Koopak

And yeah this is my kicker, losing Ignite sucks because its a unique power among blasts and especially in AR. But the fact that its being replaced by a boring as hell ST blast is just dirt in the wound.

I agree to a point, which is why i like them responding to different amounts of afraid. Like the AV is a powerful villian, he/she should be willing to walk through a bit of fire to 'prove a point' But honestly expanding that mechanic to be different per AV to reflect what they value, intimidation vs safety, would be fun, but a wholly different ask.

Assuming CoD is up to date, 1.0 https://cod.uberguy.net./html/power.html?power=sentinel_ranged.psychic_blast.scramble_thoughts&at=sentinel

Taunt overrides Affraid (lets not confine ourselves to solo play), and just reducing Affraid values could also work to make the set more useful. Honestly Its a little silly that AVs run from crap like caltrops. Big bad AV should shrug off some patchs and only run where theres several layers imo

This isn't an either or, the existing powers can be made to not suck, instead they are being replaced, that's the problem. And I can assure you the other changes in the set are doing a lot more for AR's rise into being middling, rather than bottom of the barrel than ignite becoming a dot with a DPA roughly on par with the buffed attacks, this leaves AR with five high DPA ST usable attacks, when most sets are more than capable of performing well with three. Ignition is just another ST attack in a set with plenty of that. No one is saying AR doesn't need buffs, and I have no problems ditching beanbag, but Ignite doesn't need to be turned into a half baked Sentinal clone to make the set good. We can have our cake and eat it too with a tiny bit more effort.

2.5 years on i think its about time i made this post. SG Name: Invictus Academy RP/RP Friendly: Yes Theme/Era: Collegiate Education/Training Redside/Blueside: Blue Recruitment Message: Invictus Academy, is a trade school dedicated to the superpowered industries of Paragon. Whether its mutant physiology, teleportation theory, or the ever popular hero program, Invictus has everything you need for a career in the most important functions of the city of heroes. Invictus recognizes that many students will have a busy life schedule and will even be splitting their time between the Academy and a traditional collage. As such Invictus provides a flexible schedule with regular classes and plenty of one on one time with many of the greatest minds in their respective fields. Invictus Academy promises to work with any individual to help them achieve their goals and overcome any obstacle no matter how unique or challenging. With so many reasons to join, why haven't you enrolled!? ((Information provided in the discord under the rules and about section. Friendly community willing to answer any questions. No application process, just come on in and join the fun. We are always looking for new members especially those interested in producing content for the group and community.)) Discord: https://discord.gg/6F4EanqvpA

Hey sorry I haven't been on the forums for a bit, IRL got messy. That is on my goals list for this project, I just haven't prioritized it because things like Alpha get super messy and may need structural changes. If I recall I don't even have the regeneration cap implemented at this time, which Rebirth Radial in conjunction with Instant Healing will actually let you hit, just as an example. It's on the to do list though.

Sorry I've been inactive on the forums due to work. At a glance you are over invested in 6 sets, which is holding you back, particularly with the Scrapper ATOs. Endurance looks fine, but i generally am able to afford to skip Quick Recovery. Are you going for maximum stability or maximum potential? This matters because Regen is inherently an unstable set, depending on player awareness and timing to use its defensives correctly. You can lean into this with lots of pool power defensives added in, or try to compensate with pool toggles to try and get a much lower performance that requires less attention. Also incarnates can make a significant difference, notably Ageless Radial as regen gets absolutely bodied by debuffs.

i never cared much about runners personally, i generally have a ranged attack or two, or just accept that they will come back later. An aside: I've got that comparison calculator roughed out just need to get the formulas sorted, but forgoet today is a production push at work so im working late.

