BurningChick

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You're entitled to your opinion, but I've seen otherwise. I'm not saying that DS drops everything to immediately heal, but I've never seen it cast a heal without it or someone in its vicinity needing health.

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Ummm ...

Fluffy also casts TG when he's off on his own in a corner, at full health, with no teammates near him. I've also seen three Fluffies stand around a minion, perma-holding him, and lighting off a whole lot of TGs with no one possibly taking damage. Why? 'Cause there's no rhyme or reason behind what he does beyond a rote cycling of powers.

Call me out on it, but somewhere buried in the defender guides is a list of how he cycles powers ... and it matches up with the experiences of most DD players.

Edit: you realize that dark's heal (and, therefore, Fluffy's) requires a target, right? It can only be fired off in combat, and that might explain he you feel Fluffy only fires it when needed since it's rare, but not exceptional, for there to be a situation where he'll use TG without anying needing health.

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Current tech allows pets to know if you take damage. Many of them will heal you (dark servant, MM bots) when they sense you've taken damage. The issue is figuring out how much, but that's just simple subtraction.

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Nope, at least not for DS. DS goes through some byzantine form of attack chain. I.e., I've seen him fire off petrifying gaze instead of twilight grasp when both him and my DDD, standing next to each other, are below max HPs. And I've then seen him fire off TG after my DDD has once we're both at full. And I've never, ever seen him fire off two TG's in a row.

Pets don't fire off their powers based on what makes sense at the time, the do some kind of chain, with a bit of randomness (possibly caused by recharge times) thrown in for flavour.

*boggles*

You know why I came back to CoH? Folks like TMS and Taser make me seem downright normal. Well, less odd. Sorta'.

DOOOM!

Ya'll also got criticals early on and a damage buff in I5. Perma-elude was a buff to bring SR into line with the more powerful sets. Dark had its animations changed so the armours would stack. Katana had its animations redone so they weren't simply rehashes of broadsword's. The integration "stealth nerf" was due because the devs had mistakenly introduced a "stealth buff" -- the "nerf" was just a bug fix. And there are others I'm probably missing.

It's like the bubblers who say that detention field is the worst power ever, even though it replaced something worse -- a third single target def buff -- previously, (neg) energy and fire / cold were separate buffs.

It's easy for us to point out the bad, but we also tend to forget the good.

FWIW, I remember having my fire tanker (low 20s) in a Counicil mission just after BA got its taunt aura. I remember being in the middle of one spawn, having the blaster aggro a second around the corner, and running over to grab the aggro from him. And then ... it hit me. I had 10 mobs trailing behind me, 10 new mobs aggroed on me, and just about to BBQ everything with burn without having to use provoke. And nothing was hurting my tanker that HF couldn't handle.

I remember, very clearly, telling my teammates this was so good the devs couldn't possibly let it go on. And then they started giggling like school girls and suggested I start grabbing two or three spawns at a time for AoEs.

*shrugs*

And, no, I'm no fanboi; most of my posts have had the general theme of "[censored] were the devs thinking with FF ...". I'd just like to point out, before the thread gets locked, that sometimes the devs do buff ... and do listen to player feedback.

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although some of castle's comments lead me to believe any and all sustained repel powers are next on the chopping block.

i sincerely hope this doens't happen. to remove repel would be bad for the game.

there has to be a better way to deal with the potential for abuse.

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You know what's really funny? The game's best PvPers are organizing a a tournament on Test. Currently, the only restriction that I'm aware of is that a team can have a max of either one FFer or sonic. Why? The single target phases. The top tier PvPers know how to work around repel. What they can't work around is the phases; they're high accuracy and nothing in the game resists them. With some straightforward slotting, they almost never miss and come back just fast enough to fire off a second time just as the first phase is wearing off. A couple bubblers can make a 4 on 4 match a 4 on 2 indefinitely.

I really don't get why repels have to be changed.

The better question, Stormbringer, is to ask my hurricane is being singled out.

I'm guessing that the devs are uncomfortable with stormies being relatively sturdy compared to other defenders.

