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City of Heroes => Builds => Topic started by: brothermutant on September 27, 2015, 08:39:00 PM
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As the title suggests, which is better to get on a toon, highest possible Health or Highest possible Resist for a specific damage type? What I mean is this, if slotting allows a 3% increase in resistances OR a 3% increase in overall Health, is the Health a better choice because regen is based off of your Max health? If you know and respond, please feel free to cite an example (with numbers and math even would be great).
Reason I am asking is, I once thought +Health would be the way to go as it is more damage that can be taken from ANY attack, but lately I am not so sure. Is there a happy balance? Obviously, many things play a part overall: Regen/Defenses/Resistance/Health. But I am curious what others thought/found.
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I don't have the math but I generally would go the hp route all other things being equal. The resist bonuses were crappy enough that they were planning to buff them in i24 to make building for resistance through IOs somewhat viable. If i were trying to get extra resist in the i23 world I'd probably do it with enhancement boosters rather than set bonuses. Had a buddy who did that to get his stone brute the last 3% to the cap and he saw a definite increase in survivability.
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Yes, a static regen rate provides more hp per second if your hp is higher, so in that way it's better. I believe, though my memory is a little foggy, that resistance also resists resist debuffs (say that 5 times fast), meaning that, against an enemy that hits you with -resist, having higher resist might be better than hp. Someone will correct me if that's wrong, I'm sure.
Otherwise, there are a couple of other factors to consider. With certain archetypes, accolades and the random +hp you would get from other set focuses would get you near their cap anyway, so building for it was not necessarily helpful. You should also consider how often you would expect to be hit with +hp vs +res when teaming, so you are less likely to waste that outside buff. That said I usually just went for +hp in that situation for the extra regen.
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I think only Masterminds would truly benefit from damage resist over hp. Supremacy + defensive mode divided the resisted damage between MM and pets. So if a boss hit you for 600 smashing damage and you're capped at 75% S/L resist, equals to 150 damage divided by 6 = 25 damage to you and each pet.
I24 would have helped a lot with damage resist. IO set bonuses with mez resist (immobilize, hold, sleep etc) were going to be combine with types of damage resist. A lot of players who slotted several Mako/Touch of Death/Obliteration/Scirocco's IO sets to softcap their defense would get quite a bit of S/L/E/N damage resistances as well:
(https://images.weserv.nl/?url=i58.tinypic.com%2Fsc9bv6.jpg)
Image taken from here: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Enhancement_Sets#Resist_Damage
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That's nice that they were going to up the mez resist and made it general instead of untyped. Also nice that things like 2 slots of titanium or impervium would give a bit of extra resist on the way to slotting for hp or defense. The numbers still stink as far as any real ability to build for resistance though. I had thought they were supposed to up the %s of the resistance bonuses more but I guess this was the compromise point. Seems like it would've been more some bonus resistance on the way to slotting for the things we normally slotted for, but who doesn't like a bonus.
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As the title suggests, which is better to get on a toon, highest possible Health or Highest possible Resist for a specific damage type? What I mean is this, if slotting allows a 3% increase in resistances OR a 3% increase in overall Health, is the Health a better choice because regen is based off of your Max health? If you know and respond, please feel free to cite an example (with numbers and math even would be great).
Reason I am asking is, I once thought +Health would be the way to go as it is more damage that can be taken from ANY attack, but lately I am not so sure. Is there a happy balance? Obviously, many things play a part overall: Regen/Defenses/Resistance/Health. But I am curious what others thought/found.
+HP is useful across the board, since heals and natural uptick are done as PERCENTAGES of the HP (higher total means that the same % is a higher amount of points recovered). Not only that, but it applies regardless of what you're being hit with. Regen is also better to slot than resistance (usually) for the same reasons.
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Keep in mind that with each point of HP you get, the next one becomes less impactful on your effective HP due to diminishing returns. The opposite is true for resistance.
So for example, if you have no existing hit point modifiers and add a 1.5% hit point buff that's +1.5% bonus to your effective HP. If you have a +30% existing hit point bonus (20% from accolades and 10% from IO's) then a +1.5% bonus becomes a +1.15% bonus to EHP. And with resists, the opposite is true. Say you have a 1% resistance bonus, with no base resists it's just 1% extra EHP while with 50% base resists it's 2% extra EHP.
