SkeetSkeet

It's not that you "must have" super speed but you will die less if you take it.


There are plenty of good reasons to include the concealment pool. Capping stealth is useful. Phase is nice--as both an escape and to run down people using it as an escape. Three powers in the pool can hold kb protection and lotg 7.5s. There are of course builds where you get stealth/escape from other sources and the concealment pool can be skipped but there are definitely good reasons to consider it.


The biggest problem with fly in pvp zones is the presence of temp fly. As soon as people know you're flying, every single enemy in the zone sprouts a raptor pack and is in the air after you---able to fly without having to make any tradeoffs or pay any costs to actually put it in their build.


TP foe is good for breaking up base campers. Thinning the herd by droning can often lead to your side being able to throw off the campers. Instead of staying out of range, the majority of base campers believe that broadcast indignation will prevent them from being droned and will submit themselves for droning over and over and over.

When you're on the other side and actually doing the camping, you can get kill after kill after kill TP'ing people into your team and killing them. Just like campers will volunteer themselves for droning, people being camped will feed themselves to you repeatedly until the camp is broken.

Outside of base camping situations, tp foe is a great tool for snatching back runners. Especially when you can combine it with other tools like a high magnitude knockback, snipe, holds, webnade, debuffs, whatever it is you have in your toolbox. People are unaffected for a short time after getting hit with TP foe but if you just wait a beat before firing off the attack they will be affected when it lands. It's easy to get that timing down with some practice.

No matter how you use tp foe, you can be guaranteed that some people will nerd rage over it. The laughs you get from that are just a bonus.

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Oh. Well, I consider support and disruption two different roles. Most disruption toons are still viable, just not as viable as they were before.

In my opinion, Heals aren't as useful as they were, however.

When AP, a power that takes health from you, and then makes it so you can't heal after it, heals the same amount as a Respite, I don't think they are where they should be.

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Well, that's kind of exaggerated. Assuming a worst case of massive incoming damage, the first absorb pain is full strength healing for well over 1k and will top most targets back to 100% hp, the second AP will be hit by heal decay but still hits for hundreds more than a respite. The third one will be pretty weak though if you hit pbu for it it's not too bad.

Is this "less useful" than it was before heal decay? Well, yeah. However, getting your hp bar tripled up isn't exactly "weak" either. If you still die after that, then gg to the people that killed you, they earned it.

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the therm version of [absorb poin] does the same thing

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Therm single target heal hits for about a third of absorb pain. That's not the "same thing" by any stretch of the imagination.

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Now? People barely notice I'm there, save for the "hey, a defender, free kill!" moments where someone takes a second or two to gank me. Since if I try to fight back, I'll just die anyway (low damage, low resists), and if I try to heal myself, heal decay kicks in and my heals become worthless, while the person fighting me just has to keep spamming damage until I die. And if I try to run? Too bad, they just keep hitting me, and my movement is suppressed, so I can't flee. If I heal, I get suppressed too.

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When any random person who decides to kill you succeeds and you can't escape if you want, then you need to revisit your build and incorporate some more survivability into it.

If escape is your intent, you should almost always escape from one attacker. More than half the time you can avoid two. Three or more? Well, with that many people focused on you I don't know why they shouldn't reasonably expect to get a kill.

It's not that support is useless now. It's just that certain buffs got marginalized. The other aspects of support--debuff, disruption, end drain, -travel, mez protection (yes, mez protection) and heals--are still extremely useful.

For FF and Sonic, unfortunately, that's nearly a death sentence because they are so one-dimensional. Other defender primaries have had their roles redefined but can still make a serious support contribution.

I think part of the reason blasters have the reputation they do is that nine times out of ten when you get attacked in a zone by a blaster it's not just a blaster but a blaster buffed up with fort, cm and ab, with the occasional dose of absorb pain topping off the hit points when you had him dead to rights.

When you're on the receiving end of that it can seem like the blaster is an unstoppable killing machine. The unstoppable part is less now with DR and heal decay but the tendency for blasters and emps to run together is still there, contributing to the "blasters are overpowered" myth.

So on a blaster, where a lot of the 5-piece sets you might want to slot may only give 60-70% +acc... and you have 80 or so in global acc, do you put a dmg proc in that sixth slot or top off the acc?

You could conduct a campaign to let people know that storm can heal.

You'll make more than 20% if you just keep the item and flip it.

Bonfire is a crappy power--for dropping in the middle of a spawn to do damage. Bonfire is a great power for area-denial and other situational uses.

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Today's facepalm:

Tank with 42-month vet badge in RWZ, talking to a rad/rad def teammate of mine who mentioned having soloed their last level, wanting to know why anyone would solo a defender.

Doesn't take AE to produce idiots.

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Depending on how it was meant it's a fair question. Given a defender's potential as a force multiplier, solo play barely scratches the surface of what the AT can do.

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I think this is sort of like the defender equivalent of the Scrapper Challenge: given an 8-person team built entirely of the clueless and badly built, how long does it take you to get through a 54 Maniac boss farm, and how many people die during the run?

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It's pretty straightforward to do this with dark. Especially with vengeance and howling twilight you can keep a bad team hacking away at 54 bosses indefinitely. The mission will take somewhere between "not long" and "forever" depending on how much dps they can muster.

It's hard to get excited over an issue that contains no new content.

Color me underwhelmed. No pun intended.

I don't get why the concealment pool is such a popular choice for a pve build. Stealth and invis aren't that useful when you can stealth cap yourself vs npcs with super speed and a stealth IO--which can go in sprint so it doesn't even cost you a slot or a power choice.

Phase shift is of marginal utility in pve and grant invis is also marginalized because so many people stealth cap themselves.

Seems to me that the cost of a pool and power slots could be far better spent.

