SR Enduring

[cohRock]

I made a beam rifle / SR sentinel.  He's only level 4 so it will be a while b4 it matters, but I have a question about the Enduring power.  (It replaces Lucky in traditional SR builds.)  In addition to its recovery boost it grants 7.5% base defense to psychic damage.  That puzzles me.  Don't SR's melee, ranged, and AOE defenses already cover psychic (as well as every other damage type)?  What good is the specific psychic defense when you are already better covered by SR's more global defenses?  Wouldn't it have made more sense for the psychic protection to be resistance?

 

Is it worth investing any slots in?  My initial plan is to 3-slot for endurance recovery.  With recharge from Quickness and recovery from Enduring, this all sounds like it might be pretty darn nice.

 

His template adds Tough for smash/lethal resistance, and Weave and Combat Jumping for a little extra "everything" defense.  I don't expect a scrapper, but I'm hoping for a nice level of survivability.

[oldskool]

IIRC, there are two tag types.  There are positional tags and damage type tags.  For most practical purposes having a higher value in the melee positional is just as good as having smashing/lethal defense.  This is because most attacks have both a positional tag and a damage type.  The game cares which of those you have with the highest value to determine if you dodge or not.  So technically Super Reflexes doesn't protect against "every other damage type" at all.  In fact, generally speaking Super Reflexes doesn't enhance any of your typed damage defenses.  The Sentinel version has a minor buff to psychic defense in Enduring that the other versions do not get.  

Is it worth slotting Enduring for defense?  Maybe if you have spare slots, but probably not.  Psychic damage without a positional type is generally rare and often linked to crowd control.  Crowd control powers usually do fairly low damage and you'll often ignore the mez portion anyway.  So I wouldn't worry about it too much.  If you're planning to layer other powers from the pools know that those are universal defense to everything.  So you could end up like I did where I have over 20% Psionic defense without even trying for it.  Is that enough to really stop an attack?  Nope, but it isn't worth it to really push it beyond that.  

I'd suggest sticking to the plan an slot Enduring up for endurance recovery.  That's a sound way to go.  

Bonus note.  While Lucky is gone the values of that get rolled into Evasion.  This is something Sentinels and Stalkers share in common (since they too skip out on being Lucky).  

Edited July 24, 2020 by oldskool