Softcapping Inv without the Fighting pool

[jack_nomind]

As to Mathematics, Arcana worked out on Live that Defense was just slightly over 2x better than equivallent Resistance.

 

So if you had a choice between +2% Defense and +4% Resist, you were better off with the additional Defense (up to Soft-Cap of course).

 

neither of those things is true.  Arcanaville demonstrated Defense was inherently flawed.  defense and resistance have accreating returns; getting some -- even what seems like a lot -- of one you don't have much of isn't worth getting what seems like a little of one you already have a great deal of.  +2% resistance at 88% (mitigating 1/6th of incoming damage) is more valuable than 4% defense (mitigating ~1/11th of incoming damage)  from zero.

[arcanaville]

As to Mathematics, Arcana worked out on Live that Defense was just slightly over 2x better than equivallent Resistance.

 

So if you had a choice between +2% Defense and +4% Resist, you were better off with the additional Defense (up to Soft-Cap of course).

 

neither of those things is true.  Arcanaville demonstrated Defense was inherently flawed.  defense and resistance have accreating returns; getting some -- even what seems like a lot -- of one you don't have much of isn't worth getting what seems like a little of one you already have a great deal of.  +2% resistance at 88% (mitigating 1/6th of incoming damage) is more valuable than 4% defense (mitigating ~1/11th of incoming damage)  from zero.

 

The situation was a bit complicated because the question of how valuable defense and resistance were had both mathematical and situational complexities to the question.

 

Let's start with the simple question and work outward from there.  What's more valuable, defense or resistance?  Well, obviously values matter.  80% resistance is very likely to be more valuable than 8% defense.  So how do we compare apples to apples?

 

We can consider the simplified case of damage mitigation.  Resistance is easy (or easier): 50% resistance means you take half the damage that you would have taken if you didn't have the resistance.  Is there a value for defense that generates the same result?  Well, no.  First of all, resistance is constant while defense is statistical.  If someone shoots you with an attack that deals 100 damage per hit and they hit you ten times, that's 1000 damage.  If you had 50% resistance, then that would be 500 damage.  Period the end.  With defense, there's statistics clouding things a bit.  If a minion attacks you twenty times and you have no defense, *on average* they will hit you ten times.  If those attacks deal 100 damage per hit, you'll get hit with 1000 damage.  On Average.  If you had 25% defense, then On Average you'd have been hit five times instead of ten, and you'd get 500 damage.  On Average.  In practice, you'll see different results at different times.

 

But if we consider the long term average, then 25% defense equals 50% resistance, right?  Well, that depends.  When the thing attacking you is a minion with base 50% tohit, then yes, on average, 25% defense will mitigate the same amount of damage that 50% resistance would.  But then we have to consider not everything has base 50% tohit.  Incarnates don't.  Any critter that possesses tohit buffing powers don't.  If you're crazy enough to fight +6 or higher, the combat modifiers start adding tohit increases again.

 

Still, most of the time most things attacking you outside of Incarnates (and a few other interdimensional thingies) have base 50% tohit, so in those situations 25% defense equals 50% resistance.  Except there's one more thing about averages to consider.  If you're hit over and over again with 50 damage attacks, you could pop heal inspirations if you get too low on health.  But if you're occasionally hit with 100 damage attacks that's a little harder, because the damage is more bursty.  Consider 40% defense and 80% resistance.  There's a big difference between getting hit over and over with 200 point damage attacks and every so often getting hit with a 1000 point damage hit.  In the long run it averages out.  But you have to live long enough for it to average out.

 

So X resistance mitigates the same amount of damage as 2X defense, but resistance is more smooth, which seems like resistance is better.  But defense has an advantage that has nothing to do with damage.  When an attack lands, you take damage and you also get hit by any secondary effects in the attack.  Resistance reduces the damage.  It generally doesn't help with any of the non-damage effects.  Defense, on the other hand, works by making attacks miss entirely.  So when defense "works" the entire attack fails: the damage misses, and all the secondary effects also miss.  So the difference between 40% and 80% damage resistance is that 80% resistance reduces damage by 80% while 40% reduces *everything* by 80% - damage, debuffs, everything - because those things simply don't land 80% of the time (relative to not having defense).

