This is my first time spending any substantial amount of time on the test server. I was so curious about Defiance (and, I'll be honest, a bit skeptical) that I just felt I had to try it out. I'm not a big number-cruncher--or at least, while I can be, when it comes to a game I just prefer not to do it. So this report will be a bit impressionistic, but I hope still helpful.
The character I was playing was a level 32 Energy/Energy blaster. I decided to try this out first in an outdoor mission of my level, set on Heroic. As a matter of fact, it was the War Wall Defender mission, since I happened to have that one, so it was against Rikti, generally white minions and yellow lieutenants in small groups. I had two goals. First, to try to see Defiance in action at each boost level. Keeping the threat level fairly low would, I thought, give me more control over the damage I took than something higher. And, second, I wanted to compare a normal mission with Defiance to one without. While on live I believe I did War Wall with a team, I've soloed several missions just like it on Heroic, so I'd be able to see how it compared.
Also, the train station entrance is conveniently near the hospital. Unfortunately, that proved to be important.
One overall comment to start out with: it's impossible for me to tell how much of the trouble I was having with using Defiance was due to the lag on the updating of the status bars. There were a couple of times when, according to the info on my health and Defiance meters, I should have gotten a boost, but didn't. My assumption is that my health had already regenerated enough at that time to take me out of Defiance range, but that it had not yet registered on the bars. Would my testing have gone better without that lag? I don't know. I tend to doubt it, but I just don't really know.
Second overall comment: my health bar had to be at a truly scary level (yellow, verging on orange!) before Defiance started to kick in. After playing a blaster for 33 levels (and some of them debt-filled levels, since this is my first character and I'm still learning), a yellow health bar is enough to trigger an almost instinctive response to run or seek a heal. It was very hard for me to suppress that response so that I could experiment with different damage levels. I realize that this doesn't prove anything other than that trying to use Defiance as suggested would necessitate a huge change in my playing style, but still, there it is.
One more overall comment I just remembered: the scaling of the Defiance bar was really confusing to me. .0.1, 0.3--what do those numbers actually mean?
Now, on to the mission. It was fairly easy (once I got over that instinctive thing) to get Defiance into the 0.1-level boost range. After a bit of practice, I found that I could even keep it there for a fairly long period of time, say several minutes. I did notice a damage boost--however, it wasn't enough of a boost to decide a fight, or even shorten it. What I mean here is that, for example, if I could have defeated a mob with two shots without Defiance, it still generally took two shots with Defiance. The difference would be that the sliver of health he had left after the first shot would be smaller with Defiance. Unfortunately, that wouldn't stop him from being able to do just as much damage, so it didn't help much.
Another thing is that it was very difficult to do this--sustain the affect, I mean--if I was facing more than one guy, or two at most. The reason is that, with one, there would be a reasonable amount of time between taking hits for me to evaluate how damaged I was and do something about it, if necessary, before I could be defeated. But if there was more than one, there was a pretty good chance that they'd hit me simultaneously, or close enough to it not to matter. In that case, I'd go straight from my 0.1-level boost to being dead.
I never was able to sustain any other Defiance level for long enough to really evaluate it. I did get to see a bit of the 0.3 and 0.5 levels--but only briefly. I was able to see that the 0.3 level boost really was helpful, or could have been. With that boost, I was able to one-shot a guy with an attack that wouldn't normally be able to do it. Of course, immediately afterwards, his buddy came up and whacked me over the head, and I died.
And that's the problem. The next step after that was death. At 0.3 Defiance-boost health level, it actually only took one hit from one of these guys to kill me--and remember, we're talking about white-con minions.
I went on a second time, the next day, to check this again: was I imagining things here? But the second time I did confirm that yes, when I was in the 0.3 level Defiance range, an even-level Rikti Infantry could indeed kill me with one hit. An even-level Headman could take me from 0.1 to death in one hit. And finally, a slap from a Rikti monkey took me from 0.5 Defiance level to death. Really. A monkey-slap.
Of course, that is all assuming that the numbers I was getting from my Health and Defiance bars were accurately reflecting the situation, which I'm not at all sure of. You really, really need to fix that, and then have people test again to see if it made a difference.
Now, all of this was solo--I haven't tried it in a team situation. With what I've seen, I've tried to come up with what sort of team makeup might make this feasible to use. I could come up with one or two possibilities: if another player was buffing my damage resistance and/or debuffing the mobs' damage, then I'd be willing to give it a try. That could potentially help with the one-shot-away-from-death problem. Buffs to my defense or debuffs to mobs' accuracy? Probably not enough--still too big a chance of taking that one hit. Maybe, if I was with a tanker or controller that I absolutely trusted to keep everything off me....but then would Defiance ever have a chance to come into play at all?
A word about the avoiding being healed idea. I could very quickly go from a low level of Defiance buff to dead so quickly that I never even had time to react. Can I really expect a Defender to have those kind of reflexes? On top of everything else they're trying to do in the middle of a battle? It doesn't seem fair to even ask them to try. Same goes for the idea of going in and taking damage before the tank takes the aggro from me: that tank would have such a narrow window of opportunity in which to do this that I just don't think I can realistically expect it.
So, overall opinions. Is Defiance a good power? That really depends on what it's meant for. If it's just meant to give blasters a little extra, fun thing, then it succeeds admirably. It's a neat idea.
If it's meant to give blasters more survivability then......maybe. I think there are situations where that damage boost might make the difference, even if those situations are rather limited.
But if it's really meant to be something that we deliberately make use of, then I have to say, I couldn't make it work for me. I really did try. Certainly it's possible that it's a flaw in my playing that made me unable to do this. But come on, newish or not, I'm not that bad a blaster! The difference in health level between getting the boost and being defeated was just too small, and unless I had lightning-fast reflexes, I don't see what I could have done. Trying to keep it at that line earned me more debt than I've ever seen before.
This reminds me of my initial reaction when hearing about the power: "Well, I'm not sure whether or not it'll really do that much good, but at least it can't hurt anything." But I think I was wrong. It can't hurt anything UNLESS my future teammates get it into their heads that we should try to deliberately use it--like not wanting the defender to heal me, or getting mad at me for using a respite. I am very uneasy, seeing that things like this have actually been suggested by the developer team. If ideas like that really start to gain currency, then it seems to me that Defiance is going to do vastly more harm than good.
My apologies to the originator(s) of the idea. I don't want to belittle your efforts. I just don't see this as workable, at least for me.
.......Wow........
Sorry this was so long!
