Is 90% Resistence = 45% Defense?

[Troo]

If so, and 59% is the new 45%.. thoughts?

[Major_Decoy]

Well, for Four Star difficulties, all enemies have +30% to hit, so no. 59% is not the new 45%.

 

That said, Incarnate content and four star difficulty settings are entirely optional.

Edited January 26, 2023 by Major_Decoy

[Snarky]

Defense>Resistance>Heal. 

 

(Unless you are on Dark Armor and are stunning and fearing and stealthing and to hit debuffing and have the best heal in the game on a few second cycle with a hair trigger, but, edge case)

 

But no, Resistance , in my opinion, has still not overshadowed defense.  Layered mitigation is the key.  Whether it be the tortured path Dark takes to get there or the classic Invulnerability that goes Defenses with debuff resistance, and heavy resistances, and Dull Pain.  

[twozerofoxtrot]

I'm a little confused by the topic and what it's asking.

 

Are we basically trying draw equivalence between Res and Def based sets?

 

I think there are some nuances that keep them from being directly compared. Res protects against -Res. Def doesn't protect against -Def. Def inherently provides a layer of defense against status effects, Res based sets usually have you eating everything and relying on your status protection toggles, but Mags can stack up on you. And so on.

 

As for the question in the OP, this is one reason why Absorbs are so powerful.  You can't get Res above a 90% cap but if you can rock 5k(ish) effective HP, then that 90% goes a longer way. Absorbs are affected by Res.

[aethereal]

Yes, 45% defense and 90% resistance both decrease damage by 90%, assuming no to hit buffs (and other minor caveats).

 

Contra @America's Angel, accuracy doesn't change the mitigation provided by defense.

 

Consider an enemy who attacks with accuracy 1.2.

 

Against a defense 0 target, the attack hits .5 * 1.2 = 60% of the time.

 

Against a defense 45 target, the attack hits (.5 - .45) * 1.2 = 6% of the time -- a reduction of 90%.

 

To hit bonuses change the mitigation provided.  Accuracy bonuses do not (with caveats).  Enemies with enhanced accuracy hit more than 5% of the time, but they hit 10% as often as they would without defense.

 

And neither commonly occuring level difference nor rank bonuses give to hit bonuses.  Incarnate/hard mode do give to hit bonuses, 45% defense is not 90% mitigation there.

 

The big caveat: if an enemy has so much accuracy that it overcaps to hit chance (ie, it would naturally have a greater than 95% chance to hit and it's capped down to 95%), then some of its accuracy is "wasted" against defense 0 characters but is functional against defense 45 characters and then softcap defense provides less than 90% mitigation.

Edited January 26, 2023 by aethereal

[Troo]

so.. is it accurate to say:

45% defense and 90% resistance both decrease damage by 90% in typical content

58.75% defense and 90% resistance both decrease damage by 90% in Incarnate content

88.75% defense and 90% resistance both decrease damage by 90% in Four Star content

 

[Snarky]

it is early but my read is that defense at 45 stops minions at base 95%

[DoctorHugh]

I'm not a mechanics wonk, but one thing I do consider is the magnitude spread of incoming hits.

 

If I understand it correctly, resistance mitigates damage on every incoming hit. Defense means you're more likely to avoid the hit, but when it does hit, defense does nothing to mitigate it.

 

In my experience, there's a significant difference between a stream of incoming, smaller hits (which I can react to), and having two defense rolls in a row fail and smack me for max damage.

[aethereal]

10 hours ago, Troo said:

so.. is it accurate to say:

45% defense and 90% resistance both decrease damage by 90% in typical content

 

Yes (besides cases where you're at extreme level shifts (+6 or more) or where enemies get +to-hit from their powers.

 

10 hours ago, Troo said:

58.75% defense and 90% resistance both decrease damage by 90% in Incarnate content

 

I believe so, though it's shockingly hard to get information on the to-hit bonus for Incarnate characters.  This is the common wisdom at leaast.

