Rodion

My main problem with all these proposals is that they do nothing to make the character truly Vigilant: most defenders are easily slept, held or stunned. How can you be called "vigilant" when you're snoozing on the job?

Blasters can attack when mezzed, melee characters get mez protection, Khelds can get mez protection when teamed with controllers. Heck, even FF and Sonic defenders get mez protection for everything except sleep with their big bubbles, and Rad defenders get mez resistance with Accelerate Metabolism. So giving defenders some limited form of inherent mez protection isn't unbalanced.

I don't really care whether this is implemented as a Dominate-like clickie that charges when you use primary powers (so you'd have to choose when to use it tactically), or a permanent break free with a recharge (same logic as above), or a general mez protection or resistance that increases with the number of team mates and/or their hit point levels (much the way it works now), or whatever. You can roll +recharge or +recovery or lowered endurance usage into it as desired for maximum balance and to give FF/Sonic defenders something as well.

But any way you look at it, a power called "Vigilance" that literally lets you fall asleep is one of the biggest misnomers in the game.

Yes, the variance is quite high with bronze rolls because there are so many things that are worthless, and a few things that are worth quite a lot but may take a few days to sell at their true value. If you don't have market slots or time, bronze rolls may not be a fast and reliable income generator.

To get the real answer you'd need to go through the list of bronze rolls you're targeting and figure an expected return for each recipe. Then multiply that by the probability for each one and add them up. That would give you the expected value of a bronze roll. Then do the same thing for salvage.

You also need to consider both the average and median value of each item. The average bronze roll may be worth 1,000,000, but the median is probably 5,000 (the vendor price). The average and median salvage price are pretty close, currently 1-3 million. The value of salvage is pretty stable over short periods, the demand is much higher, and you can pick exactly what salvage you want based on current market conditions.

Really, it depends on when you need the inf. If you need 1 million immediately and you're level 25, and you can generate 540 tickets in 30 minutes, you can basically be guaranteed of getting 1-2 million with salvage. With a bronze roll it's an "investment" with unknown potential.

Over long periods (many rolls) bronze probably outperforms salvage (I've sold many recipes for 10, 20 and 30 million), but in the short term salvage gives better returns. It's like the difference between a CD and a stock.

I usually go for this roll as well, especially when I can use some of the recipes for the character rolling. There are some excellent sets available at this range: Crushing Impact, Thunderstrike, Reactive Armor, Smashing Haymaker, etc.

Many of the uncommon sets tankers and scrappers use to soft-cap defense are in this range, and even if you're not using them for yourself, they can sell for quite a tidy profit. Not everyone cares about purpling out characters because the bonuses for purples are limited to relatively few types, not all of which are useful for many characters (except the vaunted +recharge, of course!).

I'll often buy rare salvage with tickets when I need a particular piece to craft a recipe, especially when all my slots are already filled with bids or items for sale. When you make bronze rolls you get a lot of good stuff, but it doesn't always sell immediately.

Cryptic seems to do a lot more marketing than NCsoft/Paragon Studios. When I was bothering to track CO they had their devs talking to every no-name MMO website on the planet three times a week.

Cryptic really seems to be shoveling their hype out of the back of a truck to anyone who'll listen. NCsoft is more restrained and less hyperbolic.

The other part of the equation is Star Trek Online. I'm guessing that the MMO websites are anticipating that STO will be a big deal, and they're paying close attention to Cryptic in general. And they may just be greasing the wheels at Cryptic so they get similar treatment for STO.

No, the common wisdom on sleeps is wrong. Solo, area sleeps are great. They last a long time and usually recharge quickly, so you can methodically destroy large spawns while they're napping.

Even on teams they can be very useful, especially if you aggro two groups at the wrong time. Heck, you can sleep a big group around a tank and it's as effective as a hold until they wake up. Which can be many seconds, just depending on what's going on. If your team's in trouble, you're probably outnumbered, which means you probably aren't attacking every mob in the spawn, which means the sleep will be the most effective when you really need it.

The other thing about them is that if you sleep mobs when they've aggroed on you, it's more than likely that they will aggro on whomever woke them up instead of continuing to attack you. So they're a great defensive tool for a controller, blaster or defender.

Mez attacks are among the most powerful in the game. A lot of players skip them and opt only for damage attacks. This is a mistake. Once you get a damaging attack chain to recharge fast enough, you don't need more attacks. You need a variety of effects to use when necessary.

