Mack008

Thanks for the advice, but no joy.

Don't know what the problem is.

OK, I just returned after seven months off from CoH, and I have a new computer (running Windows 7). The problem is that a bunch of my old keybinds don't appear to work.

For example, my target-nearest keybind:
/bind ` "target_enemy_near"

Produces nothing. I tried using the menu option to set it, but it wouldn't do it either. It's almost like the game isn't recognizing that key.

I've got a similar problem with using the ] key, which I use to send a message to a channel. Don't know why it won't work either. Weird part is that all of my other keybinds appear to be fine.

Any help would be appreciated.

I wouldn't add damage to it unless you've reached the upper 40's and have slotted all your other powers first.

Also keep in mind that Char is damage over time. It's only 4.2 seconds, but given how little damage it deals to start with, there's bound to be somewhere else for you to put the slots that will have a bigger impact for you.

Ice / Mental might be nice. The extra AoE from /Mental helps compensate for Ice's lack.
Hmmm....

Well, it's definately not the toughest set. Most of the powers are resistence based, very little defense available. The good news is that you have a powerful heal available, but you'll need to hit a couple of targets to be effective.

I grabbed Death Shround early, and regretted it. It will need SO's and a handful of slots before it becomes worthwhile. The Endurance cost just isn't worth it otherwise. Once slotted, it becomes a nice extra attack but don't expect it to wipe out a mob.

I highly recommend getting Oppressive Gloom as soon as it's available. For me it was a game-changer as it stuns all the minions around you thereby mitigating a lot of damage.

So what's the overall best Hero-side flashback arc for merits?

I've never tried this, but see if you can add an ambush at the same time he escapes. It may give the window of opportunity he needs.

So learned a new AR/Dev trick... or at least it's new to me.

While toe-bombing a group with Trip Mine, it struck me that the Mine wasn't going to be quite powerful enough to kill off all the minions. So I queued up M30 Grenade on the target closest to me. Trip Mine's slight delay before detonating was just long enough to pull out the AR and perform the To-Hit calculation on M30 Grenade. The result is that even as targets were flying away from Trip Mine's knockback, they were also getting hit from M30 as if there was no knockback. Combining the two powers proved to just enough damage to wipe out all the minions.

So, start Trip Mine and queue up M30 while you're still in the middle of the bad guys.

Cheers,
Mack

I've got an old 50 AR/Dev that I may respec, but here's my thoughts:
-- M-30 is a decent AoE, with a nice 80 foot range. Save it for the later part of a battle so if you knock something away it's probably dead anyway. It's also good to use when you find yourself suddenly surrounded by bad guys--shoot it at the closest and watch them fly away from you. (50% chance of 3.3 KB)
-- Beanbag... to be honest I never tried it, but I don't doubt it's utility.
-- Buckshot is another solid choice. The knockback is only 50% chance of 1.2 Magnitude, so it's manageable. And as a cone it matches up nicely with Flamethrower and Full Auto.
-- Body Armor is straightforward, just don't put too many slots into it. If I remember correctly you can put a -KB IO in it.
-- Consider getting the Cryo Freeze Ray instead of Surveillence. I use it in the same capacity that most use Beanbag: You can take a Lt out of the fight until you're ready to deal with him. It also pairs well with Ignite (though that may make your head hurt when you freeze a target then light it on fire).
-- LRM... I have a love/hate relationship with this one. It's cool, and you blow stuff up from a long range, but I don't find it useful on teams. After reading up on Surveillence, you'll probably get more use out of Surv than LRM.

And I'll endorse the idea of combining Cloaking Device with a Stealth IO (I put one in Combat Jumping). Makes planting those Trip Mines a breeze.

Ahh, that makes sense with what I was seeing. Thanks.

I noticed something odd with the damage bonus from Against All Odds in the Shield set. When fighting a single opponent, I'm getting a 15% bonus with occasional spikes to 21%. I see similar spikes when fighting multiple opponents as well.

Is anyone else seeing this odd spike?

[ QUOTE ]
The experts of the set know to take and use ALL the powers and know how to use them to the greatest effect. The newbies know to take the "big three" and don't know what else to do. The "mediocre" players gets nothing more from the set than a newbie does. All other primaries have more of a "gradual scale" to their "usefulness/easiness to learn". FF doesn't, you either know it all or you know nothing, there is really little ground in the middle for those that want to slowly step into the set. It's not a learning curve, it's a learning CLIFF.

[/ QUOTE ]

Quoted for containing more truth than most libraries.

[ QUOTE ]
I'd be more than happy to leave this thread if we can get a red name to guarentee none of the changes that may come from this thread will ever see the light of day outside of the Defender AT.

I don't need +Pie on my Mind/FF and Bots/FF toons. I'm not asking for +Pie. I'm frankly more worried about getting nerfed by someone's great idea for an "improvement".

[/ QUOTE ]

So you don't even care about FF Defenders?

Great, thanks for the help.

Why does everyone assume that a change to the FF Defender Primary automatically means a change to the FF Controller Secondary?

They can be changed independently.

Mack's unsolicited recommended changes (now cottage free!):

[u]Detential Field[u]: Make a Toggle, with a max time, and a hefty Endurance cost.

[u]Repulsion Bomb[u]: Reduce the Knockback, increase the chance to Stun from 40% to 80%.

