Sorry Powerhelm, my anger after briefly scanning most of your post left me too blind to read it through in it's entirety. My original post still stands. Here are some additions:
[ QUOTE ]
Don't even get me started on the "benefits" Vigilance has for Defenders who bubble...oh...extra Endurance when my teammates run low on health...wow...that means I can cast those low cost bubbles AGAIN! And without ANY added benefit!
[/ QUOTE ]
Vigilance kicks in when your team NEEDS it most. It gives you an endurance discount on all of your powers. What does that mean it lets you do to save your team from certain doom? It lets you: Detain the boss or AV, use Repulsion Bomb on the biggest mass of enemies to get them OFF of their feet for a few precious seconds, turn on Force Bubble not ONLY to push all the enemies out of melee range of everyone, but ALSO to grab that aggro for yourself and save your teammates FROM the aggro, and finally you can Force Bolt anyone left standing. The vigilance allows you to keep this up long enough to get your team back to safety. That is the power of Vigilance on the "sinister six". Sure you've maybe played the set since Beta, but did you actually USE every power every day in every situation? I have.
[ QUOTE ]
While I appreciate that you seem to feel the "Sinister Six" have a use I can say that having played a bubbler for 4 years...they really don't have more than at best situational uses. And the occasional situation in which those powers come in handy don't justify the power slots and enhancements they eat up...
[/ QUOTE ]
Only "occasional" situations? You know what, just for you, I'm going to copy and paste selected excerpts from my many writings on the subject. Lets call this...
PK's Greatest Hits!
or misses, depending on your point of view... 
Detention Field - Recommended Slotting: 2 Accuracy, (3 Recharge Reduction and 1 Endurance Reduction Optional)
Imagine that the battlefield is like a chess board. Wouldn't you like to be able to take the Queen out of the game until there are no other enemy pieces left? This is essentially what Detention Field can do for you. You can use it on an enemy to take that enemy out of the fight for a short while. I have found three general uses for this power. When soloing you can use it as an alpha strike to make one less enemy that you have to fight at the same time. You can also use it on a dangerous boss or Sapper to take him out of the picture. The third use I've found for this power is to take out enemy 'buffers' from the battle, such as Devouring Earth eminators that they drop on the ground, Malta auto-turrets and Sky Raider's Force Field Generators. After all the other enemies are gone, the Detention Field should have lifted, and you can easily take out the helpless buffer if you choose to (they give no xp as far as I know). A very versatile and useful ability.
Repulsion Field - Recommended Slotting: 2 Endurance Reduction (3 Recharge Reduction if you want to use it alot or even Enhance Knockback if you want them to fly farther)
This is called Repulsion Field but the effect is actually a knockback effect, and its primary purpose is to keep melee enemies away from you by knocking them back. It does cost a bit of endurance when you are surrounded by a mob, but if you are on the outside edge of combat, this should not be an issue. The field itself doesn't use much endurance when no enemies are near you, and it can save you from sneak attacks from the back (I'm looking at you, Stalkers), or it will keep alot of tiny minions off of you (like Devouring Earth Swarms!). It, along with the PFF are the two primary powers to defend YOURSELF from attack. Note that with PFF on, this power is useless, so you would use this power when you still want to be able to attack enemies rather than hide from them. This power is also not as much of an aggro magnet as Force Bubble is, because it will only aggro enemies that you CHOOSE to bump into.
You can also choose to be a more active Defender and run around like crazy with it on to keep all the enemies off their feet. Just make sure you're not pissing off any tankers or scrappers by leaving their mobs alone. The 'crazy man' strategy is very useful for saving your team from a wipe and giving them a few precious seconds to escape.
Another use I found for this power is to save a teammate in trouble. Simply turn the power on and run to them, knocking the enemies away from them. If any attackers are killing your ally, you can also go towards THEM and keep them off their feet for a while. If you get into trouble from this, you can always turn on your PFF to protect yourself and to disperse the aggro you've obtained.
Finally, sitting with it on next to all but the most powerful villains (some Bosses and all AVs) will stack the knockback effect and make 90% of mobs go flying where a regular knockback power might just make them grunt.
Repulsion Bomb - Recommended Slotting: 1 Accuracy and 2 or 3 Recharges (This power can Disorient, but it's such a low chance it's really not worth slotting)
This power works like Force Bolt, but with an Area of Effect knockback and a 40% chance to disorient. Good to save teammates with, good as a battle starter, or just good as a general knockback power.
I think you could use this all of the time along with Force Bolt to keep enemies away from your squishy friends, and even your squishier (post-Issue 6) scrapper buddy, with their consent of course. All the scrapper has to do is pick one target and auto-follow them while attacking, so that when you shake all of the enemies off him, he can run right to the one he wants.