That said we rarely get that choice when building a character, since defense is so much more superior than resistance and comes in bigger numbers.
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+HP is useful across the board, since heals and natural uptick are done as PERCENTAGES of the HP (higher total means that the same % is a higher amount of points recovered). Not only that, but it applies regardless of what you're being hit with. Regen is also better to slot than resistance (usually) for the same reasons.
Regeneration is based off of current maximum health meaning +MaxHealth increases regeneration in total points. But heals are based off of original base health: buffing +MaxHealth does not increase heals in total points per heal. The old Dull Pain guides did the math and the testing to confirm this. Slotted Dull Pain did something like 78% heal but visually it looked closer to 50% heal because that was 78% of the base health bar, not the boosted one. If you have 1000 points of health and apply a 50% heal, that would be 500 heal. If you boosted your health to 1200 points, that same heal would heal for the same 500 points, or visually something closer to 40%.
The reason for this is because actually heals didn't heal percentages at all: they actually healed based on a table calculation similar to how attacks dealt damage. Those tables were calculated per archetype to make heals come out to nice percentages (most of the time) but they did not change when players buffed MaxHealth, so there was no way for a MaxHealth buff to make heals scale up.
The question "all things being equal what's better, +MaxHealth or +Res" is a tricky question because the premise - all things being equal - is never, ever true in CoH. It can't even easily be engineered to be true on paper in an academic question, because of the question of what does it mean to be "all things being equal." All we can really do is compare incremental benefit, which means given a specific set of circumstances, we can ask whether +X MaxHealth buff is better, equal, or worse than +Y Res. Outside of those specific circumstances, any comparison is likely to be conditional. Sometimes this is better, sometimes that is better.
Because players sometimes thought about things in terms of points, and sometimes in terms of percentages, and game effects sometimes conveniently worked in ways that appeared to be simple in points and sometimes in percentages comparing effects can be difficult. To "normalize" the comparisons, I came up with a system for directly comparing a specific amount of resistance and a specific amount of +MaxHealth by converting the +MaxHealth buff into an effective resistance. Basically, it works like this (warning: math inbound). Take your total MaxHealth buff. Say its +40%. Calculate this number: 1 - (1/ (1+buff) )). In other words, if the buff is +40%, then first you calculate 1/(1+0.4) = 1/1.4 = 0.714. That's actually the apparent damage admittance: damage will appear to be hitting only 71.4% as hard. Then you calculate 1- that value, which is 0.286. That's the effective resistance: the amount of reduction in the damage.
So +40% max health "looks like" +28.6% resistance. Note that you can't add or subtract these numbers: you cannot "stack" any true resistance on that apparent resistance value: that requires more complicated math. Now, there's one big catch to this. In this comparison system, you have to assume that your effective resistance value - in this case 28.6% - is not only your resistance to damage but also your resistance to heals. In this system, all of your self-heals will heal for 28.6% less. This is due to the fact that heals do not scale. They heal for the same amount with or without +MaxHealth, but in this new system where we are making +MaxHealth look like +Res, heals are stronger for +Res for mathematical reasons.
In a perfect idealized world without debuffs and the like, +40% Max Health looks exactly like +28.6% resistance in all respects except it will seem like the maxhealth character is getting exactly 28.6% less benefit from heals. However, the max health character has that effective damage mitigation against all forms of damage, even unresistable damage. If I took all Real Numbers and combat spam away, and the only thing you could see was your health bar, outside of heals, if the only thing that happened was something attacked you with damage of the resisted type, you couldn't tell these two situations apart.
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Thanks all for the info and responses.
The way I am looking at it is this:
If I had say 1000 HP base, what would be better, +4% Resistance to an attack (flaw here is that you rarely get resistance to ALL attacks, and unresistable damage would be where +HP would definitely shine) OR +4% to Base HP (adding 40 HPs basically). On my paper, both would allow me to survive a 1000 points of damage (either all at once or many hits adding up to 1000 damage) leaving me with 40 HP. HOWEVER, only the +resist would allow me to survive another 40 points of incoming damage (40x0.96=38.4 points of damage taken, means I have 1.6 HP left), whereas the extra HP did nothing to make me survive the next 40 point attack (unless it made me heal FASTER).