Sorry for double post, page moved on me. It really does, but way back in the day (the first few powers have not changed in damn near forever) it was pretty hellish. Possibly, the thing id the debuffs stack so much harder and faster there you need to open with MoG to accomplish it and even then it could collapse out from under you. Im not saying SR is in a good spot, it is way better than it used to be but anecdotally it seems to still underperform when pressed IMO. However unlike regen thats purely a feel, as i havent put much effort into the set. Neither would I, but I also wouldn't disregard those results. Its just one of several pieces of circumstantial evidence. like we are doing now. I'm not making a call for action, im arguing what i think should be done if and when the time comes. Im not going to say more until i can try this myself but i've soloed Posi on Kat/Regen Scrapper, and Brute is much more durable. If there are any other details id be interested what i should do to reproduce this. I mean that will ultimately skew things more in my favor but doing so is a bit difficult to accurately model without taking a lot of over time data. What ill probably do is include a field to add the debuff% and then have it auto apply the given sets debuff resistance to that.

Ill see if i can get time to put together a calculator for this tomarrow, will be useful to have some of this done already for my other projects. On Brute? I don't want to be a dick but my man.... how???

Well said

No, I imagine you did not run into any difficulties at level 41 or level 50 on one set with an extremely high defense debuff resist and another with both mixed defense methods (resist, defense, and regeneration) and moderate debuff resists to everything except -end/-recovery. As I said, debuffs are uncommon and of modest magnitude throughout most of the leveling experience. This is because debuffs are, in many ways, the club used to bat down high end builds in end game content. If you can give an example of how debuff resistance added to regen would somehow make it behave notably different in low level content, you will have an argument here. If your primary concern is the 1-50 level grind, that's all well and good but none of what I'm suggesting has significant impact on that. Regen is great while leveling, well, past level 17, that climb to your mez protection is rough. We can tweak 1-50 scaling till we are blue in the face, powers are very much capable of being scaled along the path to solve any problems that would come up, and again I chose debuffs resistance partly because of its low impact on anything but the content where Regen falls abnormally short. ITF is one example where Regen collapses, but only one. I'd KILL for 15 seconds of survival against the first defense smack without having to rely on my survival tools or kiting. 70-80% chance to be hit is the norm in there for a Regener. DDR might not be the right answer, i know its not on brand, as the set has no +defense powers, and i have no problem with any one debuff remaining nightmareish. As I said, ITF is but one example, there are many. You say i can 'talk about anything i want' but that doesn't hold much water when your counter argument is 'but what do the devs want?'. Yer gonna have to ask them dude, I'm just a shitter on the Scrapper forum who spends an unhealthy amount of time optimizing the regen set. We CAN operate under the assumption that the average performance of armors ARE within scope, because if they aren't then when the great armor pass comes they will all be moved and, generally, will probably remain in their same relative position to each other, probably. If we cant? Then your counter point here amounts to "we don't know what the devs want so we cant speculate" which is not an argument but a shutdown of the discussion. I'd need to dig to pull up some of data that was shared in the past regarding this however I'd highlight that when the community was asked to vote on what the devs should focus on a couple years ago, new endgame content won out hard. Anecdotally however, I rarely see people put down a character before vetlevel 25, most atleast get to around 50 where they get T4 incarnates. Given the xp scale of Vetlevels, and the common rate at which people get farmed to 50 id argue that yeah that anecdote, how ever little a data point it is, does point toward the claim people spend more time at 50. Honestly I find the people who actively enjoy the 1-50 leveling experience to be in the minority, but thats again anecdote, ill have to get back to you after digging up the data points. I mean its entirely likely this very logic is why the live devs left balance in the state it is. After all each balance issue only effects a small portion of the player base, a potion that shrinks every month because of said problem. Add on the pressures the live devs had to actually make money and yeah. And again just because an issue might be small does not make it unworthy of discussion. This kind of thinking locks things in place and keeps old aches and pains around even when they may be very easy to fix. see below I feel as if you generalize such to include myself. If that is not the case then ignore me here. If it is, then I want to highlight that every single time I have brought up outside benefits of inspirations, pool powers, temp powers, and party buffs, i have specifically stated that Regeneration benefits MORE from these than other armors. I am happy to run the math here to prove this point. Powersets must be considered in full context, naked can give you a basis, but it isn't at all accurate to how the game is played. If a set does poorly naked, its worth looking at how it does with a few pool powers and comparing that performance growth relative to other 'strong' sets.

