Arondell

[ QUOTE ]
Try a yearly subscription instead. I pay approximately 11 dollars a month.

[/ QUOTE ]

A few years ago shortly before one of the local COMPUSA stores went out of business they were dumping a lot of their merchandise. I got around a year and a half worth of time cards for just under $40.

[ QUOTE ]
First of all, the -res cap is quite high; Sonic/Sonic is an exceptional offensive debuffer. It may be more specialized than a Sonic/(not Sonic) combination, but it is very effective in that particular niche.

[/ QUOTE ]

I believe the -Res cap is 300% so a single sonic/sonic couldn't come near it. The best you could reliably get is around 120-150% -Res on a single target and 50% with area effects.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
the point of the defender AT is to protect others

[/ QUOTE ]

Honestly, I completely disagree with this.

...<stuff>

Sure, a consequence of a Defender on a team is very likely to be a safer team overall, but I would never say the job of the Defender is to protect the team. I am no one's babysitter.
<snip>


[/ QUOTE ]

This sounds like an issue of semantics and attitude. Nevertheless I stand by my original opinion. The purpose of the AT is to protect by making your team harder to kill or the enemy easier. Fulcrim shift actually embodies this. I would also highlight that *most* of the defender primary sets have at least one power that can only be used on allies. The extreme case being sonic with five.

This doesn't mean you have to be a "babysitter". If some nitwit goes wandering off away from the team then I'm not going to go chasing after him. Indeed with vigilance it might be a net positive.

Call it support, protection, *defending* or whatever. Different sets achieve this in a myriad of ways but its a universal theme within the AT.

Edit : Without having seen a specific comment by a dev I'd say the current implementation of vigilance was to make the point that defenders, as designed, were intended to be team oriented.

On vigilances behalf the point of the defender AT is to protect others. Vigilance works well this way because the larger the team the less damage individuals need to take before it starts having a significant effect. So on a full eight man team it can make a big difference. On a two man team not so much.

So even if it *did* work solo if its going to continue to follow the point of the AT then it would probably mean that it still wouldn't be that noticeable until you had taken a lot of damage. At which point it probably wouldn't help much anyway.

As for the argument that its the only non-epic that can't solo with its inherent. Well its a team focused AT so its not like it doesn't make sense. Of course this doesn't mean you can't solo with one but soloing was not the intended purpose so it follows that the inherent wouldn't be useful for that.

Think of soloing with a defender as a much less severe version of a petless mastermind.(Talk about making an inherent useless.)

[ QUOTE ]
As for being rewarded for not doing our job, so little life needs to be lost for there to be a noticeable affect that as long as someone is slightly injured, there should be a noticeable difference.

[/ QUOTE ]

Reasonable statements arguing the merits of Vigilance are heresy! Only hyperbole decrying its horribleness are permitted!

[ QUOTE ]
Yet, if so much as one person died (hey, it's the teeens), I could do whatever I wanted and the blue bar would keep increasing.

[/ QUOTE ]

And thus was born the "death slave".

[ QUOTE ]
So while it makes sense that an empath can "feel" the suffering of their allies, and use that to help them out...doesn't it also mean they can feel the pain of their enemies?!

[/ QUOTE ]

To a degree. Another question would be to ask should they *try* to do so. Simply because you can understand or even sympathize with a persons motivations doesn't mean you condone their actions.

"Jeeze he had a bad childhood so I should not take action to stop him from stealing that purse." or "I know he means well(In a sick twisted way.) so I won't stop Dr. Vazhilok from putting that immuno suppresent into the cities water supply."

Edit : Actually given the upcoming redemption/fallen expansion this would make a great template for fallen empaths. Empathizing too much with villans?

[ QUOTE ]
They tried Vivox in EvE and it flopped. People opted out of it en-mass.

- Additional UI clutter that I can't get rid of which does nothing in game for me. In EvE, every window has vivox controls on it even if you have opted out of it.

- Developers trying to pump it by holding their live chats using vivox. If you want to listen to the chat, you have to opt in.

- Lag. it's part of the client (or is in EvE) and thus generates additional lag.

- Integration: If your client crashes you lose your voice coms. This isn't as bit a deal in a game like CoH but it was a major problem in EvE.

- People who want to chat with their friends without being in game can't.

Oh, and don't forget the attempt to increase subscriptions by $5 a month to cover the cost of Vivox. That caused so much hue-and-cry that they eventually relented and the "10 day free trial" never expired.

Adding Vivox to the client is a bad idea. Hopefully CoX learns from everybody else's bad mistakes.

Y.

[/ QUOTE ]

1. Actually it didn't particularly flop.
2. The user interface "clutter" is virtually unnoticeable unless your looking for it.
3. After one of the major updates it wasn't opt-in/opt-out it was simply activated for everyone for free.(The original plan was going to be something like 7-8 dollars per *year* not five dollars a month. )

4. You do loose coms in game if the client goes. Big deal in EvE. Not that big a deal in CoX. The result in eve is that small corps tend to use eve voice quite a bit. Large corps or alliances with greater resources tend to get their own server.

5. General voice quality for EvE Voice is pretty good. Most people don't have an issue with that and the single biggest request be that it have its own standalone client.

[ QUOTE ]
Sonic also has a glaring hole to psi, which force fields do not. Its not a huge issue, but if issue 13 does involve a shadow shard revamp, wisps are one group a sonic defender is more or less useless against.

[/ QUOTE ]

If your going to compare it with force fields and in conjunction to the shadow shard it should be pointed out that force fields is next to useless vs the Rularuu eyeballs which have a huge accuracy bonus.

[ QUOTE ]
Balance: Liquefy has a very long recharge in exchange for too many effects. The -ToHit/-Defense debuffs aren’t that much stronger than lower tier debuffs in other sets, so it seems the addition of low damage, a weak hold, a tiny chance of knockdown, and an undocumented –Recharge debuff are all supposed to justify this long timer, but it is not seen that way by many players. This is all on top of the fact that none of these effects are synonymous with liquefaction.

[/ QUOTE ]

This has been brought up a number of times and from what I can tell the sonic defender community is far from agreed on this. Some of the points stated are vague. e.g. "The -ToHit/-Defense debuffs aren’t that much stronger than lower tier debuffs in other sets." How much is "not that much"? According to the in game stats the base for these two are -44.63%. With my current slotting (hamidon enhancements) Thats a -69.61% to-hit and -87.02% defense. In addition to the weak hold/knockdown/damage with a 2 min 32 sec recharge time. I've always felt thats pretty good. Its certainly useful on cutting down incoming damage. How many other powers debuff both those stats that much and how much faster then 2.5 minutes would it have to recharge to be considered worthwhile?

[ QUOTE ]
I would call Burn's change many things:

Power alteration
Reduced in effectiveness
Strength modification
Debuff to the power
etc.

[/ QUOTE ]

As I recall the Repulsion Bomb nerf was refered to as a "Functionality Change"

Arondell

[ QUOTE ]
-Defender/Controller – Sonic - Liquefy (-DEF, END redux)

[/ QUOTE ]

Quibble point.

Liquefy is (-Def, -Acc, Hold, Knockdown)

So with Enzymes the benefit should be (-Def, -Acc, End Redux).

Also the hold component does require a to-hit check so Lysosomes could also be quite usefull. (-Def, -Acc, +ToHit)(However the format works.)

Makes both enhancements quite good for Liquefy since the power actually uses all components.

Arondell