archgemini24

Unfortunately not. You eat the full 20% for 10 seconds. As has been mentioned, there are ways to offset that portion, but the -Def was enough to push me to other sets to use with Shield, because if I need inspirations/overbuilding to fix that hole, I might as well run an entirely different melee set and not worry about any part of the crash at all, and use said inspirations/overbuilding to drive me further up.

I feel like Peacebringers are the big winners and losers of the KB->KD enhancement. Energy Blast users, too. Runner-up winners are Fire Controllers and Storm Summoners (Fire/Storm together lumps them in with PBs and Energy Blast). Winners in that it makes their sets play better together (all that AoE in Luminous Detonation, Solar Flare, Dawn Strike, and Photon Seekers, and only the first attack launched is usable). For Fire controllers, Bonfire is amazing with the conversion to KD. I might lose some damage, but I can open with Bonfire or Flashfire + Fire Cages and go to work. At worst, the enhancement makes Bonfire a "power-tax" in that it goes from an almost skippable power to a must-have. PBs are losers in that it really does feel like an IO tax on an AT that already finds itself starving for slots (Tri-form, in particular). My human-form only PB uses 6 Sudden Accelerations in his build (Gleaming Blast, Radiant Strike, and the 4 AoEs previously mentioned). That is 5 6-slot bonuses I am potentially missing and a 5-slot bonus (I have a FF proc in Solar Flare). Energy Blast and Fire/Storm would be in a similar boat.

Good thing I looked into this before I rolled out this awesome idea I had in my head for a SS/Shield Brute or Shield/SS Tank: that level of unresistable -Def would have broken the combo if I planned on playing it to be the point for top-tier content (perhaps even for any content where a +Def power was not available). A few points: If the -Def cannot be removed, can it be offset by adding an offsetting amount of +Def in the same bucket of Crash effects? If the idea is that -Mitigation must be included as part of the crash (I believe the -Dmg and -End are enough), it should affect secondaries equally, at least on paper, so if the -Def must stay, add an equal amount of -Res (but doesn't Resistance inherently reduce the effects of Resistance debuffs?). I don't want to see -40% Res added to the Crash, though, as that would make the set unplayable for everyone... I really like the combined ideas of: - Removing the -Def portion of the Crash so that no Mitigation set is so distinctly impacted versus any other, - Lowering the values of Rage's +ToHit/+Dmg (+10/+50) so that double stacking (+20/+100) only marginally eclipse's today's single-cast values. This means the -Dmg and -End penalty stay in place in exchange for the periods where the player effectively has Build-up, and, - Adding a close-range "Collateral" AoE to some of SS's powers (all except Footstomp, maybe?) to make up for the loss of +40/+160 that double stacking gained. The hope being this would make the rest of the set more palatable to play, and less reliant on Rage and Footstomp. Mostly, I just want to play the combo I had in mind without having to worry about if critters are going to drop the right inspirations so I'm not flirting with Death every two minutes simply because I chose a Defense set.