Those mez attacks come in very handy when you have to deal with things like Sappers. Also, two of the same kind of attack can also mez a boss immediately. For example, an MA scrapper's Cobra Strike and an /Energy Tanker's Stun can Stun a Dark Ring Mistress in one shot from the scrapper and the tanker. When players combine their powers in this way tough groups like Carnies suddenly become a whole lot easier.

One assumes that you are ejected from your villain SG when you become a hero, or at least when you join a hero SG. The database structure will dictate what's possible: if the character has the database ID for the SG stored in the character record, then it's impossible to be in multiple SGs. If there's a third relational table that links the character ID to the SG ID, then it's possible to be in multiple SGs if the database rules allow it.

One also assumes that any bids or items you have for sale on the black market will either be refunded or lost. Although I guess there's no real reason why bids and items couldn't just stay on the villain market until the day you returned.

These are all policies the devs will have to work out.

I concur with your assessments on Mutation, Fallout, and Choking Cloud. But I always take Radiant Aura. It lets you keep other inspirations in your tray, and is useful for healing the rest of the team, which makes it much more justifiable to avoid Mutation and Fallout. I usually slot Doctored Wounds in it as well, which is good for 5% recharge (more recharge is always welcome).

EM Pulse is a great hold: 28 seconds base duration. Ice's Glacier is 15 seconds. Glacier is also a PBAoE hold, which means you've got to run into melee range. Which is fine if you're an in-their-face kind of controller, but if you're a ranged controller Glacier is suboptimal. If this were Earth/Rad or Grav/Rad with a ranged targeted AoE hold I'd be more willing to give up EM Pulse. The Recovery debuff is definitely noticeable, especially when you're running the RI and EF. But it's manageable.

If you play on teams that kill off members all the time you might consider Fallout. But when I play with my SG, which I do most of the time, characters very rarely die. Wasting a power selection on something I'd use once every 20 playing sessions just isn't worth it. Which is the same reason I skip Mutation. All the other powers will see much more use.

Another thing to consider is the Day Job accolade power you get for the University and the Hospital. It lets you rez team mates. Just hang around those places for 21 days each, and you get the accolade. Hang around for more days to get charges on the rez (I've got 15 on one character, not sure what the max is). It is interruptible, so not quite as convenient as Mutation or Resurrection, and doesn't have any kind of buffing or debt protection, but it gets the job done and requires no power slots.

I have this accolade on my Ill/Emp and Fire/Rad controllers instead of the rezzes out of the secondaries. Most of the time I'd need to use it the players combine insps and rez themselves before I can get over there.

The Dark Miasma rez is a great offensive weapon. Its regen debuff is actually its most powerful feature. It's also a stun, a slow and a recharge debuff. It's invaluable for taking down AVs. The rez is actually its least useful feature, and it's a pretty good one because it rezzes multiple characters.

This is not workable because people often don't play for significant periods of time. Anyone who didn't log in during that period would lose their items. People leave the game for months and expect their items to still be there. At this point, deleting items on the market is no more acceptable than deleting recipes or salvage from their characters.

Originally there was a 60 day limit on items left on the market, but that was removed a couple of issues ago. The market is now essentially another personal bank where you can store a lot more stuff (especially multiple items of the same type, such as salvage).

It really depends on what kind of damage the alpha is doing, and whether Rise to the Challenge is debuffing the attackers' accuracy. WP tanks are vulnerable to ranged energy attacks, especially if your defense is debuffed. A lot of attacks debuff your defense (swords, bullets, radiation, etc.), so you really want to make sure that there aren't any baddies standing back debuffing your defense.

In my experience WP tanks are pretty robust when they're surrounded by a lot of mobs. But I have to admit that I'm really leery of tanking for a pickup teams against certain types of attacks. Many tanks have poor defenses against certain damage types, and on a large team that has questionable buffs it can be a real meatgrinder.

I recently ran a level 41 Fire/Ice tank against +3 carnies with no buffs. The team leader wanted to charge into every mob. The team literally did not buff me at all. Or anyone else on the team, for that matter -- the lone defender later said she was falling asleep. I went down twice, then went to Ouroboros and filled my tray with purples. Then I took charge and resorted to the tried and true corner pull method and quickly finished the mission with no further deaths.

When your AT and your team can't help you handle the damage, you have to resort to divide and conquer tactics and inspirations. It's never fun when that happens, but most tanks can't handle the broad spectrum of damage types until late in their careers. And, sadly, some tankers can't handle certain damage types without outside help. (Elusive Mind is a great thing for Fire Tankers to get: be sure to go for it the next time the Rikti invade!)

