Guide to Defensive Passive Abilities in Champions Online (Part 3)

This guide to defensive mitigation passives has two other parts. Make sure you do not miss them:

Guide to Defensive Passive Abilities in Champions Online (Part 1)

and

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

This defensive passive was very popular in open beta, but a few nerfs really hurt its popularity. Many of its early proponents respected or retconned out of it as soon as a free retcon was made available.

This is basically a standard ablative damage shield. The personal force field (PFF) is a fixed amount of hit points that attacks must bust through before you can be harmed. A portion (the majority) of all damage is absorbed by the shield until it runs out of health. The amount of health the PFF has is determined by your ENDURANCE stat. The speed with this the PFF regenerates health is determined by your EGO stat.

There are two major problems with PFF currently:

1. There is no way to tell how much health is left on your shield. Devs have said they plan to eventually add some kind of health bar UI element in the future.
2. The regeneration speed of the PFF is extremely slow - even with EGO super stated and raised to a high level.

STATS FOR SCALING: Endurance and Ego.

Advantages of Note: Expel Impurity enables the PFF to remove bleed and burn DoT attacks, but few if any people take this. Most just rank it up to 3 for maximum protection.

Defiance is an interesting passive in that it starts off weak (no resistance) but builds to very high values. As you are attacked (every 5, 4, or 3 seconds depending on rank), you gain stacks of Defiant! (up to a maximum of 8 stacks). The more stacks you have, the more damage resistance you have. Whenever you gain an additional Defiant! buff, it refreshes all existing ones as well. The amount of resistance gained from each Defiant! buff scales with your CONSTITUTION stat.

There are a number of powers that synergize with this one. Defensive Combo can add up to one stack of Defiant! simply by attacking with it (originally, the number of stacks from Defensive Combo was unlimited). Enrage converts all stacks of Defiant! into stacks of Enraged!, which can provide for a pretty significant damage buff.

This passive is good for long battles against powerful villains (especially cosmic and legendary rank). But the alpha strike could be brutal since you start off with no damage resistance.

STATS FOR SCALING: Constitution

Advantages of Note: Force of Will adds knockback and stun resistance as your health gets lower. This is interesting, since status protection powers are so rare in CO. But adding this resistance only when your health gets low is probably too late. The truth is, the only effective status protection is the block ability right now. That is the unfortunate truth of the matter.

The different defensive passives have their own strengths and weaknesses, and depending on your character's role the best passive will vary. While not absolute, this is a bit of a guideline:

Tanking - Invulnerability and Defiance.

DPS or Light Tank - Regeneration, Invulnerability, PFF

Support - PFF, Invulnerability, Regeneration

Soloing - Regeneration, Invulnerability, PFF

Your own experiences may be totally different, and I invite you to share your comments in this article.