ClawsandEffect

You do realize that when a tank gets mezzed his taunt aura drops, right? If a tank is out of commision for even a couple seconds all those critters he had beating on him shift their attention to the rest of the team. At which point the squishies will be doing all they can just to stay alive, and the tank will probably never get unmezzed.

If no one at all had mez protection...well scrappers would be unplayable for one. Unable to solo at all because they can't enter melee before they are mezzed. Not very useful on teams because they're getting mezzed and the defender is focusing on the people that do more damage or can soak more agro.

An Empath, Thermal, Sonic, or Pain Dom character would be absolutely mandatory on a team that included a tank that they wanted to be at all useful, and that character would spend the majority of their time making sure they weren't mezzed.

Melee characters would ba a joke, and avoided like the plague because they would need assistance just to stay active and alive, people would build teams of all squishies because it is more efficient (since teams built like that work just fine now)

The same would hold true if everyone had mez protection as well. Why play a scrapper when a blaster kills faster and doesn't have to get into melee? Why play a tank when a controller can keep the team just as safe, and be of more use in the process.

When someone says: "Give everyone mez protection" I hear: "Gut melee ATs".

Withstanding mez is the ONLY thing that another AT cannot do better and more efficiently. AoE damage? Fire blaster or corruptor. Agro soaking? MM in Bodyguard mode, or Ill/Anything controller. AV soloing? Ill/Rad controller, Rad/Sonic defender, Ice/Cold or Sonic/Cold corruptor. Single target damage? Sonic blaster, Ice blaster, same with corruptors. Everything that a melee character can do, a squishy can probably do better, except withstand mez.

If everyone had mez protection, melee characters would become useless and obsolete, because it is the only thing that someone else can't do better.

You can view that as a challenge if you like: Name ONE thing aside from withstanding mez that a ranged AT cannot do better than a melee AT.

That's strange, my Rad/Sonic doesn't have that problem, and I almost never use Siren's Song with him, and seldom use the debuffs while soloing. I get by fine with just Screech and Dominate 90% of the time.

Will Domination and Scramble Thoughts aren't good enough? You have options before Epics, it's not the game's fault you chose not to take them.

Yes, it IS fair for squishies to not have mez protection, they have other ways of dealing with it. There are a very small number of powerset combinations that have no way at all of dealing with a mez, and once you include epic pools, that number reduces to 0. Every AT has at least one mez power in a pool that is available to them.

Melee characters cannot prevent mezzes from targeting them in most cases until they get epic pools. Several have melee range mez effects, but that does not prevent them from being targeted with a mez from outside their range.

Therefore, they get mez protection to make up for their lack of ability to avoid it.

No ability to avoid = mez protection. Ability to avoid = no mez protection. I really don't see why that logic is so hard to understand.

If you really want squishies to get mez protection, put them in the same boat as melee ATs and take away their ability to mez at range until level 41. That's where the balance has been struck, and if you want to change that balance, you need to equalize it. The devs have apparently deemed that the ability to mez at range and protection form mezzes combined is not balanced with the rest of the game. Even the sets that DO give you mez protection (FF and Sonic) don't have much in the way of other useful powers that increase your combat effectiveness.

On standard difficulty (which is what the game is balanced around) any squishie can solo with a minimum of difficulty. Don't be upset because your defender can't solo x8 missions, they were never meant to. Hell, the only melee characters that can do it easily are insanely expensive high end builds. Out of all my scrappers, I have exactly ONE that can solo on that high of a difficulty, and he's not consistent in it. If I'm not paying attention I die just as quickly as anything else. I also spent over half a biliion influence on his build. There are controllers that can do so easily, and my Rad/Sonic defender solos better than most of my melee toons, slower, but very safely.

All ATs are not equal at all things, nor should they be. High end scrapper builds can solo AVs. There are a number of squishy ATs and powersets that can do the same with much less of an investment. Those same squishy ATs and powersets also add much more to a team than a scrapper ever will.

There is no way to tell which ones you've killed if you didn't make notes about them beforehand.

I just wrote them down on a sheet of paper.

So, if you didn't make notes about them you are pretty much SOL.

I'll bet you need Anti-Matter to finish it. He can only be found in Tina MacIntyre's arc, so if you outleveled her before you started working on AVs you may have never gotten to fight him. He usually shows up pretty early in her arc, so you can Ouro it and get him pretty quick.