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Combat attributes does not show proper attributes with dr. There has been no official explanation with numbers on how dr works

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We could have a complete list of the DR numbers for all ATs and powers but when pressed on the question, the dev response amounted to "We regret to inform you that posting a list of numbers is too hard because it's a long list." True story. If your forum search fu is good enough you can still find the post from the redname followed by 20 pages of fanboi's defending it.

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Hilariously, in the new bubble farms, heals are completely useless.

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Tanks are pretty worthless too, as defense isn't required.
It's really sad to see that level 50 Scrapper or Tank that doesn't even use their multitude of toggles.
It's... almost depressing, actually. But Fire/Kins found a new niche, haha

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Bubble farms truly are a sign the game is playing hopscotch over the shark.

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... due to the fact that people are now doing Boss Farms, which require atleast some type of heal.

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True. Still, 54 boss farm teams are intricately minmaxed chimeras. It's a little misleading to single out just one head of the beast (hp buffing) without mentioning the seven other equally required pieces.

Also 54 boss farm teams give me pre-purple patch flashbacks. Remember in the not-so-good old days how debuffs were regarded as worthless because they scaled down to insignificance against deep purples? Yeah, it's kind of like that. Lolissue14darkmiasma = Lolissue1darkmiasma. Look for "all debuffs (and mezzes) underperforming all buffs (and heals) against the game's most rewarding content" to rear its ugly head again in the defender issues thread.

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Only one problem with this theory. Dark does just fine against level 54 boss spawns. By just fine I mean stand there in the middle of them spamming miasma goodness while nearby spawns are chain pulled into the fray and the team kills everything without missing a beat. Of course dark does have a substantial heal to smooth things out on top of the debuffs. Neither would be sufficient by itself but the set as a whole performs just fine.

Snow storm is a complete skip for arena and for zone is only good for harassing fliers. Steamy mist is still handy to cap off your stealth and it can hold both resist and defense kb protect IOs which is no small consideration.

O2 boost was mostly skippable before and is less useful now. Gale can be slotted up for enough kb to put a lot of people on their butts in zone play but for arena most of the people you face will have enough kb protection to stop it cold.

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Trick Arrow toons are Shark food, in order to irritate imo you need to be hard to kill too

Hey Neeto was that you on a Grav/FF yesterday in RV?

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With a good build and general heads up play, controllers of any stripe can potentially be fairly hard to kill. Relatively speaking, of course... a solid spike can still wipe them out as easily as anything else.

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Just fill the 8th slot with a warm body, don't hold up the show for no reason.

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I see that a lot, where a team forming for a task force has 6-7 people already and could pretty much breeze through it with what they already have but the person with the star is stuck on their "must have" to fill the final spots.

Sometimes they're holding out for empathy but just as often it's kinetics or tank or brute or rad or whatever.

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man our weekly "healer" threads aren't what they used to be.

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It doesn't have to be empathy but you do want some form of healing along with buff/debuff against level 54 boss spawns. Otherwise, the few hits that do get through are going to wear people down.


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yeah, FF and Cold totally needs heals in order to protect a team. /sarcasm

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FF or Cold in that particular situation, with no heals on the team are going to be watching a lot of people die. Been there, seen it. I really find it baffling that people get so indignant about healing as a game mechanic. It has a place, along with buffs, debuffs and everything else.

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I would love to be able to find normal functioning teams in this game anymore. I mean I used to run with teams that were perfect, Tankers would tank, controllers would hold, Scrappers would help with damage along with blasters, and defenders would heal/buff. But nowadays we get Scrappers that stand on the edge and use Shockwave and Torrent because they make for fun powers because they're knocking the mob around....


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Hey, at least they're standing on the edge--better than standing in the middle and dividing the spawn in two.

I prefer more versatile players than your golden age's teammates, people who go beyond their primary--defenders who blast, blasters who control, controllers who tank, tanks who smash, etc...

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Versatility is great but a lot of bad players fail at it. Instead of going beyond their primary they simply fall well short of being able to perform at it.

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You may be at the damage cap, but the multiple fulcrums will still debuff the bosses even more.

Not to mention the multiple stacked speed boosts, and either controls or blasts that the kin defender/troller will be bringing to the table.

Really depending on how you slot your attacks you can benefit from 5-6 speed boosts for the +rech, which will always help in a farm situation.

Multiple kins also allow for more of the initial fulcrum buff that centers around the caster to hit those blasters that don't go into melee to get more +damage.

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After 1 or 2 kins, you're much better off adding aoe -res to a team to give that capped damage even more bang for the buck. There are a lot of sets that offer aoe -res so it's usually pretty easy to pick up. Also, adding variety means you pick up some additional surivability debuffs/buffs which is also helpful.

It doesn't have to be empathy but you do want some form of healing along with buff/debuff against level 54 boss spawns. Otherwise, the few hits that do get through are going to wear people down.

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It's not uncommon for bugs, especially ones that aren't game breaking and don't have a large impact on players, to take years to fix.

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Not uncommon, but still kind of sad.

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I can't imagine playing the set on a defender. It just feels so 'meh' to me, but at least I have a decent primary to show for. TA/Arch just sounds painful to me.

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At various points along the way, TA/Arch can be painful. Of course the same can be said for many builds. In the endgame, built for high recharge/recovery, TA/Arch is a damage dealing, debuffing beast.

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Concept limitation is something that we, human beings, impose. Not the game. And for every player with a specific concept that doesn't fit a weapon-based set, there's another player with a specific concept that won't be met by anything but a weapon-based set. That includes TA and Archery. The fact that they use bows and arrows for graphics doesn't make then any more or less popular than any other powerset, or any more or less likely to be selected for concepts. Truth is, you don't know what Random Player 164,330's concept is, so how can you postulate that TA or Archery won't fit it?

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^ the truth.