Resistance or Defense?

Hey, first time starting a Brute, and I wanna know whether I should go the defense route or the resistance route. Which is better in the long run?

A resistance set is better for survivability in my opinion, because you can build for defense on top of the resistances and layer your mitigation which makes you even tougher to kill. Defense based sets are harder to build resistances behind.

Not that something like Super Reflexes isn't a great set...but Dark Armor with softcapped defenses is much more survivable than Super Reflexes could be.

Personally...I wouldn't bother trying to cap all resists and I would build for S/L/E/N softcap...I would pick up tough to help with S/L resists and take weave, manuevers and combat jumping to help with defenses. I would slot reactive armor in all my resist toggles and take sets like kinetic combat and eradication in my attacks to help defenses.

I would add to this that if you cannot build enough defence into your character you are probably better off taking a defence set, because although layering is good, 2 small layers is not as good as one great layer (And capped defence is the key layer).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aggelakis PrincessDarkstar: "RAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH SOMEONE IS *WRONG* ON THE INTERNET!"

It depends entirely on the enemy type. There are MANY sources of defdebuff in the game these days. Building for defense w/ incarnate content and no DDR is especially futile.

I used to love and adore DA w/ defense stacked on top of it. However, little energy resists and rampant defdebuffs in trials has left me discouraged with the set.

So, to reiterate, it depends on what you want to tackle. Even with IOs, every set has an achilles' heal.

Is there any slotting 101 guides for noobs? Im still very new to the game so when someone says slot for S/L/E/N softcap i have no clue what that means lol. Sorry for the questions just trying to learn as much as i can.

Sweet thanks for the info, trying to learn all i can, soon will be trying to figure out my own build for my TW/EA brute, so trying to learn about the builds and stuff as well

TW's Defensive Sweep can give you more than enough Melee defense to keep up and close encounters more than manageable; especially when combined with EA's resists. So you've actually got fairly decent coverage.

Ranged defense is a little difficult to come by so try for typed defense instead.

If you're not scared of the Endurance monster (and you shouldn't have to be with both Energize and Power Sink) go with Soul Mastery for Darkest Night and the additional 20% direct damage protection plus the enhanceable To Hit debuff.

TW also has a fair amount of KD/KB for other forms of mitigation and should buy you some time to use Power Sink offensively (with Lightning Field).


[You know, if you go with Staff, you can get comparable Melee defense plus bursts of added resistance from SkySplitter in Body Form (+7.5%)]

Resistance is best late game they say. I have a hard time accepting this 100% because you don't just get a fully IO'd brute at lvl50... also, if you do lowbie TFs/Trials then of course the bonus drops.

Also, people forget the lack of DDR in resistance sets (Bar Invulnerbility.. because invulnerability is BOSS).

I say go with what you feel most comfortable with. On teams, epect some sort of buff to your defense or reduction in hits taken in some form due to aggro or ally abilities. Personally, I like the hybrid sets: Invulnerability. Stone Armor. Willpower. even Shield Defense. These sets I find tend to do the best in the long run. Easier to softcap than pure resistance yet generally has better tools of survival than pure defense.

I dunno.. if you have a few hundred million inf to spare then yeah.. go pure resistance but looking at it realistically, they aren't so different and they both have issues.

If you're looking at the end game content then I'd suggest the best option is for layered defences. A set that absolutely excels at one type of thing (regeneration or defence for instance) tends to be a little weaker at the end because of the way that IOs work.

In very loose terms, it's fairly easy to build anything to a high amount of defence through IOs, but it is nigh impossible to get even a small improvement to resistance through IOs. For this reason the most survivable will be a set that begins with a good amount of resistance and you shore up the weaknesses with IOs.

Luckily every set is viable with IO investment.

Generally speaking Resist > Defense because its possible to reach (at least) Smashing/Lethal softcap with a Resist based set whereas its nearly impossible to have a reliable amound of damage resist with gear.

Resist is also VERY hard to cap and is usefull till hardcap (90% on a brute). On a defense set, passed 50%ish, every extra defense buff will be lost on PvE (or only fighting vs defense debuffs).

BUT:
- Mind that Incarnate Softcap is very harder to reach.
- High def sets also have a large portion of DDR (Defense Debuff Resist) which you cannot find on resist sets.
- All resist sets have a weakness which can really blocks you on some missions or AV.
- Some sets are "Heal" based, they also can be S/L softcaped and tend to have less weaknesses than resist sets. They also tend to be more steady untill you reach a (quite high) cap of incoming damage when you just get mashed down.
- Some sets have high resistance AND defense, if you want to play the toughest **** possible I would advice to go for these.

Regen.

Sorta.

Do you want to make an unkillable god-monster that runs around soloing 4/8 incarnate content? That's pretty respectable, but I find it boring; it's boring to farm up enough influence and rare drops for the build and it's boring to run around solo once you've got it. It's impressive, but I don't actually want to do it. And the answer for that, as others have said, is "both, plus a self-heal or high regen."

So what you're actually going to want to look at is the metagame, and the class's caps or softcaps.

We have :

45%/59% defense softcap, same as anyone else.
90% hard resistance softcap.
2500% regen hard cap.
3212.7 hard maxhp cap, which can be expressed as ~214% maxhp.
I'm not familiar enough with the Absorb mechanic to identify how our class affects it.

Keep in mind that we have 100% base regen (not counting our free Health power) and 100% base maxhp.

And what we're identifying, here, is where we're most likely to hit our caps when we're being buffed.

There are tons of Resistance buffs in Support sets; these range anywhere from about 8% all the way up to sonic's ~50% (if you're under the bubble). There are also tons of Defense buffs, but many of them are quite small; that being said, small things add up and Maneuvers is a very common power. There are also a small handful of builds that can simply softcap their entire team outright.

MaxHP buffs are comparatively rare. The only one I can think of offhand is Frostwork from Cold Domination, but I kind of feel like I'm forgetting another one or possibly two. Frostwork can nearly cap a Brute's HP on its own, and Accolades more than make up the difference... if Frostwork is slotted. (It surprisingly frequently is not.)

But regen is very hard to cap! It certainly can be done, but the only time it's ever likely to be a concern is while running Instant Healing on a Regen build with a Regen-buffing support.

So what we want are probably minimums of something in the neighborhood of 14% Defense (pretty easy), 40% S/L resist and whatever we can get for the other types, howevermuch MaxHP we can get (since although we can overcap it it's a relatively rare buff), and Regen all the way.

This is basically why WP is so fantastic, and so overplayed.