You can't get ANY of them from bank missions. You probably ran the arc and didn't realize which AVs you needed for the badge, none of them appear anywhere but those two arcs.

Edit: Tina's arc is called The Praetorian War, Maria's is A Hero's Hero. That's what you look for on the Ouro lists.

If I recall correctly, it will have a chance to give endurance to both you AND your targets, since all are considered targets of the power. Power Sink works the same way I think.

I wouldn't put the proc in Drain Psyche. A) It will give your foes end as well as you B) you only get a 20% chance every 2-3 minutes instead of every 10 seconds.

Oh jeez, you went and said it.

DO YOU REALIZE WHAT YOU'VE STARTED?!?!?!?

Yup, met my wife in CoH. At the time I was in Ohio and she was in Iowa....now we're both in Iowa. At the time she was a relatively new player, and now she has more 50s than I do.

She also has a better scrapper than me...which is just galling because I pride myself on my scrappers.

Currently her computer is down with a burned out hard drive, so only one of us can play at a time, usually me because she doesn't like the laptop's keyboard and I'm used to it.

Has more inherent damage than other armor sets. As well as a second Build Up power in Fiery Embrace.

It has decent resistances and gives the tools to make things dead before you are. Also has a damn good heal in it.

Electric has....Lightning Field and Power Sink.

With Fiery Aura you'd have: Good resistances (not as good as Electric, but still pretty good), a very nice heal, possibility of double build up, and a good damage power if you have a primary (or secondary) that can leverage it.

The defense from Shields as a power pool would probably take Fiery Aura from slightly underpowered to very overpowered. Because you would get all the things mentioned above plus the ability to softcap, which I have not managed to do in a Mid's build yet.

Also, how do you deal with a power pool....that is accessible to people already playing Shield Defense?

2 copies of all positional defenses by level 14? With tanker numbers that is 30% defense to everything, unslotted, at level 14. Above softcap with just normal slotting, not even taking IOs into account.

By the nature of power pools, they are available to everyone which is why their effects are generally pretty mediocre.

A set of powers specifically focused on positional defense that is available to everyone would make already powerful builds just insanely broken.

First off, Suggestions and Ideas would be a better place for this.

Second, um, gonna have to say no on this one.

Electric Armor already has higher resistances than the other armors. That's because it gets no defense to go along with it. The other resistance sets generally have some defense. Willpower has typed defense, Invuln has Invincibility, Dark Armor has Cloak of Darkness (same numbers as Weave). Only Electric Armor has no defense in the set itself, so it gets higher resistances to make up for it.

If Shields was available as a power pool, an Electric tank would be able to have capped or near capped resistance (definitely capped to Energy) and softcappable defense. That would be insanely overpowered (think Granite with no movement or recharge penalties overpowered)

Also, instead of making new animations for just the melee sets to accomodate a shield, they would have to make new animations for EVERYTHING.

I also think it unlikely that they are going to give something like this to blasters. They are powerful enough without softcapped defense (I have seen a few builds get in the 30-35% range already), if they had that potential, they would get stupid overpowered pretty quickly.

Interesting idea, but the amount of work and the balance issues would be huge on it.

I mentioned Empaths a while back in my post. Pretty sure I wasn't saying "lolhealers".

I was saying that the people that insist on having one on the team usually can't tell the difference between a good one and a bad one. A good one is an asset that will make the team better, a bad one is, more often than not, a space on the team that could be better used. Unfortunately, I've been seeing a lot of bad ones lately.

On the same note, a lot of those same people have teamed with a bad Dark or Stormie, and it has colored their perception of the sets.

I had a blaster I ran with a D3 for the first 4 signature TFs in a row. I have not gotten through them faster before or since, largely because of the D3s contribution. Dark gets the majority of it's good powers fairly early, so it is ideal for low level TFs like that.

Storm is a good or bad set, depending on the player. They either make the team a steamroller, or they cause teamwipes. Not a whole lot of middle ground I have seen.

Well, I for one have been enjoying the debate. It's been a lively one, and it has for the most part stayed civil.

It's rare to have a debate on these forums go on this long without turning into a mudslinging contest, and I like it when one does.