DrMike2000

Unpaid overtime, Cien, not completely unpaid.

People in this industry generally work pretty hard, and often contribute personal time in evenings or weekends for free. I doubt the CoH dev staff are any exception judging by the general high quality of their work.

As long as you don't think they're taking your $15 and buying gold back-scratchers and laughing about it, that's cool.
The current level of bugginess experienced with new issues IS you getting your money's worth.

I reckon you're probably getting some of the negative reaction because your opening post has an accusatory tone to it.

Hi. I'm a games programmer.

Fixing bugs takes time. Some industries do produce error-free code, such as the military. To do this, they take much longer, spec stuff out much more carefully, and employ many more people in testing. Thats a really good thing when lives depend on your software behaving correctly.

Applying this level of quality control to a game requires either much more money or time or probably both. As it is, every game studio I've seen relies to some degree on a bit of unpaid overtime from its staff. Asking for more of this would be kind of rude, so lets rule that option out.

Would you rather:

a) Have each issue take twice as long and pay maybe $45 per month for the privelege of a bug free game?

b) Leave things as they are and put up with the few bugs you have to deal with?

I'd choose b) myself.

And if you're asking people to cross every t and do every i, can you at least talk in proper sentences with capitals and punctuation?

Is the "Don't" from personal experience, Daemodand?
I do realise I'm flying in the face of received wisdom here, and my inner little sceptic is saying "don't" too, but I'm resisting the urge to listen.

I think I'll give it a go. Combat Jumping with a BotZ set will cover Immobilise and Knockback for really irritating stuff like earthquake patches.

If this would work for any melee character, its a soft-capped Stalker. If it doesn't work, well, I've got vet respecs coming out of my ears.

Sonic Blast.

Sonic Blast is generally the best secondary to use with just about anything. It has good controls, the AoE damage is a bit weak but not terrible, but the -20% Res per blast really adds up on a Defender. It provides more -Res than any Defender primary. You could say its so good its broken. This feature alone makes the set the king of Defender blast sets.

FF particularly benefits, because it doesn't have any means of boosting damage on its own, so FF/Sonic makes a very nice pairing.

(They also look kind of similar if you ask me, both being colourless and a bit telekinetic in appearance, but thats just my opinion.)

You normally have a 50% chance of being hit, subject to some modifiers.
A Force Fielder can give everyone else on the team 45% Defence just using SO enhancements and Manouvers from Leadership, thus dropping this chance to 5%, subject to the same modifiers. You can be doing this at level 22.

So, having a single FF-er on a team full of squishies (Blasters, Controllers and Defenders) or Resistance based melee-ers will mean they take only 10% of the incoming damage they would otherwise.

If the enemy does 100 damage per hit, you still take 100 damage per hit, but you get hit ten times less often with the Force Fielder around, so the overall incoming damage is 10% less than what it was.

If you replace the FF-er with a Sonic Resonance Defender, a team will be taking 56% less damage, ie 44% will get through.

So yes, Force Fields protect the team much much better than Sonics do. But sonic also add a big chunk of Res debuff to the enemy, making you defeat them faster.

FF is the ultimate Defence set. Sonic is a balanced Defence-Offence set.

I've found mine to be... challenging, now at level 30.

I'm also playing a Thugs/Pain MM and the difference is night and day.

I guess Ninja/Poison picks up a bit with Noxious Gas, which looks like an incredibly useful power, but still won't improve your bread and butter per-spawn performance.

My FF/Sonic Defender had 38% vs Melee and 45% vs Ranged, AoE and Psi, and could take alpha strikes with the best of them, barring enemies with harsh +To hit buffs or Def Debuffs.
It wasn't traditional tanking, in that I didn't draw aggro from teammates, but made them as invulnerable as me instead. Sometimes teams got it, sometimes they didnt, but I often lead the charge and always survived, even against +5s.

My Kin/Elec Defender couldn't tank, and loved nothing better than a Tanker or Scrapper to take the hits for me.

My Sonic/Energy couldn't tank particularly well, but pretty much any teammate of mine could, so I never needed to.

