DrunkFlux

Depends on how much defense or resistance you already have. Each point is more valuable than the last. When your going from say 75% resistance to 85% resistance, your reducing incoming damage by about 40% inspite the fact you only increased your resistance by 10%. If you go from 75% up to 90% your taking 60% less damage. Or are about 2.5 FOLD more durable than if you only had 75% resistance. The same is in reverse, losing the resistance can mean taking only 1/10th damage to suddenly taking 1/4th damage, 2.5 fold more damage taken, if an attack would have taken off say half your health at 90% you can guarantee your going to be losing all but 1hp, if that attack also has DoT on top of it it'll bypass the 1-hit rule and actually successfully one-tap you. Similarly defense is similar for hit odds, theres a gigantic difference between only 30% defense compared to 45% defense. In content with hard mode or incarnate content likewise 65% defense is many times tougher than 30% but generally being at soft-cap defense nets you a 10 fold durability increase outside of incarnate level content, and inside incarnate content to get to soft-cap would actually make you probably closer to 14.5 fold durability increase compared to zero defense. in fact, each % of defense below softcap increases your damage taken by on average 20%. 40% defense can expect on average to take twice the damage of someone at 45% defense at normal softcap. 35% defense takes triple the damage on average, 30% quadruple the damage on average compared to 45%. The same happens with incarnate content, just add 20% to all those numbers and you'll have the same difference. If you were to layer the two and get both to max, in normal content thats a 100 fold durability increase. Incarnate content it turns into a 140 fold increase of survivability. Thats the 'Force multiplication' effect veterans talk about with defense and resistance. Each extra point is more valuable than the last, exponentially so.

Someone else recognizes the insanity of defense in this game, I'm not alone in this world anymore.

Fire melee was given -defense which is what effected the fire farmers, and honestly not even a topic for game balance but the old topic of farmers and the impact they've had on this game. They hated the buffs to fire melee BECAUSE it made it harder for THEM to farm as much exp when the mobs(who all at the time used exclusively fire attacks the fire farmers were immune to due to max def vs fire + max resist vs fire) could defense cascade them(which'd break their immunity). All it did was make them remove fire sword powers from the mobs which lowered exp slightly which is the biggest sin to them of all: lowering there exp gains. All that matters to them: exp per hour is there precious as the one ring is to golem. I think thats what they are actually talking about.

I had a rough experience earlier today in a team attempting the newest TF blind on 4star on my blaster, and I admit in that attempt that I wish I was on a sentinel instead, as my blaster was a energy blast user, i couldn't nuke effectively when there was toxic gas everywhere causing me to be defeated in 3 seconds of entering to attempt to hit Nova(which has a 3 second activation time). Even jousting didn't work. So having sentinels also being a viable alternative for content i'm less familiar with is going to be nice whenever i'm playing ranged DPS.

I'll say this right now, a little psychology lesson on why nerfs should never, ever just be thrown about willy nilly: Nerfs have twice the emotional impact on a negative end as buffs on a positive end. People even still bring Titan Weapons up as "unfair nerfs" even if titan weapons is still considered by many an S tier set, because it 'was' nerfed from being as absurdedly op as it was. People even feel tankers were over-nerfed when they are STILL way more powerful than they were on the live days following the changes to there AoE that happened a few years ago and the changes this year, the changes this year some people act as if tankers are WEAKER than the pre-buff days. Constant nerfs carry a psychological effect that can cripple and even destroy a community. Which kind of as my last post mentioned, is 90% what happened to champions online. A lack of a spread sheet and standard for what powers did. A total lack of understanding that they were even nerfing powers damage when those powers weren't even used for damage at all(which revealed just how incompetent they were). They nerfed based entirely on whether x or y power was just popular, until eventually no one was playing the game and then they ended up with an even 'worst' developer later who made even worst changes. Heck by the last months I played CO I was 100% unwilling to share builds purely and entirely because I worried they'd get nerfed. I couldn't even ask for build advice because i feared nerfs and everyone sharing would get nerfed. It was an extremely unpleasant and toxic community and it was toxic 'because' of the non-stop nerfing. And this train of conversation 'here' reminded me just a little of the early days of that downhill trend. And a few other games and once-popular(some still popular even)game mods also experienced the same thing.

