Quick question on overlapping defenses?

[Squishor]

Hey, I was hoping someone can help me out with understanding defenses. If I have say fire at 45% I know that is capped but if it was only say 35% but I had melee capped at 45.. If an enemy hits me with a melee fire attack would that go under my melee def for calculating the % chance to land the attack? Same question with ranged and aoe etc. 

[Cutter]

I'm prolly not using quite the right terms here, but...

 

Most attacks will have two+ tags, one for positional (ranged, melee, or aoe) and one+ for typed (fire, lethal, energy, etc.). Attacks always care about all defenses they are tagged as, and apply against the highest of these defenses. So in your case the attack tagged as "melee" and "fire" would care about both of those defenses, and if your melee defense is higher that's the one the hit roll would be made against.

[Snarky]

The golden rule in game is Def > Res < Heal.  So softcapping 1 Def is golden. S/L for most melee since most of the attacks they face have a S/L component. Even if it is a huge fire attack there can be a tiny lethal side effect and therefore drops into the S/L bucket. Fire farmers only face fire attacks so they only need to defend and resist vs Fire.  Blasters and squishies tend to get high ranged defenses because as ling as they are 8 feet away they are ranged. 
 

If you want to ‘layer defenses’ you want to look at the premier example. invul armor. It has high resists, some defense, resistance to debuffs if its defenses and a heal. So you softcap an invul to S/L defense, pump up the resist numbers and polish the heal a bit and you have all three legs of the stool going. Done right the things are unkillable outside a Hami raid or incarnate patches of death

 

Invul armor is not sexy. Most people want a damage aura or to run a squishy or something besides SuperBrute. But it is a good look at how it can be done correctly. 
 

then as you choose what you are building  (Iceman42?!?) you say well i got no resists but i have defense and can work on heal i/o and  Procs and solid those up with I/Os so that you can deal with stuff that breaks past the RNG. 

[Squishor]

Thank you for the responses!