Maelwys

Since Brutes get Fury; little/no damage slotting in their attacks doesn't cripple them as much as a Tanker. As such they're one of the easiest classes to level up (the easiest being a MM) if you're not throwing influence at loads of Procs and Globals.

Theft of Essence: Chance for +Endurance in Dark Regeneration. Done. (OK, Panacea and Miracle in Health help too, but I would have killed for the Theft of Essence set on my old Spines/DA Scrapper on live...)

Mez Resistance indeed just lowers the duration of status effects; it doesn't negate them. As such building for it via set bonuses is pretty pointless because unless the magnitude of the resistance is in the thousands of percent it tends to not matter very much. Personally I'd aim to pick up Mez Protection via the likes of Rune of Protection or Clarion Destiny instead.

Team size has no bearing on HitChance. Even Cosmic Balance only grants damage resistance; not defense. And if you're asking if enemies randomly target teammates? No, it's not a straight "roll a d8". The PVE AI builds up a threat list based on factors like distance and previous damage dealt; and the taunt effect overrides whoever would ordinarily be at the top of the list.

Aside from the fact that this -45% ToHitDebuff would need to actually be -93.75% against a regular +3 mob and at least -300% vs a level 50 AV... ...sure.

Nope. Bodyguard mode only kicks in if the pet is within range of Supremacy AND is commandable (with their orders set to Defensive stance plus something other than Attack e.g. Follow/GoTo/Stay).

See; that's exactly the sort of toon that provokes comments like "Yeah; I'm sure they have plenty of fun playing it.... but it's inefficient as heck." Currently your main ST rotation of (CB-PV-PF-PC) is 227.70 DPS and your backup ranged rotation (CB-PV-XRB-PC) is 215.36 DPS. However just by dispensing with unnecessary set bonuses in those attacks (ignoring defense, bare minimum recharge and 95% Hit Rate vs +3s) you could easily be hitting 276.46 DPS and 278.77 DPS respectively. Also the 6th IOs in both Atomic Blast and Atom Smasher are also just screaming out to be replaced with another damage or -res proc. And Aim/Build Up can take up to 70.35% local recharge before the Gaussian "Chance for Build Up" IO drops below a 90% activation rate. Actionette - Blaster (Radiation Blast) v2.mbd Those are the kind of tradeoffs we're talking about. You're intentionally forgoing damage output in favour of defense; as well as other things like unnecessary global recharge and accuracy bonuses - although there's an argument that more global recharge is always useful to get your nuke up sooner so that one's less contentious. (I intentionally didn't go poking at the other powers; even though stuff like unboosted Purples gives me the heebie jeebies) None of this really matters outside of niche content. You don't need high damage output; just like you don't need high defence... because the vast majority of content in CoX is ridiculously facerollingly easy. The reason that we're continually being loud about this particular tangent is that it is disingenuous for anyone to claim that you can build a toon for softcapped defense without making non-negligible tradeoffs (such as sacrificing damage output!) - there simply aren't enough power picks and enhancement slots to get everything simultaneously.

+1 for Carp Melee. (C'mon Devs; we've had Fish Blast / Fish Affinity Ranged toons available for nearly a year... where's my slimy befinned War Mace Weapon customization option??!?)

Championess made the same claim on Page #1 of this very thread. We're still waiting for evidence. At an absolute minimum; by building for +Defence you're sacrificing a few enhancement slots that could have been utilised for Damage Procs instead... and frequently it locks you into specific power pool selections and enhancement set choices; meaning that other potentially-beneficial powers and set bonuses get passed over. And for an AT with no inherent Defence (such as Dominators) the sheer magnitude of bonuses you need to chase and attain in order to hit the 45% threshold is often very punitive for other aspects of your build. Even if you just aim at a single flavour (like Ranged Positional defense; or S/L Typed defense). Obviously some builds are (far) more efficient than others with how they handle the tradeoffs; and specific powerset combinations don't work well with damage procs or set bonuses (like Masterminds and toons with lots of long-duration Pseudopets). And I have a fair number of builds that chase 45% Defense efficiently as a gimmick. But there is a good reason why most of the high-DPS builds out there cap out at about ~15-20% Defense rather than ~45%... especially when you can just raid the AH for big purple Insps and/or pop a Barrier Destiny Incarnate.

(Although TBF my real source of fury from the oldenwebs wasn't <blink> tags but crap like this)

If with 45% Defense; the nasty +3 AV has an 9.75% chance to hit you then with 44.55% Defense they'll have a 10.8225% chance to hit you. So in relative terms; on average you'll be hit 11% more compared to if you had 45% Defense (10.8225/9.75=1.11) That's why people argue that the last smidgen of Defense or Resistance before the "cap" is the most important. But either way you'll still be getting hit on average by roughly 1 in every 10 enemy attacks. So I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.

Which chart? The resolution of the last one you posted was so small I can't tell if it's correct or not because I can't tell what it's saying. That said, again, absolutely none of this is rocket science. I just spent a few minutes knocking together a quick Google Sheet showing the effect of a given set of Defence/ToHit/Accuracy buffs; including the streakbreaker: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wIsH6SWzb5uH1QZgwK0gneBodGj0LdBaM1MqGeoWe3g/edit?usp=sharing (anyone/everyone can feel free to make a copy and check the figures, then bin it once they realise how simple this stuff is!) IMO the answer is that the 45% softcap (58.75% in Incarnate content) is absolutely a thing. The real question however is whether achieving it is worth the build tradeoffs; given the prevalence of Teammate buffs/Inspirations/etc and Defense Debuffs. (spoiler alert: the answer here is "almost never, unless you are on a toon that already has lots of Defense and DDR such as like Super Reflexes") TL;DR: Is it true? Yes. Should you try and achieve it? Probably not.

