hit can never be lower than 5% (for further reference please check http://cityofheroes.wikia.com/wiki/Limits)
So while 45% defense is ideal for your ELA tank 32.5 can be just as effective.
32.5% puts you in range of the softcap when you use a small purple inspiration called a luck
(if you are still not sure on how the softcap works be sure to check http://cityofheroes.wikia.com/wiki/Limits it is on Dechs Kaison blog




What defensive powers do I need to select to achieve softcap?
The following powers are needed to attain the softcap on a ELA
1. Combat Jumping
2. Weave
3. Maneuvers
These are the 3 main powers to select from there is also “stealth” that you can run as a toggle as well to try and push you over the line (note: I do not recommend taking stealth at all. You already need to make huge sacrifice to attain the sofcap as it already stands and this will add extra strain on your agro control and endurance usage).




How do these 3 powers help?
These three powers give a defense buff to ALL damage types (typed and positional):
Typed defense
Smashing
Lethal
Fire
Cold
Energy
Negative Energy
Psionic
Positional defense
Melee
Ranged
AoE (area of affect)
We are going to focus on 4 most common TYPED defense Smashing/Lethal/Energy/Negative Energy. These four are the most common damage type enemies use in the game. Smashing and lethal at the highest, energy second and negative third.


So let’s look at what you will need to start doing to your ELA tank to get too softcap.
We have 2 options to take at the beginning of building your level 50 tank. We can continue to use your SO’s which gives us a decent buff to resistance but not enough for defense.
Defense with 3 single origin enhancements in the 3 defense powers (maneuvers, combat jumping and weave) you have chosen will buff you to only a staggering 9%
We have decreased S/L/E/NE attacks to 41% chance to hit you :nowhere near the 5%

If we were to upgrade to common IO’s those same states for S/L/E/NE increase from 9% to 11.5%. Not a big jump at all, but still an improvement. Every percentage helps.

Now it gets tricky determining what sets to get and for what powers with the budget we have. Let’s start with the most expensive sets we can get

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