The fact that the incarnate softcap is the new standard forced me to plan a better staff/elec build than I suspect I would have in the past. I used to focus on the s/l softcap to the detriment of other types, but since that wouldn't even mean anything in particular anymore I'm going for ~34% s/l/e/n instead. As that's i-capped with medium or large purples I foresee a pretty hectic DA playstyle, but in a good way. Running on x8 might be safer than x5.
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Well....|
Originally Posted by Werner
My thought even at the time was that incarnate to hit would reward defense instead of punish it. People acted like it wasn't possible to hit the incarnate soft cap, so defense was screwed. But it's quite possible on defense-based characters, and I assume everyone's figured that out by now. It's only very difficult to impossible on characters that are not defense based. So to me, it was everyone else (like me) who had soft-capped defense on top of resistance secondaries that were going to suffer.
It seems that I was wrong too, at least on teams, with Barriers flying around everywhere and other stacked buffs. I assume resistance is still just fine on teams. And I feel like I'm doing just fine still with my character solo, even if I don't feel untouchable the way I did with soft-capped defense. I can also respec to recover some of that survivability, even if not all of it. People seemed to go through a long period of underestimating the soft cap, and then once they were convinced it was valuable, they went through a long period of OVERestimating the soft cap. Maybe we've finally reached a happy medium, but I haven't been on the forum enough recently to know, and certainly don't survey people in game. (Why ARE all these other people running around in my MMO?) The soft cap is very, very valuable. It's also not the end all to be all of survivability, particularly on something like Dark Armor with so many other tools. Also, when I say I'm moving away from the soft cap on my character, I never WAS at the incarnate soft cap, and defense further from the soft cap contributes less to survivability, so I'm giving up less. Also, the planned build would still be incarnate soft capped to melee and lethal with a double stack of Divine Avalanche. That's a large portion of incoming damage in many groups. |
In my opinion, there's two ways of looking at the contribution to mitigation of defense. The first is that the last point of defense is the best, because it increases your survivability the most, based upon time-to-defeat.
The other view is that every point of defense reduces your incoming damage stream by two percent, based upon total impinging damage.
For years, everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY, seemed to weight the first method more highly.
I never did. I view all points of defense as equally valuable. 30 percent defense means you mitigate 60 percent of the incoming damage stream. If you then nest 50 percent resist inside that, then you have mitigated 80 percent of the incoming damage stream. If you then have 50 hit points per second of effective healing, then you can withstand 250dps of incoming damage forever.
In my opinion, viewing it this way leads to toons with broader performance envelopes. I will cheerfully build for 40 percent defense, if it gets me enough resists and heals to more than make up the difference in mitigated damage.
Granted, the whole picture is MUCH more complex, with debuffs, buffs, differing damage types, differing attack types, and status effects thrown in as ways to also mitigate incoming damage. Indeed, one of the simplest and most potent forms of mitigation is simple maneuverability: There is no baddie in the game that will attack you while on the run. This is why I always emphasize battlefield awareness and maneuver when I'm discussing tankers.
So in my book it's not a big deal to 'lose the soft cap', as long as your overall mitigation package is adequate to the rigors you will face.
Mitigation works as you describe. Survivability doesn't. For the sake of anyone that has no idea what we're talking about...
For enemies with 50% to hit, 45% defense provides 90% mitigation, 40% defense provides 80% mitigation and 35% defense provides 70% mitigation. It's a nice, linear relationship.
However, discrete effects ignored, someone with 90% mitigation can survive twice as much incoming damage as someone with 80% mitigation, who can survive 1.5 times as much incoming damage a someone with 70% mitigation. Survivability is a measure of how much incoming damage you can survive. Each increment of mitigation improves survivabilty more than the last. It's not a linear relationship.
So other things being equal, if I can survive 10 bosses at 45% defense, I can only survive 5 bosses at 40% defense. This can and has been demonstrated in game. Other things, of course, are not typically equal, but making up that defecit takes quite a lot. It CAN work out that way, though. For instance, it might be worth dropping to 40% defense to pick up Aid Self.