I don't represent others, so whatever they are arguing is not my argument, please do not mix them. I defined what I considered the kinds of situations that cause the issue and it is not this. I also don't expect Regen to solo +4x8 ITFs or AVs, even though it absolutely can. When I make my comparisons its meant to be relative to other armor sets. If you believe EVERYONE should be nerfed? Or that there should be more content that isn't solo able by a Scrapper? Totally understand, but that has nothing to do with Regen specifically. If you believe that there needs to be some kind of publicly mandated standard handed down by the devs to have such a discussion, then we fundamentally disagree. Do we want to discuss it in the context of each piece of content as equal or do you want to weigh it based on what content is done the most? Is that even a relevant discussion? I understand if you are trying to make sure any discussion is well framed but at some point you are asking for so much specific and hard to quantify information about things that are, relatively intuitive for most people, that it feels more like moving the goal posts. Which I'm not accusing you of, it is just frustrating to repeatedly have to address the question of "but is that actually common enough to matter". If I didn't feel it was, and you didn't feel it wasn't, we wouldn't be having a debate. So now, if we want to continue this we have to start hashing out very specific terms and definitions that we can agree on point by point from the ground up. This is painfully true, even if you personally feel I fall on one side or the other. The set, mathematically, CAN be, the third most durable in the game naked, and much more when factoring in outside buffs. But that's not how it plays in the hands of the average player. I believe there should be some effort to resolve that so that the set is accessible and doesn't feel garbage to many of its detractors (cant please everyone i know) without reducing its potential and room for personal performance.

Admittedly I solo +4x8 content semi regularly so that's going to skew my view on this bit. That added DDR to /SR only after SR had become known as near useless due to it. They may have had the tools to monitor it but my personal impression of balancing decisions by Cryptic and Paragon after were reactionary rather than proactive analysis. This is reinforced by how long it took for /SR to get said DDR. /Regen lacking debuff resists is only intentional 'by default' if you ascribe significant intent to the application of debuffs. Not to disparage the live devs, but I just don't think that was a priority to them, and I don't hold it against them. To a point, some groups or enemies just have debuffs on everything that are scaled to ridiculous degrees. The math here doen't matter, debuffs and debuff resists don't scale with level and have a relative impact. If you assume you want to keep the experience at each level range about the same, adding debuff resist only matters in which power, and thus what level it becomes available at. And yet this is the only place where debuffs can be reliably countered by any methods other than kiting on a melee AT, which I'm not adverse to, but it shouldn't be necessary to the degree it sometimes is. Debuffs are actually disproportionately worse to deal with at sub 45, you just generally don't see as many, meanwhile at 50 you are piginholes into Ageless Radial to give yourself the ability to not be flatlined by a bad rotation of luck and massive debuff stack even when using MoG. Again this isn't to say you cant handle it, just that the effort is more than other armor sets, either because they have debuff resistance or because they have defenses that soft counter debuffs. Regen it going to be hit more than any defense set, meaning not only does it not have defense debuff resist, it will take all debuffs more often. Regen has less resistance than resistance sets and thus cannot resist -resistance as effectively. At least one of these weaknesses is not present in most other armor sets, and for some neither is. The 'extreme' here is agro on 7-14 +2-4, Arachnos, Cimerons, IDF, Tsoo, Banished Pantheon, and so on. Casual players face this all the time. I've not said any of this was insurmountable, just that its one of if not the biggest threat to Regen's survival and one of the key ways it feels weak to so many players. If we want to use an appeal to authority and arguments on anecdotal performance. I ran the entire DA arc on +4x8 solo and only lowered the diff for AVs because when they bumped to lvl 54+3 I cant out dps their regen. Trust me I'm WELL aware of how to survive the hell that is Ancients of Sorrow. Doesn't mean that should be a skill set expected of everyone, or even half that. Something like 1/3 of my SG mates regularly miss cooldown rotations, we aren't talking about a community of extreme raiders here. If you have defense cap defense debuff will struggle to build up, regarding a build with about 25% +defense, i have eaten more than -50% defense debuff in: ITS, Aeon TF, Arachnos groups, Carnivals mask stacking, and probably one or two things slipping my mind. I'm so used to having to track my debuffs that i have all of my monitor slots used in my UI and still pop open the overall combat stats window on certain content, and have Ageless Radial hotkeyed. Yes, but actually no (meme) Regen has tools that allow it to trivialize any damage spike assuming it is not debuffed to hell, namely MoG and Dull Pain. Let me make this very clear, Instant Healing, Fast Healing, and Integration do almost NOTHING to keep you from being killed inside 2-3 seconds. If you use the small calculator to the side of my main regeneration calculator and compare any idle standing set to Regen you will find that your Effective Health without MoG is terrible (if memory serves its about 1/2 that of a radiation build), and you can and will get smacked down HARD by a damage spike if you dont have it or another tool lined up. As long as we are claiming to know the intentions of the original developers, I would point out Regeneration has a self revive and the only other armors with self rezes are notorious for being weaker or having similar problems. It seems reasonable to assume the self rez is a concession to this weakness, one overlooked when later content added death limits. If theres a relative difference between two sets then eys one can argue there is a balance issue. The question is whether or not its significant. I would say the real issue is not the balance of Regeneration, but its inaccessibility to more casual players. I think that should be improved some. If you dont care what happens at 50 then yeah you aren't going to have about 90% of the issues iv outlined because the game is... i don't want to say easier prior to 50+ because that's not right but the difficulty curve is more in line with a more linear growth of power. You don't see that whack debuffs, the attacks that hit for well over 1.5k damage before resistance. Unrelated but if you feel that balancing lvl 50 characters is impossible you must think the HC devs are on a fools errand because thats been their primary project for the last year in preperation of developing more endgame content. This isn't speculation its in their own public announcements here on the forum. Either way we are not going to agree one ounce on that point.

