Guide to Defensive Passive Abilities in Champions Online (Part 2)

Make sure you have read Part 1 of the Defensive Passive Guide before moving onto this part.

This is a pretty standard tank style resistance ability. With invulnerability slotted, it will reduced all incoming damage by a small fixed amount, and then also by a percentage. The fixed damage reduction amount scales with your STRENGTH stat, and the overall percentage damage resistance scales with your CONSTITUTION.

While this might seem overly complex, the net effect of this is that when you raise STR and CON high, weak henchmen attacks can be virtually nullified. Since each attack is not very damaging, the fixed damage reduction almost completely mitigates it. Then the percentage mitigation kicks in for the rest, or for large villain attacks.

This is one of the most common and attractive passives for tanks, as dulling the rate of incoming damage is important for giving your healers time to repair your wounds.

STATS FOR SCALING: Strength and Constitution.

Advantages of Note: None. Just raise it to rank 3 and enjoy.

This power exists in all of the different martial arts frameworks - dual blades, single blade, fighting claws, and martial arts. This passive raises both your dodge chance and avoidance percentage. Dodging in Champions Online is a little more complex than in some MMOs like World of Warcraft. Dodging an attack is not total mitigation in CO. When you dodge an attack, the percent of damage mitigation is equal to your avoidance. As a result, you need high dodge AND high avoidance if you wish to go this route for staying alive.

As an added bonus, Lightning Reflexes significantly reduces the damage taken from bleed and damage over time effects. This is nice but not enormously powerful. There may be some end game bosses, however, for which that would be invaluable.

This tends to be a streaky defensive passive, since a few bad rolls in a row (no dodges) could spell death. There are a number of abilities and items in the game that raise dodge chance or avoidance amount. If you stack a few of these you can really take them to astronomical levels. The developers have started to put caps on various stats in the game, so this might become less possible in the future. But that is what respecs and retcons are for (if you can afford them).

STATS FOR SCALING: Dexterity.

Advantages of Note: None. Just raise it to rank 3 for full effect.

This section of the guide covers 2 of of the main 5 defensive passives. Make sure you read the rest of the guide to learn about the rest. Save comments for the final article to keep them all together. We welcome your input and feedback on how the passives have performed in your gameplay.