A simple fix?

From what I've been seeing, a lot of threads on the boards come up with fairly complex ways to "fix" Kheldians. Particularly tri-formers. I got to thinking about it last night while I was busy not getting enough sleep, and came up with a seemingly simple answer. What if the Kheldian inherent buffed Defense instead of Resistance? This would allow tri-form builds to more reasonably acquire Defense despite lack of access to toggles and would remove the redundancy between the inherent and Light Form/Eclipse.

If I'm simply suggesting something that's come up before, then I apologize. I am fairly new to the Kheldian boards since prior to i21 I rarely played either Kheldian AT.

@Rorn ---- Blue Baron ---- Guardian

I've thought the same thing in the past but the reality is that the tri-formers wouldn't see much benefit out of it relative to the human-only.

(My assumption is that you would have to reduce the Defense bonus per teammate because you only need 45% to soft-cap, rather than the 85% to cap resists. I'd imagine each teammate that can give extra Defense would only give 5%.)

As a Nova, you have some basic Energy/Neg resist and that's it. Unless you're IO'd out to the gills (tentacles?), a paltry 10-15% Defense isn't going to soft cap you and the more stable 20-30% resists would increase survivability from the attacks that would likely one-shot a squishy character.

As a Dwarf, yes, the Defense would help (~60% resists to all but Psi + 10-15% Defense from teammates and other set bonuses could soft-cap you) but I don't know if it would help more than capping your resists (in which case, when slotted, you only need 2 particular teammate types to achieve).

However, as Human, you're going to be running around with capped resists already (Light Form or Eclipse) so all that's happened with a change as proposed is buffing Human-form. Instead of needing a lot help via set bonuses to get the defense soft cap, you can snag a teammate or two and soft cap your defense with relatively little IO investment (that is to say, it isn't too hard to get to 20-25% S/L resist, it's a lot harder to get the next 20%) Obviously, solo acts are still going to need a lot of Set help but if you team, Human-only will still benefit more from the change than the tri-formers.

I'm not saying the idea is bad but to couch it in a "it would help Tri-Formers" is shaky to me. What I will admit is that teaming as a high-end Kheld with allies that give the Resist bonus is not "worth it" from an Inherent Power perspective. There is no benefit to extra resists when you can self-cap so easily. On that front, I would argue for a change in the inherent but on the other hand, not everyone who plays a Kheld is running around with Perma-Light Form/Eclipse. The extra Resists on a "casual" player or a lower-level one would likely help them more than extra Defense, which a PB has no access to boost without Sets anyway.

I look at the Kheld inherent as simply gravy: if it helps, yay, if not, I'm not worried. On an 8-man team, sure, I might be rocking with +20-30% damage, same in Resists and an extra Mag status resist and all that is good but I'd still want to be effective without it. For the high-end Khelds out there, Defense>Resist but that's not the case from levels 1-40 (and maybe all the way to 50, until you can really fill out your Kheld with Sets).

We do have to think of the broader player base and the journey to the end-game, as well.

While I agree Human form would gain more from this change than tri-forms, I won't go so far to say that tri-forms don't gain anything. The 10-15% from team members would go a long way toward augmenting set bonuses. It might not make it easy to softcap, but it would make it much easier to get the next best thing: 32.5%. I suppose it might negatively impact the early game though, so what if rather than replace the Resistance bonus it was just added to the Resistance bonus? That way each nearby Tanker, for example, would give a WS 10% Resistance and 5% Defense. That would help survival in the early game (where Khelds are noticeably squishy) and help the broader playerbase while still benefiting high end builds. I'm not sure whether or not it would be too strong a buff to the inherent though.

@Rorn ---- Blue Baron ---- Guardian

Yep, lots of the resistance we get is wasted past the cap, so getting some defence instead would be great.