Another trick you can do I call the Big Bang and Crunch. You have an ally hold aggro, either a tank or another hero with taunt. Then you use repulsion bomb on an enemy near him and knock all the enemies back or onto the ground. They then have to get up, shake off disorientation and/or run back to the hero. This is plenty of time for yourself and other blaster types to go nuts on the enemies, hitting them as much as you want. The enemies then come back to the taunter, and you rinse and repeat. This tactic will not work as well as it has in the past because of the longer recharge time on the power than it used to be. You can also use this with Force Bolt to position enemies together or against a wall for Area of Effect attacks. You can then use Force Bolt to tuck in any that get out of the area.
Force Bubble - Recommended Slotting: 1 Endurance Reduction (Optionally 1 to 3 Recharges depending on how often you think you will make use of the power)
Finally we come to the final power of the set, the Force Bubble. It keeps enemies away from you, and pretty FAR away from you. This is a power that should probably not be used all the time, as it is noted for being the ultimate aggro magnet. This is mostly a click-and-use, then turn off when you don't need it kind of power, unlike Dispersion Bubble.
You can stand in the far back of the team formation and use it to keep your squishy friends safer, you can also even use it to 'pin' enemies against walls and corners to keep them immobile. A neat trick is to have your toughie friends sit on the very edge of the bubble, and if they run into trouble, they can hop back just a couple of steps into safety! You can also aggro some enemies around a corner and use this power to KEEP them around that corner, while your buddies blast away at them and you are relatively safe. You can also use this power to help your allies escape in the case of an emergency.
You can also make USE of the fact that the Force Bubble draws aggro towards you. Again, spread aggro is almost always better than aggro concentrated on a squishy, so you can use Force Bubble to push against the enemies and draw aggro to yourself. Then if you start to get low on health due to their ranged attacks, you can quickly turn on PFF. You now should have most of the aggro still on you, but you're almost invulnerable. When the enemies are aggroed by other heroes, the aggro will be more spread out, and will be less dangerous to any individual hero. You can rinse and repeat if another hero for some reason draws most of their fury.
Another neat trick only works in certain circumstances. Basically when you are in a room which goes INTO a short-in-width hallway, you can stand right around the corner of the hallway and turn the power on. Then whenever any mobs are aggroed, this acts as a barrier which they cannot pass. You can use this either just to keep the enemies away from your teammates, who are in the room and can blast at a safe distance, OR as a great way to give your allies a safe retreat.
Finally, the enemies in the game have two 'modes', melee mode (when you can see a melee weapon in their hand) and ranged mode. It usually takes a few seconds for them to switch modes, and when they are in melee mode, they many times prefer to STAY in melee mode. You can take advantage of this with the Force Bubble. You can either wait until the enemies are engaged in melee battle with another hero, or engage them yourself up close and personal, and then instantly activate the power. For many of the enemies, they will still remain in melee mode for a while and will keep trying to run at you rather than attack. If you continually back up and move forward again, moving the bubble and pushing against them in the process, you should be able to keep this up for a good while.
-----------------------------------------
Knockback = 100% Defense AND Damage Resistance. Plus another damage resistance buff for most allies because "in general" ranged damage from enemies is far less than melee damage from enemies, so if they are knocked back away from you and your squishy friends, they can't hurt you as much. It also gives a -50% debuff on melee players' damage-per-second as a side effect. Basically an enemy that's flying backwards and has to take the time to get up IS NOT ATTACKING YOU OR YOUR ALLIES. However, the melee players have to chase it down. Or they could ignore it and attack the enemies near them while the blaster attacks the flying enemy....
Do I think it's worth it to sacrifice some offensive power for defensive? Most of the time yes, because debt really kills your xp/hour ratio alot more than the dent in your damage-per-second. That's all opinion and playstyle preference though, it's very hard to quantify some things....
-----------------------------------------
DPS is like cholesterol...
The BORING DPS is Damage Per Second.
The FUN DPS is Defense Per Shot!
This refers to the fact that every time you knock an enemy back, it essentially provides you with 100% Defense and 100% Damage resistance for the 5 seconds it takes him to get knocked back, recover, and then get up again. If you KEEP using knockback powers all over the place, enemies will only have a CHANCE to get off an attack less than 25% of the time.
Knockback powers sure kill your boring DPS but it adds a HUGE injection into your FUN DPS!
---------------------------------------------
When the S**T HITS THE FAN however, the good FF Defender is "authorized" to cut totally loose and knock everything in every which direction and get them all on their butts and not attacking their teammates. This is where Vigilance and the benefits of it kick in the most. It makes FF the ULTIMATE damage mitigator for three reasons:
1) It knocks enemies AWAY from your allies and in GENERAL ranged damage from enemies is less than melee damage. What also helps with this is that enemies that are stuck in "melee" mode often times WON'T ATTACK BACK with a ranged attack, they will just keep running to try to get to you and attack you in melee.