 

10 hours ago, Troo said:

88.75% defense and 90% resistance both decrease damage by 90% in Four Star content

 

I don't think so.  I understand this to be the place where the to-hit bonus for Four Star content is added:  https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=challenge_empowerment.challenge_empowerment_3.hard_mode_3

 

That suggests as far as I can see +25% to-hit.  That would mean that enemies would have a base 75% chance to hit, so you'd need 70% defense to floor their to-hit chance, so 70% defense to get 90% damage mitigation.

 

EDIT:  Caveat about hard mode (especially) and incarnate content: because of the higher base chance to hit, you're much more likely to be in the scenario where accuracy bonuses overcap the base chance to hit, and thus flooring the chance-to-hit mitigates damage by less than 90%.  In normal content, enemies need 1.90 Accuracy to touch 95% chance to hit you.  In Four Star content, they need only 1.27 Accuracy to touch 95% chance to hit, so it's pretty likely that they will be way over cap on to-hit chance, so mitigation will be less than 90% even by flooring their to-hit.

 

I am open to being wrong about incarnates and hard mode!

Edited January 26, 2023 by aethereal

[aethereal]

4 hours ago, DoctorHugh said:

I'm not a mechanics wonk, but one thing I do consider is the magnitude spread of incoming hits.

 

If I understand it correctly, resistance mitigates damage on every incoming hit. Defense means you're more likely to avoid the hit, but when it does hit, defense does nothing to mitigate it.

 

In my experience, there's a significant difference between a stream of incoming, smaller hits (which I can react to), and having two defense rolls in a row fail and smack me for max damage.

 

I think this is a valuable point.  In a lot of ways, we focus too much on the expected case here.  Unless you're open to faceplanting every, what, tenth spawn to twentieth, what we should be considering is how much damage you take not in the expected case, but the 90th or 95th percentile of unlucky cases.

 

Note that luck does play a factor for Resistance-based characters as well -- if enemies hit you 50% of the time (ie, they're even-conn minions with no to-hit bonuses, and you have no Defense), then they can still hit more than 50% of the time and you'll take more damage when they roll well.  However, the downside is greater for Defense-based characters than Resistance-based characters.  If the enemies expect to hit you 50% of the time, then your maximally unlucky case is they hit you 100% of the time, and thus you take 2x your expected incoming DPS.  If the enemies expect to hit you 5% of the time, then your maximally unlucky case is they hit you 100% of the time, and thus you take 20x your expected incoming DPS.  Note that the maximally unlucky case for the Defense character is much more unlucky than the maximally unlucky case for the Resistance character.

 

But also note that when you're talking enemies who have say a 70% chance to hit you (because of Accuracy bonuses), your unlucky downside is that much more reduced.

 

The whole mitigation question is almost impossibly nuanced, which is why we often retreat to simple cases.

[Snarky]

I started on invul brutes. Layered mitigation and big old health pool. 
 

I moved to Dark Dark Brutes.  Stealth, Stun, Fear, hardy resists, to hit debuffs, and the best heal in the game.  With a comfy health pool

 

I moved onto Blasters built for Range and Defense.  Hit and run

 

Now I am on a Dark Dark Corruptor.  Not built for range or defense.   It takes all of the Dark Brutes tricks and puts them on steroids, then adds adds some ST holds and enemy debuffs and even a enemy 30 sec time out (black hole, just break glass).  Not much resists or health compared to the Brute, but decent AoE and great ST blasting.  With great power comes not giving a crap what your enemies plan.  Stun them black hole them, to hit debuff and fear them, floor their regen and lower their damage, just make their lives miserable.  Then, once you’ve said “hi” scourge them down.   Defense? Resist?   Yes please meat shield…. Go make friends.  I will be right beside you.  

Edited January 26, 2023 by Snarky

[Troo]

11 hours ago, Troo said:

so.. is it accurate to say:

45% defense and 90% resistance both decrease damage by 90% in typical content

58.75% defense and 90% resistance both decrease damage by 90% in Incarnate content

88.75% defense and 90% resistance both decrease damage by 90% in Four Star content

 

I'm okay with these being mostly accurate.