That's if you are in a team without support. Stormwalker was reacting to my comment about how support, outside buffs, greatly enhance the set's potential. This solve the damage spike issue by simply giving you the resistance and defense to eat it and not care, raising your Effective Health. I'll also note that while running lvl 40 without a full IO build you will struggle to perma Dull Pain, you still can get very close. The requirements are about 265% total +recharge between hasten and IOs to perma it. a low bar given 95 of that can come from a pair of recharge IOs at 50 and you can get msot of THAT with appropriate level SOs. You wont perma but you can get close, and especially with support buffs. Gonna try to address all three quotes here. Firstly I wouldn't dare to assume the weakness to debuffs is intentional, frankly debuffs seem overlooked by the live devs in a lot of situations regularly throwing things way out of alignment. Perhaps it was but the main reason id suggest focusing on debuff resistance as it is kind of a lame thing to deal with, and more importantly you can give regen debuff resistance without drastically effecting its overall performance, just patching the spots where damage spikes come out of nowhere and you don't have tools because of stacked debuffs which are only monitorable via the powers menu which as a non standard UI component and numbers heavy is very unfriendly to more casual players. Again this would be a 'test and see' thing not a 'we need this or riot' thing. As for how to really truly solve the damage spike issue, well I think debuff resistance handles it gracefully by reducing the frequency of stat crashes and reducing overhead for the player, but if you want to solve it in a direct fashion the set needs a way to raise its Effective Health without raising its Effective Regeneration. Its EfR (Effective Regeneration) is top notch, second only to two sets and those in specific modes (Granit Stone and Defensive Bio), but its EfH (Effective Health) is well bellow most of its competitors. This could take a number of shapes, from allowing Regen to bypass the health cap but get less regen% to adding an Absorb of some kind, perhaps excess healing becomes a barrier, to a stagger mechanic that causes a hit of say 1k to be applied in 250 damage chunks over the next couple seconds. Whatever it is, that's how you'd solve it. The issue is that might be to drastic, which is again why I focus on debuff resistance as a starting point. It lowers the skill floor while keeping the skill ceiling about the same, and doesn't drastically impact its overall performance. Off topic but ill fight anyone who says you need Physical Perfection in a build for endurance. Conserve Power is pretty baller though.