[u]Force Bubble[u]: Reduce the magnitude of the Repel, but add a -Slow component to compensate.

Pretty sure all of these were previously mentioned by various folks, but felt they were worth repeating.

[ QUOTE ]
The only "censoring" I've tried to do is suggesting we stop talking about the secondaries. We've all had our say, let's move on.

[/ QUOTE ]

Great, you agree with the original premise of this topic. The rest of us agreed on that 400 posts ago when it started.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Hmm... Not a FF Def, and not a FF Def. Irrelevant.


[/ QUOTE ]
Not at all irrelevant. Unless you just feel an overpowering need to play a Defender, why would you play a Defender FF when the other ATs work better with FF?

[/ QUOTE ]

So the answer to playing a FF Defender is to... not play a FF Defender?

Nice.

[ QUOTE ]
*sigh* If Knockback reduces the effectiveness of your secondaries, and other primaries don't cause that Knockback, FF will reduce the effect of your secondaries. It's that simple.

[/ QUOTE ]
Excellent! You finally agree that the FF Primary needs to be addressed and not all the Def Secondaries!

[ QUOTE ]
If you play a Bots/FF, the bots will still hit despite Knockback. If you play a Mind/FF, Terrify will still hit with Knockback.

[/ QUOTE ]
Hmm... Not a FF Def, and not a FF Def. Irrelevant.

[ QUOTE ]
If you play a Rad Defender, there is no Knockback to hurt your secondaries. Ditto with Kin. And Dark. If you play Storm, Storm works with Knockback.

The odd man out is the FF Defender.

[/ QUOTE ]
Exactly. Adjust the FF Primary, not all Defender Secondaries.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Changing the secondaries does nothing to address the discrepancies between FF and the other primaries.

[/ QUOTE ]
This simply isn't true. The only other Defender primary that knocks things around like FF is Storm and Storm provides extra damage powers that aren't hurt by the Knockback. You're not left with killing things for 50 levels using only single target blasts with Storm.

FF doesn't provide that kind of compensation for making your secondary almost useless. And it _can't_ provide it unless the powerset was almost completely reworked to make it a clone of Storm.

[/ QUOTE ]

Dude, changing the secondaries has zero effect on the relationship between the primaries. Nada, zilch, zero. If XYZ primary was better than FF, then it will remain better regardless of changes to the secondaries.

Or mathematically:
If XYZ > FF
Then XYZ + 1 > FF + 1

[ QUOTE ]
Who's going to slog their way through 37 levels of FF defending to magically have their problems solved by keeping 15% of their endurance when they're nuke-ing?

Changing the secondary won't make FF any more attractive to prospective defenders - it'll mean more Rads and Kins.

[/ QUOTE ]

Exactly. Changing the secondaries does nothing to address the discrepancies between FF and the other primaries. If you have more Rads & Kins now, you'll still have more of them afterwards.

Adjusting FF itself is the only way to address the problem. The secondaries are irrelevant.

[ QUOTE ]
The argument for not changing FF powers comes from the fact they work so well.

[/ QUOTE ]

Not for Defenders. If they did, we wouldn't have a 18 page thread.

Again, you're thinking of other AT's, not Defenders.

[ QUOTE ]
Again, Force Fields works great in every AT except Defenders. It's probably not short comings in FF that are the reason for that.

[/ QUOTE ]

And you still don't get it, or simply refuse to. The only person speaking about other archtypes is you. The only person talking about Defender secondaries is you.

The rest of us are discussing the Defender Primary of Force Fields. If you don't think it needs to be changed, then simply say so and move on.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
1) Changing the Defender Secondaries does nothing to address the Force Field Primary. While FF characters would benefit, so would every other Defender Primary which does not solve the subject of this discussion.

[/ QUOTE ]
I understand where you're coming from with this, but I disagree.

If I herd with my Mind/FF and then "nuke" them with Mass Confusion, I'm not risking life and limb. Ditto for herding with a Bots/FF.

But if I herd with a FF Defender and nuke them, it's very close to a death sentance. Defender nukes don't kill anything _and_ leave you drained of Endurance. You're a sitting duck that's just herded several groups of baddies to your location.

Popping blues isn't really a fix for that because it's not something you can do over and over. You run out of blues.

Ditto with things like the "huge scatter" of Repulsion Bomb. That scatter is barely noticable to Controllers and Masterminds. It stands out like a sore thumb to Defenders because of how their cones behave.

[/ QUOTE ]

You missed my point. Boosting ALL Defender Secondaries is a boost to ALL Defenders, not just Force Field Defenders. The performance discrepencies between the FF Primary and the other Defender Primaries would be unchanged. Thus it doesn't address the subject of this thread which is [u]improving the FF Primary[u].

If you wish to discuss buffing all the Defender Secondaries, that's cool. But start a thread for that instead of polluting this one.

OK, Mack's opinion here.

1) Changing the Defender Secondaries does nothing to address the Force Field Primary. While FF characters would benefit, so would every other Defender Primary which does not solve the subject of this discussion.

2) In my mind (which knows nothing about how the game is coded) adding a few additional effects to the underperforming FF powers would be the most straightforward way of strengthing them without overpowering them either. Ideas like adding a -Slow component to Force Bubble, or increasing the Stun effect of others, are reasonable, should be easy to implement, and would be difficult to abuse.

Personally, I only want to see some minor adjustments for the simple reason that they are much more likely to occur.