Hopeling

Whaddya mean? You just scrambled the letters around!

Slightly less snarkily: No it can't, not since the HO fix. Unless you count Ageless Radial, I guess.

What does it already mean? It's mitigating 4.5%, but 4.5% of what? What does that tell me? 4.5% isn't very much; does that mean 90% resistance isn't much better than no resistance? And then it's 5.85% against a boss, and 8.19% against a +4 boss, and 45% against the same +0 minion if I had no defense, and so on, so is it variable and unreliable? Any of these numbers is useless (because you have to know everything else about the situation to put the number in context), and also misleading (because it doesn't directly tell you what the resistance is doing).

The problem is that looking at it this way doesn't give you usable information. We figure out what the power does by looking at what the power does: 90% resistance prevents 90% of the damage you would take. It makes you ten times tougher. You don't need to know anything else about how much defense you have, or the rank or level of the enemy attacking you or what attack they're using. Going from zero resistance to 90% resistance makes you ten times tougher, period, the end. What if I also add enough defense on top of that to prevent half of the damage I would have taken? Then I'm twice as tough as ten times as tough as I was before. That's twenty times as tough. I don't really care that half of the incoming attacks were missing already - those attacks were missing anyway without my powers, so I can't attribute them as being mitigated by my powers. Nor do I care that bosses were already missing 35% of the time instead of half the time - my resistance still prevents 9/10 of their damage and my defense still prevents half of their hits and I still take 1/20 of the damage I would have taken with no defense and no resistance.
This part, btw, is because mitigation cares only about the damage prevented. Mitigation measures the difference. The hit chance formula, expressed simply and uncluttered by all the clamp() and whatever that isn't relevant here, is:
Accuracy*(Tohit - Defense)
And we can distribute that through:
Accuracy*Tohit - Accuracy*Defense
How many attacks were hitting with zero defense? That's the same formula again, just with 0 plugged in for defense:
Accuracy*(Tohit - 0) = Accuracy*Tohit

So what is being mitigated by the defense - what is the difference between the chance to be hit, with and without defense? That's just subtraction:
[Accuracy*Tohit] - [Accuracy*Tohit - Accuracy*Defense]
Distribute through: Accuracy*Tohit - Accuracy*Tohit + Accuracy*Defense
The first two terms subtract to zero: 0 + Accuracy*Defense
And then we're left with just the Accuracy*Defense term.

Yep, agreed. Raising security issues as a problem is valid, and the proper response is to try to think of ways to address them for this specific idea, or an alternate form of the idea that is more secure (a point card would be one method, since you could just tell the code to your intended recipient, although it wouldn't let you gift your monthly stipend and would be somewhat less convenient than having the whole process inside the game), not just poo-poo you as a worrywart and trust in the magic elves that figure out such things.

Sometimes such criticisms come across a little bit like ye olde predictions that the human body cannot withstand the air resistance from a vehicle traveling at breakneck speeds in excess of 30mph, but that's just a matter of presentation

It isn't. That's why I stopped using it as an example once the thread became less silly than it was on the first page:

No, that is almost completely opposite of what I've actually said:
I meant only what I said: looking at Fulcrum Shift in the absence of other damage buffs does not give a good picture of what it does. And what it actually does in practice, and more appropriately what Kinetics as a whole does, isn't out of line with other support sets, IMX.

Fulcrum Shift is good, but not so good that it passes up -res at zero stacks, as post #74 claimed.

Brutes yes, but Tankers have Conserve Power. They had Conserve Power since long before they got Electric Armor (and it was proliferated at the same time Conserve Power was replaced with Energize).

Stalker Weapon Mastery has Physical Perfection, not Superior Conditioning.

So you'll buy a new game AND purchase from the Paragon Market? Why would NCSoft want to prevent this? But, apparently I was wrong about Nature. Still, I strongly expect we'll see something new in at least one of the next three weeks.

I don't recall any specific promises of "something new every week", for what it's worth. We've certainly gotten new things more often and in greater quantity than we used to, the occasional dry week(s) notwithstanding.

I prefer the first method, personally, but I'm not sure it's better in any meaningful way.
If I ever get there, I'll tell you.

ftfy

Many of the most amazing steamroller teams I've ever experienced had nobody with Kinetics. Some of the most painful and ineffective teams I've been on had at least one Kinetics character. Fulcrum Shift can be awesome, of course, but in general use (even under good conditions) it's not incredibly superior to a good -res power. 9 out of 14 archetypes don't even have a high enough damage cap to get full benefit from a saturated Fulcrum Shift.

Also, holy cow Talesin, multi-quote or no (it's the little square button on the bottom right of each post, with a " and a +), you don't need to compose an individual rebuttal to every post in the thread.

*bow*

Thank you for the explanation, and also for helping to make my hilariously extravagant practices sustainable.