But, perhaps most importantly, the devs don't have any real problems with a defender being defeated in 10 seconds, but it's damned tedious and slows down gameplay for a defender to effectively pin a melee player and then take 5 or 10 minutes to to defeat him. This is especially annoying to the uninformed or casual PvPer who may not understand that there are counter-measures available to repel.

Hi Ashlocke,

The devs really like KB and repel; they're extremely comic-booky. Remember when tanker attacks were larded with KB? The devs were surprised that tankers hated it.

And I think they're still surprised that the playerbase hasn't widely adopted large-scale KB and repel for team play. They've schwacked tanker defenses, they've reduced the number of mobs that most debuffs and all controls can affect; to them, it's obvious we should be looking at KB and repel for additional defense. But it's not obvious to the players. It's still better to fearsome stare and darkest night a bunch of mobs, with the chance of missing some, than to spread them out with force bubble and miss most most of them.

It's also interesting that two powers are exempt from the AoE limits: force bubble and hurricane. The devs really want us to keep mobs bouncing around, away from the squishies. Well, at least Statesman did; he lavished much praise on FF's final three powers, to the point where it seemed like they were so powerful, they oughta' be nerfed. _Castle_ backed off from the sales pitch and called them "situational by design," but there was still the undertone of, "Find the right situation, and you'll be amazed at what these powers do."

We still don't know what those situations are since the devs don't like us pinning mobs and players.

*shrugs*

But I don't think they're ever going to expand of FF's abilities. They think there's value in mass keepaway, and that's enough for them. FF is balanced by its defense buffs, everything else in the set is filler.

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Wait a second! What are you planning with Force Bubble? It repels. That's all it does. Taking away repel means it creates a big bubble that does absolutely nothing.

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That's probably why Castle mentioned how the balancing job on the other repel powers is much more difficult

What's funny is that it's only real use for force bubble is as a control to pin folks in corners and let loose with all the other KB powers in FF. There's really not much reason to use FB out in the open; few teams like having their mobs spread out that far, and an awful lot of the defender's attacks don't have that much range.

I think it's going to be a howler to see how the devs are going to handle nerfing force bubble; I mean, you gotta work hard to make one of the least used powers in one of the rarest sets in CoH even less appealing.

Then again, maybe the devs will surprise us and, horror of horrors, make FB useful as something other than a control.

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You should see far fewer typo's ...

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Typos and spelling mistakes are invevitable, aren't they?



I know I have to edit most of my posts to fix up grammar and spelling mistakes even if I go over them before hitting "Submit," and I used to make beer money in university proof-reading papers.

Acrobatics only helps agains knockback, NOT repel (the effect, not the power from kin).

Repel is found in ... hmmm ... force bubble, hurricane, and telekinesis.

Edit -- beat to the punch!

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[Given the nerfing that was given to Regen with IH and MoG along with Phase Shift and Kheldian's Quantum Flight, these were certainly PvP nerfs. I fully expect you to nerf hurricane which is needed. Also fix the toggle droppers. Hurricane and things like that should be made Clickies like IH was with long recharge times(to be fair). I'd leave Stalker's Hide alone though. They are pretty weak without Hide and since you can buy IR goggles in a zone if your side is doing well along with all the leadership powers tossed on, this should be adequate.

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Ummm ...

Hurricane's not an "Oh crap!" power like most of the ones you listed. It's a debuff -- a standard part of the defense a stormie gives her team.

If you go through the big toggle dropping powers defenders have, most of 'em are KB and repel powers, which as many people have pointed out, are largely resisted by the folks they're supposed to be used on. The toggle drop aspect was added to these powers because they're supposed to be bad news to melee-based mobs and toons. If the KB and repel aspects are entirely nullified, then these powers won't be functioning as intended.

But thank you for nerf-herding ... while trying to prop up your own hobbyhorse

So ...

What is the final word about FF?

Everything, every single positive word I've heard about the set for months boils down to, "Yeah, love teaming with bubblers. Would I play one? Err ... just love getting those buffs."

