So in Issue 24 Synapse confirms we can now finally build reasonable +Res like we can defense.

Is that a trick question? Forget now, when even my current 40%+ s/l resistance is very noticeable on a blaster. But in I24 blasters are going to have regen-scrapper levels of regeneration inside that resist.

Ah, if it was anyone besides you Arcanaville I would be in a scrappier mood. Sigh. Actually, I been trying to tone down my forum responses to more of what i would like to say in person anyways.

But seriously. My point is that a Blaster can AND will get shredded. My Dark/Invul Brute that I blast with (thx soul mastery) can periodically get shredded. Especially in Incarnate Trials, but also in ITF and regular high end play. I know you know the Blaster numbers, but here they are. 75% resist capped, and 1600 Health. So a good alpha of 6400 will floor this guy, even if it is pure S/L (soooo rare). That is the best he can do. We both know Brutes and Tanks who regularly trot around with that much S/L, tons more health, and usually much more regen will faceplant regular. Thats why they all seek the softcap. You know you are not gonna softcap that Blaster AND hardcap S/L resist. Not unless you got a bucketful of extra enhancer slots (and prob another bucket of powers to put them on) cause there will not be room in the build.

Will some resist help a Blaster yes. If in theory a Blaster could hardcap S/L resist would that be great? Sure. They would shake off an alpha here or there once in a while, and faceplant slower than they usually do. But seriously, this is not the solution for Blasters. It is a band aid. Or more closely that blue tape the athletes put on, great psychological help. What Blasters need is what i have seen you argue quite well for. Mez Protection. Cause they will never tank. Period.

Edit: I did not know about the regen scrapper level. But healing is the third level of protection. 1)Defense 2) Resist 3) Regen. It is very helpful, and I believe will achieve its intended function of getting a Blaster ready for combat in a minute or two, the next fight. But Tanking means just shrugging off everything happening right now. And, more to my point, Blasters may pick up a bonus here or there, but not enough to matter. On your 40% resist Blaster, how much are you going to alter your build, even if each 4-6 i/O set offered you 3-5% s/L resist? Are you going to gut your build chasing that? Seriously? Is it that good?

The problem I have with this argument is the general problem of Defense versus Resistance. Defenses (even typed defenses) work against a much larger range of powers than resistances do.

Compare the values of soft-capped Ranged Defense for a Blaster against capped S/L Resistances. Now obviously the S/L Resistance Blaster is going to be tough against enemy groups that deal S/L Damage but against other groups he basically has nothing. Now conversely soft-capped Ranged defense works against any group irregardless of damage type.

I don't think that there is an easy fix for this but it really feels like building Resistance on a squishy character is a fools game, you either end up with a character that strong against one pair of damage types and very weak everywhere else or a character that's pretty weak everywhere.

Personally I would love it if the shields that squishy characters get in their epics were changed to provide resistance to all or all-but-psionic (possibly with the total numbers reduced to avoid upsetting melee characters). Then I would feel that I had a decent foundation to build IO resistances on.

Lets say the devs dare give ANY IO set bonus a 5% smash Lethal bonus.

This means with 4 such sets slotted a Willpower, Dark, and Fire tanks can all hard-cap their S/L Resistances.

Elec and Bio (in efficient stance) will cap with just 3 such bonuses.
Bio in Defensive only needs 1.

4%?

Bio Defense with 1 still.
Bio Efficient with 3 still.
Electric, 3.
Fire, Dark and Willpower? 5.

3%?

Bio Defense soft caps with 2
Bio Efficient soft caps with 4
Electric soft caps with 4.
Fire, Dark Willpower all manage to get 85% Smash/Lethal Resistance.

OK, what about 2%?

Bio Defense soft caps with 2
Bio Efficient caps at 88%.
Electric caps at 88%
Fire, Dark and willpower all cap at 80% but now can also stamp a 3% unique for 83%. Thats not to mention other sources of +Resist.

This is not to mention: I would take it for granted that the 2 type deal will be treated as a IO wide thing. Anything that currently only yields Smashing resistance will in i24 likely yeld Smash/Lethal.

Even with small numbers its going to be hard to avoid this level of powercreep. Heck, just look at what we got now. Kinetic Combats with level 3 can already grant 2.5% to smashing. It can be safely carried in Air Superiority and Fighting>Kick, not to mention any attack you happen to be slottable for Knockback.

I return to my original statement: This is going to be BAD.

Oh well... I guess it was due for Invuln to join the SR club. Everyone will soon have Invuln's Toy, and all Invuln will have is the ability to try to slot for every single hole it has (meaning every damage type but Smashing/Lethal.)

[Disclaimer: I use numbers for Bio here that may not be final]

But that's not the same thing as saying its not worth much. The rule is not "everything that doesn't make us immortal is trivial."

Probably not, because I'm /energy manipulation. But would I chase it on my I24 Water/MC blaster, which will have an absorb shield instead of a +regen sustain? Depending on the numbers, maybe. Resistance synergizes with Absorb in a way I don't think even I could convince people of until they see it on beta for themselves.

I don't see how that is applicable to my argument that capped s/l resistances will not be useless. Are you saying you disagree with my assertion that capped s/l resistance are not useless?

No, I'm saying that I don't believe that it will be worth it for a Blaster to build for resistance as opposed to Defense.

