The meta game has changed

The issue is that breaking set advantages is bad, and if you do it again its still bad. It doesn't get any better if you do it more often. In fact, each time you do it the problem gets worse.

And what do you mean by "debuffable resist." Is there any other kind?

Well, it's been mentioned already that defense doesn't grant DDR, so that fire armour tank with 45% melee defense can be knocked down to 40% with just one hit from a minion with an axe. And that can lead to cascade failure pretty quickly.

Resistance works different. Resistance itself resists resistance debuffs. And it uses your full resistance to resist every debuff even if your resistance is debuffed. A blaster with 30% smashing defense will resist exactly the same amount of a debuff as a tank with 30% smashing defense.

That said, yes, defense bonuses are too good. I have an Invulnerability/Ice Melee tank that gets 45% smashing/lethal defense with only one power that provides defense: Tough Hide.

However, there is a significant difference between resistance and defense bonuses right now: The resistance bonus changes are new and with discussion, we might end up with something more reasonable, something that doesn't cause the same problems defense bonuses do.

Note: Almost every AT has the capability to build on it. Every AT that has no armors gets to pick an Ancillary/Patron pool that gives resistance in addition to Tough.

Here are Smash/Lethal numbers that can be easily reached by ATs without even using native powers (so defenders are ignoring potential self buffs from their primaries)

Blaster: 46.4%
Controller: 66.3%
Defender: 66.3%
Corruptor: 49.7%
Dominator: 56.4%
Mastermind: 66.3%

So no one really can say they can't leverage the advantages of this change if they want to.

Ok, you missed it. Here you have only res values. To have something relative to softcap, which lets in only 5% of damage in many circumstances, you would have to have the ability to negate 95% of damage via resist. Since this is clearly not happening in your above numbers, we can state that the res values, while nice, serve far less a purpose than going for softcap.

Please, do not bring one argument without bringing the other. Mitigation is mitigation. You cant ignore one means of mitigation while considering another, when the source of the mitigation is identical (ios).

Good point. But making resist bonuses more reasonable puts you where with what, by implication, are unreasonable defense bonuses?

Yeah, pretty much. The amount of Defense that IOs can build up on a squishy character is borderline game breaking. There's a reason that Incarnate foes have more To Hit and that so many newer NPC groups love defense debuffs.

MajorDecoy's post had the rest of the information that you should need. My post was more of an expansion to his, didnt realize I also had to copy paste his to make the message complete.

If YOU dont care about resist, thats fine. But IO granted def bonuses are extremely volatile. One spark comes from the wrong direction and it ignites a cascading failure that will result in you eating paviment within seconds.

Resistance may have a lower cap (for most ATs) but it does not suffer of that extreme volativity.

So lets make it short. How much of a resist do you think appropriately matches the effect of 95% mitigation with some failure from softcapping defense. Pick a number and defend it. Handwaving saying that in some circumstances defense doesnt work anymore is meaningless, because guess what, other defense sets suffer the same problem _with their powers_.

Before we go anywhere, where are you getting that 95% from?

45 Defense at best gets you 90% mitigation.

As for the rest, if you want to pick a single number out and single the entire game around it, then I think you don't fully understand how the combat mechanics in this game work.

Those sets get defense debuff resistance.

False. The soft-cap is 90% damage mitigation in most cases (its *less* in situations with sufficiently high accuracy, such as high level gunslingers).

This is true.

45% defense means 95% of attacks miss (because normal enemies have 50% miss chance). That's 95% mitigation against minions. I believe bosses get accuracy bonuses.

90% resistance gets 95% mitigation against the same enemies because of that same 50% miss chance.

Anyone confirm if you get the debuff resist with IOs? Or is that specific to powers.... Because if the IOs provide rdd, that is obscene.

That's how resistance works. There is no separate resistance debuff defense attribute.

I fear I dont type fast enough to finish this post before Arcanaville strangles you.

Most foes have 50 ToHit.

Defense goes counter to this, but you cant get it lower than 45.

Then the critter has Accuracy. Accuracy multiplies somewhat like
(ToHit-Def) * Accuracy.

A minion (for example) has 100% accuracy. An AV may have 150% accuracy.

So, a minion has a minimum chance to hit you, if you "soft cap" of:

(50-45)* 1 = 5%

A AV:

(50-45) * 1.5 = 7.5%

The minion had a 50% final chance to hit, now he has 5% chance to hit. That's 10% the damage he was able to land before, result of 90% attack avoidance (for the encounter.)

The AV had a 75% final chance to hit, now he has 7.5% chance to hit.
That's 10% the damage he was able to land before, result of 90% attack avoidance (for the encounter.)

Edit:
Seems I managed to get this out before Aracanaville posted, she may still be typing her long disemboweling numeric attack, apologize before she finishes and she may forgive you!!!

There is not such a thing as "Resist Debuf Resistance". Resistance, off itself, resists resistance debuffs. It's just the nature of the beast.

The only way you can make a resistance ignore Resistance is by flagging the debuff irressistible.

So, up to now we have:

Resistance cant be debuffed as Defense can.
Resistance also happens to resist Damage debuffs.
Everyone has access to pools they can use to quickly build their Smash/Lethal resistances.

Whoa. I think I have a major problem with these resist values then.

That's not how we define mitigation. Mitigation is what we mitigate, what we prevent from hitting us. When an even minion shoots 100 attacks at us, on average 50 will hit. There's no mitigation happening there. When we flip on 45% defense, we mitigate 45 hits out of 50. That's 90% mitigation.

Why we don't use the perspective you're articulating is that its extremely unwieldy, and doesn't match expectations. An even Boss has a base 65% chance of hitting you. The *best* that 45% defense can do is reduce that to 6.5%

Quick: how much damage mitigation does 90% resistance have against an even Boss? That's right: 90%. That's how we define mitigation. Any other number is just confusing. But in the perspective you mention above, its not 90%. Its 93.5%, same as 45% defense.

You can't take credit for mitigating attacks that would have never landed anyway. Otherwise, you could legitimately claim credit for mitigating all the attacks generated in the zone you're standing in, whether they are aimed at you or not. We also do not want to say that all players start off with 50% damage mitigation, unless they are facing a +1 boss in which case its 28.5%, which is different from a +2 Lt which is 31%.

Anyone who takes that perspective does not get to quote mitigation numbers without specifying against which critters they mean. And they get to do their calculations over and over and over again to specify those numbers for every kind of critter that exists.

The standard model of damage mitigation says for all standard critter types at all combat level differences from even to +5, and for all cases where the attacker has +90% accuracy or less defensive mitigation is identical the normal calculation for even con minions.

I'm certainly glad you did get this out, but I suspect Arcana's still got a post coming...

*Is it bad this nearly made me choke with laughter?

Originally Posted by PapaSlade Rangle's right....this is fun.

You are now starting to understand, then

Fair enough.

Starsman, I understood how you got your numbers, I just wasn't aware of the standard definitions of mitigation on the boards. It just seemed pedantic to tell One Frigid Witch that there's no such thing as 95% mitigation when you could just show that 90% resist hits that same 95% when the 50% miss chance assumed for 45% defense is applied as well.