Power Surge

Haha...good answer.

A lot of powers/sets/IOs protect against things except Psionic. It's the intentionally built hole that is hard (impossible at times) to overcome.

It is just the way it is.

I know that...it's just that the set gives psi resistance, so I figured that power should also.

When the powers are ported around, they are rarely changed much (outside of AT modifiers). In the case of Power Surge (Surge of Power), it doesn't give psi resistance in any of its incarnations.

In the case of Elec Armor, only one power (not the set) gives psi resistance (Static Shield). That doesn't mean any or all others in the set should, simply because one power happens to do so. That premise is not conducive with how the powersets in the game tend to work. Toxic resistance tends to be similar in that it may appear in one power of a set, but not in any other power of the set.

It's very rare to get that level of psionic resistance at all, which was kinda the point we were making before. To have it in Power Surge, at the level Power Surge brings your resistances, would be very much off of what other sets can generate. Even with just Static Shield 3 slotted, you're at just under 42% Psionic Resistance, which is very nice for that attribute.

The set is Electric Armor...within that set is Static Shield, which gives psi resistance...therefore the SET gives psi resistance.

Since the set is mostly resistance I figured a tier 9 that further boosts resistances would boost them all.
I was just wondering why it leaves out Psi...that's all.

The set does in that the power is part of the set (from a logical standpoint), however, it is still an isolated power, which is what foils the premise.

That is different than say, a fire oriented powerset, which has multiple fire oriented powers throughout the set, rather than the aspect just in one power. That's the distinction being made there between the words 'set' and 'power' (from a thematical standpoint).

The set may be mostly resistance, but in this game, as we've said before, Psionics is very commonly excluded in resistance/defense, foiling that premise as well. In this game, if something boosts all resistances, it is far more common that it doesn't include psionics, and therefore you'd want to assume it didn't rather than it did.

Which is, in itself, a flawed premise, when you consider that there is only a single power that increases smashing/lethal resistance (Charged Armor) and a single power that increases fire/cold resistance (Conductive Shield). By the same logic presented there, the smash/lethal and fire/cold resistances shouldn't be included in the tier 9 because they only exist in a single power within the confines of the set.

As it is, having played with the power on my Elec/Stone Tanker, I'm not as enthralled with it as I was when I first got it. The power is only slightly more useful than Elude on an */SR simply because you're adding more resistance to an already resistance heavy set: most of the +res is redundant and the comparative improvement in survivability isn't nearly as impressive as you would hope. It would be a lot more useful as a +def power than as a +res power considering how singularly focused the set is otherwise.

If you're going to use the same flawed argument, I suppose that's right. From a purely logical argument, both cases are flawed (you're just arguing the converse with the same problems as the original argument), and frankly, I think that horse was already beaten. That line of argument isn't consistent with this game, anyhow (At this point, we've turned it into a discussion on logic and set theory, rather than game mechanics and design, and we've only done that to clarify what we're talking about with the idea of a 'set'. It still has no real purpose in the discussion or why Psionics isn't included in the power.).

I agree. In fact, I've seen several recently who skipped it. Obviously it would be better as +def, much in the same way any other tanker set improves when you can stack multiple mitigation sources, but on that token most sets are biased one way or the other. Redundancy is kinda the name of the game in many of our powersets. In too many respects, Elec Armor for tanks plays like an Invuln without Tough Hide and Invincibility, but added a pretty decent amount of Psionic protection to it.

I'd actually recommend that all non-IO Elec's skip it. Any IO'd build would benefit greatly from taking it, if only to use it for the ability to slot the hold purp (which is actually quite good for the power itself, since it's packing impressive +rech).

Having played it, I've found the psy protection to not be all that impressive, but, of course, the other melees I play a lot are */regen (lol damage type), */wp, and DA/*. Of all of them, the Elec/* definitely feels a lot squishier against psy than any of those other characters.

Of course, the one portion of Elec Armor's survivability you ignore is the end drain. While it's not going to make a major difference in a fight against a single hard target, I've found it helps enormously when fighting hoards of enemies, especially if you slot Lightning Field and Power Sink for End Mod. Of course, then you get into the issue of how effective end drain actually is, but it's still some degree of diversified survivability, giving Elec Armor the benefit of 3 different survivability mechanisms: damage recovery (+regen, self heal), resistance, and end drain. Then again, Invuln is packing a similar number (+hp/self heal, resistance, defense) and probably to better effect from a survivability standpoint, but I don't think any powerset quite compares to the sheer endurance assistance that Elec Armor provides (except maybe Energy Aura).

