BurningChick

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Actually, Detention Field is the best control there is against archvillains. Cage the AV, eliminate all mobs around it, then gank the AV at your leasure.

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With I7, many AVs (but certainly not all) in the upper game were given protection against caging.

It's ironic that the users of the only defender primary solely dedicated to overall team safety ...

... have some of the lowest /personal/ damage mitigation in all of defenderdom. Even weirder: kin, defenderdom's best set for amping up offensive performance, can provide better damage mitigation than FF in certain situations.

What FF needs is a broader array of tools for keeping the entire team (including the bubbler herself) safe.

As an addendum: FF is the only defender primary whose entire arsenal of mob-affecting powers can be neutered by AVs and monsters. That is an awesomely stupid design decision.

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What did y'all do to Jimmy? He looks scared or something. Give him teh hugglez or something.

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haha, I thought the same thing.

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You know what's funny? The first thing I thought upon seeing that picture is that his desk is suspiciously clean. Most IT staffers I've met have piles of manuals, cables, screws, tools, CDs / DVDs and mis-behaving PCs piled on their desks.

Oh wait, I totally resemble that remark

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I am having a little trouble wrapping my head around this. Will this allow use to view our characters and Bios online?

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It'll let /everyone/, if you opt in, to see things like build (and possibly enhancements), costumes, badges, and, presumably, bios online. This also might cut down on board spam where people cut 'n' paste their current builds from hero planners and instead use a link to their heroes' online info.

If the devs really nail it, the system will also (finally!!!) let people see what their set bonuses add up to without using a spreadsheet or a hero builder.

I, for one, am digging this announcement

Hmmmm ...
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In the coming months we’ll be looking to add literally dozens more employees.

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I wonder if this means City of III? The currently dev team is up to the task of new zones, animations, and sets ... but dozens of hires?

Unless they mean secretaries and janitors for the new digs

Hmmm ... I also wonder what happens to Statesman's "vision guy" role? I think his vision was frequently flawed (distance as genuine, bona fide damage mitigation [*cough*ForceBubbleandRepulsionField*cough*]), but it was also mostly right.

Interesting news, to say the least.

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Posi and I did want to make this the year where we gave fans what they've been asking for!

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Does this mean FF gets its reworking?

Folks have been asking for that since /Beta/.

What with _Castle_ hammering nails in the coffin of "distance = defence" 'n' all ...

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How much longer before its up and running?

Simple Question, just needs a simple response from a Dev.

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Because IoPs are tied into bases and raids, and because both of these systems are currently fsck'd, IoPs can't properly come back until the other systems are fixed. And fixing bases and raids might be a nightmare for balance reasons; the original calculations seem have assumed that raidable bases would have large (40+ reasonably active /accounts/), but with base rent reductions, tiny SGs can have raidable bases.

I'm pretty sure the devs don't want 40 toons descending on a base with only 10 defenders, so ...

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Most of my family is from Texas. Does that count for

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All my exes live in Texas.

Does that count for anything?

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That depends on where you hang your hat....

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Except ...

Home is anywhere you hang your head.

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Most of my family is from Texas. Does that count for

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All my exes live in Texas.

Does that count for anything?

Damificanremember if anyone's posted about FF in here, but here are some things that, IME, shouldn't be forgotten.

In Beta, bubblers could shoot through PFF with a large accuracy (ToHit?) penalty. Tankers were not amused.

Through most of Beta, FF had *3* single target buffs: one for smashing / lethal; one for NRG / neg; and one for fire / cold. The elemental buffs were rolled into one and FF gained a new power, Detention Field, to replace the third buff.

Through most of Beta (I'm really not sure of the timing), FF's single target buffs went from 2 to 4 minute timers. And you think Speed Boost is difficult to manage in big teams ...

FWIW, if you add all this tidbits together, it appears that FF defenders were intended to a defender / tanker hybrid with the single target buffs being situational, like CM or Fortitude, that can't reliably (or numerically) be kept on entire teams. The intended play style seems to have involved squishies cuddling up under dispersion bubble and the KB / repel powers with mobs not getting pummelled by ranged attacks focusing on the very tough bubbler. The single target buffs were probably meant for nice boosts to melee classes who can't function under Dispersion Bubble while Force Bubble is out. The big deal with DB probably wasn't the def itself, but the mez protection -- which melee toons, at the time (and besides Ice and its sleep hole), didn't need.