So what I am saying is, does +HP increase Health recovered by Self Regeneration, and How long till a health tick is regened by my toon?
Obviously, you NEVER get universal resistance to all (except that one PvP IO I think). BUT, what is the way you guys focus on your toons when playing? Do you try to Hard Cap your Health if at all possible? It makes a huge difference to me because many Epic PPs have +Res to 2 to 4 types of damage, but only one or two have a +HP power (usually Ice, sometimes Earth powers). And I want a toon that will survive after all. If that means I got Ice or Earth powers, I will build toons where the theme makes sense. E.g. I made a "Tanker Mage" toon that had Illusion, Storm, and EARTH powers because...he was a Mage, he can do whatever he wants. I am not saying I would ignore things like Tough or +Res choices on IO sets for bonuses, but I would say the following is how I like to survive things:
Extra Defenses and/or To Hit Debuffs > Extra Health> Extra Regen and/or self heals> Extra Resistances and/or damage debuffs. Is this the wrong way to think about this?
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So what I am saying is, does +HP increase Health recovered by Self Regeneration and How long till a health tick is regened by my toon?
Since regen is percentage based then max HP increases health gained per tick.
As for the exact tick percentages and their frequency, according to the wiki it's 5% max HP every 12 seconds with regen bonuses increasing the rate of ticks. So if you have a 400% regen rate (+300%) you get 5% of your max HP back every 3 seconds. If your HP is at 3000 as well then that's 150 HP (3000*0.05) regenerated every 3 seconds (12/4).
Back to resists, the significant resistance bonuses from IO's are so few and far-between that it'd be easier to just list the ones you might want to actively try to get:
1. PVP +3% Res IO (unique).
2. Impervium Armor +3% psionic Res IO (not unique, but rule of 5. Wouldn't use this on a main build, but perhaps on an alternate build for psi-heavy content).
3. Aegis +3% psionic and status resistance IO (unique).
4. Scirocco's Dervish +3.13% negative energy resistance set bonuses (3-slot bonus).
5. Might of the Tanker ATO set 2.21%/2.52% S/L resistance bonus (6-slot bonus)
When choosing the build to place these in, go with ones that already have some levels of resistance but not quite enough. For example, Elec Armor Brutes have low levels of negative energy resistance so one or two of those Scirocco's Dervish bonuses really help out.
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If I had say 1000 HP base, what would be better, +4% Resistance to an attack (flaw here is that you rarely get resistance to ALL attacks, and unresistable damage would be where +HP would definitely shine) OR +4% to Base HP (adding 40 HPs basically).
Arcana gave out a detailed math analysis. I'll try to put it in description with less math...
The same value of +Resist as +HP (say, 4% to each) would allow you to survive more damage if you put it as Resist. In addition, it's easier to heal someone who has lower HPs but is resistant to damage, than to heal someone who takes full damage but has high HPs. So, in a base scenario, +Resist is better than +HPs. In addition, +Resist has a higher effect as you start stacking Resistance buffs (because what's really relevant is not Resistance, but "Admittance", how much damage is actually getting through the Resist, and that has the same increased effects as a mob's ToHit chance being dropped to the floor).
So you want % points of Resistance more than HPs, if you can. The catch is that the Devs knew that, and you see that powers that give +MaxHPs have much higher values than powers that give +Resist(All). So 4% Resist > 4% MaxHP, but that doesn't mean that chasing Resist is better than chasing +MaxHP... it's easier to get higher values of +MaxHP.
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Since regen is percentage based then max HP increases health gained per tick.
As for the exact tick percentages and their frequency, according to the wiki it's 5% max HP every 12 seconds with regen bonuses increasing the rate of ticks. So if you have a 400% regen rate (+300%) you get 5% of your max HP back every 3 seconds. If your HP is at 3000 as well then that's 150 HP (3000*0.05) regenerated every 3 seconds (12/4).