And vastly oversimplified, that's what I'm considering doing. I'm dropping to 40% defense (non-lethal ranged and AoE, while Barrier is down) to improve the cycle time on Dark Regeneration from about 15 seconds to about 10 seconds.
"That's because Werner can't do maths." - BunnyAnomaly
"Four hours in, and I was no longer making mistakes, no longer detoggling. I was a machine." - Werner
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See, I don't know if you shoot for overkill on survivability, or if I've just been luckier when playing my BS/DA, but I've never felt like I needed DR coming back that fast. |
Originally Posted by Werner
I'm dropping to 40% defense (non-lethal ranged and AoE, while Barrier is down) to improve the cycle time on Dark Regeneration from about 15 seconds to about 10 seconds.
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Mine recharges in about 17-18 seconds, and it's always been up when I needed it.
Or maybe I'm just not pushing my scrapper quite as hard as you are.
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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. |
I shoot for overkill on survivability, then go looking for a challenge.
My experience with my Katana/Dark is long periods of cruise control followed by huge waves of damage. During cruise control, I rarely need Dark Regeneration, and if I do use it, once is plenty. During the waves of damage, my hit points are dropping like a stone, I hit Dark Regeneration, and my hit points continue dropping like a stone, often faster than Dark Regeneration recharges. There are other tools available, of course, like Barrier, Void, or inspirations. But I'm using Void offensively, and I treat Barrier and inspirations like "if all else fails" tools (which sometimes has me dying with Barrier available and a full tray of inspirations - "I can do this!" *splat*).
"That's because Werner can't do maths." - BunnyAnomaly
"Four hours in, and I was no longer making mistakes, no longer detoggling. I was a machine." - Werner
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Originally Posted by Werner
Mitigation works as you describe. Survivability doesn't. For the sake of anyone that has no idea what we're talking about...
For enemies with 50% to hit, 45% defense provides 90% mitigation, 40% defense provides 80% mitigation and 35% defense provides 70% mitigation. It's a nice, linear relationship. |
While that's competely true, the joker in the deck is the fact that in the latter content, baddies with 50 percent to hit are not terribly common.
Simply enough, a level 54 boss/elite boss has a 9 percent chance to hit even if completely floored. (Assuming what I think I know is accurate.)This moves the cutoff of maximum defense mitigation from 90 percent to 82 percent. Or, L54's put through 80 percent more damage than L50's.
[Important caveat: I do not know, and as far as I know no one knows to date, the exact effects 'plus levels' have on to-hit chances. I would assume they have the same effect as plain old levels, meaning the dev's have the ability to dilute the maximum effectiveness of defense at will as they move forward in content design. It might be nice for folks who care more about such things than I do to tinker with the numbers and see what the exact effects are.]
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| However, discrete effects ignored, someone with 90% mitigation can survive twice as much incoming damage as someone with 80% mitigation, who can survive 1.5 times as much incoming damage a someone with 70% mitigation. Survivability is a measure of how much incoming damage you can survive. Each increment of mitigation improves survivabilty more than the last. It's not a linear relationship. |
Indeed this is so as you approach the inflection point of taking zero damage, where, of course, all the math goes 'TILT'.
However: While the impact of defense on mitigation is large, it is not nearly as large as it is commonly perceived(5 percent soak-through vs 9 percent soak-through), and reaching the point of maximal impact is considerably harder than it once was (45 vs 59).
All of this strongly indicates that layering is once again rising to prominence as the most effective strategy, assuming, the Dev's don't also render the eeffects of resistance and healing moot. (Also leaving aside debuff, buff, maneuver, and a host of other considerations.)
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So other things being equal, if I can survive 10 bosses at 45% defense, I can only survive 5 bosses at 40% defense. This can and has been demonstrated in game. Other things, of course, are not typically equal, but making up that defecit takes quite a lot. It CAN work out that way, though. For instance, it might be worth dropping to 40% defense to pick up Aid Self. And vastly oversimplified, that's what I'm considering doing. I'm dropping to 40% defense (non-lethal ranged and AoE, while Barrier is down) to improve the cycle time on Dark Regeneration from about 15 seconds to about 10 seconds. |
Are you picking up any resists?