Essentially agree with all of that. My biggest issue tends to be with the rather common assertion that Regen needs hard stat buffs when the real problems are, like you mentioned, an over abundance of edge cases that make otherwise solid stats insufficient. Other armors take debuff resistances and high Effective Health for granted.

I agree this is where things should start. Ish? As I mentioned, theoretically its one of the best if not the best, even solo. The problem is, like some strategies in speed running (GDQ is live i have it on the brain deal with it) it may be optimal, but human execution of it isn't. This is part of why there is such a wide disparity in opinions on the set. I feel confident that anything you can do on a scrapper of another armor set, Regen can do too, it just might take a bit more practice. That all said I 100% agree that you have to put far more effort to accomplish the same performance of other sets for little to no reward. Your only reward is that Regen can uniquely survive situations other armor sets cant and almost always has an option to handle any situation, assuming you can recognize and use that option quick enough. Now, that's an awesome power... but only for a tiny fraction of the game. 90% of the time, you are working hard for no reward and I think that should be changed.

This is not my argument and that's a rather reductive way of phrasing it. Regen, numerically, stands with its brethren in the armor power set category just fine BEFORE you factor these in. That is to say that in terms of the raw amount of damage it can theoretically take per second and remain standing (Effective Regeneration), it is fine. When you factor in the fact that its weaknesses are easily patched by outside sources the result is that it becomes extremely strong. The weakness is not holes in defense or resistance, but in timing of power usage and enemy attacks, and how that plays against Effective Health, and the lack of protection from debuffs that uniquely harm it, or harm it especially badly. This means that the performance of the set fight to fight is dependent heavily on both RNG and a players ability to mitigate that RNG, which is why raising its Effective Health would patch up its only weakness in the case of damage only considerations. To make myself abundantly clear, Regen is not 'weak' because it cant handle damage per second, its 'weak' because it cant handle damage spikes specifically, and debuffs specifically. At least not without an unreasonable amount of game knowledge and experience to mitigate those effects since those weaknesses are to somewhat obscured mechanisms. Predicting alphas and monitoring/knowing debuff sources. These issues largely fall away with support, especially the damage spike issue, and makes the set vastly stronger than its contemporaries. However without support Regen demands to much of the player for admittedly I believe the strongest THEORETICAL performance, even solo. The trade is not worth it to 90% of players.

ho boy we doin this again. Mostly, but not entirely, and not in the same ways Troo disagrees. And what the other side keeps missing is that this is false. Respite =/= Dull Pain or Instant Healing, there is no inspiration that will give you the HP cap, no inspiration that will give you regeneration rate, and precious few pool powers or temp powers that can do those two things either. Meanwhile if you are defense capped, purples are useless, if you are resist capped oranges are useless, if you are both, they are both dead weight. This goes too for pool powers, an SR character cannot make significant use of +defense powers, a resistance character the same for +resistance. At the end of the day you can cap Resistance and Defense from numerous outside sources, both when solo, and ESPECIALLY in a team. You cant cap your hp and regeneration as easily from outside sources. For this reason alone, on a mathematical scale, assuming perfect execution, Regeneration is actually the strongest armor. That doesn't translate well to human play however because this game lacks for tells, its hard to tell when a damage spike is coming and the animation time before a power takes hold is a constant challenge to master. As such in practice it often falls far behind the other powersets, this goes double if you are coming from any other armor or expecting it to perform similarly. If you want to argue this is a poor match for the games inherit systems? I agree If you want to say the set requires to much effort to perform at its maximum? I agree a little If you want to say the set mechanically, mathematically, is inferior? You are dead wrong. If you asked me what Regeneration needs? Well my answer has shifted over the years as I've worked to master the set, but my answer now would be: -Debuff Resistance buffs, Defense would be great but not on theme, but recharge and regen are on theme and recharge at least will matter (regen debuff resist is overrated, there is very little -regen in the game and much of it is of a magnitude so high you'd need 99% resistance to not just be turned off) -Shortened or removed 'animation time before effect'. (Note that's not cast time, that's just how long it takes to get the damn power to start working, you can lock me up all day in a fancy animation but if its a self heal to save my life, can it please take effect quickly? I'll do the dance after, just heal me NOW) -An absorb layer or a way to exceed the max hp cap, a system that staggers damage, or just some more resistances. Anything to just take the edge of damage spikes as Regen has a very low Effective Health compared to other sets, especially resist sets, and runs the risk of being alphaed more than any other armor. (This is a maybe, and the last issue that id focus on only if the others didn't bring its average performance up) The issue with buffing regen though is that if it is mishandled, the set tips over into OP territory FAST, and even if you handle it well, those who are comfortable with the demands of the set will begin performing much higher than the average. Its a catch 22 leftover from the live devs, the only people left maining regen are the hardcore players who have committed to reaching its theoretical maximum, and those playing it for theme. If you buff it, sure more people will play it, and the theme players will be happy, but the hardcore players will start soloing things that shouldn't be soloed. If you buff it in a way that prevents that, you risk ruining what draws those hardcore players to the set in the first place. tl;dr: Nerf Regen, it is the only way