Back to resists, the significant resistance bonuses from IO's are so few and far-between that it'd be easier to just list the ones you might want to actively try to get:
1. PVP +3% Res IO (unique).
2. Impervium Armor +3% psionic Res IO (not unique, but rule of 5. Wouldn't use this on a main build, but perhaps on an alternate build for psi-heavy content).
3. Aegis +3% psionic and status resistance IO (unique).
4. Scirocco's Dervish +3.13% negative energy resistance set bonuses (3-slot bonus).
5. Might of the Tanker ATO set 2.21%/2.52% S/L resistance bonus (6-slot bonus)
When choosing the build to place these in, go with ones that already have some levels of resistance but not quite enough. For example, Elec Armor Brutes have low levels of negative energy resistance so one or two of those Scirocco's Dervish bonuses really help out.
Thanx Aur. Problem I have is, if I have like 50% S/L Res, and say 30% Energy Res, should I really put effort into getting any Res for Neg/Fire/Cold/etc on a squishy? Reason I ask is I would imagine, with lowish defenses (circa 30+%), I would think universal +HP would be the way to go as some, if not many, attacks are gonna hit me. I certainly do make alt builds just for Psi protection for instance, but that is assuming I remember I can switch to the alt build while getting ready to fight Psi heavy attackers.
Problem with altitis is it makes it harder and harder to remember what you have on any given toon.
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So you want % points of Resistance more than HPs, if you can. The catch is that the Devs knew that, and you see that powers that give +MaxHPs have much higher values than powers that give +Resist(All). So 4% Resist > 4% MaxHP, but that doesn't mean that chasing Resist is better than chasing +MaxHP... it's easier to get higher values of +MaxHP.
Thanks sly, I kinda figured it was +Res ideally but that +HP was easier to acquire. Hmm, may need to see how close I can get my squishies to (near) max HP on an alt build and run some numbers on how much that gimped my toon by forcing the +HP thing. Will do the same for +Resists I think to have something to compare to along with a "normal" build where I primarily focus on what my toon needs (Damage/+Recharge/High Defenses/etc.).
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On a squishy there's no way you're going to get enough resist from set bonuses to matter significantly. Try to raise your 'lowish defense' instead.
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Thanx Aur. Problem I have is, if I have like 50% S/L Res, and say 30% Energy Res, should I really put effort into getting any Res for Neg/Fire/Cold/etc on a squishy?
On ANY toon, squishy or otherwise, it'd be safe to ignore all resistance bonuses from IO's except for the 5 I listed above.
Not just because HP bonuses are better, but because defense, recharge, recovery, damage, regen and HP bonuses are better.
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Thanx Aur. Problem I have is, if I have like 50% S/L Res, and say 30% Energy Res, should I really put effort into getting any Res for Neg/Fire/Cold/etc on a squishy?
Short answer: probably not.
Slightly longer answer: it depends on how much effort. Which is to say, if I was building a squishy for survivability I would focus on defense first and regen second not because defense and regen are better than resistance and +HP, but rather because those two are much easier to acquire in large numbers in the invention system. I think +HP is also good, but I usually assume I'm going to get some of that through accolades on any character I'm trying to min/max for mitigation. +HP and +regen synergize, which is to say it tends to be better to get some of each rather than all of one (+HP boosts regeneration for one). If I'm getting a lot of +HP in accolades I can get away with focusing on +regen in the build more. Squishies also tend to have low max health caps and its possible to run into those and have capped benefits if you have other +HP buffs in play, such as hoarfrost.
Defense tends to be the best thing to go for in the general case for two simple reasons. First, defense has accelerating benefit which means (up to the tohit floor) the more you have the more benefit you get from getting even more. And second, there's lots of opportunities to get it. And since it is very difficult for squishies to fully reach the tohit floor for all attacks, you usually don't run out of ways to improve your defense.
I wouldn't sneeze at other benefits, but I wouldn't over-thrash my build to get them. I'd consider, in an I24 world, looking at some of the resistance bonuses in things like melee sets where I might not be sacrificing much, particularly in builds that were not loaded with purples and ATIOs. But I'd consider them nice to have bonuses, not something to build for explicitly.
