Defence? Positional vs environmental

[DemonWithin]

What's the difference between the 2 defence types.  Is there an explanation somewhere?

[MunkiLord]

Good info here.  https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Defense

[Gulbasaur]

Every* attack has certain positional tags and damage types. For example, an attack might be tagged "ranged" and do fire and smashing damage.

The game then looks at ranged defence, smashing defence and fire defence and picks the highest of the three. The rest don't matter.

 

In this example, if ranged defence is the highest, that's the number used. If smashing defence is highest, the game uses that number. If fire is the highest, it uses that number Highest value always wins.

 

If you have good melee, range and AoE defence, you're covered for almost* all attacks because almost all attacks have positional tags.

 

The other route is to aim for high smashing and lethal defence as they're the two most common damage types and many attacks have multiple damage types (usually smashing and lethal plus something else) - again, highest number wins so if an attack does smashing and energy damage, the high smashing defence will cover it.

 

Which is better? The one you can get most easily. If you've got 40% S&L defence but only 10% melee defence, building up your melee defence is probably not worth doing because any attack with smashing or lethal damage will only use the 40% higher value. Likewise, if you've got massive positional defences, you can basically ignore all others.

 

Toxic defence doesn't exist but toxic resistance is a side-effect of some heal skills (as well as some other powers) and psi defence and resistance are something you either have a lot of or none at all but can be built up with IOs if you really need to.

 

(* there's a small number of attacks that don't have a positional tag - they're all psi damage and really I wouldn't worry about them too much. There's also stuff like Hamidon's special damage, which you need to use special inspirations for).

Edited April 11, 2020 by Gulbasaur

[Lines]

Each attack has a few components. An attack might have the components Cold/Smashing Ranged, for example.

 

Whichever component you have the highest defence against will be used in the defence roll. So if you have Smashing at 30%, Cold at 20% and Ranged at 20%, you'll roll against it with your Smashing defence.

 

Since practically every attack has at least one type (Smashing, Negative, Cold, etc) and one position (Melee, Ranged or AoE), it's normally a good idea just to focus on either your typed defence or your positional defence.

 

Generally it's easier to build your typed defence thanks to massive boosts from fairly roundly available powers like Scorpion Shield, which gives you high Smashing, Lethal and Energy defence. Also, since the sizeable majority of enemy powers in the game have either smashing, lethal or energy components, you can get away with focusing mainly on those three. Negative is also good to cover.

 

Super Reflexes and Ninjistu are examples of powersets that make good use of positional defence, which covers more attacks. Other than those few sets, it's normally pretty tough to build positional defence.

 

(Edit: Ninja'd by a couple of seconds!)

Edited April 11, 2020 by Lines

[Greycat]

If you're curious for examples on what enemies do what, you can always go to paragonwiki.com. For instance, I did, looked up Council - here's a Nebula Buckshot's entry on powers.

Shotgun (Ranged) Cone, Lethal, Foe Knockdown
Good at close range. Fires a cone of buckshot pellets and can knock some foes down.

Brawl Melee, Smash
Council brawling attacks.

 

Versus a Nebula Elite Marksman

Cryonic Rounds (Ranged, Lethal/Cold) Foe -Recharge, -Speed
Your movement and attack speed has been slowed by the Advanced Rifle Cryonic rounds.

 Incendiary Rounds (Ranged, Lethal) Minor Damage over Time, Fire
You are taking Fire Damage over Time from the Advanced Rifle Incendiary rounds.

 Brawl Melee, Smash
Council brawling attacks.

 

So, if you (somehow) have only Smashing and Melee defense, there's nothing to counter that shotgun, the Cryonic or Incendiary rounds. But you've got some defense if they come in to brawl, since those are smashing/melee.

 

If you have no "typed" defense (smashing, lethal, fire, cold, etc,) but have ranged, AOE, and melee defenses, you've got defense against both of these mobs attacks. They can of course still hit you, but they have a lower chance to. There can be some intricacies (+ mobs, defense debuffs, anything over defense caps, incarnates, etc.) but ... bluntly, I don't care about it enough to keep the math in mind. 🙂 Plenty of people do and can explain it until you're trying to find defense vs math.

[Silverado]

5 hours ago, Gulbasaur said:

* there's a small number of attacks that don't have a positional tag - they're all psi damage and really I wouldn't worry about them too much.

To further expand on this, they're usually Mind Control powers, such as Mesmerize, Dominate, and their AoE versions. Used commonly by The Lost, Rikti, and certain AVs such as Sister Psyche and Malaise

[MTeague]

Yea. Some Tsoo boss kept terrorizing my Claws/SR on a safeguard thursday night.  had to combine a few insp's for a Break Free for the first time in forever on her.

[Outrider_01]

8 hours ago, Gulbasaur said:

The other route is to aim for high smashing and lethal defence as they're the two most common damage types and many attacks have multiple damage types

Wish that was more clear to me, have a ton of mids builds that are *ahem* soft capped 45% all but Psi/Toxic.  Guess they are just like Neo from the Matrix, but shots and strikes would miss without moving.

[Haijinx]

1 hour ago, MTeague said:

Yea. Some Tsoo boss kept terrorizing my Claws/SR on a safeguard thursday night.  had to combine a few insp's for a Break Free for the first time in forever on her.

SR gets double whammied by those since they have no defense, and no terrorize protection in Practiced Brawler. 

[Sakura Tenshi]

it should be noted on a conceptual level, positional defense is your character dodging attacks, environmental is that the attack might connect but slide right off or glance, you can see this in the little popup words that appear above your head. When you avoid an attack with positional defense, you see a small "avoided" above your head, when you avoid damage through environmental, you get a "deflected" notice, this is why Invulnerability has so much environmental defenses: because you see superman sometimes getting hit, but he's so damn sturdy the attack slides off or just cannot even be felt by him. (which makes me seriously wonder why Heightened Senses in Willpower grants environmental defenses instead of positional)

 

Furthermore, I think there's only a few instances where attacks are straight damage type and lack positions: mind control powers being a bit one, but I believe damage patches like Caltrops, Burn, and Talon of Vengeances' Ashfall similarly lack positionals, though I suspect they are not purely autohits.