Yes. The trick (as we're at pains to point out here!) is knowing what the proper question is.

No, that's not how the streakbreaker works. The allowed misses in a row depends on the final chance to hit, after your defense is applied, not before. If you have high defense, the final chance to hit you will be low, and streakbreaker will allow many misses, easily up to 100, before it forces a hit. MY UNDERSTANDING IS THAT STREAKBREAKER IS SEPERATE MECHANIC AND APPLIED ONLY IF THERE IS A MISS. SO, I REKON A MISS COULD STILL BE HAD BECAUSE OF A HIT-ROLL... You're correct that the Streakbreaker only kicks in to override misses. However in order to see if it should override that miss or not; the Streakbreaker looks at the FINAL HIT CHANCE of the attacks that have actually landed on that target; after the target's Defense buffs and any ToHit debuffs have been taken into consideration. So OK; a +3 AV may well have a 95% to hit unbuffed players with a particular attack... however when they use that attack against [a player that has +45% Defense] then without any other buffs/debuffs in play that attack's FINAL HIT CHANCE will almost certainly be lower than 10% (it'll only be above 5% due to the AV's AccMods!). And unless that FINAL HIT CHANCE is above 20%; the streakbreaker will permit 100 misses in a row. Therefore with significant Defense buffs in play the streakbreaker won't be a factor at all (which is why we're all saying that it's largely irrelevant when building for +defense!)

Endurance Reduction in your attacks (particularly the AoEs) is always the best place to start. VEATs also tend to run a fair number of toggles so make sure those are appropriately slotted and maybe don't run the ones you don't need at the time. Then there's maximizing your recovery via a Panacea, Miracle and Numina in Health and EndMod and Performance Shifter in Stamina. And picking up your passive +Endurance accolades. Many VEATs eventually run Ageless at endgame which will help too... but IMO Crabs are the ones that least benefit from it (especially Crabberminds) To give you an example: my pet-focused Crab (which still has a full spammable attack chain) recovers a smidge over 2 End/Sec with all his toggles running.

This is the answer. All that charts and numbers tomfoolery is just so much bawbaw soup.

Correct (aside from Purples and PvP IOs, as @Uun has already pointed out above!) To add a bit to my statement of I guess it might help to give a few examples... "Luck of the Gambler +7.5% Recharge" Global IOs are maybe a good example of this. Whilst these IOs can be boosted to improve their Defense enhancement aspect; I always attune them because their powerful recharge effect (which is coded as a set bonus) is low hanging fruit when it comes to minimizing build tradeoffs for benefits when exemplaring. Sometimes I'll have a set of 2-5 LoTGs in a power and I might choose to only attune the LotG Global plus maybe 1-2 others; then boost the rest. However the "Steadfast Protection +Def/Res" Global IOs (which function similarly to LotGs!) I'll almost always boost instead of attune. I know that if I boost this IO to Lv30+5 then I can put it plus a Lv40+5 Reactive Armor Res IO and Lv40+5 Reactive Armor End/Res IO into the same resistance toggle to bring that toggle up to the ED cap for Damage Resistance aspect... but if I instead attuned the Steadfast then that combination of enhancements would fall short of the ED cap (so I'd need to combine it with HOs and/or Pure Lv50+5 Resistance IOs instead!). And although this means that my build will lose its global +3% Def effect if I exemplar lower than level 27; that is much less impactful than losing +7.5% global recharge from a LotG(s) if I exemplar lower than level 47.

Yep. Because Attuned IOs always act as if they're even-level to you; their Set Bonuses continue to function regardless of your level (only capping out at the lowest available level of their enhancement set). So whenever you exemplar; they tend to keep their set bonuses. Therefore if you do more lower-level content AND your build relies more on set bonuses than it does on raw power aspect enhancement; then Attuned IOs win. However if you're do more level 50 content OR your build relies more on keeping the raw aspect enhancement of your powers high than it relies on set bonuses; then Boosted IOs win. You can also mix both attuned and boosted; which can sometimes be beneficial if you rely on specific set bonuses more than others (e.g. global recharge for permadoms). Personally I tend to just boost everything other than Procs/Globals; which get attuned (though purchased from the AH rather than manually poked with Catalysts). ATOs (and Winter Sets!) are both separate beasts and they get manually Catalyzed at Lv50 in order to upgrade them from regular to superior.

I actually have quite a few 50s that possess an attuned damage proc plus a boosted Lv50+5 Acc/Dam or Acc/Dam/End in one power or another. Not because it makes any difference to the mechanics of the proc... but because I have a habit of buying attuned IOs off the AH whenever I'm levelling up. It makes absolutely zero difference to the set bonuses; they always combine (because Attuned set IOs are just treated as "even-level" Unattuned set IOs). ATOs behave differently because whenever you Catalyze them they do not become attuned (they're ALREADY attuned!) but instead become an entirely different IO set.