Comparing your level 50 WP scrapper to a level 22 tank is unfair. The tank will be much more survivable at level 50 than your scrapper if you slot it out comparably, never fear.

Single-target blasters do almost as much damage as scrappers, considering they usually have both Build Up and Accuracy. Most have some kind of mitigation or extra effect (such as -dmg resist, knockback, -defense, etc.), making them contribute to damage output in other ways. Single-target blasters are more likely to have the control-type powers (holds, stuns, sleeps, etc.).

So in terms of team safety and total damage output single-target blasters may be marginally preferable to scrappers. After all, an ice blaster can continuously lock down most bosses in 3.5 seconds, and an Electrical/Electrical blaster can do it in 3.17 seconds, which is faster than most controllers.

On the other hand, the basic question isn't one that I'd think to pose. The real question is whether the character is effective: is it competently built and competently played?

After all, if the mega-AoE blaster is jumping the gun and dying so often that you have to wait around for them to come back from the hospital your DPS is going to much lower than if your single-target blaster is an effective controller and doing the same damage as a scrapper.

If only English had parenthesization: to be more accurate, I should have said that FF/Dark Blast "provides no defense debuffs or resistance debuffs to the enemies." I assumed that since I was speaking of force multipliers the parentheses were obvious from context.

Obviously, FF provides defense to the team, but it doesn't act as a force multiplier for attacking the enemies the way that every other defender primaries and some defender secondaries do (i.e., increasing your damage or chance to hit). Also, since any defender can take the Leadership pool, its presence on a character says nothing about the qualities of the primary and secondary powersets.

Perhaps more relevant to this discussion is the currency of your experience with these powersets. Things are very much different now than they were in the past. If you provided 306% defense with your Dispersion Bubble and Maneuvers, I'm not sure how anything could have possibly hit you when you threw out a blast. But I have to admit I don't remember how defense worked back then.

What you can't do as a defender when playing on a large team is attack a large group first, or do anything that attracts aggro to you alone unless you have some kind of mitigation. You have to time your attacks properly while aggro is focused on the tanker, or other members of the team. So that means using area effect attacks is generally a bad idea for defenders, unless you have that mitigation (the knockdown in Freezing Rain, for example) or someone else is a bigger aggro magnet.

I started playing around I3 or so, and played defenders all the time, starting with Storm/Electrical and Empathy/Psychic Blast. I soloed them frequently the whole five years (it took two years to reach 50 on one, and four on the other). Though Empathy is kind of slow to solo, it's certainly possible. I can easily solo +1/x4 spawns with the Storm defender, and that's not a particularly spectacularly tricked out build (more is not harder, just time consuming).

Nope. I just got two BAB gloves for the first two pieces of event salvage on a character that has never done the event before.

I just don't find the current Vigilance to be at all useful except for low-level (pre-Stamina) or poorly designed defenders (ones that use End profligately).

If the rest of the team is dying and you're held, stunned or slept, or if the baddies are attacking you, it doesn't matter how much endurance you have: in those cases you either have to stand there doing nothing because of the mez, or you have to fight or flee or heal yourself or defend yourself. And then there is the vast majority of defenders that aren't empaths to consider...

A much better Vigilance would allow you to actually be Vigilant (i.e., not falling asleep, being stunned, etc.), or use your powers more quickly or more effectively. Having the end to use those powers would also be nice, but team mates are rarely dying because I'm out of end. It's because I'm mezzed, or too far away, or they're taking damage faster than my powers can recharge, or they are crazily debuffed and I can't stop the enemies from attacking.

The current Vigilance is only helpful for defenders who have done poorly. It rewards failure instead of success, unlike all the other inherents, which reward characters for performing their functions well.

For example, if a defender is getting low on Endurance, he might say, "Well, I guess I'll just let the blaster faceplant so I can heal the tank better." That just doesn't seem right to me. Blasters get more Defiance by blasting faster, Dominators get more Domination by dominating, Brutes get more Fury by attracting aggro and attacking, etc.

This attitude is amazingly common, and extremely puzzling to me. The only real way you achieve any rewards in this game is to defeat enemies. Any character that cannot do this is not well-designed.

First off, you have to realize that not all powersets are created equal, and certain primary/secondary combinations allow defenders to defeat mobs safely and relatively quickly solo, which also allows them to contribute offensively on teams.