 

But, just to try to shorten the story a bit, then you have to consider the effects of defense debuffs, tohit buffs, and the situational difference between the two: team defense buffs are more common than team resistance buffs, so if you have defense you likely have a lot of what everyone else on the team will get, whereas if you have resistance you may end up with both high res and high def in a team.  Ditto inspirations.

 

Short answer: there's an X defense = 2X resistance rule of thumb that helps with the very high level damage mitigation mathy comparison.  But in the real game, you always need to evaluate the specifics of the situation to know whether X defense or Y resistance is going to be more helpful in practice.  The article of mine linked above refers to a specific set of situations, prior to the game making changes which altered those situations somewhat (very specifically, adding Elusivity, which was an idea of mine but it wasn't incorporated in the way I described using it).

[jack_nomind]

No, it wasn't.  And it doesn't exist in any form in PvE.  Fighting +6 is bad because of the +tohit -- but it doesn't take anywhere near that to see >50% ehp loss vs defense-heavy sets due to accuracy increases.

[Heraclea]

So X resistance mitigates the same amount of damage as 2X defense, but resistance is more smooth, which seems like resistance is better.  But defense has an advantage that has nothing to do with damage.  When an attack lands, you take damage and you also get hit by any secondary effects in the attack.  Resistance reduces the damage.  It generally doesn't help with any of the non-damage effects.  Defense, on the other hand, works by making attacks miss entirely.  So when defense "works" the entire attack fails: the damage misses, and all the secondary effects also miss.  So the difference between 40% and 80% damage resistance is that 80% resistance reduces damage by 80% while 40% reduces *everything* by 80% - damage, debuffs, everything - because those things simply don't land 80% of the time (relative to not having defense).

 

This factor became more and more important, and is especially crucial in late added content.  The only way to stay in the game is not to get hit.   

[Hyperstrike]

So X resistance mitigates the same amount of damage as 2X defense, but resistance is more smooth, which seems like resistance is better.  But defense has an advantage that has nothing to do with damage.  When an attack lands, you take damage and you also get hit by any secondary effects in the attack.  Resistance reduces the damage.  It generally doesn't help with any of the non-damage effects.  Defense, on the other hand, works by making attacks miss entirely.  So when defense "works" the entire attack fails: the damage misses, and all the secondary effects also miss.  So the difference between 40% and 80% damage resistance is that 80% resistance reduces damage by 80% while 40% reduces *everything* by 80% - damage, debuffs, everything - because those things simply don't land 80% of the time (relative to not having defense).

 

This factor became more and more important, and is especially crucial in late added content.  The only way to stay in the game is not to get hit.   

 

Not quite.

 

One way to stay in the game is to not get hit.

The other way is to be tough enough to survive whatever you DO get hit by.

[Heraclea]

This factor became more and more important, and is especially crucial in late added content.  The only way to stay in the game is not to get hit.   

Not quite.

 

One way to stay in the game is to not get hit.

The other way is to be tough enough to survive whatever you DO get hit by.

 

If you don't have 100% immunity to -tohit, -regen, -recovery, etc., debuffs that diminish the effectiveness of heals, and mezz like Confuse that ought to be covered but isn't -- your ability to resist  the damage won't do you a lot of good.  This is the point Arcana was making, I think. 

[DSorrow]

If you don't have 100% immunity to -tohit, -regen, -recovery, etc., debuffs that diminish the effectiveness of heals, and mezz like Confuse that ought to be covered but isn't -- your ability to resist  the damage won't do you a lot of good.  This is the point Arcana was making, I think.

 

Agree with this. I have a TW/Elec brute who's hard capped against S/L/E/F/C damage and against any non-debuffing enemies that mostly deal those types, I can go AFK in the middle of a group and not die because they can't get a lucky burst to bring me down. On the flipside, heavily debuffing enemies can crush me simply by stacking stuff like -def and -regen: suddenly I'm taking double the damage (though still at a steady rate), but I'm not regenerating any.

 

I haven't yet played my Rad/SD extensively at 50 so it's yet early for me to say whether maxed Def or Res is "better", but so far I can say that both have their merits. However, given a chance to cap one stat and have a significant amount of the other, I'd definitely take soft capped def + significant resistance rather than the other way around.