Changing repulsion bomb so that it's enemy targettable was a nice touch ... but you folks missed out on how it never, ever was the knockback people wanted from the power. It was the disorient and quick recharge that made it situationally valuable; pepole worked HARD at mitigating the KB so it would be useful in teams. Now? You made it more useable at the expense of making it far less useful. And you did nothing to its needlessly long animation time. When I fire off a power with a 3+ second animation, I expect something pretty spectacular to go off, but when the ragdoll rollback hit, I had mobs standing up in mid-flight. The power didn't even interrupt the mobs' attack chain.

Please, _Castle_, if you folks are going to keep FF weighed down with situational powers, can you tell us, specifically, what those situations are? You, Geko, and Statesman have all previously given examples about when phases should be used, but no one has ever told us when FF's moment to shine is, or was intended to be.

Did I just step into a regen thread in the scrapper forum? 'Cause it sure feels like it.

I'm just sayin'.

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If Defender primaries were significantly more buff/debuff-oriented, with the occasional control power thrown in here or there, then I wouldn't care if Controllers got equal or better mileage out of that occasional power (just as I'm sure Blasters don't really care that Defenders get equal mileage out of Aim). But that's not the case; our specialty, as Starshield points out, isn't nearly common enough in our own power sets.

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I always come back to dark miasma.

Dark is a wickedly good blend of powers with lots of debuffing goodness. I have never, not once, in my time playing my dark defender, felt outclassed at defending a team while standing next to a controller. And doubly so while in AV or monster fights where controls start to falter. IME, nothing in the game turns an AV into a cuddly little kitten better than a dark defender.

Not enough buffing and debuffing in defender sets ...

Wow, I had never thought of it that way before, but how absolutely true.

'Trollers and defenders should be balanced out to do roughly equivalent damage AND equivalent damage mitigation -- each AT in its own way. How absolutely right.

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It would also be difficult to make a strong case for force bubble being significantly in favor of controllers, since it has a defense component.

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Nope, there's no defense component. Force bubble does two things: repel with a small / tiny chance to knock affected mobs down. There's a ghetto damage debuff in making mobs switch from melee to ranged attacks, but this argument holds for all KB / repel powers.

FB is, however, a superior power for someone with pets since the pets will soak up some of the aggro that would otherwise be directed at the bubbler. I've heard of MMs who can make wickedly good use of the power because they can deliberately set their pets up as aggro sponges.

FB and force bolt, and to a lesser extent repulsion bomb, can also be used to ram mobs into a controller's AoE effects like ice patch -- a case where the seoncdary reinforces the primary.

Force bubble is undoubtedly superior for a set with pets (see _Castle_'s comment about finding someone with taunt), but not necessarilly superior for all controllers.

Have you ever played a bubbler against an AV?

Keeping dispersion bubble on an entire team often means being within range of an AV when he goes postal. I've seen more than a few bubblers get nailed by AntiMatter, for instance. That 16% defense a bubbler gets from dispersion is as good as nothing in an AV fight.

I would still rather have a dark defender against an AV. -regen. -resistance. -accuracy. A big AoE heal. A pet that's further stacking -regen, -accuracy ... a pet that's also putting up big green numbers. FF might keep a team safer at the expense of her own safety, minute by minute, but dark miasma is going to make the fight go much, much faster. I don't think many people appreciate how spectacularly good -regen is. But that's a digression.

Besides, it's just freakin' ignorant on the part of some people to distill FF into three powers, ignore the other six, and say,
"just bubl meh i pl u k?"

_Castle_ ... why would someone choose to play a FF defender outside of concept?

What other set requires someone with a particular power, taunt, in order to use their top tier power?

What other primary has such thin slotting options?

What other primary is built around having so many situational powers?

And just what are the situations where the devs find value in the final three powers in PvE? Solo? In teams?

I appreciate the time and effort you spent in going through the list, but it seems ... I dunno ... like the requests of bubblers have fallen on deaf ears. Changing repulsion bomb was interesting, but, frankly, for power that does little more than knockback, a 3 second animation and 30 second recharge is laughably bad. I actually 6-slotted this power for the disorient in I5. But now? The disorient component is so weak it isn't worth slotting. The damage component is insanely bad.

