I almost never see this topic come up, so I assume that many people are just kinda free wheeling it with their defense and not actually looking at how much defense they need, and not calculating when it is efficient to use defensive weapons over heal.

I thought I would share a quick example of how I evaluate weapons as I come up on T7 looking ahead at BQ Opponents.

First for reference: Dr. Beatdown Level: 283 Health: 1202 / 1202 Strength: 865 Defense: 470 Speed: 471 Intelligence: 1129

Tier 6 currently

Damage Per Icon: 5.88 Defense per icon: 5.42

Opponents I'm potentially interested in beating in upcoming BQs: Surge The Gatkeeper Mornrise Serpent Cursed Effigy Tormented Sanddragon Sagitarrius

Next step is look for the icon that they use EVERY single turn.

Surge - Water EVERY turn, Decent amount of physical and Dark sporadically. Gatekeeper and Mornrise also have some very common icons that can be covered with MSOB or CWS, but i'm going to stick to Surge for the rest of the example.

Next I look at my weapons, which for Tier 7 will be RIWoD + Shinwas Quill

RIWoD 24 Icons 3x Water, Fire, Ice, Magma (16 each potential for up to 64 damage blocked) 10% Heal (120 HP)

Shinwas Quill Attack: 7-10 Physical, 12-15 Light (19-25 icons) Defense: 8-10 Dark (43-52 Potential Damage Blocked) Other: Heals 10% (120 HP) 3 Mod slots

Defense Eye of Royalty 6 Icons (32 damage blocked) 25 Icon blessing (135 Damage blocked ~30% uptime)

Since Surge does water Every turn I'm going to consider Pirate Cutlass as a potential opponent specific upgrade for Surge.

Pirate Cutlass 10-15 Water icons 10-12 Physical Icons 60 Water Defense 3 Mod slots NO HEALING

If I leave it unmodded 60 icons will give me a potential for 325 Damage blocked, which far outpaces the 120HP heal on RIWOD.

Now the question we need to ask is: How much water does Surge deal out on a given turn. Sugrge has a DPI of 11.55. It's scroll will always do 7, and its worst weapon will do a minimum of 11, and its best will do 26 giving us a range of 29-59 water icons per turn, or 335 to 681 water damage per turn. So currently I will saturate a pirate cutlass even without mods.

A Defensively Modded Pirate Cutlass will block up to 72 icons or 390 Damage.

That 681 water damage is a pretty unlikely scenario in reality, it would require him to roll 1:11 odds on 2 weapons while using his 2 strongest weapons. A more realistic max damage he would potentially woll would be 41 or 473 Damage.

The question becomes - if I am having trouble surviving against the challenger, whas is the best way to move foreward in training. To ever get it to the point where RIWOD would be better than pirate cutlass, I would need to get my HP up above 3250, which is currently a long way to go, and does not seem to be efficient. If I increase my defense to 600 though (130 points) now my Pirate Cutlass is going to block up to 440 water damage, which is still saturated, but using 130 stats, I increase my damage mitigation per turn by 115.

However, If I keep going with that and increase to 750, my Pirate cutlass with be blocking 492 damage, which is going to be higher than the theoretically likely high damage of 470, so i'm going to start to waste mitigation.

With this analysis in mind, my future training plans are probably going to be to hit 600 Defense, and then go back to only training HP and STR for the the rest of the Tier. the other defensive weapons that I would potentially use in the tier are even more powerful and more likely to saturate (MSOB/CWS)

If people found this interesting, i'll post a Divine Denizen example next.

I have a ton a charts derived from when I was first started thinking about final stats for Verdugo. I did it off of specific opponents - baen, meatslab, mutant scientist, prodigy and the impossible hydra. I matched up defended icons for each (based on what weapons/scrolls I was using for each opponent), expected opponent damage (based on what weapons they had and again what weapons I had), and worst case opponent damage. High level results offered nothing new - health scales linearly and defense scales on a stunted square root graph with very little gain after 7000 - 7500 defense. Against each one of the opponents, it was always better to forego defense for health. Based on my weapons and scrolls, I was blocking a lot of 2 icons but my opponent was always breaking through my defenses. If however, I used different weapons and scrolls that allowed me a wider range of coverage, say a ton of cobalts or a ton of the void scrolls, then having higher defense would be to my advantage.

I haven't done it to the opponent extremes, like when you are 50+ battles deep, so that might be interesting to see.