defense for a dark armor?

I have played around a bit in Mids, trying to find ways to add at least reasonable levels of defense to my DB/DA and it's proving to be difficult to get more than 20 - 25% positional defenses. so started looking at going for typed defense instead.

how effective is that compared to positional defense?

should I focus on smashing / lethal? while a higher percentage of attacks contain some element of s/l, are there some nasty attacks out there that don't and need to be protected against?

what would secondary focus be? was thinking energy / neg energy would be the next likely hard hitters to try to defend against.

or is it better to stick with positional defense? in which case, I would focus mainly on melee and aoe (for use against some of the nasty point blank aoe on some bosses and above).

and yes, I know that with an unlimited budget it would be possible to get up to soft cap but looking at a bank account in the 50 - 70 million range. I also am not interested in getting close to the cap at the expense of gutting powers to use as IO mules or taking 4 travel powers just to slot Zephyrs.

I will focus primarily on the strengths of the set - resists and a nice heal, but relying just on resists and heals isn't cutting it at higher levels with the difficulty slider moved up. and I won't reopen the discussion about the lack of + resistance IOs vs. availablitity of + defense ones :-)

given the current state of IOs, adding some defense seems to be the best way to improve my survivability. but would certainly be interested in other options if anyone would like to share their experiences.

If you can pull off good numbers with typed defense, that's a perfectly viable alternative. Yes, smashing/lethal first, energy/negative seconds, fire/cold third. Here's a breakdown of incoming damage I got from someone who made a careful study of the subject:

69.68%  Smashing/Lethal
16.45%  Energy/Negative
  7.23%  Fire/Cold
  4.60%  Toxic
  2.04%  Psionic

Is there anyway you can post up your build so we can give you a helping hand?

Is that "over the lifetime of a 1-50 character"? Or "in the 40-50 game?" Or what? I'm curious because it seemed for a long time that the Dev's answer to "make it harder" was "put in more exotic damage and dirty tricks" (see: sappers, Mother Mayhem, Master Illusionists, Arachnos everything.) and they finally started to try to rebalance things with, for instance, Cimerorra.

You should be able to softcap smashing/lethal, ranged, and AoE.

Werner has a Katana/DA that is softcapped, and I have a BS/DA that is softcapped. It should be theoretically possible to softcap smashing and lethal, and get ranged and AoE to at least 40% (that last 5% or so is tricky anyway)

The overwhelming majority of melee attacks have a smashing or lethal component to them. The only ones I can think of offhand that don't are: Scorch, Incinerate, and Mind Probe.

I'm sure there are more that don't, but those were the only ones that came to mind.

The question I ask is a slightly different one: How much do you need?

I come from a background of playing a lot of force fielders, and there are times that more Defense, or more layers of protection, are simply not needed.

If you get to only 25% to all, you've just doubled your survivability. In emergency cases, whatever those might be, you can take a single small purple and double your survivability AGAIN.

I don't know if you're gunning for Ruladek the Strong (or whatever), but if you're playing relatively normal content and losing by a little bit, making yourself twice as hard to kill should solve the problem.

Consider a softcapped SR scrapper with Tough and Health. They've got about 15x the survivability of a no-defense no-resist character, and recover their health in 133 seconds.

With 25% Defense, roughly 50% average Resistance, and decent slotting on Dark Regeneration, you have 4x the survivability of a n-d-n-r character and recover your health in about 15 seconds. Survivability goes up proportionately if you're stunning lots of minions.

4 slotting Reactive Armor in resistance toggles with 4 slotting kinetic combat in melee attacks can help get you 10-15% s/l defense. Taking tough/weave/combat jumping and slotting the steadfast +def IO gets you 15% def to all, so you'd be at ~30% s/l and then you could slot 2 sets of BoZ in CJ and SJ for 6.26% more r/aoe (21.26% total). Next you can slot 2 or 3 pbaoe powers with sirocco's dervish for 3.13% aoe def each (another 6.26-9.39%) and your aoe def will be up around 30-33%.

On top of this you have cloak of darkness which will push you up to around 35-38% s/l/aoe def.

I typically find that to be sufficient on teams because you also have the weaken combo and sweep combo to limit damage as well as oppressive gloom and cloak of fear. Using weaken+CoF will add around 10% -tohit which essentially will push you up to the 40-45% "effective" defense range for s/l/aoe. (*effective in that the -tohit will be resisted by higher rank/con foes).