Resistance!

The real question is, "Does she coach defense, too?"

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

I like to think of her as a "defense contractor."

I'm only a casual baseball fan, although I did follow the rise of sabermetrics starting in the early 90s. What I find most facinating about sabermetrics in general is that baseball is *sold* to its fans in large part through its statistics: moreso than any sport baseball is known for its statistics. Historically speaking more kids have an entire team's statistics memorized than can name *one* quarterback rating.

And yet, baseball is *run* by a bunch of old guard traditionalists who believe in judging things based almost entirely on gut instinct and tradition. Its that dichotomy, more than the actual statistics, that I find interesting. It would be almost as if the NFL featured and highlighted quarterbacks in all of its promotional material and you discovered virtually all the coaches and general managers in the NFL thought that left tackles were the most important player on the field.

Resistance is trustworthy protection, so needs to be moderated so as not to unbalance enemy groups as part of overall game balance and experience.

Defense can be easily countered without instantly killing/unbalancing content towards those without it, and is still prone to the Random Number Generator killing them on a whim, so it's okay to drown players in it.

*saves Arcanaville posts for later reference when trying to explain stuff*

lol, I read it more as a comic nod to The Borg or some such...

As a little aside, health bonuses are rather good currently and can be used as pseudo-dam rez due to being able to take more of a hit and it works well with regen.

Yeah, funny title aside, that was my "Suggestions" forum proposal to add +resistance bonuses to IOs but create a limiting factor (similar to the "rule of five" after which bonuses stop working) to prevent the combination of defense and resistance from reaching overpowered levels.

I saw that. Good read. The easiest way to do that may just be to cap each of their total contributions. Example: No more than 15% (totally arbitrary number) dam rez to smash/leathal would be allowed via set bonuses, 22.5% rez to f/c/e/n, and 30% rez to psy/tox (less common = higher cap). I fear this would cause too much unrest for players, not to mention a re-eval of current set bonuses by the devs... yikes!

Absolutely. I dont think that was the best game design decision though. but since I dont have a way to fix it, I am not going to ***** too much about it.

First, I just want to say thank you for the in depth explanation. It is exactly what I was looking for. A follow up question though. In the end game, where all the debuffs are flying around at saturation levels, and defence ekes out ahead, would it not be possible to increase the availability of resistance bonuses without kicking balance in the teeth and at least make resistance a viable option?(Perhaps with bonuses that don't examp down past 45, much like the incarnate abilities)

It makes sense that increasing damage could be a bad thing, and while there is the two shot rule, squishies probably don't want to be two shotted by average minions. Is leveraging -resists a worse option because resist debuffs are in fact resisted by resists?(I dont know how it works, I have just heard that it indeed does) How is that different than softcapped defence avoiding defence debuffs 95% of the time? Is part of the issue that say you have no defence(regen scrapper) you can basically laugh at defence debuffs, but with resistance debuffs, if you have no resistance, getting debuffed means the mobs will be hitting you far harder?



Understood. Again, not the way I would have designed it standing here 7 years later, but since hindsight is 20/20, and I have no idea how to do it better, I will just accept it for what it is.

Again, Thanks Arcana.

An interesting read. I am surprised I haven't read it before.

Technically, that's what the destiny buffs are sort of intended to do: allow for ultra high buffing of the players, including resistance, but only for limited times.


Well, its really just SR scrappers and tankers that have that 95% debuff resistance. Outside of that defense debuffs tend to have a higher effect on high defense than resistance debuffs tend to have on high resistance because of cascade failure.

Lets simplify a bit: lets eliminate DDR from the equation for a second and look at comparing 45% defense to 90% resistance. We'll throwequivalent strength debuffs at them: -5% defense and -10% resistance. Here's what happens. The resistance set gets hit with the -10% resistance debuff, but 90% is resisted so it only gets hit with -1% debuff. That reduces resistance from 90% to 89%. In return, the damage it takes from a 100 point attack increases from 10 to 11 points of damage. Note that this is actually 10% higher damage. The way the math works out, a 10% resistance debuff increases the damage you take by 10%. Its not that the resistance debuff does that directly, but the math ends up that way.

Now without DDR, the defense set will get hit with the entire 5% debuff, but unlike the resistance set the defense set will *avoid* 90% of these debuffs relative to the resistance set. If we're talking about a 50% base tohit attacker, the resistance set will get hit with 50% of those debuffs, while the defense set will only get hit by 5%. The defense set gets hit 90% less often. So while the resistance set gets hit for only 10% of the debuff, the defense set gets hit for all the debufff 10% of the time. That should average out over time, and it does. Or it would, if it wasn't for cascade failure.

Resistance doesn't just resist resistance debuffs, it always does so at full strength (barring unresistable debuffs: it gets a little more complicated when those enter the equation). So even though while debuffed the resistance character has 89% resistance instead of 90%, that character still resists 90% of all incoming resistance debuffs. Their ability to resist debuffs doesn't go down. As more and more debuffs land they will take more and more damage, but they will still be resisting 90% of those debuffs, so each will continue to land at -1% debuff.

However, the defense set was counting on *avoiding* those debuffs, and once it gets hit by a debuff, its defense goes down. That defense is what was preventing the debuffs from landing, and with defense debuffed more of the debuffs will tend to land. This causes defense to spiral downward, which each debuff making it easier for the next one to land. While resistance maintains its protection against debuffs, defense doesn't. Once debuffed, those debuffs accelerate the effect of more debuffs, and you get a cascading effect while I called "cascade failure" when I described the effect it had on perma-elude scrappers. It still applies today. While resistance continues to protect against resistance debuffs, and thus its actual damage protection drops in a constant fashion under debuffing, defense loses protection against debuffs at the same time it loses protection against actual damage, and that causes an accelerating effect that causes defense to lose protection to both debuffs and damage, and you can quickly end up with no protection to anything (at least via defense). That can't happen to resistance: a large enough debuff can neutralize resistance, but it cannot be picked apart in this way.

For the situation to be at least roughly symmetric, defense sets have to be able to *consistently* reduce the average magnitude of incoming defense debuffs to roughly the same degree resistance sets with comparable levels of resistance do. Unfortunately, that is really really difficult to do. If we set DDR to be roughly the same thing as the equivalent resistance, then a defense set will have the benefit of both DDR *and* avoidance, and their protection will be better. But if we don't, then we end up with a slower downward spiral of defense and by the time debuff protection equals resistance debuff protection, actual *defense* will average a lower value, making defense less able to actually protect against damage. Its nonsensical to explicitly make defense protect against defense debuffs as well as resistance protects against resistance debuffs, but have the actual damage protection be weaker.

So this is a case where the devs have to make a qualitative decision, and the decision tends to resolve itself this way: in general powersets with sufficient dependency on defense will tend to have an amount of DDR which is very roughly comparable to their dependency on defense, not their actual defensive strength. Invuln depends a little on defense, but its protection is balanced between defense, resistance, and +health/heal. Its actual reliance on defense is low, so its DDR is low. Shields relies a lot more on defense, so its DDR is higher. SR depends almost entirely on defense, and its DDR is astronomical. Beyond that, its a purely qualitative judgment call. It is not intended to produce a numerically equivalent situation, because such a numerically equivalent situation is not, in the straight forward sense, possible.