[marcussmythe]

If you don't have 100% immunity to -tohit, -regen, -recovery, etc., debuffs that diminish the effectiveness of heals, and mezz like Confuse that ought to be covered but isn't -- your ability to resist  the damage won't do you a lot of good.  This is the point Arcana was making, I think.

 

Agree with this. I have a TW/Elec brute who's hard capped against S/L/E/F/C damage and against any non-debuffing enemies that mostly deal those types, I can go AFK in the middle of a group and not die because they can't get a lucky burst to bring me down. On the flipside, heavily debuffing enemies can crush me simply by stacking stuff like -def and -regen: suddenly I'm taking double the damage (though still at a steady rate), but I'm not regenerating any.

 

I haven't yet played my Rad/SD extensively at 50 so it's yet early for me to say whether maxed Def or Res is "better", but so far I can say that both have their merits. However, given a chance to cap one stat and have a significant amount of the other, I'd definitely take soft capped def + significant resistance rather than the other way around.

 

Just to chime in:

Both is good.  If I can only have one, I err towards DEF, because at 50, damage never killed a tank.

 

Hyperbole perhaps.  Im sure I've been floored once or twice by the -damage- in a Psi or Nrg damage attack, and the debuffs didnt matter. 

 

But in every case I can recall where one of my lvl 50 melee characters went down, my DEF and RES had been gutted to somewhere between 0 and -100 before I dropped - and I cant imagine I would have dropped if I still had them.  I'm confused, I'm blind, I'm terrorized, I've got so much -RCHG that my T1 attack is solid black and my self-heals are a distant memory.  Sure, I'm not -held-, but I may as well be.

 

I remember grinding fights, HPs slowly dropping, trying to finish off foes before they finish off me, staying in to keep the aggro off the team - all that good stuff at lower levels, or with older villain groups, but modern lvl 50 gameplay is rocket tag.

 

Perhaps with the rise of IOs and Incarnates it can be nothing else - my Melees are essentially unkillable by anything short of debuff stacks (Okay, and Nosferatu.  Screw that guy) - but its had an interesting side effect.  My scrappers survive things my brutes and tanks cannot, simply because the scrapper kills everything before it can be killed via massive damage output - while the brute or tank has to weather the storm, and the increased resistances and HPs do not make up for the increased time under fire. 

 

 

[arcanaville]

So X resistance mitigates the same amount of damage as 2X defense, but resistance is more smooth, which seems like resistance is better.  But defense has an advantage that has nothing to do with damage.  When an attack lands, you take damage and you also get hit by any secondary effects in the attack.  Resistance reduces the damage.  It generally doesn't help with any of the non-damage effects.  Defense, on the other hand, works by making attacks miss entirely.  So when defense "works" the entire attack fails: the damage misses, and all the secondary effects also miss.  So the difference between 40% and 80% damage resistance is that 80% resistance reduces damage by 80% while 40% reduces *everything* by 80% - damage, debuffs, everything - because those things simply don't land 80% of the time (relative to not having defense).

 

This factor became more and more important, and is especially crucial in late added content.  The only way to stay in the game is not to get hit.   

 

Not quite.

 

One way to stay in the game is to not get hit.

The other way is to be tough enough to survive whatever you DO get hit by.

 

This is true, but in the end game the devs started stacking up a lot of debuffs, because they really couldn't keep adding damage since everything would start to one shot all the non-tanks.  But those debuffs would quickly stack up if they all landed, and even debuffs you don't normally consider in most damage mitigation discussions start to become important.  -Recharge, for example, could very quickly kill anything that relied on clicks for defensive purposes.  -End would eliminate your toggles.  And Slow would basically anchor you in place giving you no options for escaping the situation (short of teleporting away).  In fact, slow plus -regen could kill an invuln just as much as spike damage, because if you can't run away and you stop healing, all the resistance in the world can't save you.  It can only prolong the inevitable.  This made non-damage resistances increasingly important for any non-defense heavy mitigation combos.  Defense implicitly mitigated debuffs, but you could also have very high resistances to debuffing on top of damage resistance, at least situationally.