Do you guys really want to make bubblers feel better? Make repulsion bomb, for defenders, tanker-style knockback and add a debuff component to it. Add a similar debuff to force bolt. Keep repulsion field as the keep-away power, but retool as a small version of force bubble. Turn force bubble in slow / recharge debuff. You won't need new art. FF would still add nothing to a team's offense. And FF would get some versatility without being overpowering.

I've tested force bolt's damage; it's exactly equal to one half the damage from an unslotted brawl.

Repulsion bomb's damage is around the same level.

The amount of damage is so low, I doubt either power could dent a white minion's regen rate. "Slightly more damage" in this case is probably 4 or 5 points of damage ... that's hardly a difference worth acknowledging. FWIW, RB on a -30 minion will blow it half-way across a zone, but will only remove about 1/3 of the mob's HPs.

It's impossible to taunt mobs around the circumference of force bubble. Force bubble can affect an unlimited number of mobs; taunt can hit five in a relatively small AoE. Mobs naturally spread out one deep along the circumference of FB effectively rendering any AoE into a 2 or 3 target attack. The second point is that some mobs will resist the effect, remaining inside force bubble, but will still aggro onto the bubbler. Effectively, this creates a situation where the battle is happening on two fronts with piles of minions on the outside and the more dangerous mob(s) on the inside. For a set that's all about providing damage mitigation, it seems ... odd that using a set's top power can make things more dangerous.

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Knockback is not a Debuff, and Controllers have the same modifier as Defenders for this.

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For this, I will nitpick.

Technically, knockback and repel are debuffs since, according to Statesman, a group under force bubble "will be subject only to the lesser damaging Ranged attacks." There's the distinct impression from the honcho himself that RF and rorce bubble are "always out" powers on squishy-heavy teams.

*shrugs*

Your responses aren't unexpected since I've been telling defenders that we're only better at buffing / debuffing than 'trollers, and most of FF is neither. But to find out that FF is superior in some ways on a controller is disheartening.

Let me repeat a question I've asked before: if you folks had significantly changed a tanker primary or scrapper secondary as you did repulsion bomb, would you have initiated a dialogue with them? Further, would you even consider making a power in scrapper Invuln superior to the same power in tanker invuln because the power just seems more ... scrappy?

Look, _Castle_, you're coming awfully close to saying that bubblers should suck it up and become buffbots because, by design, a big chunk of the powers beyond the buffs are situational. Well fine ... but Statesman has said, over and over, that he wants players to be actively involved in combat. OK, so I can blast with my bubbler ... but I respecced out of her AoE blasts simply because my bubbler can't deal with incoming aggro as well as her bubbled teammates. Essentially, I can walk away from my PC with neutrino bolt on auto, aiming at the tanker, and grab a snack and be as effective as I would be mashing buttons. That just isn't right. My bubbler isn't an active part of combat any more; she's much less so than in I4 (or previous issues) simply because she can't rely on dispersion bubble to be a decent amount of defense. Previously, I used to charge into melee and light off irradiate, then line up electron haze to help pile some mobs onto melee. That just doesn't work anymore. Bubblers have become duller to play since I5, even if the buffs are more desirable.

There's a reason why FF defender are rare as hens' teeth: if you want to play an offender (a blast-heavy defender), you're better off picking any set other than empathy or sonic. You can do so more safely with debuffs and heals. You can do more damage with buffs and debuffs. Fine, my bubbler can put a bunch of slots into attacks ... but can she safely and effectively use those blasts?

FF is still borked.

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If you wanted to justify people taking Hover, then give it a more significant Defense %. Like 7-12%. Then people would fall all over themselves to take it, even if it was slow.

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The devs are really, really keen on powers that keep mobs (or toons) out of melee range. Why? Because there's a ghetto damage debuff, 20 or 30%, when mobs switch from melee attacks to ranged. Hover is the only "travel" power that can, in many situations, guarantee that a toon can stay out of melee.

There are, of course, caveats. Hovering above combat isn't always appropriate due to certain maps or teaming situations. Floating above combat, for instance, removes the user from many heals and buffs.

