Let’s do some math to identify just how much trolls suck compared to camwhores. We’ll bumume a camwhore with defense 10, and a troll with defense 25, and that we’re attacking one of the lvl 6 forums because that’s where defense would help the most. (Note – this is theoretical – my troll is like level 5 or something currently)

The amout of damage you take per hit is:

camwhore: 24.67
troll:    20.83

The hit percentage I know less about, but let’s bumume the following:

camwhore: 75%   hit
troll:    52.5% hit

That makes the expected damage/round ignoring the free turn when you kill a thread:

camwhore: 18.5
troll:    10.9

The camwhores attacks are something like 3 times as strong, so she’s still going to take less damage overall and pay less to repair her stuff. Also, she’ll get more random **** the next day because of her charisma. She still come’s out ahead, but it doesn’t seem too bad. The defense is clearly helping the troll in some manner.

But here’s the kicker. Unless you’re doing a speedrun of some sort, you should probably be using pump me up whenever necessary as a camwhore. That means every 3rd turn you could be healing 35ish ego. Calculating for pump me up every 3rd round, the damage/round is the following:

camwhore: 10.25/non pump me up round
troll   : 10.9/round

So in addition to doing drastically more damage than the trolls and getting more stuff the next day, the camwhores can take less damage per attack than the trolls if they use pump me up (at the cost of more damage to the equipment, and more sexiness, but it’s really not that much).

I’m not sure that the douchbaggery saved by adding a couple more attacks with damages comparable to the existing troll attacks really does anything to shrink this gap.

——

As for fixing the trolls, I think simply having forums that do more damage might fix them by itself. With a defense of 25, you take 83% of the damage that you take with a defense of 10. When you’re taking 24 down to 22, it’s not a big deal. Going from 60 to 50 is. That’s not even counting the miss rate.

It would be nice if defense did some sort of flat damage reduction in addition to the percentage based reduction. We’re currently dealing with numbers too small for defense to be really worth it (ignoring things I don’t understand well such as hit %).