I made a TA/A duo, and found myself on a squishy team one time. I reasoned that dual Manouvers and Flash Arrow, compounded with Fortitude on both of me would allow me to tank. I was wrong (partly because the Empath didn't keep up the Fort, partly because Freakshow dont keep any To Hit debuffs when they rez), and it was a very humiliating experience in trying to prove how cool Defenders can be.

My Empathy/Energy duo could withstand anything due to insane +Regen, high Def and double Healing Aura, and would often tank when I ran on a team. Once again, all my teammates would be incredibly tough as well.

Storm/Ice and Dark/Rad would both tank reasonably well. I managed to duo groups of level 54 Rikti with them in the RWZ come to think of it, so they were survivable if not really tanking since they split the aggro.

So that's what?

5 who could, 4 who couldn't.

Having said all that, my Tankers Tank better. It's good to think both inside and outside the box.

Cool. That's encouraging to know. So what happened in the 30's?

I've been having a look here at the enemies I'd be facing:
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Villain_Merit_Rewards

Carnies get introduced, but if I remember correctly, the Illusionists don't appear until the 40s?
Rikti start to appear from 30 onwards.

I can see the big problem with my plan being Mind Control/Illusion Control powers which dont have a position - I'd be a sitting duck for any Rikti Mentallist or Carnie Illusionist unless I got them first.

Hmmm.... I can practice this with my current Stalker I guess. See how it feels.

I've been eye-ing up a potential MA/SR build. I'd ideally like to fit in Fitness and Fighting, and it all gets a bit tight on powers.

A wierd thought occurred to me - how well would a Stalker function without mez protection? I'm guessing that the answer is "badly" so the question really is "how badly?"

On my current stalker (EM/Nin) I postponed it until the mid 20s without too much hassle - I think the first time I havent picked mez protection as soon as its available. I know that the amount of mez I face will only increase at higher levels having played other Villains into the 40s, so surviving the 16-24 range without mez protection isnt too big a deal.

I wouldn't dream of doing this on any other melee character, but if I'm hidden, and always get in the first strike on any potential mezzers, and have close to capped Defence, and carry break frees... this almost feels like it could work in PvE for solo or small teams.

Has anyone ever tried this?

Energy/Energy sounds like a very good choice for a solo blaster.

Your attacks do knockback for free providing very good damage mitigation, and you have a few reliable hard mezzes in your secondary for dealing with annoying mobs like mezzers or Tsoo Sorcerors.

I made one and got him to 50. He was my damage-per-second AoE blaster - 3 damage cones (Howl, Shockwave and Psychic Scream) that could practically be spammed back to back once I'd got some decent recharge slotted in them. I went the PFF-Aid Self route later on, but adding Static Discharge from the Electrical secondary would probbaly close that attack chain completely by the mid 40s, and look completely awesome.

He was a bit short of burst damage compared to other blasters (eg Energy secondary) but good at handling large crowds of lower cons. There are enough tricks such as Sirens Song and Drain Psyche to give you good survivability for a Blaster.

Personally, I'd roll Sonic/Sonic.

It's a lot less powerful, but its very friendly towards an "offender" style of play in that you only need to play attention to your team every 4 minutes to rebubble them.

Radiation Emission is signing up for a career of watching the enemy who you've set your toggles on, and micro-managing the debuff situation all the time to make sure your team is safe. Its a really powerful set, but I'm not a fan of it on Defenders. I'v eplayed it on Controllers who can stop the anchor running off.

That's my personal preference for what I'd play. Its also my preference for who I'd rather team with. I'm always happy to see a Sonic Defender rock up when I'm teaming.

Yeah, its not like anyone would notice the difference between 56% and 68% in gameplay. You're still turning suishies into Scrappers, Scrappers into Tanks, and Tanks into Adamantium-plated gods.
Having a Sonic Defender on the team makes everyone incredibly tough, although you'll really notice when the psychic damage comes in, say fighting a Lost boss.

One other point worth making about Sonic Resonance is that its a bit of an End pig. You get Disruption Field and Sonic Dispersion pretty early, before Stamina. Both are incredibly useful powers and should be run on a team, but they'll leave you with little endurance for actual blasting. Even so, those two powers and the ally shields mean you're more than pulling your weight on a team in Steel Canyon.