 

Really, no damage mitigation could keep you alive indefinitely against a significant number of genuinely strong attackers in CoH, because offense was pretty high in CoH.  So the most important damage mitigation was strong offense: you had to kill them before they could stack up and kill you.  And that's part of what made -recharge such a nasty debuff.  It hurt the clicky-defense people, but it turned off everyone's offense.  And once everyone in the team is no longer clicky healing or buffing or attacking, life gets very difficult very quickly.

[arcanaville]

No, it wasn't.  And it doesn't exist in any form in PvE.  Fighting +6 is bad because of the +tohit -- but it doesn't take anywhere near that to see >50% ehp loss vs defense-heavy sets due to accuracy increases.

 

I'm not sure what this is a reply to, because I'm not sure what "it" this refers to.  The I7 combat mechanics changes altered the "purple patch" combat modifiers so that from +1 to +5 critters gained accuracy bonuses instead of tohit bonuses.  This made their overall increase in accuracy hit defense sets and resistances sets more or less equally.  In terms of averages, the "2 to 1" rule of thumb for damage mitigation worked from +1 through +5 for that reason.  To a first order approximation (factoring out all the complexity I referred to above) accuracy bonuses are not a problem for defense, or rather not more of a problem than they are for everyone else.  At least until you hit the ceiling.  Above +90% accuracy bonuses there was the quirky problem that defense set with zero defense would now hit the ceiling: you can't get hit any more often than 95% of the time by attacks that aren't autohit, so accuracy bonuses higher than +90% didn't do anything to players that had no defense.  Which means they could only continue to hurt players that did have at least some defense.

 

In terms of normal PvE critters with higher than 50% base to hit even without tohit buffs, my recollection is that Praetorian DE were the first sneaky bastards to get higher base tohit post Issue 7.

[kenlon]

I'm not sure what this is a reply to, because I'm not sure what "it" this refers to. 

 

They were talking about the Elusivity idea that you floated in your defense rework proposal.

[jack_nomind]

I'm not sure what this is a reply to, because I'm not sure what "it" this refers to.

 

Intended to directly follow the last sentence of the (your) immediately previous post,

 

The article of mine linked above refers to a specific set of situations, prior to the game making changes which altered those situations somewhat (very specifically, adding Elusivity, which was an idea of mine but it wasn't incorporated in the way I described using it).

 

The I7 combat mechanics changes altered the "purple patch" combat modifiers so that from +1 to +5 critters gained accuracy bonuses instead of tohit bonuses.  This made their overall increase in accuracy hit defense sets and resistances sets more or less equally.  In terms of averages, the "2 to 1" rule of thumb for damage mitigation worked from +1 through +5 for that reason.  To a first order approximation (factoring out all the complexity I referred to above) accuracy bonuses are not a problem for defense, or rather not more of a problem than they are for everyone else.  At least until you hit the ceiling.  Above +90% accuracy bonuses there was the quirky problem that defense set with zero defense would now hit the ceiling: you can't get hit any more often than 95% of the time by attacks that aren't autohit, so accuracy bonuses higher than +90% didn't do anything to players that had no defense.  Which means they could only continue to hurt players that did have at least some defense.

 

Specifically, a +3 AV has a net 1.95x Accuracy modifier.  Against a zero Defense, full Resist kit, this translates into a ~90% increase in incoming damage; against a full (whatever that means for this enemy) Defense, zero Resist kit, it translates into a ~95% increase in damage.  As you say, so far, so boring.

 

But there are two other concerns.  You also mention tohit bonuses, and their uncommonness.  What's much more common both among AVs and their associated groups, though, are defense debuffs.  Our Resist tanker has very quickly hit their minimum avoidance against the accuracy buff -- but the Defense tanker has a great deal more to lose.  This is compounded by few sets (really only SR) achieving DDR equivalent to Resist tankers' innate RDR, and I find resistance debuffs to often be less common and lower in magnitude than defense debuffs.

 

The second concern is somewhat lesser and works against the first, but still not in favor of the Defense tanker.  It's relatively easy for a Resist tanker to achieve 30% or more Defense and a commensurate 25x effective hit point total, falling to ~13x ehp against our +3 AV's improved accuracy.  Most Defense sets also include a significant S/L resist component -- but for Ice Armor or against energy or exotic damage, Defense sets struggle to build the same relative Resist values and often end up in the 40% ballpark.  From a starting place of only about 17x EHP, they fall to ~8x against accuracy-improved enemies.  The relative difference is still similar but in application that five lifetimes' worth of HP is very significant, particularly when it knocks the tank into single-digit ehp multipliers; and further, even, when it's the already spike-vulnerable Defense tanker who has to deal with the thinner buffer.

