Arondell

Well from your description it sounds like you didn't like playing it at any point. Most people can figure out by level 24 after they have most of a sets signature powers whether its something they enjoy. Certainly after level 32. It sounds to me you were loathing Sonic Resonance before you got to 32 so why bother pushing all the way to 50 doing something your not having fun with?

I've mentioned and seen mentioned by others that not all power sets or ATs appeal to all people. Merely because you didn't like it doesn't mean it sucks.

The Sonic Disruption field is targeted on allies not enemies. If you kept on trying to put disruption field on enemy mobs its not much of a surprise that it didn't work very well.

Also running a toon all the way to 50 then deleting it because you hated it? Given that you can get all the primary powers after 32 it seems odd that it took another 18 levels of suffering to figure out it wasn't for you.

If I don't like it after I get to level 25 or so there is no tier 9 power in the game that will save a set for me.

I went for Cardiac on my sonic/sonic and once I slotted in the second tier pretty much all endurance problems just went away. Most of the time I had six toggles running while constantly blasting and my endurance rarely went below 50%.(Two Leadership, Combat Jumping, Sonic Dispersion, Sonic Disruption, and the epic Temp Invulnerability) On those rare occasions where it did I would just hit conserve power and it would slide back up.

The secondary resistance 20% global boost didn't add a great deal to my total buffing ability. I went from a combined total of around 54-55% to 57-58%. Still nice to have and when higher level cardiac enhancements are out that will improve. On the other hand I am now solidly at the defender cap for smashing/lethal resists and around 24-25% for everything else except psionic.

Five of Trick Arrows powers are AoE effects with defensive components.

1. Flash Arrow(-To-Hit)
2. Glue Arrow(-Recharge(20%))
3. Poison Gas(-Damage(-31.25%))
4. Oil Slick(Knock down)
5. EMP Arrow(Hold + various other endurance effects)

Also its two single target attacks Entangle and Ice Arrow both have Slow and -Recharge components. There is actually a lot of mitigation in the set.

The -Perception debuff is nice too. I'm also a fan of pointing out the mechanism of the debuff. A targeted large AoE autohit power with a decent duration. Powers are more then just the raw numbers.

Edit : Deleted first sentence. I thought I had seen it asserted somewhere that the -Accuracy debuff wasn't affected by level but can't find any references stating that.

Actually I was a little surprised that anyone was still paying attention to this thread enough to post in it. I was amusing myself reading it until I came across this little bit here. I have played EvE Online and this statement *BREAKS* the BS meter.

The best mining ship in EvE is called the Hulk. What Firewasp referred to as the "Largest epic mining barge". It is considered a Tech 2(T2) class ship. The best equipment(Mining or otherwise) available to it is T2 class equipment.

Tech 3 equipment is specialized equipment that only works with one class of ship. The T3 ship class called "strategic cruisers". On top of that none of the T3 equipment has any bearing on mining output or yields. You do not use strategic cruisers for mining. You can't even fit T3 equipment on anything other then strategic cruisers. Lets not even get into the whole the whole super secret exploit thing.

So basically Firewasp spouted a bunch of BS about EvE Online that anyone with anything better then a passing knowledge of that MMO knows is total BS to assert why his opinion in this game is valid.

Wow.

I would also like to add that the mechanism with which Sonic Disruption provides its AoE 30% debuff is pretty awesome. An allied anchor toggle for such a thing is much better in my opinion then an enemy anchored toggle or a targeted AoE effect of limited duration. At least from a *team* perspective.

Well the sonic DoT attack, shriek I think, sort of does that. After the first damage pulse the resist debuff boosts the rest of the attack.

Well...You can already do this with the power monitoring feature. For that matter I already do. Just set it to monitor the endurance discount and damage bonus and it constantly shows what it currently is. Granted its not a graphical bar but a numerical value.

Quite true. Can this be said for most defender builds though? Force Field is known for being the best at stopping damage before it happens. What about sonic or empathy? How about trick arrow? This is part of the problem with just about all the proposed ideas for a defender inherent. How to have one that doesn't have variable utility depending on which power set you use. Lets face it the defender power sets as a group boost pretty much every attribute in the game. So what do you have an inherent do that gives all the power sets an equal advantage?

