halfflat

I so agree.

My favourite team character is a Kinetics/Psy defender. But she would be much more fun it would be if I didn't have to worry about speed boosting everyone every 2 minutes. I deliberately did not take Increase Density, because having to maintain a second 1 minute duration buff on some characters was just too tedious for words.

Lack of endurance is effectively never an issue in replenishing the buffs. Range can be, when party members wander off. The primary reason why defenders cannot self buff has been due to mechanics, not game design. So let's just replace these annoying targetted buffs with a low endurance PBAoE toggle buff which has a decent duration once activated. The net effect will be similar, save for all the tedious replenishing.

It would also improve defender solo survivability (which is certainly an issue for some sets).

I love the idea of a Markov model approach for this problem. I can imagine a scenario in which people upload data from Herostats (say) that describe the sorts of fights one gets in to in a variety of contexts (e.g. over the course of a given TF.) These are aggregated, and coupled with survivability stats of a character (derivable in principle from a Mids representation), one could derive the histogram for passive survival in these contexts. Coupled with attack and other power data, could potentially even estimate solo active survivability.

Sounds like a lot of work though!

Agree entirely, Oedipus_Tex! (I think I've heard of your brother — can I call you Ed?)

The ability to withstand the two (or more) big hits is a definite advantage to resistance and +max hp which are not captured by the simple model.

I was very happy when they put in the no-instadeath scheme, but now it seems like every second heavy hitter does their damage from 'one attack' in multiple tranches or has persistent DoTs, merely to work around it.
Grr, it was put in for a reason!

Though inherent health now means that everyone's bonus regen starts at 40% unslotted. From a clean slate then, the first 1% defence is worth 2.8% regen if Health is unslotted, or 3.08% is slotted with a single level 50 IO.

EDIT: Just saw Signpost's reply. Sorry for being late to the party

There are four key variables in determining survivability in the face of damage: bonus max HP, regen bonus, defence, and resistance. And there is a way of reducing the problem of which to focus on to a very simple equation.

For the sake of argument, let us equate survivability with the average amount of incoming damage you can survive indefinitely. Let:

d = incoming damage per second
hmax = base maximum HP
h = current HP
m = bonus HP (as a percentage, so that max HP = hmax(1 + m))
f = defence as a percentage
r = resistance as a percentage
g = bonus regeneration as a percentage

Then (averaging over time),

dh/dt = - (0.50 - f) d (1 - r) + (1 + g)(1 + m) hmax c,

where c is some constant representing base regeneration rate.

The indefinitely survivable damage rate then is d such that the right hand side is zero:

d = c' (1 + g)(1 + m)/( (1 - r)(1 - 2f) )

where c' = 2 hmax c is some constant. To keep things neat, let F be twice the defence, F = 2f.

The optimisation question is: given your current values of g, m, r and F, which should you increase by how much? The benefits are given by the partial derivatives ∂d/∂g, etc.

∂d/∂g = d/(1 + g)
∂d/∂m = d/(1 + m)
∂d/∂r = d/(1 - r)
∂d/∂F = d/(1 - F)

This again shows that as resistance and defence increase, the same increase gives a larger benefit, while as regeneration and max HP increase, the same increase gives a smaller benefit.

Given the choice of an increase of x in regeneration, or y in defence, what should you choose? The relative benefit of choosing regen is:

(x ∂d/∂g)/(2y ∂d/∂F) = (1 - F)/(1 + g) x/2y

which is greater or equal to one only if

(1 - F) x ≥ (1 + g) 2y.

One percent of defence is equal then to 2 (1 + g)/(1 - F), or equivalently, (1 + g)/(0.5 - f), percent of regeneration.

If you have no bonus defence nor any bonus regen, one percent of defence is worth two percent of regen. On the other hand, if you had 10% defence and +300% regen, one percent of defence is worth 2 (1 + 3)/(1 - 0.2) = 10 percent of regeneration.

These same ratios work to compare any two of the four stats. Should you go with a 10% regen bonus or 2% to max hp? Well, the regen is better if (1 + m) 0.1 ≥ (1 + g) 0.02. If your current max hp was at +10%, and your regen was at +80%, then since 0.102 ≥ 0.036, you should go with the regen. If on the other hand, you already had a regen bonus of +500%, then 0.102 < 0.12, and you would be better off taking the +2% max hp.

