-dmg and layered mitigation

Personally, I feel that having layered mitigation tends to beat out stacking same-type stuff.

So -dmg with Defense is fine with me (assuming that I'm soft-capped and looking for something that's not redundant)... just like -tohit with Resistance.

But, if I'm looking to capitalize -dmg; chances are good that I'm doing it on a Resistance toon; since I can add Defense from pool powers and IO set bonuses (ie. KM/Electric/Soul/Void Brute or Stalker; Electric/KM/Soul/Void Tank)

IMO, I'd be a bit more hardpressed, using the same methodology to build Resistance of a Defense toon.

Meh. Whatever. I'm stupid and OK with it. I will continue to believe that a resistance based character hit with a resistance debuff is hurt more than a defense based character hit with a resistance debuff... mostly because the next shot is more likely to hit the resistance based character than the def based character and the def based character has time for those resistance debuffs to wear off. Layered mitigation is better.

So, I'm scratching my head here...how are you folks getting a -20% resist on a 90% resistance to land at 88% resistance? .2 * .9 = .18; .9-.18 = .72 .... should be talking a 72% number here after that debuff shouldn't we? I admit I don't know the ins and outs of how it all works but it seems to be a bit skewed here in the discussion.

AhhIsee, I knew it resisted resist debuffs, was not sure of the mechanism with only "10% getting through" Thought it resisted a % value. Thanks

Possibly, yes. The idea of average damage isn't perfectly applicable to the actual survival of defense-based characters, since they are particularly vulnerable to things happening in non-average ways.

This topic has definitely come up before. It's somewhat intuitive, if framed in the right way. Let's say you have 1500 HP. If you're taking 100 HP/s of damage and regenerating 50 HP/s, in perfectly continuous ways, then you're losing 50 HP/sec, and it will take 1500/50 = 30 seconds for you to die. That's the perfectly average view of mitigation.

Now instead imagine you're being swung at by attacks that deal 1000 points of damage, delivered once every 5 seconds, that have a 50% chance of landing. We'll leave the HP recovery continuous. That's still an average of 100 HP/sec damage actually landing on you, but the instantaneous amounts that land are very large excursions from that average. In this scenario, here's a 25% chance that any sequence of two attacks will both land in a row, dealing you 2000 points of damage in a 10-second window, which isn't long enough to recover enough HP to make up the difference. That's going to kill this character barring other healing.

Basically, the larger the quanta of incoming damage are relative to your remaining HP, the more likely it is that streak of hits over the next several attacks will kill you. Honestly, the same thing is strictly true of mitigation that's heavily predicated on resists (since foes have chances to miss even players with no defense), but we tend to consider this a dominant effect on defense-oriented mitigation because, at high levels of defense and low levels of other mitigation, large HP% excursions in damage are more noticeable because nothing else mitigates them.

Edit: The closer incoming damage and HP recovery are to continuous, the less likely this scenario is to arise in practice. If you're taking, say 20 attacks a second at 10 damage each, each with a 50% chance to hit, that's also an average of 100 HP/s damage that will land. But in this scenario, it's much, much less likely that you will suddenly suffer 2000 HP of damage in the course of 10 seconds, because the odds of that many of the attacks streaking hits on you in that timeframe is far lower.

With a 20% -Resist buff, 90% Resistance is <45% defense.

I stand by my original statement. The defense character only has a 5% chance of getting hit... and only a 5% chance of getting hit again after that. The odds are .25% chance you'll get hit twice in a row by that attack. Since most -resist debuffs only last 10 seconds and recharge on those attacks are roughly 8 seconds, the probability goes in the favor of the Defense based character. On a character that has aggro on 10 mobs, the odds stack drastically in favor of the defense soft-capped character. As the Resistance based character will flatline in a matter of seconds... Much like a defense-capped character getting cascading failure of -defense attacks.

Deleted to prevent misinformation