Anyways, just looking at the raw numbers, and assuming you're not facing snipers or mobs with ranged mezzes, the damage reduction from hovering out of melee is superior, in and of itself, than having the power give 7% def. Keeping out of melee is THE advantage hover has over CJ or sprint. Hovering requires no managing of position to stay out of melee; CJ and sprint do.

I'm not saying the speed numbers for the flight pool are right, or that the distance = defense thing is good, but hover does have its advantages.

Just something to chew on: until a few weeks after I5 went live, Force Bubble (ninth tier FF power) was the most expensive toggle in the game. On its own, with 1 redux slotted and no stamina, it could drain a bubbler's endurance in about 30 seconds. Until recently, its only effect was to keep non-resistant mobs out of melee. No debuffs, mezzes, buffs, or KB. All it did was gently shove mobs out of melee. That's how good the devs figure keeping mobs out of melee is. They've backed off on the position more recently in toning down the end cost of some keep-away powers, but that's the mindset behind hover.

Quickie edit: hover also minimizes KB and ragdoll. When hit with KB while hovering, you flip and don't get blown half-way across the map.

Any hints about what's piquing your interest?

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My favorite was when statesman posted his "personal" regen scrapper build on the forums. It was to prove that regen was perfectly fine even after all the nerfs. The funny thing was.....his build could not possibly exist in the game. It was a developer-created build that regular players can't have. But guess what....that was used to "prove" that regen is ok, and the nerfs went live

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It wasn't his build, it was his test environment that was borked. But that's a digression.

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And WokkaWokka, Supermax’s statement is somewhat valid given that the devs have never played a Blaster.
Sasheem

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Yep, that's exactly what I meant. I can GUARANTEE that statesman (and his opinion is apparently the only one that matters in the end) has NEVER sat down and played a high level blaster for an extended period of time. I'm not somewhat sure of it....I would bet my life on it.

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A while back Statesman posted that he had played a blaster 0 to 50 on Live without a travel power. The thread appears to have entered the void, but I specifically remember this post because of the oddity of someone making do without a travel power.

The devs (and other red names) DO play toons on live, for instance Cuppa has a fire / fire / NRG tank, but they often see their toons' roles and abilities in very different ways than the players do. Just a random example, but States, in one of his I5 tanker posts, mentioned that he had played a tank by taking something like 1/3 or 1/2 of the aggro for the team, letting everyone else spread out the aggro. Most players with tanks aim for 100% of the aggro and base their expectations on this.

My hobbyhorse is the final three knockback / repel powers in FF that don't often see the light of day, even though States told us how wonderful they are.

No, I don't have anything enlightening to add about the blaster inherent, other than the CoV inherents seem to fit their respective ATs much better than the CoH ones do. The CoH inherents were tacked on after development, while the CoV ones were a part of the development process.

I'll bite:

1.) Iggy and the Stooges: Search and Destroy
2.) The Velvet Underground: Sweet Jane
3.) Public Image Limited: Rise
4.) Buzzcocks: Ever Fallen in Love
5.) Camper Van Beethoven: Take the Skinheads Bowling
6.) Billy Bragg + Wilco: California Stars
7.) Pixies: Gigantic
8.) Squeeze: Black Coffee in Bed
9.) White Stripes: Seven Nation Army
10.) Strokes: Last Nite

I wonder if this, coupled with my plan to pull with Rain of Fire, will finally make Taser /kick me?

Hi Statesman,

Can you please, please, please give us some thoughts about force fields? If FF's ability to drop toggles is neutered, FF's role in PvP becomes vastly diminished since a single pool power, acrobatics, invalidates a third of the set. Additionally, since knockback is supressable, if I do knock someone back, supression kicks in giving him immunity to knockback. Knockback is, at very best, an annoyance in PvP. Toggle dropping is THE raison d'etre of a bubbler in PvP.

Hell, I can't even use repulsion bomb anymore to reliably mezz opposing toons.

You don't talk about FF as a def-based set, so it's unlcear whether def scaling will affect FF. Repulsion bomb still isn't particularly useful to solo bubblers despite its recent change. So ... whither force fields?

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Castle = coolest dev EVER!

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Dev, maybe. Red name? Cuppa still wins

She has an insanely tough job: herding belligerent nerds in an online forum.