We already have set bonuses larger than that, and they're supposedly being made larger.
I don't think it will be worthwhile for anyone to build for resistance instead of defense. But, considering that the resist bonuses are getting inserted into existing sets, some of which give defense already, I don't see any compelling reason that it needs to be "instead of", no more than we build for defense "instead of" recharge. There's a tradeoff to some degree, but builds can still plausibly get good amounts of both, sometimes in the same IO set.

So, trade softcapped defense and no resist for for no defense and 75% resist? Not worthwhile, even if plausible.

Keep softcapped defense, and get 50% S/L resist instead of 40%? Now that would be a useful improvement. Not transformative, but useful, and (set bonus amounts pending) probably wouldn't require giving up much else from the build.

I'll keep this tucked in my head for future experiments.

I do tend to believe any strategy not giving a very high probability of success is useless. Not quite "If it doesn't make us immortal it is useless" but definitely on the track to that station. Not trying to justify anything, but when you play as crazy as I do (or poorly..) you gotta have planned for success long before you wade in lol.

Well, I'm saying nothing for or against that idea at the current time, given I don't know the numbers to make that judgment.

The way I read it, the status resist buffs are being made larger. The actual damage resistance buffs are just being added, at whatever value.

Well beta starts today according to coffee talk, guess we will find out.

?!

And here I was about to cancel my subscription (in an attempt to focus in other stuff, not out of any wish to actually quit.)

I actually predict this will go that way... for a while.

I quit before GR came out, and back then I would soft cap against SL all my characters. I found it odd that apparently no one noticed how powerful a character with soft-capped SL defense was. My Fire/Fire dominator out-tanked granite brutes (via a combo of Mez and plainly being able to survive a lot of damage.)

Buying Kinetic Combats was also dirt cheap. Everyone only cared about slotting for recharge. Perma-Hasten were everyone's goal at the time. I found it rather... shocking coming 2 years later and hear nearly no one talk about perma-hasten anymore. Everyone now focus on Soft-Capping. Mind you, people still aim for high recharge but it seems to be an after-thought.

In similar fashion, I expect a lot of people to ignore this new resist IOing, until slowly it becomes more popular and suddenly everyone is targeting at hard-capped SL resistances, with Defense as a secondary thought.

We will see, though.

I'm hoping to switch a lot of characters over to resistance slotting. For no other reason than I'm sick to death of trying to soft-cap every character.

Yeah me to. I'm really, really hoping that I can make tough characters using resistance slotting. I'm not holding out much hope that it will be viable for characters that don't already have good resistances though.

I only go for Perma Hasten on Doms and very specially skewed builds. My current project is a reincarnation of an idea from 2 years ago. A super high recharge Dark/Invul Brute. But he is also s/l softcap, as you pointed out, it is crazy to not do that with a good build these days.

I am also holding out hope for being able to make some builds that chase a different goal than S/L/En softcap. I love reactive Armors, but it gets boring after awhile lol.

YES - this.

On Ice as well.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

*sits with popcorn*

I'm listening.

The fundamental questions with Absorb are how large the shield is and how frequently you can reapply it (either with a click or a constantly reapplying toggle).

What this means is that the damage you can effectively mitigate with an Absorb power is not measured in straight DPS but is more a matter of how frequently the attacks come relative to the shield refreshing.

For example lets say I have a 100 point absorb shield that refreshes every 3 seconds. Now lets say I have two choices for enemies, I can have a foe that attacks for 300 points of damage every 6 seconds or a foe that attacks for 150 points of damage every 3 seconds. In both cases they are dealing 50 DPS but in terms of actual hit point less the second foe will deal about half the damage.

The first foe will deal 300 points of damage of which 100 will be stopped by my shield since it has time to refresh in between his attacks so he's effectively dealing 200 points of damage every 6 seconds. The second foe on the other hand will only deal 50 damage every 3 seconds since my shield will refresh in between his attacks so although he attacks more frequently he still faces a fresh shield.

So as you can see Absorb works best when faced with a larger number of smaller attacks rather than a small number of larger attacks. Resistance helps this by making all attacks smaller.

That's the basics although Arcana could probably explain it better .

That's basically it. But its the specifics that are tricky. I think high resistance is going to unlock a huge amount of survivability for the absorb shields. They are stronger than the regen sustains. For example, Frigid Protection shows 60.24 Absorb per tick. Real Numbers isn't good with showing the activation period but I believe Arbiter Hawk stated it was going to be 3 seconds per Absorb tick. So that's 5% every 3 seconds, fully slottable to 10% every 3 seconds. That's 3.33%/sec of damage mitigation. *IF* you could use it all, that would be equivalent to 800% regeneration. Compare to, say, Force of Thunder which has a +250% regen buff half-enhanceable. So fully slotted that would be about +375% regen, or 1.56%/sec.

*IF* you can use it all, you could have double the mitigation of the +regen sustains, something approaching Regen scrapper mitigation. *BUT* its very difficult to use it all, because Absorb is a use it or lose it mechanism. Whatever you don't use in one 3 second tick you can't carry forward. Its gone, and a new fully charged tick replaces it.

Since defense makes damage more bursty, it will tend to reduce the efficiency of Absorb. Resistance evens out damage, making it increase the efficiency of Absorb. There's no such thing as an apples to apples comparison with Def and Res in the real game because you never get that choice, but the Def has traditionally been the better play because you can get more of it and it mitigates secondary effects and not just damage. But if Resistance can unlock more of Absorb than defense, that might reduce the gap between the two substantially, because Resistance has a lot of upside on an Absorb toggle.

Yet another reason to slot for Resistance Bonuses it looks like. Especially with that new absorb proc IO mmmm