UberGuy

I'm not sure how many additional times or ways I can say this.

Because with more buffs you could do it faster.

Edit: More significantly, you've defined a case with a significant number of caveats. That your baseline is solo is very important. No bosses is too. You're repeating maps you've memorized, with obviously the same foes repeatedly. You've got an AoE-centric build, designed to mow minions fast. You've declared that what matters to you most is drop rate, and you want the Defender's benefit to double your solo speed in order to make it worth your time.

Those conditions are not the whole game. Adding a force-multiplying Defender to a team of 5 is a 20% decrease in per-teammate drop rate for easily a 25% increase in kill rate.

Here's a question for you. Do you think any one Defender doubled your speed before IOs? I will bet you it did not, unless maybe it was a Kinetics.

This alleged problem is not founded in the existence of IOs. Again, this is the part of your thesis I take exception to.

I think that you're putting far too much faith in a mathematical model dictating actual player choices. I think basically no one is basing team build choices on minimum performance optimality criteria like that. If they were, no one would ever invite a Tanker or a non-AoE Blaster to a team.

Yep.

There's a reason everyone is happy to buy level 50 ones, and why (back when you could farm for them), people farmed them at L50 and not, say, L28.

You can't get two purples from defeating any one mob.

Imagine for a minute that every mob you defeated dropped a recipe, 100% of the time. (Scary thought.) Every time you defeat a mob, you get a recipe.

You go in solo and defeat 100 mobs. You get 100 recipes.

Now you take in two characters. The split should be roughly 50/50, but however it works out, if you add up the two character's drops, they'll have 100 recipes. Same if you take in 3, 5, 8 characters. They'd end up with 100 drops spread among them.

It's still not a terrible thing to do for the inf bonus, and for all I know you get bonus tickets in the AE. (It seemed that way to me dual boxing it.) It just doesn't provide any direct benefit for recipe drops.

That's not how it works.

When you defeat a mob, there is a 1-in-X chance that it drops something. What X is depends on the mob's rank. X depends in no way on how many people are on the team. Mob is defeated, random check is made to see if it drops something from a given drop table.

If that 1-in-X chance does result in a drop, then* a check is made to see what was dropped. We're mostly all talking about Pool A recipes, which contains commons, uncommons, rares and purples**. Something is chosen randomly from the table.

Finally* a random determination is made to see which character on the team the drop is given to. If the recipient can't accept the drop because they are out of room, the drop is lost. (We were told that SO drops behaved in this way a very, very long time ago, and I'm assuming recipes and salvage work the same way.)

* I actually have no idea if it decides what to drop before it decides who to give it to, or the other way around. However, it doesn't matter in the end.

** Each mob can only generate one drop from each drop table it's eligible to drop from. There are drop tables for enhancements, inspirations, salvage, pool A and pool E recipes. Pool E has costume and (I think?) respec recipes in it. You can get both a pool A and pool E drop from the same mob. I actually don't know if the boss Pool C/D drops are considered part of Pool A or not.

Actually, Kheldians form attacks are quite special. They kind of act like changing archetypes. The form powers, found in the "Inherent" category, achieve this by referencing completely different ranged and melee damage tables than the human form attacks. The Nova blasts use the Ranged_SSDamage table and the Dwarf attacks use the Melee_SSDamage table. This is in contrast to the human form powers, which use the regular Ranged_Damage and Melee_Damage tables shared by the other ATs.

It's interesting to me that RedTomax's site shows the *SSDamage tables as having entries for the Arachnos epic ATs. I'm not aware of them actually referencing these tables, but haven't looked.

One other possible nit to pick: you also don't get 3x the inf or prestige per map. Reward per defeat per character on the team is divided by the team size and then given a bonus based on team size. For a team of three, the bonus is 1.5x. Each member of a 3-player team will earn 1.5/3 = 50% of the solo reward per kill. Obviously, taken as a whole, you earn 1.5x as much in total.

Definitely not disagreeing about whether you gain more. It's just not 3x as much.

(I'm actually under the impression Tickets also work out in a similar way, but I've never analyzed it myself, so am not sure.)

The two things highlighted in yellow say two separate things. With respect to the first one, look, we don't need a lot of things. When was the last time serious power gamers in this game needed a Tanker? Yet people still play them. Hell, they're fairly common on teams from people in our little power-gamer's channel. I am fully convinced that they will still be played even when we see Brutes in Paragon. Even among power gamers, there are plenty of people who play to take something and make it as good as it can be, not just always play the very best thing possible.

Buffs and debuffs are insanely more helpful to have on a team than a Tanker. They take something you can already do, and let you do it even faster. If you weren't already perfectly safe, they let you be even safer. Most of the players I hang with are addicted to speed in this game, and I don't just mean movement and attack rate. Whether they're mowing down mobs in missions, farming, or running TFs, they want to bump their DPS, their inf/hour, their drop rate, or their merits/hour. Buffs and debuffs bring all that. Nobody's IOs and inspiration rages are going to keep them at the speeds they can go by adding buffs and debuffs. If you're satisfied with what IOs and inspirations can do for you, that's fine. The rest of us will take the buffers and debuffers you don't seem to think you "need" to team with.