Okay lets see if i cant keep my thoughts together today. That is just a fact that players wont perform a set to its optimal potential unless it is one of the sets that is just a series of toggles with no room for skill expression. When I said it is 'false due to scale' and 'edge cases' I was intending to refer to your note on how Regeneration does nothing while at max health. This complication simply doesn't yield useful, actionable information. This is because if you are under an amount of fire sufficient to need the use of your survival tools, you will not be at max health for more than a game tick or two. As such your regen is disabled for a very small amount of time, often less than the regeneration tick rate. Further trying to model this element requires simulation, not just computation. All of this combines with relatively high damage spikes compared to Effective Health in the game such that often using a power like Instant Healing on reaction rather than proactively will simply get you killed as the time it takes for you as the player to process you need to use the power, and then physically start the activation, and then for that power to complete casting, and in the case of +regen powers, for it to tick enough times to save you. The problem with this is the model you have chosen, while it yields a seemingly intuitive result, a 'Survival Time' it's actually misleading. This is because a Survival Time is actually a largely useless piece of information without an accurate damage model, and, preferably, a target survival time. Sure you can focus simply on getting this value as high as possible, but that doesn't yield valuable insights in my opinion as every stacking source of defense, resistance, and regeneration modifies the Effective Regeneration and Health contributed by every other source. Further this shift is not easily visible, since the result is considered in seconds. I feel quite certain this 'Survival Time' model is the source of a significant amount of misunderstandings on the actual durability of Regeneration specifically. If your goal is to understand the fundamentals, then I assure you they are exactly as simple as the model I outlined, it is only when factoring in player performance and edge case attack types that it changes. I cant speak to the degree to which one person or another may have argued with you but I will say this. Most Defense sets reach defense caps to either all damage types or to the three positions very easily, and almost never have +MaxHp. As such Tough becomes a critical source of Resistance to reduce the risk of a bad luck streak resulting in their death or as simply the only path forward in durability after hitting the defense cap. I would definitely agree that for many defense based armor sets, Tough is a key power to making the build able to handle tough customers like AVs or to solo +4 Incarnate content, especially if the player is not comfortable with Rune of Protection. Alright I think that about covers my main points. I want to apologies if I came off a bit antagonistic. Keeping my thoughts together lately has been hard, which is a lot of why I have Brute added to the spreadsheet but not Stalker despite Stalker being about as easy to implement.

