Trying to understand Defence - please help!

[masterxenn]

 I am trying to make a farm/itrial front line shield brute. I was informed that 45% def is the "soft cap" for def based toons, and i have managed to get my melee, ranged, and AOE def to 50% or better (with no one in range for phalanx fighting) and still cant manage to be real successful. I have done the math with the formulas I got off of paragon wiki, and they fall into the streak breaker catagory of 0- < .2 allowing critters to miss 100 times out of 101 attacks. can anyone tell me what im doing wrong? (besides not being a resist based toon)

[eabrace]

1) Soft cap for Incarnate content is different from the soft cap for normal content.  I don't recall the exact number, but it's higher.  I want to say it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 60%, but I don't have that number in front of me at the moment.

2) I've never been a big farm advocate, so I don't know the exact mechanics you're dealing with, but are you fighting enemies at roughly the same level or higher levels than your own?  I believe the soft cap numbers are based on fighting even-level enemies since enemies that con higher have an easier time hitting you in general.

[masterxenn]

yea, im not much of a Farm fan eather, I am doing it  as a favor to my sg mate's. *sigh*. but yes you are correct I am fighting +3's, the equasions that I worked out were taking into account the +3 bounus. (I used the Boss modifier). do i just need to cap out my resist?

[eabrace]

do i just need to cap out my resist?

Well, it certainly couldn't hurt to add as much resistance as you can squeeze in.  Of course, any regen you can muster from set bonuses and the like would be beneficial, too.

[GuyPerfect]

The 45% "soft cap" applies to same-level enemies because 1) enemies have a 50% base ToHit, 2) hit chances have an absolute floor of 5% (hence the 45%) and 3) same-level combat does not make use of any special modifications known as the purple patch.

Against Incarnate enemies, we're looking at enemies that upset the balance by 1) having ToHit bonuses and Defense debuffs and 3) being higher level than player characters. I believe some enemy attacks have greater than 1.0X Accuracy as well. When all of this compounds on top of your head, you'll find yourself getting hit a lot despite having traditionally soft-capped Defense.

For Incarnate content, the rule of thumb is closer to 60% Defense to whatever you're defending against. And as always, due to that 1/20 guaranteed rate of failure, you'll not have totally reliable protection coming from Defense buffs.

[Codewalker]

The Defense softcap for Incarnate content is 58.75%.

So long as you're fighting enemies within 5 levels of yourself, the softcap remains the same. Critters between 0 and 5 levels above you gain accuracy bonuses from the purple patch, so although they do have a better chance of hitting you, it's not something that more Defense will help with.

Of course against enemies with to-hit buffs like Tactics, the more def you have, the better.