However, here's a really, really, really big caveat. Don't overlook the fact that one way to improve survivability *a lot* in an indirect but very powerful way is to build for at least moderate if not high recharge. Recharge has no direct mitigation benefit but recharge is the tide that lifts all boats. It improves the strength of aid self. It tends to increase DPS which indirectly reduces incoming damage. It increases firing speed itself which tends to increase the amount of secondary effects like mez and debuff you are cranking out. Half the damage mitigation in my main came from things like defense and regen, but the other half came from having really fast cycling Energy attacks that just spewed out knockback in ridiculous amounts. That plus enough recovery to power those attacks meant most things not knock-resistant were not standing up long enough to generate enough damage to threaten my moderate damage mitigation.
Also, if the squishy in question is an I24 blaster, recharge would tend to improve any blaster whose I24 mitigation bonus was a click. My main, at over 160% global recharge, was going to get *a lot* of mileage out of Energize. Lots of squishies, like most defender/controller/corruptors with self heals, Kins, Rads, most Controllers and Dominators (particularly those going for perma-dom), and lots of others, would gain sizeable survivability benefits from having high global recharge.
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yeah I really wish I had Energize on my old Blapper. He really could have used it. And I agree that low HP caps for squishies make it easier to come close to cap if you get things like earths embrace or Hoarfrost (both epic sets that have these have a +Defense toggle too, which I would also grab). It is just one of those min/max things I always worry about: do I have enough Health? Did I get enough Def and/or Resist? How do I survive if I don't have Mez Resistances (one of the reasons I really like certain Defender Primaries/Troller secondaries is if they have some kind of Mez Protection). Otherwise, I get Combat Jumping + Super Jump + Acro as a minimum protection set (a "waste" of 3 power choices IMO).
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How do I survive if I don't have Mez Resistances
Carry break frees.
No seriously, making builds that can survive without inspirations is an interesting exercise, but in practice ignoring your inspiration tray is like ignoring your secondary. There's even an entire school of build-craft that says if you can't get to 45% defense as a squishy, then build for 32.5% so that a small luck (12.5% defense) will get you to 45% (minus some padding to account for debuffs). In the days of Defiance 1.0 I used to pack oranges on my blapper - because even though oranges were weaker than purples (lucks), the oranges allowed my blaster to get to lower health and still survive which was in effect a free damage buff due to defiance scaling upward with low health. People used to talk about the best tactics to complete the STF when the best tactic period was for your tank to pack a tray full of purples and everyone else just go to town. Repeat as necessary, guaranteed to work for all teams (in a pinch, teams without tanks could have anyone be a tank with enough insps).
My regens pack purples, my invulns pack greens, my blasters pack rainbow sherbet. With inspiration combining, you're rarely without the thing you need. I tended to build for the majority case and let insps handle the corner cases, because if your build only needs them occasionally you'll likely never run out (as opposed to needing them all the time, in which case eventually you probably will). You won't likely find another MMO that allows you to carry twenty unrestricted stackable thermonuclear strength temporary buffs. Builds should serve playstyle and everyone plays differently, but most of us at least occasionally use insps. If the mitigation hole is deep enough to worry about but also uncommon enough to not want to waste too much time trying to negate with special builds, fill it with insps and continue building for the rest of the day, is my philosophy.
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There's that, plus clarion, plus in most cases ranged defense is your best mez protection.
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I suppose the Insps is what I always try NOT to use, I should be popping those things like skittles. And like you said earlier, recharge helps a ton. And its the one thing that Insps can't do. I should remember that when building a toon. Thanks all for the help.
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I'm risking necro posting here, but it's Halloween so I figure it's ok.
The one point that is not being addressed in this thread is that you will have damage mitigation factors that affect what might work best on your character. You will get a better idea of what is better for that character if you review them.
For instance if you have a Ice dom/troller you will have access to artic air and shiver (amongst other things). This allows your character to survive a lot more easily in a lengthy fight but that your Achilles Heal will be the alpha strike. Those two powers will negate over 100% recharge and add in lots of other soft control goodies like slow, afraid and confuses.
For me this means that I would build first to make sure of the alpha strike, probably defense. From there I would have to consider the secondary and even the Ancilary choices I wanted.
IF I'm taking Stone mastery epic (troller) and have access to Earths Embrace, then adding HP makes little sense (I can cap HP when I want), I'm adding res.