 

That allows me to take my next step into more nuanced blending. I'm looking at you -toHit.

I've done capped defense.

I've done capped resistance with only incidental defense.

I've blended the two.

 

Now the hard question. Is below accurate?

-20% ToHit and 35% Defense = 45% Defense with both decreasing damage by 90% in typical content

and if so then,

combining -20% ToHit and 32% Defense and 75% Resistance = decreasing damage by greater than 90% in typical content

 

 

Edited January 26, 2023 by Troo

[Shred Monkey]

In normal MMOs, if you're getting hit by 1000 hp attacks, 90% resists can theoretically keep you alive long enough for heals to help.  Defense, on the other hand keeps you alive until that one hit gets through and BAM your dead. 

 

However, CoH is different from normal MMO's in that we don't have healers... so with resists you just run out of HP.

 

Personally, I just go with defense and wakies and just throw in resists when it's convenient.  And if I'm really trying to be unkillable, I'll layer on top of all that a bunch of soft controls... knockdowns, staying at range, geometry tricks and slows to abuse bad pathing AI... fun stuff.

 

 

 

[Troo]

17 minutes ago, Snarky said:

With great power comes no giving a crap what your enemies plan.  Stun them black hole them, to hit debuff and fear them, floor their regen and lower their damage, just make their lives miserable.

😄

 

I do love me some dark corruptors.

My favorite has been Rad/Dark.

It's akin to a cat playing with a mouse.

Radiation's "I'm never going to miss" combined with Dark's "You're gonna have a tough time hitting me" layered over "how's that perma Slow, perma Fear, Stun and go straight to hell debuffage taste".. yummy. The heal is just a cruel cherry on top.

Dark corruptors are the inspiration for this topic. I would very much enjoy playing a Energy Melee/Dark Miasma character.

[GM Crumpet]

7 hours ago, Snarky said:

it is early but my read is that defense at 45 stops minions at base 95%

In a lot of cases, but a higher amount will counteract -def attacks. The -def (as far as I understand it) comes off the overflow first

[aethereal]

53 minutes ago, Troo said:

Now the hard question. Is below accurate?

-20% ToHit and 35% Defense = 45% Defense with both decreasing damage by 90% in typical content

 

No, you add up the ToHit and the defense -- so -20% ToHit and 35% defense is the equivalent of 55% defense (so it's 10 over softcap for ordinary content).  So, I mean...  yes, that would decrease damage by 90% in typical content, but so would -10% ToHit and 35% defense.

 

To be clear:  I'm talking about the amount of ToHit debuff that lands, not the amount that your power nominally does.  As a debuff, ToHit is affected by the purple patch -- so if you're using it on a +4 enemy, the nominal amount of the power is multiplied by 0.48 before it lands.  And ToHit is I believe further affected by AV resistance.  This is why, I think, many people in the ultra-high performance crowd are less enthusiastic about ToHit debuffs than they are about defense.

 

53 minutes ago, Troo said:

and if so then,

combining -20% ToHit and 32% Defense and 75% Resistance = decreasing damage by greater than 90% in typical content

 

Defense (including ToHit debuffs) and Resistance are multiplicative in effect.  So if you have floored enemy to-hit chance (by whatever combo of to-hit and defense) and gotten to Tanker resist cap, then you have mitigated damage to 10% * 10% = 1% (99% damage mitigation).  So yes.  Any amount of resistance combined with floored to hit will mitigate damage by more than 90%.

[Troo]

@aethereal that's super helpful. Thank you.

 

I remembered something about -toHit being worth 1/2 from something... stoopid purple patch.

 

It seems you are following my train of thought. I appreciate your skipping ahead to AVs and high performance.

[aethereal]

Just now, CR Americas Angel said:

 

Incorrect. Versus an attack with a base accuracy of 2.0, your 45% defense is only providing 85% mitigation. (Whereas 90% resistance would still provide 90% mitigation.)

 

Dude.  I said that in the message you just quoted.

[aethereal]

4 minutes ago, CR Americas Angel said:

Ah okay. I thought when you wrote "contra" you were disagreeing with something I'd written.