Sorry yes this is correct, i cant tell i should probably wait before replying to this discussion further im making some trivial mistakes i should be able to remember and did when making the calculator above. One note is that -def does still effect a character at 100% pre cap resistance since the base to hit is 50% and you can be debuffed to a capped 95% chance to be hit

This is a bit frustrating because your math and examples are correct, as is your understanding of the mechanics at play, but your conclusions are false due to scale. To put it simply you are focusing on the micro, small segments of activity, and attempting to incorporate all edge case scenarios. This results in a very top heavy model that, given correct information will result in the same conclusions, but only after you provide it the correct data, that being the real hp values, real regen values, real attack rates, and real damage values at play. Extrapolation is key here to remove this, and I start with resolving the first problem I see most people make when talking about calculating durability, assumed damage values. In your example for instance you assumed 20 damage done evert second by a single attack. This normally is fine on the surface, but as you outlined, it makes defense weird to calculate with regeneration due to not regenerating while at full health. This is ultimately a useless piece of information in my opinion however as if you are at max health then the only thing that will matter is your Effective Health for the next attack. So in order to eliminate variables we do not have, I have rearranged the problem, instead of calculating the 'survival time' of a given amount of health, regen, resistance, and defense, I have instead calculated the total amount of damage necessary to tend one's health down, and how much beyond that must be done to bring that health down to zero, all averaged. This eliminates the need for assumed damage, and attack rates by scaling our calculations to a larger scope. This scope id a bit to large to be 100% accurate, there are after all attacks that can just one shot you (with the exception of one shot protection), but for 90% of situations it is accurate. Addressing your assertion that resistance is reduced in value by defense, I feel you are conflating two details in your example of a 50% def and 50% resist characters. As I stated +30% resistance is more valuable to the +resist character, this has NOTHING to do with defense however, this is simply the result of exponential growth from linear scaling. I feel that mentally linking the two stats in the way you outline is detrimental to an understanding of the system even if it is, on the the surface accurate that more defense is better as you gain more defense, the same is true for resistance, and its merely a matter of where the caps lie and the costs of obtaining those stats. They DO scale multiplicatively however and your example does not disprove that, it merely proves what I outlined above, that Resistance and Defense grow exponentially in value the more you have. To reproduce your math in a better model: Effective Health: MaxHP / (1 - resist) / (1 - (0.5 + defense)) DEF only (this is zero +def as the base to hit is 50%) 100 / (1 - 0) / (1 - (0.5 + 0)) 200 EHP RES only (removing base to hit to match your example) 100 / (1 - 0.5) / (1 - (0.5 + -0.5)) 200 EHP DEF + 30 RES 100 / (1 - 0.3) / (1 - (0.5 + 0)) 285.71 EHP RES + 30 RES 100 / (1 - 0.8) / (1 - (0.5 + -0.5)) 500 EHP This seems to support your point, but the real issue here is the exponential value, lets look at the reverse, +30% defense added to both. DEF + 30 DEF 100 / (1 - 0) / (1 - (0.5 + 0.3)) 500 EHP RES + 30 DEF 100 / (1 - 0.5) / (1 - (0.5 + -0.2)) 285.71 EHP These EHP values are the amount of damage, on average, that needs to be thrown at you. This extrapolates away attack rates and magnitudes. As we can see the results are the same, this has nothing to do with defense and everything to do with scaling. Again you are right in that an attack that doesn't hit doesn't benefit from the other stats, but its also a 100% mitigation, thus we can treat defense as eliminating attacks. The other benefit to this model over yours is that it handily handles regeneration, easily, again not longer needing to worry over edge cases. Lets look at that with real numbers on a real scrapper with max hp cap, 200% regeneration, and 25% +defense (plus 50% base) and 50% +resist, these being chosen because on average +defense comes in values roughly 1/2 that of +resistance, for every 1.5% defense you can get you can usually get 3% resistance for similar investment. Scrapper hp cap is 2409, 200% regeneration is 20hp/s. Effective Regeneration: Regen / (1 - resist) / (1 - (0.5 + defense)) Effective Health: MaxHP / (1 - resist) / (1 - (0.5 + defense)) DEF only EHP 2409 / (1 - 0) / (1 - (0.5 + 0.25)) 9,636 EHP DEF only EHP/s 20 / (1 - 0) / (1 - (0.5 + 0.25)) 80 EHP/s RES only EHP 2409 / (1 - 0.5) / (1 - (0.5 + 0)) 9,636 EHP RES only EHP/s 20 / (1 - 0.5) / (1 - (0.5 + 0)) 80 EHP/s So what does this mean? Well it means that if you are taking 80 dps or less, you will never die. If you are taking 100 dps a second it will take EHP / (EHPs - DPS) seconds to die. Thus... 9,636 / (80 - 100) = 481.8 seconds or 8.03 minutes on average. Now lets try +10% Resist and +5% Defense respectively, and if you want a time to die, we will assume 200dps DEF + 10 RES - EHP 2409 / (1 - 0.1) / (1 - (0.5 + 0.25)) 10,706.66 EHP DEF + 10 RES - EHP/s 20 / (1 - 0.1) / (1 - (0.5 + 0.25)) 88.88 EHP/s 10,706.66 / (88.88 - 200) = 96.35 seconds RES + 10 RES 2409 / (1 - 0.6) / (1 - (0.5 + 0)) 12,045 EHP RES + 10 RES 20 / (1 - 0.6) / (1 - (0.5 + 0)) 100 EHP/s 12,045 / (100 - 200) = 120.45 seconds DEF + 5 DEF 2409 / (1 - 0) / (1 - (0.5 + 0.3)) 12,045‬ EHP DEF + 5 DEF 20 / (1 - 0) / (1 - (0.5 + 0.3)) 100 EHP/s 12,045 / (100 - 200) = 120.45 seconds RES + 5 DEF 2409 / (1 - 0.5) / (1 - (0.5 + 0.05)) 10,706.66 EHP RES + 5 DEF 20 / (1 - 0.5) / (1 - (0.5 + 0.05)) 88.88 EHP/s 10,706.66 / (88.88 - 200) = 96.35 seconds Again we see defense compounding with defense better and resistance compounding with resistance better. Forgive me if this is a bit rambling, i'm struggling to keep all my thoughts in order currently due to work

