I can understand from a balancing standpoint you don't want the 1 ship tanking 50 ships because its godly and whatnot but its countering most of your ability descriptions, aux power to structural 2 can easilly hit 76%, stack it with brace for impact for 55% and throw in a polarize hull or hazard systems for another 15ish and you get a whopping 51%, and thats if you use 3 engineering consoles for resists....


so many abilities increase your resists by this % and that % but those %'s are almost irrelevant as you will easilly hit the 'soft cap" of 45% and anything passed that barely gets you over 50, maybe 51%. so many abilities can hit that cap by themselves its pointless to even put what %'s they increase since it's irrelevant.


whats everyone elses thoughts on % resists and shields/armor and soft caps? both now and with the changes coming on tribble?

The resistances work a little differently than you expect. Rather than blocking/absorbing X% of the incoming damage, instead they act as if you have X% more health while taking that form of damage.

What this means, is that if you achieved 100% resistance, you'd take 50% damage, not 0%. With 200% resistance (if you could get that), you'd take only 33% damage. Basically, the damage you sustain can be calculated by this formula:

DamageTaken = DamageReceived * ( 100 / (Resistance+100) )

So while it looks like the resistance has diminishing returns, in actuality it always adds that X% in terms of how long you can survive against that damage type.

ok so 10000 * (100 / (51 + 100)) = 6662.516556

and 10000/6662.516556 = 50.0934357% damage taken, meaning 49.1ish% absorbed...so really its a big complex formula for getting roughly the same exact number as mitigating actual damage? I think what you were getting at and what the confusion is, is that the % shown on the ships defense screen is actually POST that formula and not PRE like most mmo's do(or used to do if it has suddenly changed in the last year).

If what is displayed is pre then that formula doesn't make sense because it already caps at 50% despite what you do, post makes more sense in how they get that number.

Which basically just sumes up my post the same question? why the cap around 50%? especially when it only takes 1 or 2 abilities or a couple pieces of equipment to get there? your not really trading off much to get that resistance defense on your hull and not have roughly the same offensive abilities you had before, seems like if you wanted to max your ship out for defense you should have a defensive advantage over someone who focused on offense an there really isn't much there because of how easy it is to hit such a low cap?

I don't think you quite understood the formula the 'resistance' part is the tooltip bonuses not what your ship readout says, you seem to have used the final value that the ship readout says. ie this is the formula to arrive at what the readout says given your tooltip stats.

If you had 4 consoles that add +30% resist each, the number you'd plug into that equation is 120, which would result in a 55% (roughly) absorption. It's not capped at 50% as such, I think it's just hard to get over that.

But yes, the paperdoll/readout screen shows the post-calculation number, not the tooltip values that went into it. Ideally I think they should show both, but then, people might be even more confused.