A couple more links, while I'm here, to show how FF has evolved away from this view into what is, primarilly, a buff-centric set:
_Castle_ calls FF's AoE keep-away situational, but dispenses with dev tradition and doesn't name what those situations are. Worth noting:around the same time as _Castle_ made this post, it was formally announced that he had become "the powers guy" and the first announcement about def scaling was made.

This entire thread, started by _Castle_, reads like the final nails being hammered home into the coffin of the ol equation, "distance = defense". IIRC, Statesman's post above is the last time any dev mentioned distance as being a form of damage mitigation -- almost exactly two years ago in August, '05.

Few people think about defender FF (possibly because it's in the running for least-seen CoH primary), but it's had one of the weirdest rides in the game. Especially for a set that many people have /always/ viewed as underachieving.

And something else to chew on ...

In raid-type situations (AKA, Hami) with significant rewards, the devs deliberately render moderate amounts of defense worthless because of how easily Bubblers can buff def to ridiculous levels. 10 FF defenders, with DB and Maneuvers, can take an entire zone to the hard def cap of 200 ...

BaB alluded to this in I9's Beta.

So ...

You guys are thinking about making another set that takes ideas for improving defender FF ... without actually improving FF?

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having both "to hit" and "accuracy" I think is part of why the system is so borked, besides the tohit numbers being so much higher.

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Well ...

The current system is also borked because def buffing can become equally absurd.

A team of 8 FF defenders can buff their own defense to somewhere in the neighbourhood of 325 def. Without huge gobs of ToHit bonuses, nothing could consistently touch them since FF has both postion and typed defense (a kludge to fix yet another bug in the system). If those same defeders all took dark blast, things get even weirder.

Long term, both ToHit / accuracy and defense should be reigned in, with numbers rejigged so that small and moderate amounts of defense are always worthwhile, but folks can still beat on each other.

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With that slotted, against even con minions, I expect to land 90% of my attacks. Against Lts, 85%. Against bosses, 75%... depending on the type.

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You should double-check what forum you're posting in

I'm not a numbers wonk, but Arcanaville's numbers seem OK.

But ...

Since this thread has gone off in tangents anyway, I thought I'd just through out my experience.

On my FF defender, I can buff a blaster in Siren's Call to be not all that much more tough than he'd otherwise be. If we have 2 FF defenders, and we both remain standing, that same blaster is *AWFULLY* tough to kill. If one of the bubbler's goes down, that same blaster is much easier to drop; god-mode in PvE is 45% defense, but it seems to be about 85 in PvP. And 65 def (Big Three + stacked maneuvers) is borderline with the bubblers being much easier to drop than their teammates..

That's an awfully large break with how defense works in PvE, and, ultimately, is one of the contributing reasons why people get fed up with PvP: powers that arguably work too well in PvE don't work well enough in PvP. We're not talking builds or player experience here, we're talking straight-up mechanics.

Just a suggestion ...

But you did a good job normalizing the relative benefits of resistance and def in PvE, but PvP is still completely and totally out whack in favour of resistance. I dunno how to fix it, but I would love to see this particular balance issue fixed.

Mostly because some of my favourite toons are def- or -ToHit-based, and they function either not at all (my EA brute) or require radically different builds between PvE and PvP to be effective at either (my dark and FF defenders).

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I like it. Maybe this means that all-Defender teams can no longer trivialize content and steamroll through missions, but aren't we complaining that the game is already too easy?

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All-defender teams would still steamroller content since the additive (de)buffs like +damage and -resistance would be unchanged.

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It's interesting, but this all started when they put I5/GDN on test. All these arguments have been putting around for two years. They were right then and the devs still did it and ED. Sigh...

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I must've missed those threads since I was spending most of my time screeching that the GDR made FF defenders more desirable to have in a team, but much less desirable to actually play because of the disproportionately large nerf to DB. The overall lack of self-defense in FF made Statesman's suggestion that we use, as _Castle_ later described them, FF's situational aggro pigs to make up the difference laughable.

Especially since the effectiveness of of ToHit debuffs was left unchanged in I5.* Even ED didn't touch ToHit debuffs all that hard since most people were slotting one or two end redux in the big debuffs, anyway.

* The only big exception is whether or not you consider Dark Servant a debuff. At the time, few people did.

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Most honest post in this thread.

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Hey, wait, I also extolled the virtues of of broken mechanics!

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That I am, in fact, a troll ...

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Most honest quote in thread -1!

But, seriously, addressing the stacking buffs issues, such as they are, is a mountain of work that would touch nearly every aspect of gameplay, up to and including basic mission design. And I'm not sure the ROI would be enough to justify the time and money to do it. The perfect time to have done it would have been I5, concurrent with the GDR and before the subsequent change to def scaling.