If I'm taking Nature Affinity secondary (troller), I have amply access to Hots and regens and even some decent resists. I would work +HP.
If I'm taking a Earth Assault secondary (dom), I have access to lots of knockdowns and some stuns. Adding HP sounds good because you can add kin combats to all your kdown powers. This lets you have huge amounts of rech and would let me get the self heal usable very often.
ETC, ETC.
This doesn't directly explain your question, but I always think about things like this when making a determination as to what will work best for my builds.
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I'm risking necro posting here, but it's Halloween so I figure it's ok.
The one point that is not being addressed in this thread is that you will have damage mitigation factors that affect what might work best on your character. You will get a better idea of what is better for that character if you review them.
Strategically, good advice in general. However, when specifically comparing +HP and +Res, this is less important because except for the factors discussed in this thread both of those have qualitatively the same kind of benefit: higher effective health, higher effective alpha strike resilience.
Also:
If I'm taking Nature Affinity secondary (troller), I have amply access to Hots and regens and even some decent resists. I would work +HP.
Actually, I think this is not good advice. Assuming we're talking about a level of +Res and +HP that are comparable in strength "on neutral ground" then anything that actually *has* resistances would benefit from stacking: I would tend to pick +Res over +HP on anything that actually has resistances. The HoT and regeneration don't swing the recommendation the other way because as previously discussed, regeneration is "neutral" between +Res and +HP and heals are actually *stronger* with +Res over +HP. Furthermore NA had absorb. If memory serves, resistances affected incoming damage before it interacted with absorption: in other words resistance "protected" absorption, effectively amplifying it. +HP did not synergize with absorption in the same way (or any way).
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Strategically, good advice in general. However, when specifically comparing +HP and +Res, this is less important because except for the factors discussed in this thread both of those have qualitatively the same kind of benefit: higher effective health, higher effective alpha strike resilience.
Also:
Actually, I think this is not good advice. Assuming we're talking about a level of +Res and +HP that are comparable in strength "on neutral ground" then anything that actually *has* resistances would benefit from stacking: I would tend to pick +Res over +HP on anything that actually has resistances. The HoT and regeneration don't swing the recommendation the other way because as previously discussed, regeneration is "neutral" between +Res and +HP and heals are actually *stronger* with +Res over +HP. Furthermore NA had absorb. If memory serves, resistances affected incoming damage before it interacted with absorption: in other words resistance "protected" absorption, effectively amplifying it. +HP did not synergize with absorption in the same way (or any way).
As usual, you are bringing in information I was unaware of. That definitely calls into question my ordering of importance HP/Res for Nat affinity.
In this case, resistances affect incoming damage before absorption is something I didn't know. I always assumed it was absorption that was eaten before any other consideration outside of whether or not you were hit. This is the case in many other games and it just creates a much less valuable, apart from all your personal defenses, shell of fast eaten HP.
So since -tohit, Defense and resistances will all be counted before absorb, there does come one additional question. Since Wild Bastion is on such a long recharge (240 seconds), how long does the absorption bubble last? Does it go beyond the 10.25 duration listed in mids? The question comes since the healing portion of WB last for that duration.
If that's the case, then adding res becomes way more important than adding HP. If not, then res still probably wins, but not by nearly as much since you still want to make sure you are not hit by enough to kill you and +HP has a universal flair since it has no damage type consideration.
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As usual, you are bringing in information I was unaware of. That definitely calls into question my ordering of importance HP/Res for Nat affinity.
In this case, resistances affect incoming damage before absorption is something I didn't know. I always assumed it was absorption that was eaten before any other consideration outside of whether or not you were hit. This is the case in many other games and it just creates a much less valuable, apart from all your personal defenses, shell of fast eaten HP.
So since -tohit, Defense and resistances will all be counted before absorb, there does come one additional question. Since Wild Bastion is on such a long recharge (240 seconds), how long does the absorption bubble last? Does it go beyond the 10.25 duration listed in mids? The question comes since the healing portion of WB last for that duration.
If that's the case, then adding res becomes way more important than adding HP. If not, then res still probably wins, but not by nearly as much since you still want to make sure you are not hit by enough to kill you and +HP has a universal flair since it has no damage type consideration.