[rehmus]

once you get into Alpha incarnates, you can take cardiac that boosts your resists by 20% across the board.  if you're close to the cap with IO bonuses you should have no problem hitting the cap.

[arcanaville]

I'm not sure what this is a reply to, because I'm not sure what "it" this refers to.

 

Intended to directly follow the last sentence of the (your) immediately previous post,

 

The article of mine linked above refers to a specific set of situations, prior to the game making changes which altered those situations somewhat (very specifically, adding Elusivity, which was an idea of mine but it wasn't incorporated in the way I described using it).

 

Ah.  The problem I did not anticipate properly when I proposed Elusivity is that it isn't a blanket balancing solution.  It is/was a tool, and one that had to be used carefully and surgically, no different than any other power or ability in a defensive set had to be balanced within its own situational context (i.e. the other powers in the set).  However, it wasn't used in that way for various reasons, most notably that the mathematics involved in using it were time consuming for the devs to work with.

[jack_nomind]

Ah.  The problem I did not anticipate properly when I proposed Elusivity is that it isn't a blanket balancing solution.  It is/was a tool, and one that had to be used carefully and surgically, no different than any other power or ability in a defensive set had to be balanced within its own situational context (i.e. the other powers in the set).  However, it wasn't used in that way for various reasons, most notably that the mathematics involved in using it were time consuming for the devs to work with.

 

Well... I don't know what you meant when you proposed it, but what I took you to mean is that the hit formula ought to look very roughly something like one of these things:

 

[*]Equivalent to Defense vs Accuracy, such as (Acc - Elu) * (TH - Def)

[*]A regressive or reductive element, roughly (Acc^(bonus) + 100)/(Elu + 100) * (TH - Def)

[*]Literal anti-accuracy, (Acc) * (TH - Def) / Elu

 

(with some substantial variations possible, for example, 1. could be done as something like 1 + acc/100 - elu/100; or 2 could compound/decay accuracy rather than dividing it.)  I don't understand why the developers chose 3 for PvP elusivity but I imagine something in the family of 2 would be much easier to balance for PvE, particularly if Elusivity is difficult to come by.

[Super Homer]

Ah.  The problem I did not anticipate properly when I proposed Elusivity is that it isn't a blanket balancing solution.  It is/was a tool, and one that had to be used carefully and surgically, no different than any other power or ability in a defensive set had to be balanced within its own situational context (i.e. the other powers in the set).  However, it wasn't used in that way for various reasons, most notably that the mathematics involved in using it were time consuming for the devs to work with.

 

I have a question for you:

 

What if today elusivity/anti-accuracy was implemented as you described in that 11 year old post? If I understand correctly, all sources of personal defense from armors (defense sets) and epic pools (Scorpion shield?) would become anti-accuracy and defender buffs, pool powers, set bonuses, those all would remain defense.

 

Would you still say your statement holds? That it would hurt no one? Given how many builds these days are designed around tons of +def, it sounds to me that these builds would be perceived as being nerfed, as they no longer would floor x or y defense type. *I* personally think it would be awesome, but do you think it would be worth convincing anyone of this today? Be it the HC team or the player base that will be annoyed at no longer flooring smash/lethal/melee on this or that build?

[Heraclea]

Really, no damage mitigation could keep you alive indefinitely against a significant number of genuinely strong attackers in CoH, because offense was pretty high in CoH.  So the most important damage mitigation was strong offense: you had to kill them before they could stack up and kill you.  And that's part of what made -recharge such a nasty debuff.  It hurt the clicky-defense people, but it turned off everyone's offense.  And once everyone in the team is no longer clicky healing or buffing or attacking, life gets very difficult very quickly.

 

I hate this because it erodes the social angle of the game.  Teammates, and the additional mobs they spawn by being there, become liabilities, because sheer numbers of these mobs becomes a rapidly escalating problem.  Especially so if your role on a team is to attract as many of the incoming attacks onto yourself and away from the rest of the team. 

 

Seriously: go fight something else.  Don't play bad content.