Arcana,
If you have the time, would you elaborate on the -Dam to resist thing? That's something I've just about completely forgotten over the years and was having difficulty finding the info on.
For instance, if you were fighting an AV states and he had unstoppable going he would have a smash Damage resistance of 90%? If you could throw 100% -Dam on him, it would hit reduce his damage by 10%?
I'm sure I'm not correct, cuz that would be too simple a formula.
Short answer: if your debuff was resistable, yes.
Longer answer:
City of Heroes worked on a system of
attributes and
aspects. Attributes were things that could have some value, like your health (Hit Points) or your regeneration rate. Aspects were, well, aspects of those attributes. Take Hit Points. That Attribute had a value: your current total health. But it also had an aspect called Max. Max was your maximum health. So if your character had max health of 2000, but had taken damage and currently had 1000 health, then the value of Hit Points was 1000, but Max Hit Points was 2000. And hey, you could theoretically buff your max health, like with powers like Dull Pain, right? But only to some limit. That was MaxMax, the maximum amount you could buff your health to. We called it the Health Cap. City of Heroes called it the MaxMax of HitPoints.
That's attributes and aspects. What about damage; how did damage work? Well, on top of an attribute called HitPoints there were these special attributes called Smashing, Lethal, Fire, Cold, Energy, Negative_Energy, Toxic, Psionic. They also had a value, and that value was always identical to the current value of HitPoints (not exactly, but close enough for our purposes). Why did these exist? Well, when someone hit you for 10 points of smashing damage, what that power did was deduct 10 points from your Smashing attribute. Since that was linked to the value of HitPoints, it caused your health to drop by 10 points. Good so far.
One of the aspects that existed was called Res. Res was the amount that you Resisted changes to that Attribute. So if you had a Smashing Res of 50%, that means when someone tried to deduct 10 points from your Smashing value, they'd actually only deduct 5 points instead.
Another aspect was Str. Str was your Strength when it came to that Attribute. Suppose you have a power that does 10 points of Smashing damage according to its definition. If your Smashing Str was 2.0, then that power would actually do 20 points of damage, not 10. The Smashing Str(ength) would boost the effects of powers you used that affected the Smashing attribute on any target.
Now, here's where it gets a little funky. Suppose I am trying to debuff your Smashing Str - basically debuff your damage strength. I am using a power that is trying to lower the value of the Str aspect of your Smashing attribute. Its an attempt to modify the Smashing attribute, so your Smashing Res kicks in and tries to reduce that effect. So if I try to reduce your Smashing Str by -20%, your Smashing Res would reduce that also by half, reducing it to -10%.
See, the game doesn't care if you are trying to change my Smashing *Value* or my Smashing *Strength* or my Smashing *Resistance* or for that matter any other Aspect of Smashing. All it cares about is that you're trying to change some Aspect of my Smashing attribute, so it uses my Smashing Resistance to counter that.
The game sees "Smashing Strength" and "Smashing Resistance" as just different Aspects of the Smashing Attribute. *Players* see those two things as totally different things: one's damage and the other is resistance. We don't normally connect the two. But deep within the game, they are just two different "Smashing things."
And that's why Smashing resistance will resist Smashing Damage Debuffs. As long as those debuffs are actually resistable, and most debuffs designed to affect enemies are.
Note: most *self buffs* were flagged unresistable, and this is why. If they were not unresistable, you'd resist your own buffs. That's undesirable. They were also flagged "unaffected by strength buffs" and the reason was that obviously the game did not want someone using Build Up to suddenly boost their resistance toggles. If that flag wasn't set, that's what would happen, and occasionally the devs would forget to flag something correctly and these things actually *would* happen. And in one interesting instance, the devs did this on purpose and caused an interesting effect. Combat Training:Offensive for Widows buffed player Accuracy, and that buff was affected by strength buffs. That means since it buffed Accuracy Str, and it was affected by Accuracy Str
it actually buffed itself. The game did not spiral that buff infinitely; the engine had an intrinsic limit where that buff could buff itself, but that buffed value couldn't then buff itself again and again. But to correctly calculate what your accuracy buff would be, you needed to take this buffing-the-buff effect into account.