2) Enemies ON THEIR BACKS aren't fighting and aren't attacking, so that means that with every knockback attack that you use on every enemy, that's about 5 seconds break you get from that enemy doing ANYTHING to you. Multiply that by the entire MOB getting knocked on their butts after you jump in the middle of them with Repulsion Field and your whole team gets a 5 second break to get out of there!
3) It draws the enemies attention AWAY from your teammates, allowing you to tank for a short time as the enemies turn to look at the guy that knocked them on their butt. Use Force Bubble and you will get the attention of almost the ENTIRE MOB! Then when the heat is on the FFer and the FFer looks in trouble due to their weak personal defense? Personal Force Field, BAM! The enemies try to attack the FFer and they can't TOUCH him. That gives the rest of the team another 5-10 seconds of protection as the enemies "discover" that this guy is untouchable. After they discover that, they slowly "peel off" of the FFer one by one and THEN try to find another target.
But my point is here, you couldn't do all of that half as well without Vigilance. After bubbling your whole team AND blasting all the time with your attacks, all of these knockback/repulsion/capture effects would be useless if you didn't have the endurance to use them.
Vigilance truly lets the FFer be "always vigilant". Vigilance lets FFers be more than a buffbot, it allows them to attack freely, knowing that they will have the endurance that they need to turn the tide of the battle when things get rough.
That is the power of Vigilance.
----------------------------------------------
Here is the timing for knockback. You activate the power, the enemy starts flying back. They fly through the air for about 1 to 2 seconds. Add to that animation time for them to get back up again, 2 MORE seconds. Add to that the fact that if the enemy was in "melee" mode, the AI tends to like to STAY in melee mode, so it will take them ANOTHER 1 to 2 seconds for them to run back to you. So if you add it up, you get 4-6 seconds of complete protection from EACH knockback. That's good stuff, and not something that most people think about. If you actually add Knockback Distance modifiers to your KB powers and knock the enemies back through a clear unobstructed path, they fly farther, so they have more "air time" AND take longer to get back to you. It's all gravy.
Meanwhile, if you have Repulsion Field on all the time like I do, any enemy that gets NEAR you gets one hit in, and then they are out of the game for 4-6 seconds, with NO action required on your part. You can be blasting away at another guy at the same time the melee-er is trying to gank you. That's alot of protective power, it's like a free lunch. It means you don't have to worry about your own personal defense as much. Even on enemies that are knockback RESISTANT, with 2 or 3 "pulses" of the Field, they will be knocked back. Everything but AVs and Elite Bosses and a FEW bosses. But (IMHO) sadly, most people don't see the advantage of that, so they don't take or use the Field. I personally think it's awesome, but it could be more so.
It SAYS that it's a PBAoE knockback, but the range is actually 7 feet. It ends up being PBAoE because the knockback "pulses" are so slow that an enemy can get up to you and hit you once before they get knocked back. I'd love to see that sped up so that we can use it to defend ourselves, but honestly I can SEE the exploits that that could cause, that's why I suggest upping the endurance cost per hit by 3 or 4 times what it is now, to reduce these kinds of exploits.
But yes, there is a pretty high learning curve to learning how to use knockback effectively. But once you've mastered it, it will be your best friend.
Knockback = 100% Defense and 100% Damage resistance for 4-6 seconds at a time.
-------------------------------------------------
We don't roll the same way others do. We have limitations and we LIKE it. We like to keep our team defended with Defense numbers. We also like to keep our team defended by doing things that no one else can do.
We can phase shift enemies at will to save them for later, put them in the Glass Bottle of Doom while we take out all of their friends, then when they are all alone we can see the fear in their eyes as the Glass Bottle that was protecting them fades away.
We can precisely Force Bolt an individual enemy away, and slotting that power well, we can do it forever.
We can knock an entire mob backwards, off of their feet, away from you AND leave half of them disoriented.
We can CLEAR A ROOM or the center of the Rikti Mothership of all enemies with one 3 second "tap" of one power. We can choose to keep them out of there by keeping that power on, or we can let them run back to us by releasing it. It is our choice.
We can aggro an entire room while we are standing in ONE place, and then protect ourselves from any retaliation.
We can take the alpha better than a tank, and make sure that that aggro gets spread evenly so that no one hero takes it all.
We can also make ourselves virtually invincible and untouchable by all but the most powerful enemies.
We can't heal, we can't debuff, we can't make you do damage faster. We don't WANT to. We WANT the challenge that comes with our powers, we THRIVE on it.
We are the few, the proud, the bubblers.
You either understand our mentality, or you wish the powerset was something else. If you understand us, you are with us, and we are glad to have you. If you wish the powerset was something else, then play something else, and enjoy it!
ForceFields are not for everyone, but they are for us.
