PBAtty

I also find it's a pain when I'm playing my bubbler and I've got to knock a boss back into the mob because a scrapper is off beating up on a lowly minion while the squishies are getting mauled by stray bosses.

Exactly! I just started playing again a couple of weeks ago and the last time I had played was pre-Issue 15. My friend came back to play for free activation weekend and is now thinking about getting back into the game and he's been gone for almost 2 years. They didn't even have AE when he last played.

Asking an existing customer base, particularly long-time customers, isn't usually very helpful for purposes of marketing to new or former customers. Some of you are thinking like CoH vets, not like someone who hasn't played in a long time. Frankly, I think the timing was perfect. Someone who has been away from the game isn't going to have a clue about Issue 17 or what's involved in it or probably even Going Rogue. They wouldn't come back for 4 days "just" for Issue 17 anyway. Get them back to the game for 4 days with their free re-activation and get them involved again and exposed to info about upcoming features and releases. That's how you entice them to stick around beyond the 4 days. Plus, they gave early access to DP because they knew they'd lock in a certain amount of pre-orders for Going Rogue with people wanting to take advantage of playing DP toons for double XP weekend and given the number of all-DP teams I ended up on, I'd say that worked for them pretty well.

Ok, thanks, that's what I thought too....maybe it's just animation lag or I fired it off too late or something so that I'm not hitting the dead enemy in time for the extraction.

Depends on the make-up of the team, I guess. I play mostly on PUGs and seems like there's always a kin on the team so everyone has SB most of the time anyway which reduces the benefit of giving AB to someone for recharge. Always seem to have at least one teammate with a build that results in a lot of end drain and with people running all over like they are on crack at the higher levels, can't hit everyone with the RAs, so I may keep it a teammate like that....who usually is a blaster or controller anyway.

I misspoke above. I meant perma AB on one teammate. But with SB (and like I said, almost always seem to have a kin on the higher level PUGs), you can get recharge on AB way down combined with Hasten and IO set bonuses...somewhere around 60 seconds recharge....so I will often rotate AB between 2 teammates which isn't perma, but they each get AB for 3/4 of the time on the mission, which isn't bad at all.

Except that, while empathy has heals in its primary set, the primary set is really more about buffs than heals. More often than not, I've seem emp defenders give the tank Fort at the start of a mission and never use Fort again or give it to anyone else or fire off their RAs while everyone is standing inside the mission door and never use them again. How about half the team getting mezzed to death and the emp defender with CM never uses it once? AB? Almost never used by emp defenders I've come across. If you're going to take empathy, take the buffing powers and not use them, then you're doing a disservice to your teammates. That would be like a blaster who doesn't use AOEs or a scrapper who doesn't attack anything except minions....a tank who sits back and doesn't take any aggro...a controller who doesn't use any holds or crowd control. If you're just soloing, then you don't need most of those buffs except the RAs but since the OP is talking about the heals, then I'm assuming we're talking about teaming.

On my emp, I am able to keep Fort on 3 people, AB on 2 people and CM as needed. With Hasten, some recharge bonuses from IO sets, this is not hard to do at all...even easier when you get SB from a teammate. At the higher levels, put Fort on the squishies not the tanks. Blasters are a great use of Fort because they have lower defense than most and they deal high damage so you're maximizing the benefit of Fort. Keep an eye on the stamina and health of your teammates and keep AB on the 2 who seem to have the most regen and end problems. There's always someone with a build that is an end hog or who hasn't slotted enhancements for many of their powers and they always seem to have end problems. Your RAs will be up enough to help with regen and end for everyone else. Like someone else mentioned, fire them off when a fight starts and the team is all nearby. Don't fire them off when everyone is standing around waiting for a mission to start. CM is more situational. If you've got an enemy that likes to mez a lot, then you'll need it more during those missions. Don't bother with tanks and scrappers because they've got enough mez protection. Tell people to type "zzz" if they get mezzed so you can easily spot them. If you notice squishies getting mezzed a lot during a mission, then keep CM on them. With it's quick recharge it's easy to perma-CM someone during a mission.

If you want to be primarily a support emp defender on teams and you follow those basics, then you'll have people falling all over themselves to get you onto their team. By the way, my emp/archery defender uses all sorts of attacks while doing the above things. You absolutely can utilize the buffs and heals of the primary to their fullest advantage AND do plenty of attacking.

Boy, that's a pretty romanticized view of the pre-AE days. I took a long break from CoH before AE and I had three lvl 50's at the time. It took some effort to find missions from lvl 40 to 50 because so many people out there were simply running farms. Can't even count how many invites were sent my way because someone wanted to me to sidekick their lower level friend or alt to get them onto a farm. In PI, the broadcast was full of chatter from people looking for someone to help fill up their farm or pay them influence in exchange for door-sitting on their farm. PL madness had ensued long before AE. Even at lvl 30 to 40, most people just wanted to run Freakshow and Council radio missions over and over again in Brickstown. Heaven forbid we make things challenging and mix in some CoT or Arachnos. While your particular 50 toon may have taken a lot of hard work, there have been plenty of pre-AE 50s out there that came from very little work.

Sounds like you may have built the EATs up into some sort of badge of honor in your mind, but most people see an EAT running around and think "meh". I don't see this as a big deal and doesn't make me feel any less "warm and fuzzy" about my three lvl 50 toons...they are still my all-time favorites out of all of my alts. I've got two Warshades that I really like playing and won't make me enjoy them any less either. While the EATs can be a little more complicated to play and to effectively build, I've seen plenty of people who didn't have a clue how to play the other ATs too. A good player will learn to play any AT well. A bad player will play any AT poorly. I don't see it having any negative effect on gameplay but it might make teams a little more interesting because you should see more EATs mixed in...at least for awhile.