The only way for a defender to get no benefit from vigilance is to absolutely and utterly stop a team from taking any damage. I have never seen any single defender, no matter how well played, do this. I have seen a combination of defenders effectively do this but usually such circumstances end up meaning that almost any inherent would be superfluous.(e.g. Stick a force field, sonic, and kinetic on the same team and you'll steamroll almost anything.)

I have on a couple of occasions seen the "death slave" used and heard it joked about quite a bit on the forums. On the couple of occasions I have personally seen it the obvious reason was to use the huge endurance discount that is given when a team mate drops. On one occasion the guy doing it was dual boxing on the other it was only done for a brief time and both occasions was more to make the point that it *could* be done.

The "reward" poor play argument is excellent hyperbole though. I have yet to see anyone actually *try* to play poorly just to take advantage of vigilance. Given that the amount of damage the team needs to have suffered for vigilance to start providing significant benefits even extremely well played defenders get some benefit from it. In some cases poor play actually reduces the benefits. (e.g. heal aura on auto)

One exception to this is Sonic Disruption. Ally Anchored Toggle Debuff. The ally part makes it the best anchored debuff in the game IMO.(From a strictly convenience standpoint at least.)

This sounds about as likely as a perpetual motion machine.

Its been noted before that not all the ATs appeal to all players.(I don't think they are meant too.) My personal preference is defenders. I've tried playing tanks, scrappers, blasters, corrupters, and controllers. Of those the only types I have ever gotten past 15 is controllers. I still prefer defenders though. The easy solution is to play what you enjoy playing.

I have a slight quibble with this statement. Those of us who complain when we run into builds of this type aren't thinking about the poor soloing ability.

I heard something else from what Starbird said. I thought a "buffbot" was someone who always used a specific set of powers from their primary and never varied from a set pattern. The classic example being an empathy defender who sticks heal on auto and auto follows one individual and never attacks.

What Starbird said is that a good defender "tends to concentrate on buffing much more." What you seemed to have heard him say is that a good defender only uses their primary.

Having played mostly defenders myself I will fully admit to putting an emphasis on my primary powers. This hardly translates to ignoring or not using my secondaries. Most of my builds end up with two to four blasts and maybe a couple utility powers from the secondary. Does this make me a buffbot? Well I never thought so before.

I'm pretty sure those were the colors as they originally were broadcast. Silar Vs Peter clip.

That is true but the way defenders, in general, work they have a great deal of both offense and defense. They need to be in a team environment though to be able to leverage that ability. Indeed take them out of the team environment and many defender primary powers become useless.

The devs obviously used a different paradigm when designing the defender. Instead of the defense<-->offense paradigm they went for a more team power<-->solo power paradigm.

Vigilance will generally help any time anyone on your team takes damage. The defensive side of Sonic Resonance involves damage reduction not avoidance(e.g. Force Field) or reversal(Most sets). This means that sonic resonance will tend to get more benefit from Vigilance then most other sets. Particularly on large teams. That being said more emphasis on endurance reducers would be a good idea sans Stamina. I would recommend three endurance reducers in Sonic Disruption regardless.

In my experience Detention Field and Sonic Cage have apparently been given a taunt power vs scrappers. Last time I used sonic cage on a team was on some mob on the far edges of the fight. About ten seconds after I applied the cage(Bright orange spinny sphere.) the scrapper on the other side of the room turns around and sees it. He then proceeds to run all the way across the room past several far more optimal targets to attack the caged mob.

Here boy! Get the shiny ball! <Throws sonic cage and watches scrappers chase it.>

That actually shifts the point from Liquify isn't good enough to Sonic isn't good enough. It also enters the realm of how each power works and the relative advantages/disadvantages of buffs vs debuffs. I'm not going there.

The reason is that for 30 seconds liquify, for most practical purposes, gives a team better defense then Force Field while making anything in the game easy pickings. I'm thinking specifically of those pesky Paragon Protectors that manage to get Moment of Glory activated in this case.

People seem to get into this mode of thought that powers exist in a vacuum. Radiation infection is one of the backbone powers of the set it is in. Liquify is a very very nice "extra" that for thirty seconds boosts Sonic Resonances defense/offense capabilities significantly above the norm. No its not "as good as" Fulcrum Shift. Then again what is?

Reducing the recharge on Liquify without a corresponding reduction in the effectiveness doesn't seem likely to me. It really is something of an enemy nullifying power. Being able to pull it out even a majority of the time probably would be too much of a good thing.