A Sonic Defender adds about 56% Resistance to the team, not 68%.

15% from Sonic Dispersion, 20% from the ally shields is 35% base total. Mutliply by 1.6 for your enhancements and you get 56%.

It still stacks really well for characters who already have resistance, like Fire_Minded says.

I'd grab Sonic Barrier first.
Sonic Siphon doesn't do a whole heap solo I found - against anything less than a boss it means you defeat the targetted enemy with 1 less attack, but you had to spend animation time and end to fire it off, so... you kind of break even for much of typical PvE gameplay. Against AVs and EBs its well worth it though.

Rad/Sonic is a really effective and popular choice, and great for solo and team play.
Sonic/Rad is very weak solo because Rad Blast offers very little in the way of damage mitigation.

Sonic Blast is the best secondary numerically, especially solo, because all the -Res really adds up to bring your damage up to par. It also provides a good deal of safety through the quick recharging mass sleep of Siren's Song.

Sonic Resonance is in my opinion the worse solo primary - you have 5 powers that require an ally, and of the remaining four three are quite situational. Some would argue Empathy is worse, thats a point for debate I guess.

Solo-ing a Sonic/Sonic is doable, because Sonic Blast is that good, but its going to be one of the poorer Defender combos for solo work even so.

Sonic Resonance is a great set for assisting a team with minimal attention on your part - fire up Sonic Dispersion and Disruption Field, ring the team every four minutes and blast in between, with the occasional Sonic Siphon or Liquefy for hard targets or big fights. Betwee Howl and Disruption you're stacking 50% -Res on everything, and an extra 50%+ on selected targets using Sonic Siphon and your blasts. Teams will love you for this.

A very good idea.
Per-character costume unlocks always seemed counter-intuitive to me.

Costume unlocks (eg the Roman gear) provide two rewards:
- a cool costume piece that maybe fits a beloved character concept - say a time displaced Amazon.
- bragging rights, "Hey, I completed the ITF!"

For bragging rights it doesn't really matter that its per character. The same player completed the ITF.
For the actual costume piece per-character unlocks really hurt. Playing another character to unlock the costume piece account-wide for the character who requires the piece is good long term startegy to keep people playing multiple characters.

Sonic Resonance causes very little redraw. You can run the set by toggling on Dispersion and Disruption Field, and ringing everyone every 4 minutes. So there's no per-spawn activity that causes redraw. Sonic Siphon will cause redraw, but you wont compromise your performance greatly by not using it, except against really hard targets like EBs and AVs.

Depending on your concept you can probably explain this as some kind of hi-tech force field.

I played AR/Traps to the 40s and really enjoyed it, the redraw wasn't a big factor for me.

I've never really got Poison.

I'm playing a Ninja/Poison MM just now and it seems a bit underpowered - mostly single target debuffs that dont really outshine many of the group debuffs found in other sets. On a Mastermind at least you have some safety from your primary and Bodyguard mode, on a Corrupter, you'd have very little to keep you (or your team) safe.

I'd like to see it get proliferated- I think all sets should, but I think it could do with a bit of a boost first.

I believe that Electrical Blast needs looking at, but not for its damage.

The secondary effect of End Drain is implemented in a very odd manner that makes it quite ineffectual except when paired with a handful of other powersets or on superteams.

Its sold as a lower-damage/high-control set, but falls short on the high control part.

Empathy's brilliant on small teams. It can be kind of annoying to play though since it requires constantly watching for powers to refresh to play well.

After 4 or 5 years of tweaking and balancing there are no powersets that are really badly inferior to all others in all circumstances. All powersets can be played badly or well.

If you're looking for a support character, I'd recommend a Controller. Defenders are more hybrid support and offence.

Illusion Control is a popular choice for pure support - you can use Superior Invisibility to avoid almost all aggro and then assist the team with control and whatever buff or debuff set you use.

Oh yeah, thats the other benefit of Gravity as a solo-ist - no one complains about Wormhole.