It turns out that I agree with you on your points. Hitting the 59% soft cap now has similar value to hitting the 45% soft cap before, but the trade offs can be MUCH more significant when it's even possible. At some point in many builds, even with each point more valuable than the last, no matter how good that extra defense might be, it becomes less good than what you're giving up to get it. And that's where I think I've found myself.
I think all the debuffs and autohit flying around emphasize the layering approach as well. Any of my layers may simply vanish, but it would be rare for them to ALL vanish. The more I can survive with one or two layers missing, the better. It's making me think of things like slotting my Cloak of Fear better, grabbing Assault for placate resistance (not that I've seen placates, but I'm sure they'll be out there), that sort of thing.
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I'd already pushed resists (other than psionic) about as far as I thought I could push them realistically, but yeah, in the most recent build I'm fiddling with, my smashing/lethal resistance goes from 60% to 64%, and psionic goes from 58% to 70%, though other choices of slot use may be more valuable. I'd be picking up about 50 more hit points too, which is kind of like resistance. But mostly it's about getting 80% more recharge. But I'm also not likely to build it until I see what's coming in I23 with the new incarnate slot - something about damage or survivability buffs? Do we have preliminary numbers somewhere? Or is it closed beta right now?
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Originally Posted by mauk2
Are you picking up any resists?
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"That's because Werner can't do maths." - BunnyAnomaly
"Four hours in, and I was no longer making mistakes, no longer detoggling. I was a machine." - Werner
Videos of Other Stupid Scrapper Tricks
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Originally Posted by Werner
It turns out that I agree with you on your points. Hitting the 59% soft cap now has similar value to hitting the 45% soft cap before, but the trade offs can be MUCH more significant when it's even possible. At some point in many builds, even with each point more valuable than the last, no matter how good that extra defense might be, it becomes less good than what you're giving up to get it. And that's where I think I've found myself.
I think all the debuffs and autohit flying around emphasize the layering approach as well. Any of my layers may simply vanish, but it would be rare for them to ALL vanish. The more I can survive with one or two layers missing, the better. It's making me think of things like slotting my Cloak of Fear better, grabbing Assault for placate resistance (not that I've seen placates, but I'm sure they'll be out there), that sort of thing. |
There is a new faction on beta which throws taunts. They yank your targeting reticle off.
It's quite disconcerting, and adds a lot of variability.
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| I'd already pushed resists (other than psionic) about as far as I thought I could push them realistically, but yeah, in the most recent build I'm fiddling with, my smashing/lethal resistance goes from 60% to 64%, and psionic goes from 58% to 70%, though other choices of slot use may be more valuable. I'd be picking up about 50 more hit points too, which is kind of like resistance. But mostly it's about getting 80% more recharge. But I'm also not likely to build it until I see what's coming in I23 with the new incarnate slot - something about damage or survivability buffs? Do we have preliminary numbers somewhere? Or is it closed beta right now? |
We'll see what it finishes up to be, but it seems to have some promise.
It seems that I was wrong too, at least on teams, with Barriers flying around everywhere and other stacked buffs. I assume resistance is still just fine on teams. And I feel like I'm doing just fine still with my character solo, even if I don't feel untouchable the way I did with soft-capped defense. I can also respec to recover some of that survivability, even if not all of it.
People seemed to go through a long period of underestimating the soft cap, and then once they were convinced it was valuable, they went through a long period of OVERestimating the soft cap. Maybe we've finally reached a happy medium, but I haven't been on the forum enough recently to know, and certainly don't survey people in game. (Why ARE all these other people running around in my MMO?)
The soft cap is very, very valuable. It's also not the end all to be all of survivability, particularly on something like Dark Armor with so many other tools. Also, when I say I'm moving away from the soft cap on my character, I never WAS at the incarnate soft cap, and defense further from the soft cap contributes less to survivability, so I'm giving up less. Also, the planned build would still be incarnate soft capped to melee and lethal with a double stack of Divine Avalanche. That's a large portion of incoming damage in many groups.
"That's because Werner can't do maths." - BunnyAnomaly
"Four hours in, and I was no longer making mistakes, no longer detoggling. I was a machine." - Werner
Videos of Other Stupid Scrapper Tricks