Okay I think this clarified your point that was confusing me, however I personally don't think this is a very useful fact, even if its true. City of Heroes applies a clamp that ensures that there is always at least a 5% chance for an attack to hit and a 5% chance for it to miss, regardless of stats. This is a call back to the tabletop games that influenced it and their use of the 20 sided die and rules regarding it. For our purposes this means that one in twenty attacks will hit you, period, no matter what. When calculating durability this means you cannot discount, or ignore, or reduce the value of resistance simply because you have high defense. In a large pack, at agro cap you can safely assume that within 5 seconds you will take between 40 and 80 attacks, this means that at defense cap an average of 2-4 of them will hit. In high difficulty content these hits will be substantial, around 500-1000 damage, this means that you will take between 1k and 4k damage, which the high end of which is enough to flatten even hp capped tankers if you remove resistance. At the end of the day you simply cant get enough defense for its impact on the value of resistance to matter.

+def will always out perform +res on average. This is because there are no ATs capable of 95% resistance, and because resistance only helps against -res, all other debuffs are unaffected. The only exception is against heavy single hits, where bad luck can end you at any time, this is why SR has some resist. Your comment of inverse scaling is confusing me. If I understood it, then its wrong. All three defensive stats stack multiplicativly. Effective Regeneration: Regen / (1 - resist) / (1 - (0.5 + defense)) Effective Health: MaxHP / (1 - resist) / (1 - (0.5 + defense)) Apply caps to above, plug in your values, and you have your definitive durability stats baring debuffs/buffs. This means that, for say a scrapper with a caped max hp of 2400 (real cap is 2409) defense cap brings that to 20 times, or 48000 and a resist cap of 75% will further multiply thag by 4 to 192000 effective health. This is why people tend to suggest "layered defenses" however the equation above means that every 1% of resist or defense is better than the last. As an example 5% defense at 0% reduces damage taken to 90% of prior. Meanwhile 5% defense when already at 40% reduces damage taken by half. Youve gone from 10% of attacks hitting you to 5%. So its almost always worth more to continue to build toward a cap than it is to invest in the other durability stat.