Your post gives the strong impression that any amount of Accuracy reduces the mitigation provided by Defense.  You never at any point in your first post mention that Accuracy equal to or below 1.9 (for enemies without ToHit bonuses) do not result in mitigation reduction for Defense.  And 1.9 Accuracy is a pretty high bar -- a +4 Boss with a 1.2 base accuracy power would reach 1.9 Accuracy, but not exceed it.  A +4 AV with a 1.0 base accuracy power reaches but doesn't exceed 1.9 Accuracy -- so you either need a +4 AV with a higher-than-usual accuracy power, or a +4 Boss with a higher-than-"normal high"-accuracy power, or whatever.

 

So yes, I was disagreeing with what you wrote.  I don't claim to know what was in your head when you wrote it, but the text that you wrote does a bad job of explaining the reality of the situation.  In contrast, the text I wrote was careful to explain the caveats, and it seems like you didn't read it or didn't understand it.

[Troo]

1 hour ago, CR Americas Angel said:

I make sure to not tell players that 45% def = 90% res.

 

Are you suggesting 45% def < 90% res?

 

1 hour ago, CR Americas Angel said:

So you're likely going to want 150% or more for it.

 

This is an example of why I want to mess around with more blended layering to try and achieve the 90% damage reduction.

[aethereal]

2 hours ago, CR Americas Angel said:

For mobs attacking players, the following formula is used to calculate Accmods:

AccMods  =  the power's inherent Accuracy  ×  the Accuracy of the enemy's Rank  ×  Accuracy factor due to level difference

So for your boss example, above. That's:

1.2 x 1.3 x 1.4 = 2.184

And for your AV example, that's:

1.0 x 1.5 x 1.4 = 2.1

 

I didn't realize that Accuracy (uniquely among stats in CoH to the best of my knowledge) stacks multiplicatively with itself instead of additively.  But I see that that's correct.  I stand corrected on the amounts, I was assuming it was 1 + 0.2 + 0.3 + 0.4 = 1.9 for the boss example.  Mea culpa!

 

It's still not common to exceed Accuracy 1.9 all told outside of AV fights (assuming no +to-hit).  A normal +4 boss is 1.3 * 1.4 = 1.82 accuracy -- it needs a high-accuracy power to breach 1.9.  A +4 lieutenant is 1.61 Accuracy, although with a 1.2 accuracy power, it gets to very barely above 1.9 Accuracy (1.92 -- the mitigation of 45% defense drops from 90% to 89.83%).

[srmalloy]

21 hours ago, Shred Monkey said:

In normal MMOs, if you're getting hit by 1000 hp attacks, 90% resists can theoretically keep you alive long enough for heals to help.  Defense, on the other hand keeps you alive until that one hit gets through and BAM your dead. 

And Regen works loosely similar to Defense, in that you take all the damage, relying on your healing to keep you alive while you grind down the incoming damage, your goal being to cut the incoming damage to less than your healing rate before you run out of hit points. Once you get ahead of the incoming damage, you'll heal back all the damage you took until, at the end of the fight, you've healed back all the damage you took, and are standing there uninjured, while your Resistance- and Defense-based companions will be damaged to one degree or another. Regen is inherently more brittle, because it is vulnerable to any damage spike, not just a lucky one as Defense is, but it will always end a fight either chewing pavement or looking fabulous.

[aethereal]

Some scattershot further thoughts on Defense, To-Hit, and mitigation.

 

Something that I got wrong earlier in the thread, and which is...  maybe important here is that the total mitigation that can be provided by Defense scales to the base to-hit of your opponent -- in the opposite direction from what you may expect.  Though the amount of Defense required to get that mitigation scales the way you'd intuitively imagine.

 

So, imagine an opponent with an Incarnate-style 63.75% base chance to hit, and no Accuracy bonus.  Against a Defense 0 character, it hits...  63.75% of the time.  Against a Defense 58.75% character, it hits 5% of the time.  This allows the Defense character to get to greater than 90% mitigation (92.2% mitigation, specifically).  That's...  kinda weird.  The ways that Accuracy and To Hit interplay are confusing.