But that's a long time ago.

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Heals and regen have an immortality line.

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Oh, pish.

Everyone has an immorality line; mine's about 3 stiff drinks.

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But my FF controller is one of the main reasons I'm for this. Multiplicative stacking could do NOTHING but help the vast majority of buff/debuffers.

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But, on the other hand, the best fun I've had in ages involves the Pinball Wizards and enough recharge to have Howl as my attack chain.

You can, I'm sure, do the math on why this is really, REALLY fun

Arcana's right; Defender FF is absurd. For a set ones of people play, it casts a disproportionately massive shadow over all of CoH.

And this is coming from someone whose first posts were along the lines of, "OK ... so my bubbler is hitting her 20s. I don't get what I'm supposed to do with FF's next three powers." 2.5 years later, my bubbler's stuck at 37. Largely because the performance delta between having 22 defense and 45 is too large.

And, of course, EvilGeko's a troll.

I'm just sayin'

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Sure! Then Weave could give 15% Defense, and Combat Jumping could give 25% Defense (or whatever) and combined, they'd give 30% instead of 40%. When the local FF Defender buffed the character, instead of the normal 25% for the FF, it'd be 5% for 35% defense.*

Basically, additional buffs would always be helpful, but the base level abilities could be made better and more useful across the board.

* Disclaimer: All numbers used illustratively and do not indicate any relation to what said values or formulae would actually be if we were ever to implement a system such as this, which I doubt.

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Err, wouldn't such a system essentially be going back to the Pre-ED "no one really needs buffs" situation that ED and the GDN were partially intended to fix?

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But ...

All of the +defense pool powers, especially Maneuvers, have absurdly low numbers because of the merest potential that they might stack with one of the rarest primaries in the game: Defender FF. Maneuvers is borderline useless without a lot of defense backing it up, and that's an absurd situation.

FF completely and totally borks up all defense for everyone who doesn't have lots of defense (or ToHit debuffs) to begin with.

Of course ...

Another way around this problem is, of course, to, you know, CHANGE FF so it has more than 3 powers teams appreciate. But I digress.

Warshades are brutal ...

AMD X2 4400+
ATI 1900XTX (6.11 drivers)
2 gigs of RAM

Last night on a team, 50 FPS in the mission, 35-40 in combat (playing my dark / dark defender, a well-known FPS killer from days gone by), and 10 to 15 when the Warshade fired off a power -- I think Orbitting Death.

Ummm. Ouch.

I play with awfully close to minimum effects (I prefer performance over eye candy) with a decent system.

As soon as the WS left, I was cruising along at 35+ FPS.

I'm not sure what hardware you folks test the game on ... but what exactly *is* the reccomended hardware for the game now? What do your QA people use?

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My point: bases cost too much for what players think they deliver. What they currently deliver is the ability to create a social space for Super Groups that’s potentially customizable to the group’s theme/background/etc.

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What's interesting here is that, during CoV's beta (and the buildup towards it), the dev team massively hyped the functional aspects of bases. We heard much more about the med bays, SG-only content and raids than we did about having a meeting place. The prestige grind was touted as being a way to unlock powerful, useful features for bases, not to get better artwork on the walls.

I don't know if your view of bases has changed over the last year, but the current vision of them doesn't seem to jive all that well with what we had previously heard.

Kinda' like how your I5-on-Test--era view of FF (Wow, look at all those awesome, useful powers!) bears little resemblance to _Castle_'s Drumroll Please view (situational by design).

Hey, I couldn't resist that one

Ya' know ...

I think it boils down to something pretty basic:

Bases aren't cool enough to warrant the hassles inherent in having a 30+ account SG.

There's not enough room in the main SG for alts. Personality conflicts. Scheduling conflicts. Different priorities (prestige grinding / PvP / PvE / Missions / SFs). People leave. People come back. People shift from CoV to CoH.

*shrugs*

It's the cost of the functional aspects of bases people [censored] about.

Few people care about the aesthetics of bases. It's just not obviously an expression of one's self, especially if it's been designed by 20+ people, or by someone else. That's the crucial difference between costumes and bases.

If no one cares about the aesthetics of bases, it all comes down to function ... and there's not a whole lot of function in there.

And, FWIW, I don't see a lot of cloned heroes running around anymore. SGs built on very limited themes, such as everyone wears white and looks sparkly, tend to not last very long.