Keep in mind we can't just jump onto test to confirm anything anymore, so I'm going from memory and my interpretation of the power definition. If my memory of absorb mechanics is correct, the correct way to read Wild Bastion's City of Data definition is that every player had an absorb bar, analogous to their health bar, but the max of that bar was normally zero. So when we say a player had "1000 health" what we really mean is that their max health was 1000, and of course during combat their actual health could be lower than that. Important to remember that in a sense, damage and heals were "permanent" in that normally they did not expire. If you were hit with 100 points of damage, that damage was permanent in that it could be healed, but that damage subtracted from your health and that was that. Similarly heals were also "permanent" - they had no duration, they just added to your health bar and that was that.
Absorb was like that as well: you had an absorb bar, and damage to that bar was "permanent" and "heals" to that bar were also permanent. So what Wild Bastion did was two things. First, it buffed your absorb bar maximum to a level that was computed to be 25% of your health bar. If you had 1000 points of max health, you'd now have a 250 point absorb bar *maximum*. At this point, how much absorb do you have? Zero. All that effect did was give you a 250 point absorb bar. Now, on top of that, Wild Bastion *also* gave you a "25% absorb heal" which in effect filled your absorb bar. So now you have a 250 point max absorb bar, and that bar contained 250 points of absorb. How long does it last? Well, the points last forever, or until you take damage. But the max absorb buff lasts only 60 seconds. When *that* expires, your absorb bar drops back down to zero max, and of course any points inside the bar disappear.
Think of it like Dull Pain. When you use Dull Pain, two things happen. First, DP buffs your max health by 40%. And then it also provides a 40% heal. So if you have a 1000 point health bar, then first that gets increased to 1400 - but your health is still 1000 points, so it actually looks like your health bar is only 71% full. Then you receive a 400 point heal, and that fills your health bar up to 1400, and your health bar looks full again. Those were two separate effects, and when you used DP you could actually see both effects visually affect your health bar. When DP expires, even if you have all 1400 points of health, when your health bar drops back down to 1000, you lose any points above that. Most absorb effects acted like DP: they granted you both an increased Absorb bar (typically increasing from zero) and some actual Absorb points to fill it. The points didn't expire, but the bar itself did.
Now, am I 100% certain that resistances affected incoming damage before hitting absorb? After all this time, no. I'm 95% certain. I'm 100% certain that if they did not, they would soon enough because in City of Heroes that kind of discrepancy between defense and resistance (defense obviously always protects absorb points due to the way CoH tohit mechanics work) tended to get nullified sooner or later. I'm pretty sure if I detected that difference in testing, I would have wrote it up and I don't recall doing that.
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If you are right, then the absorb mechanic in CoH worked considerably different than I expected. It would have been one of the more powerful segments to the Nat Affinity build and provided quite a large advantage.
Too bad I never played around with it when I was spending lots of time with my Naff/DP defender.
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If you are right, then the absorb mechanic in CoH worked considerably different than I expected. It would have been one of the more powerful segments to the Nat Affinity build and provided quite a large advantage.
Too bad I never played around with it when I was spending lots of time with my Naff/DP defender.
The "forum consensus" on absorb was that its numbers were too weak to be interesting, particularly for blaster toggles (some blasters got absorb as part of their I24 damage mitigation revamp). As usual, forum consensus when it came to novel game mechanics was its usual spectacularly wrong self.
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The "forum consensus" on absorb was that its numbers were too weak to be interesting, particularly for blaster toggles (some blasters got absorb as part of their I24 damage mitigation revamp). As usual, forum consensus when it came to novel game mechanics was its usual spectacularly wrong self.
Completely agree. The forumites liked to do the shark feeding frenzy dance. One "leaders" opinion and a thousand posted regurgitations. But fotm would hit everything eventually and then the set/mechanic/usw would have it's day.
My personal misunderstanding of the mechanic was due to rarely using the power because I simply didn't need it while using my Naff/DP defender (which I fell in love with). Reasonably high resistance numbers combined with hots and tons of -dam left me with a pretty sturdy character.
Wish I'd finished him. Still high on my list of projects if/when.