For example, Radiation Emission/Sonic Attack has toggles that decrease the enemies' to-hit, defense and damage resistance, a cone sleep that lets you solo large mobs in near complete safety, and the secondary blasts have a damage resistance debuff that further amplifies the defender's damage. While not capable of quite as much raw damage output as a blaster, a Radiation Emission/Sonic Attack defender can often solo much more safely than a blaster, and in the long run may be able to level just as quickly by being able to run continuously as opposed to having to rest for healing, regaining end, coming back from the hospital, etc.

The defender primaries that are effective force multipliers include Storm Summoning, Dark Miasma, Radiation Emission, Kinetics, Sonic Resonance, Trick Arrow, Cold Domination, Traps and Empathy. Yes, all of the Defender sets except Force Field have some kind of damage multiplier in the form of Damage Resistance debuffs, or enemy Defense debuffs, or enemy accuracy debuffs, or enemy damage debuffs, or team damage/recharge buffs.

The combination you chose, Force Field/Dark Blast, is perhaps the worst possible combination. It provides no defense or resistance debuffs to the enemies, and no offensive buffs for your team, and therefore has no force multiplier. Dark Blast's secondary effect is mostly a 9.38% -to hit debuff, which basically causes the mobs to hit an unprotected character four out of ten times instead of five. Useful, but not as useful for a team of well-designed characters as the -35% damage resistance of Freezing Rain, or the -20% damage resistance debuff in Sonic Attack, or the -30 damage resistance and -90% run speed in Tar Patch.

Given that your experience is with arguably the weakest possible defender, you aren't in a very good position to pass judgment over how the rest of defenderdom should play.

Defenders with attacks that provide benefit to the team should be attacking all the time. /Sonic Attack defenders should be spamming their attacks because every time they hit an enemy, for 7 seconds thereafter the rest of the team will do 20% more damage. Defenders with Radiation Blast reduce the enemy's Defense by 12.5% to 37.5% every time they hit, for 3-12 seconds.

Even a /Dark Blast defender is performing a useful function by attacking. That 9.38% to-hit debuff doesn't seem like much, but if the mob is attacking an SR scrapper who's already at 35% defense, that extra to-hit debuff essentially softcaps the scrapper's defense.

Finally, many of the defender secondaries have holds, stuns, sleeps, immobilizes and so on, which defend the team by preventing the enemies from attacking at all. Defenders should take and use these appropriately whenever possible.

Defenders should not just be passive buffers. They should be active force multipliers for their teams. That requires selection of appropriate primaries an secondaries, and understanding how the powers affect the mobs and the rest of the team.

There's a reason "the best defense is a good offense" is one of the most popular cliches around.

Since forever I've noticed that the spawn generator seems to occasionally get "stuck" generating the same kind of spawn throughout the mission. Years ago I'd be doing missions and seeing a lieutenant every spawn.

After I14 or I15, I would occasionally get a mission (when running on Tenacious) where I'd see a boss most every spawn. And after I16 I occasionally see the same thing with bosses when running at x2 or more.

There seems to be a bug that causes certain spawn types to repeat far more often than they should. And I think this bug, which happens only occasionally, has been in the game for years.

This seems a lot like the recipe drop bug that pohsyb found and fixed recently. This is showing pretty much the same sort of behavior: certain players get completely normal spawns (they got normal recipe drops), while other players are getting way too many bosses (they got almost no recipe drops). This could well be another uninitialized variable that's causing the same type of spawn to be repeated incessantly.

One of the devs should scope out the code that rolls the type of spawn and make sure that all the variables are properly set, use the right parameters, etc.

The reward rolls were changed fairly recently to award sets based on their frequency of use in the game.

Previously all types of IO recipes had the same basic probability. Now melee damage sets and the like should be rolled more often. That necessarily means the "junk" recipes, such as holds, confuse, to-hit debuff, etc., are rolled less frequently.

When these sets first came out they had no track record, so I'm not sure how the devs decided to rank them. They have more applicability than the old to-hit debuffs because you can slot a full set and increase accuracy. My guess is that the chance to roll Cloud Senses is lower than it should be, but probably not too much lower.

The problem is that there just aren't any of the Clouded Senses: chance for damage or the acc/end/rech recipes available. Only a few per month show up, and that means a "reasonable" bid is very unlikely to snag the ones that do.

The 3.75% ranged damage bonus for the full set is one reason why certain players want it.