Whats very bad is, I actually saw Champions Online quite litterally go through that kind of treadmill and the game practically collapsed for it. Even before CoH Homecoming came most players had quit CO BECAUSE they all had experienced some nerf or another to whatever was top or "meta", even if they weren't using said "meta" ability in a dedicated meta build. In fact i wouldn't be surprised if at LEAST 1 out of 3-4 CoH homecoming players are at least partially familiar with CO's path, some of us more-so than others and we all have the same horror stories about it.

Actually stronger sets are even better buffed than a set thats buffing offense at the cost of survivability. Especially if you have debuff effects in play. The fact is when you ARE factoring buffs your then looking at how vulnerable it is to debuffs. Like cimeroran defense cascades, just as an example. Having yourself buffed up to say, 75% defense means they only need about 20% defense removed to potentially initiate a defense cascade(which usually starts with mobs having about 20% chance to hit the defense dependant user, with 65% being soft-cap 75 reduced to 55% means about 15% is perilously close). Enemy mobs to-hit tends to be kind of clock-based, so that 16% chance to hit you and you suddenly take two mobs attacking at the same time rolling a near identical number lowering that 55% defense down to 30, then 10 then -50% defense. But if your buffed to 75% defense with 95% defense debuff resistance(SR tanker), then they need about 400% defense debuff worth to even attempt a cascade and they'll never realistically get that(Even radiation only has -1 defense when 95% resisted), or even get close to that. Bio armor for context has only about...20% or so against ddr. A DPSer may like it, sure, but theres a reason veteran tankers aren't very impressed with it. They care about surviving the debuffs, bio offers very little against them.

Also why my DB/bio stalker and staff/bio scrapper are the only two major toons of mine that are, well, using bio armor. Even the beam/bio(originally DP/bio) sentinel(its a character with two iterations) phased out in favor of bio/devices blaster, though for different reasons. But I knew sooner or later nerfs would be on the table. We'll just have to see. Honestly i'd be more impressed if they corrected its tendency to be good against pure "Brute force" enemies and be given some options to also help it against mobs that really spam the debuff effects to balance it out. Yeah it'd be less effective against the "brute force" enemies but it'd also not suck against those enemies that are 'actually' hard. When I talk about "Brute force" enemies I refer to enemy mobs that have zero debuff/buff effects of any kind. Mobs without a means of properly countering defense/resistance/regeneration but instead rely entirely on maximum damage. Like Knives of vengeance, pre-buffed council/CoT ect, the mobs I once threw in F tier for posing no threat at level 50. A complete opposite of a "brute force mob" would be AE mobs with deadlier support sets like time manipulation(LOCATIONAL based -defense/resist(which bio is defenseless against) and radial -tohit(Times juncture, no counter but CC), +defense buff(Farsight, truely no counter than 100% completely preventing the mob from activating it entirely) hard counters bio armors to-hit reliant powers), radiation emissions(anchors can only be removed with CC), radiation blast(-20% defense in ALL attacks), demon summoning(-resistance) ect. Everything with -defense, -resistance and +defense or -tohit(and even unavoidable -tohit like radiation infection and unavoidable -resist enervating field) ect. Edit: I'll never forget the day in pvp I took my DB/bio stalker against an LR tanker, it was a curbstomp. None of my defenses worked 'AT ALL' against him because they ALL had to hit the guy.