With respect to second yellow statement, that's a non-starter with me; I'm not part of that debate and it doesn't much interest me. I think it's silly to drag IOs into that debate - people have been debating how Controllers can replace Defenders long before I9 landed.

Because it's not meaningless. So long as it can still significantly increase your performance, as all the examples I gave show instances of, it's worth adding. Again, I don't know why you're even bringing inspirations into this picture. I don't care how many inspirations you're getting. If you're going to claim that your rate of inspiration receipt replaces the functionality of the buffs a Defender can provide you, I'm going to want some evidence to back that up. My point is that a Defender can still make you faster and more effective at pushing you through content, because Defenders can provide sustained benefts that inspirations cannot. The edge case we see often is +def, but only FF is saddled severely with being a one trick pony in regards to that particular benefit.

Stop moving the goal posts. My sub-conversation with you here is about your comment regarding IOs and how they obviate the need for Defenders. The only reasonable way to read that assertion is that it obviates the need for their buffs and debuffs. If it does that for Defenders, it sure as hell does it for Controllers and Corruptors too. At that point your claim is that the buffs and debuffs of all these ATs are made pointless by IOs. This is the claim I am calling bogus.

Um, dude, I know what you're talking about, and you need to pay more attention. I have two Defenders I bring on those TFs - our resident catgurl is not the one known for playing Darks. So do two other people in that channel - in particular, they frequently bring Cold Domination Defenders. There's a new one of those now that Quat made for PvP, so that's at least four of us in there that bring Defenders. People don't always bring Defenders because we don't always play Defenders. We have other characters we like to play and earn merits on, so unless we have a stable of nothing but Defenders, other stuff that can buff and debuff is going to make an appearance. I like to play villains a lot lately, so I show up with Corruptors more often, but mostly I've been showing up on melees because I want to fund their purples using their own playtime.

In any case, that's a distraction from what I'm replying to. You keep crossing over into this debate about Defenders vs. Corruptors and Controllers. I'm talking about what you said regarding IOs. Nothing else.

Well, first of all, so what? What has that got to do with your claims regarding IOs replacing Defenders? Second of all, I've seen some Colds and Kinetics on the wall in Cimerora who might want a word with you. But ultimately, I don't really know why you think this is a problem worth mention. People understand that any support build (build, not AT) is typically a weak soloist. IOs can't fix that. They can help, but they're not going to reverse it. Why is this worth mention?

Define "enough".

You seem to feel you no longer want a Defender when you can get along without one. I think that's ridiculous. I want a Defender until there's no more meaningful benefit that one can offer me.

Let's see the difference in your team of IO'd non force multipliers and mine with some Defenders (or Controllers or Corruptors) on it. I think I know with a great deal of certainty which will go faster.

I've been thinking about this statement for a while, and I've decided I strongly disagree. In fact, I think this statement is misleading.

I play a lot of heavily IO'd characters, running the gamut of the usual design goals, such as +recharge, +defense, and high endurance/recovery. Yes, those benefits often allow me to do things that I could previously only do with the help of a Defender.

However, there's a world of difference between being able to do things a Defender used to be needed for and not wanting a Defender. Adding the benefits of a Defender on top of my IOs still makes my characters significantly better the majority of the time. I'll always happily accept more +recharge and recovery. We all know IOs don't add much in the way of +DR, so Sonic and Thermal shields are always welcome. IOs don't add mez protection except Knockback/down, but Defenders can. IOs can't replicate the sustained DPS increases of things like Tar Patch or Enervating Field, or the -Regen of Howling Twilight or Lingering Radiation. And heck, when it comes down to it, there's nothing in IOs that can match the healing of the Defenders who can heal; as much as I'm big on "healers aren't needed", their damn handy when you do take a face full of smackdown.

About the only time a Defender can't improve my characters is if I'm adding a FF Defender to a defense-capped character. I don't have a lot of defense-capped characters, though, instead having a lot of characters with +def in the 15-25% range. So instead of finding something like +def useless I find it incredibly beneficial, since just one can drive my characters near the soft-cap.

There's a world of difference between being needed and being helpful. Defenders are still incredibly helpful. People still want them on teams because they still have multiplicative effects on the team's effectiveness and divisional effects on foe effectiveness. Queue the regular debate about whether Controllers do this better, but that's not relevant to whether the benefits still exist and whether Defenders can provide them.

While some may see it as something of a role niche for a Defender, I'm not fond of considering "really helpful to people who are so casual they don't slot effectively" a good goal for Defenders.

Long before IOs my standard was two accuracy SOs, not one, because that got me close to "hit capped" against +2 foes. I know there must be a lot of people who may not slot like that because they don't know better or something, but is it better to help them by defense debuffing foes, or helping them help themselves by educating them about better slotting options?

As already noted, definitely. If you have CJ and either of Swift (for zipping around on the ground) or Hurdle (for significantly boosted CJ hangtime) you're going to move faster for fewer slots than even 3-slotted Hover. Since so many builds go through the Fitness line anyway, the CJ approach is the better performer at lower total cost (in slots).

Play IN THE NEXT TEN MINUTES and we'll not just give you a second IO'd character, we'll throw in not ONE, not TWO, but THREE of these rares you can only get if you call this number now! That's a set worth five-hundred million for just TWENTY-NINE NINETY FIVE!