The Survival Guide: How to stay upright in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles

[Gulbasaur]

This guide is intended to give newer plays some tips on how to stay alive in the game in as simple as way as possible. It won't go into the nitty-gritty, but will give you some tips and tricks to make your character feel sturdier. I'll be making frequent reference to this page on Paragon Wiki, which provides a list of most of the Invention Origin (IO) special-effect enhancements. IOs are an easy way of adding in more damage, defence, resistance or special effects to your attacks. You can craft them, buy them from a merit vendor or get them on the auction house. IO sets give you bonuses to stats if you use more than one of the same kind, but there are a few with one-off effects you can use to substantially add to your survivability. 

 

How does damage work?

As a rule, attacks have a position (ranged, melee or AoE) and damage type (smashing, lethal, psionic, toxic, energy, negative energy. There are a tiny number of attacks that ignore position and a tiny number of attacks with a different damage type, but we can ignore those because you'll see them so rarely. 

 

Each character has positional defence, typed defence and damage resistance to each damage type. Positional and typed defence can be rolled into one, which we'll just call defence.

 

Defence makes you get hit less often. Resistance makes you get hit less hard. 

 

Defence

Using telekinetic blast as an example: This attack is ranged and does smashing and psionic damage. To see if it hits, the game looks as your defence for all three of those and picks the highest, it then does some maths and rolls a virtual dice and if you number is higher, the attack misses. The "always picks the highest" rule is important in understanding defence and how it works. An even-level minion will hit you 50% of the time with zero defence and things scale differently with level differences and enemy tiers, but the short version is all defence has value. 

 

Let's say our ranged defence is 7.5%, our smashing defence is 15% and our psionic defence is 0%. The game will only look at the smashing defence's 15% for this, because it's the highest. Many attacks do either smashing or lethal damage and (almost) all attacks have a positional tag. The "soft cap" for defence is 45% - any more than that is wasted for most content. If you can get it to around 20%, you'll feel a lot more secure as a squishier archetype.

 

This means that to make the most of defence, you should focus on building up your smashing and lethal defence or your positional defence. 

 

How to I get more defence?

Combat Jumping, Stealth and Hover both give you a little bit of defence. Maneuvers gives you a little bit more. The Fighting power pool has a the Weave skill, which gives you some more. It's about building up layers of defence to give yourself as much as you can without compromising any other part of your build. And, of course, purple inspirations - don't let them sit there. 

 

Unleash Potential from the Force of Will power pool can give you a fairly large boost to your defence, with a very long cooldown. 

 

There are a couple of IOs that give you an instant defence boost but they need to be slotted into a resistance power. If you're going for Weave, also unlock Tough as it's a good place to put these if you really want to make use of it. 

 

Other than that, it's about using IO sets to layer up either S&L or positional defence until you're comfortable. 

 

Resistance

Using the above example of telekinetic blast, we can see it does both smashing and psionic damage. Unlike defence, these are calculated separately. Let's say, without any resistances, both do 100 damage - that's 200 in total. However, let's say you have 15% smashing resistance and 6% psionic resistance - now the damage is reduced to 85 + 94 = 179 damage. Not huge, I grant you, but those attacks build up over time. Resistance caps at 75% for all archetypes without their own armour powers, but that's pretty hard to get to, so just get what you can. 

 

Damage resistances are calculated separately, so you want a good coverage but smashing and lethal are the most common types of damage so are a good place to focus. 

 

How do I get more resistance?

It is harder to increase resistance than defence. There are a couple of IOs that give you either global or specific damage resistance. Weave, mentioned above, gives you more. Many of the ancillary and patron pools have a power that increases your damage resistance. Don't forget to use your orange inspirations.

 

Rune of Protection in the Sorcery power pool is notable as it's about equal to several T9 protective powers that you'd see on a melee archetype, but has a very long recharge.  

 

IO sets often give you bonuses to damage resistance, usually in pairs (S&L, E&NE, T&P). There are a few odd IOs that give you more resistance to psionic damage, but I would ignore them unless it's for a specific purpose. If you get to the point where you're kitting out in IO sets, you'll naturally end up with around 15-20% resistances across the board. 

 

Absorb

Think of absorb as disposable hit points. Absorb procs are rare, but one I think is worth mentioning is Preventative Medicine - slot it into Health so it's always on and it has a chance to give you a fairly large absorb barrier when your health drops down a bit.

 

Which one is better?

Don't rely on one. Layer them up. Defence determines how often you'll get hit, and resistance determines how hard and you'll do better with a bit of both. 

 

Full example, borrowing the maths from here:

 

I'm in a fight. I've already been hit and I have had an absorb proc of 250hp go off from Preventitive Medicine. 

 

A +1 lieutenant attacks me with telekinetic blast. I have 15% smashing defence, which means that his chance to hit me is around 44%, so he's more likely to miss than he is hit me. If he misses, which he probably will, I will take zero damage. As above, I have 15% smashing resistance and 6% psionic resistance.  250-179=71, meaning that if it hits, I take zero damage and still have 71 spare hit points in my absorb barrier. 