I wonder that to, especially as he mentions fire blast being "op" and yet fire blast would be the single worst set if it wasn't top DPS purely for the fact it litterally has nothing but damage output. I don't actually use fire blast on 99% of my blasters entirely from it being a one trick pony and terrible for adapting to difficult situations. Or ice blast, because CC and a good T9, even though its general AoE power is dismal outside of blizzard. Its actually the second safest set only to dark blast in survivability and its mostly ST damage. He mentioned kin and yet I know from experience that kinetics depends on the team actually being good, I can think of far better sets for making a team unstoppable than kinetics by itself. In fact, many of my worst teams in the pre-homecoming days were on my kinetics characters, and it was entirely from the teams then having no damage mitigation that I could not provide as a kin(all I could do is buff damage or toss out an increase density or end, teams had absolutely nothing else for survivability and constantly wiped for it). Cold domination offers little against defense cascades without sleet and snowstorm, no heals, so I am sure those vulnerabilities more than keep it from being OP. Plus I think it was slightly nerfed anyways on -resistance. I wonder what other sets he'd scream are op meta if he only knew about em. Edit: No do not mention them here i'm sure he'd complain to.

He's being hyperbolic. But in all seriousness, bio armor kind of depends on destinies to hold itself together at high levels, as I mentioned its always been vulnerable to defense cascades due to effectively being willpower in that it has smash/lethal/toxic(rather than smash/leth/psi) resist and only defense against elemental damage types and energy damage types. Its actually very difficult to plug its holes with IOs, in the same manner as it is to plug willpowers holes with IO's. Arachnos widows have a huge -defense in some of there psionic attacks, so they can "crack" a bio armor easily. Radiation damage types also crack it easy. Many tank veterans also consider bio armor very weak largely due to it not handling late game content that well or custom AE archs with lots of debuff effects. It's strong at low-mid levels and against "brute force" mobs(that is, mobs with zero effective debuff effects such as the pre-patch old council, and cimerorans to a degree ect). It also loses when it needs to make to-hit roles against enemies with high defense(and loses decisively to at that) or lots of -tohit such as circle of thorns ghosts(of which it has no proper defense against, requiring focused accuracy or targetting drone or ageless radial to enable many of its powers to hit). This is all from LIVE, btw, not the upcoming patch changes.

I have a DB/bio stalker I've had and had maxed out for years, and i'm pondering rerolling her to something else with regen myself, just because of how these changes will effect her and her theme. I suspect many people will abandon bio armor 100% until the changes are brought back to something more reasonable. it doesn't even have much in the way of debuff resistances, so anything that has any kind of a counter to its abilities can shut it down, and its even vulnerable to to-hit debuffing and enemy defenses.

This lets brutes be a good alternative to tankers and do the same job, which i was always fine with. I mean on live it used to be brutes were THE desired archtype for veterans looking to play tank roll, I think the idea is the brute and tanker to not overshine one another. Pick your poison sort of thing. May actually get me to play brutes. I'm a defensive player by nature anyways, even on higher damage AT's.

Is not 85% better and easier to manage than 82.5?

I guess as a stalker player i'll weigh in on it, and this'd be kind of "exploity". Shield charge not breaking stealth would mean if you paired it with any set with a good PBAoE such as say, street justice's spinning strikes, you could effectively use shield charge, hit the group of enemies, then immedietly follow up with spinning strikes and have the "hidden" modifier apply to the crits. Or even exploding shurikin. If I'd known it didn't break stealth i'd have used it but even if I had, I'd understand this change as it would definently have been silly that your not losing hidden. All this means is if you shield charge, you could simply use placate prior to activating any AoE that can crit like you would any other set combination.

This'll gimp(yes, gimp) my ninjitsu/energy aura stalker if it were to go live, purely and exclusively because I use that alongside unleash potential. At best, i'd just be activating it but i kind of LIKED the crash version on my stalker as I would use that to not only exceed soft cap but also help my endurance management. This change kind of guts that. It may sound good on paper to make it more practical for a less experienced player, its not so much viable for a veteran who's combining the effect with pools such as unleashed potential. It'll just be back to skipping the t9s for me on defensive toons, because i'd already be at soft-cap defense on a good build to begin without it, freeing a slot for other things. But also freeing up 3 slots for other things on my stalker as there'd be no reason to take unleash potential, it'd just be back to taking regular fighting pool again, killing build diversity.