I haven't picked this power up yet but I do have an invul tank and scrapper with unstoppable (Not IOed so the def is still crap), a PB with light form (still no form of def), and a blaster with force of nature (close enough in comparasion). Why is power surge of little use when other res cap tier 9 powers on sets with simular situations are of good use? Before the crash of course.

When the tier 9 is activated, all of the sets you mentioned (except for the Blaster) attain their damage caps with all/most of the damage types (the damage types that aren't capped are generally rare enough that they would be functionally ignored by averaged resistance calculation). Without the tier 9, assuming SOs, Elec Armor has the most resists (41% s/l/f/c/p, 75% e, 35.1% n), Invuln is a close second (52.7% s/l, 23.4% f/c/n/e), and PBs are last (35.1% s/l/f/c/n/e). I'm ignoring Blasters simply because they are barely better than pre-Light Form PBs when Surge of Power is up.

Because Elec Armor starts at the the top (and because they're all presumably balanced, every other set attains the same survivability with the lower resistance through other means), it gets the least comparative benefit of all of the sets and therefore is the least survivable with the tier 9 active.

I wouldn't say that at all (depending, of course, on who the PB is teamed with). Blasters probably get the most use out of the power, simply because they dont have much for tools to achieve passive mitigation (same argument on why others don't get as much benefit from it).

If a Blaster has Surge of Power, he has access to Charged Armor. The two slotted combine for 75% s/l/e (Blaster cap), 55.5% for f/c/t, and 44.4% for negative. (Fire and Cold can be pushed to 66%+ fairly easily with IO slotting).

It is certainly worth having on an AT that doesn't have that kind of passive mitigation, doesn't require consistent passive mitigation, and combined with defensive IO slotting it can make a pretty big difference for the AT in certain situations.

I do agree that the more base resistance an AT has, the less it brings to the table.

I said that because I was excluding them from the comparison simply because they're going to be last no matter what because they just don't have nearly as much survivability anyway. The only one of the 4 mentioned individuals that gets more from the tier 9 equivalent than the Blaster is the PB because the PB goes from middling to capped and has a higher cap than any of the others. Of course, unlike the other 3 mentioned, the Blaster has to enhance the resistance of its tier 9 equivalent, which makes it a bit worse off.

The following is how I look at it.

Unstoppable moves your exotic resists from low-middle to cap. A big increase, and that resistance is stacked on top of Defense and +HP from DP.

Power Surge for tankers and Brutes will move them to 90% to all but Psi (Toxic might not be capped either). Not as big a move as Unstoppable for those classes, and it lacks other mitigation, but 90% resists is excellent mitigation on its own.

Power Surge for scrappers moves those resists to 75%. That is very good mitigation, but doesn't have anything else to layer with. If Energize recharged faster, you could say it slowed down damage enough for the Heal and +regen to keep you up, but even at very high levels of recharge, I am dubious that Power Surge is worth it. Perhaps if you could turn it off at will in order to better utilize the EMP Pulse at the end.

But that's not what I quoted. I quoted the comment on the disparity between a PB and a Blaster with Surge of Power up.

First off, you quoted my line concerning ignoring Blasters within the confines of the numbers I gave and my commentary was directly in reference to what I quoted of yours. I ignored the use of Blaster pseudo-god modes within the context of the others specifically because they start from such a comparatively low point and require different slotting (re: they actually get benefit from slotting their pseudo-god mode)

You're also assuming that the Blaster has fully enhanced the resistance of Surge of Power, something that none of the others has any need to do. The assumption is the same slotting across all entities, and there is no benefit to slotting +res in the tier 9 for the PB, Invuln, or Elec Armor so I operated under the assumption of the Blaster using identical slotting.

Bringing up the use of the painfully anemic Blaster god modes (12% base uptime 35% average res) in a discussion of real god modes (18% base uptime, ~50+% average res) is out of place anyway. Surge of Power and Force of Nature get nowhere near the level of effectiveness of a real tier 9, even when you stack up other potential sources of resistance, and, thanks to their lower numbers, require completely different slotting than real ones in order to be effective.