 

If I had zero absorb, I'd have taken all the damage. If I had zero defence, the lieutenant's chance to hit me would have been 63%. If I had no damage resistance, I'd have taken the full 200 damage. 

However, if it did hit, it'd still knock me back...

 

Mez protection
Knockbacks, holds, sleeps... they're all a problem. The easiest way to deal with it is to pop some light purple inspirations and just carry on with your life. These have another layer of calculation. First of all, if the attack misses then nothing happens, so defence triumphs again. Secondly, control attacks have a magnitude which determines how strong it is and you can build up protection against it. If the magnitude is ever higher than the protection, the status effect kicks in. Acrobatics in the Leaping pool gives you some protection against Hold and there are several IOs that protect against knockback.

 

Rune of Protection in the Sorcery power pool provides *excellent* protection against a wide array of effects, although it's got a very long recharge. 

 

Thirdly, you can build up resistance against status effects, which makes them end sooner. The normal way through this is with IO set bonuses. 

 

Healing

When you heal, you get health back - not much to it there. The Medicine Pool has Aid Self as a self-heal. This is an interruptable, medium-powered heal. It can be a literal lifesaver, but because it can be interrupted, it's not a guarantee. Defence helps here - if they can't hit you, they can't interrupt you. There are a couple of IOs that heal you periodically, although not many are very strong. Don't forget to use your green inspirations. 

 

Increasing your Hit Points

There are a few ways to do this. Either with IOs (there's one for 7.5%, but there are also a few smaller boosts hidden in IO sets), or by going for certain accolade powers for passive bonuses (each one can be done in about and hour and a half, tops). More hit points mean that each attack is less of a threat, simple as. 

 

Regeneration

This is the mechanic that heals you over time. Increasing your hit points will actually make you heal faster, but probably not enough to really make a difference in a fight. There are a couple of IOs that give is a substantial boost, though. 

 

Debuffs

Anything that lower enemy ToHit makes them less to hit you and this take enhancements - it effectively raises your defence against that enemy. There are a few powers that reduce enemy damage by a percentage, which effectively raises your damage resistance against that enemy. ToHit Debuff can be enhanced. It's worth checking the power's stats - I'd say anything over 5% debuff is worth an enhancement while you're levelling as this will translate into you taking less hits, and therefore less damage.  

 

Wait a few seconds

Let the tank take aggro, then go for your high-damage attacks. If you lead with an attack, enemies will almost always have time to fire back once before their attention goes elsewhere and if that's a group of eleven enemies, all with ranged attacks, that will hurt. Holding off a second or two can be the difference between life and death. The tank can take it. 

 

Stand somewhere else

A little obvious here, but pay attention to the floor. If there are caltrops all over it and you see a lot of little minus numbers appearing above your head, it's time to move.

 

Use your inspirations

I'm pretty guilty of this, but remember they are there to be used and you can buy them cheaply at hospitals. A small purple and a small orange inspiration will go a long way to keeping you upright. 

 

Short version: Use pool powers and a couple of selective IOs to add defence and resistance where you can. Grab the accolades for a quick boost and grab the Absorb proc for a little icing on the cake.

Edited October 14, 2019 by Gulbasaur

[Shred Monkey]

Great Guide.  I would add a little more to the "stand somewhere else" section.  And that is this; if you are not in melee range, you are 100% immune to all melee attacks.  Whereas, if you do stand in melee range you can be hit by all attacks, both ranged and melee. 

 

While this seems obvious when I phrase it like I did, it is not a small thing.  Most melee attacks hit harder than ranged attacks and a lot of enemies do not have enough ranged attacks to keep firing them non-stop.  They end up standing still or moving (not attacking) for much of the fight while they wait for a ranged attack to recharge.  As a result, staying out of melee can effectively mitigate well over 50% of incoming damage.  In fact, while there are some very painful exceptions to this, I estimate that against most enemies groups, 75-90% of the potential incoming damage can be avoided by simply staying at range.  Furthermore, this is on it's own "layer" that goes on top of all the other "layers" you have listed.  And lastly, staying out of melee range doesn't take any investment at all.

 

Edited October 21, 2019 by Shred Monkey

[Gulbasaur]

17 hours ago, Shred Monkey said:

Great Guide.  I would add a little more to the "stand somewhere else" section.  And that is this; if you are not in melee range, you are 100% immune to all melee attacks.  Whereas, if you do stand in melee range you can be hit by all attacks, both ranged and melee. 

Oh, definitely. Understanding the core mechanics of range, patches (don't stand in them) and aggro (don't be the first to shoot if you won't survive the first shot back) are huge.

 

Tanks can only get aggro if you let them get it. If you jump the gun, you deal with the consequences.

 

Understanding the priority list for threat helps - the game is quite forgiving in that the sturdiest archetypes get priority, so once aggro has been established it's pretty safe to be a squishy... but if you're the only one attacking, you're the only target.