I7 will have some sort of magical fix for SR and Ice Tanks that lets Defense scale appropriately against higher level mobs. Yay.
I don’t actually have anyone that fits that at the moment, mind you, but …
Actually, it goes further than that, affecting all Defensive powers (inspirations, buffs), and ToHit Debuffs. Interesting.
Basically, Level advantage in PvE, Lts, Bosses, AV’s, and Monsters had To Hit bonuses. This made Defense not scale properly. We changed them so that instead of To Hit bonuses, they have Accuracy bonuses. What that means is, Defense is applied before their bonus, rather than after. Since Accuracy is a multiplier, it is multiplying a small base value than before.
For instance, an AV had a base To Hit of 75%. If a player had 25% Defense, the AV would have had a 50% chance to hit. Under the new system, the AV’s has a base 50% chance to hit. The Defense is applied, reducing his To Hit to 25%. The Accuracy is then applied, giving a final To Hit of 37.5% — a 12.5% improvement over the old system.
And, interestingly, it seems some powers are actually, behind the scenes, pets. E.g., Caltrops or Blizzards. New tech will let the devs pass on buffs that are on the caster to those kind of powers, too, if it seems appropriate (e.g., doing a Build-Up and having it affect the damage of Blizzard). More info here.
And server transfer is still coming … slowly …
It occurs to me (annoyingly after the fact) that this also impacts (favorably) bubblers, insofar as their Def buffs now have more meaning against nastier bad guys (huzzah for P-Siren).
Now, if they’d just increase the Def amounts to the old levels, I’d be really happy. 🙂
And, as a further clarification from Geko on the buffing thang:
Currently, due to limitation, target based powers, such as Rain of Fire, Blizzard or Rain or Arrows, cannot be buffed. So if you cast Build Up and then cast Blizzard, it would not do any more damage. This change will now allow such powers to be affected by buffs just like any other powers.
This change affects targeted based powers, but not targeted summoned entities or built devices or traps (you cannot pass build up and fortitude to your trip mine or fire imps). This change will, however, fix other powers that may seem unrelated, but were coded in similar ways. This includes powers such as Twilight Grasp and many Kinetic powers (typically, powers that affect one type of target one way, and another target in another way).
If you are confused, that’s ok. Lets just say “Rain of Fire, Ice Storm, Blizzard, Burn, Ignite and Rain or Arrows just got a whole lot better”.