 

If an enemy had the standard 50% chance to hit, and sufficient Accuracy to bring their total chance to hit up to 63.75%, then 45 Defense would softcap you to them, and their floored to-hit chance would be 6.375%, and you'd have 90% mitigation.

 

If on the other hand an enemy had 63.75% chance to hit and 1.0 Accuracy, then you need more Defense to floor their to-hit chance (58.75%), but that Defense would result in a lower chance to hit (5% instead of 6.375%), and thus a greater total mitigation (92.16%).   (Note that 92% mitigation is significantly greater mitigation than 90%!  You're talking about taking 20% less damage).

 

Wacky.  In an environment where that Defense level is relatively easy to achieve (full teams, for example), the thing where Incarnate enemies get a bunch of to-hit but no greater accuracy is actually a disadvantage to them.

 

In HM content, where I believe (?) you're locked into +4 enemies (and thus high Accuracy) and the to-hit bonus is that much greater, this prooooobably doesn't cash out to a super big deal?  That is, unlike at least some Incarnate content, you will have a hard time reaching Defense values that effectively mitigate you.  It also seems like on some level the answer for Hard Mode mitigation has to be "both Defense and Resistance."

 

 

It's also the case that enemies with below normal chance to hit can't be fully mitigated by Defense.  Like, if something has a 40% base chance to hit you, well, sorry, the smallest a to hit chance can be is 5%, no matter what.  That's only 87.5% mitigation.  I don't think this actually actually matters all that much?  Like, if something has a 40% base chance to hit you, it's almost certainly a pretty minor threat no matter what, so who cares that your mitigation is a little less effective.  But it's theoretically possible that something could be added to the game that did ferocious levels of damage but only had a 25% base chance to hit, and then you'd find that Defense is a notably weaker mitigation strategy against it than Resistance.

 

 

What does all this cash out to?  Like, is this number-juggling for the hell of it?  If something has like a 5% to 10.5% chance to hit you when its to-hit rating is floored, does it actually matter whether that's 90% of its damage to a theoretical 0 Defense character, or 87.5%, or 92.5%?  Maybe we shouldn't pay much attention to "how much mitigation is it," versus "what is its actual chance to hit?"  I think there's some validity there, but it does inform Resistance/Defense tradeoffs.  Though again, in the hardest content, I think it's reasonable to question how much of a tradeoff there actually is.  It's not resistance or defense, it's both.

 

TL;DR:  Defensive damage mitigation is crazily nuanced in CoH.

[EmperorSteele]

In terms of "what's better", I came up with a little thought experiment.

Let's say we have an enemy who deals 100 damage on a hit. You can fight him with EITHER a Def-caped toon, or a Res-capped toon.

The bad guy will attack 20 times. Let's see how much damage we take.

For your def capped toon, if the bad guy attacks 20 times, he will probably land a blow once (based purely on mathematics). So, you've taken 100 damage. After 20 attacks and all the time it takes for him to attack you that many times.

If you have the Resistance based toon, the bad guy will hit you 19 times out of 20 attempts (5% chance to miss), but only dealing 10 damage each time. 10x19 =190. Which is almost twice as much damage taken as the def-capped toon.

Now, obviously, there's a bit of luck involved. What if in the first scenario, he hits more than once? Or in the second scenario, he misses more than once? Hypotheticals can only predict so much, but the random luck involved in the combat system can sometimes skew things.

In "real scenarios", one must also consider debuffs being applied, as is the case with Cimerorians causing defense cascade failure (or hilariously, fire enemies with their sword attacks in fire farms XD). So while the numbers may suggest Defense is better than resistance, it's always good to have something else to fall back on.

 

[biostem]

9 minutes ago, EmperorSteele said:

If you have the Resistance based toon, the bad guy will hit you 19 times out of 20 attempts (5% chance to miss)

Don't even-con enemies only have a 50% chance to hit, assuming you had no other source of defense?