Great work, Doom_Diva!
I think the music captures the spirit of the event most successfully

While I'd love to be part of the next one, in all likelihood I will be in bed pending work, as opposed to up at weird hours getting over an illness. I'll be there in spirit

It was in the wee hours of the morning (in my timezone!) and myself and another defender, Altered-States, had just been rejected in a call to an ITF on Virtue. So we thought: let's start our own!

And then, we thought: let's make it defenders only! Ha!

The call went out, and response was swift. We had an eight member team in less than five minutes. None of us had been on an all-defender TF team before, and none of us knew what to expect. Of course, what we should have expected was utter ownage.

Participants:
Synchrony: Kinetics/Psychic Blast/Psychic Mastery. (that's me!)
Force Gray: Force Field/Ice Blast
Winterglow: Cold Domination/Ice Blast
Altered-States: Empathy/Electrical Blast
Zippy the WonderGirl: Empathy/Radiation Blast/Electricity Mastery
Guenivere: Empathy/Energy Blast/Dark Mastery
Mishii: Empathy/Radiation Blast/Power Mastery
Freya the Huntress: Empathy/Archery/Electricity Mastery

Being cautious, we took it slowly and thoroughly. We cleaned up all our ambushes, waltzed up the hill, and generally took no prisoners. From the first encounter though, we knew that nothing was going to cause us any trouble, except perhaps for Romsie. There were mutterings about DPS and pinning him down, and other vaguely anxious murmurs.

When it came time to retake the city, we were of course a team of nine. With eight defenders, it seemed callous not to let Imperious also enjoy the fun. Of course, Imperious with force fields and a speed boost really does have a lot of fun, and again we defeated all before us (and then some.)

We accidentally aggravated Romulus before we were ready. It didn't matter. He spent most of his four lives sniveling with no endurance, when he wasn't being held outright. It was almost pitiful.

Total time? One hour 39 minutes. We could have gone a lot faster. I think we had a total of three individual defeats, mostly due to overeagerness!

Remember: Defender Pride! If no one will take you on a team because of their short-sighted prejudices, form your own! With other defenders! And be awesome.

I've had issues with buying boosters from the store before, each having been resolved after a bit of back and forth with support.

This time, attempting to buy the Origins pack, I've tried with Firefox, Firefox with Adblock and NoScript completely disabled, and most recently, with IE 8. I get the "Try another retailer" message every time.

Please, please, please fix your store, NCSoft! It's not only frustrating for us - it must be losing you valuable sales too!

Just to confirm, been having exactly the same issues coming in from Australia.

If you're unlucky enough to be in an inconvenient timezone, you end up doing a lot of soloing.

I hate exemplaring my kin/psi/psi defender, because without Mass Hypnosis and Dominate from the epic, she is a total mez magnet. If there are two mezzers in a group (e.g. when facing DE, Malta, Rikti, Crey, Nemesis, ...) chances are she'll be stunned, held or whatever, and it's all over. I had to take in whole trays of break frees for some missions before the epic, and then exit to buy more before finishing. It was tedious, unheroic, and frustrating. Even now, going in a raid up against the Ritki mothership, she spends a significant proportion of the time hanging around incapacitated by mez.

My claws/regen scrapper on the other hand is easy mode. Fun, no hassles with mez. I can find challenging situations, but I never have to face anything nearly as frustrating as a single lucky mez taking me to the hospital.

Is the defender so amazingly awesome on teams that I, as the player, have to be punished with such annoying solo gameplay?

Cut down the mez frenzy. It's just annoying and stupid, and exacerbates the already huge disparity between melee types and defenders.

Gah. Down again. It's like they actually want us to stop our subscriptions.

For patching, I can understand the need to take the servers down. But regular maintenance? What exactly do they do? If the code is leaking resources, it's a bug that should be fixed.

I bet there would be much more motivation to fix it if the downtime was say, 8.30pm to 10.30pm Pacific time.

I'm doing the quote-reply thing 'cause ... well, I can't play CoH at the moment

So another period of many maintenance windows, all during peak Australian gaming time.

I'm frankly sick of it. We pay the same price for the game, yet are treated substantially worse.

It's firstly far from clear why the game needs to be taken down at all, short of issue updates. 'Required' downtime surely is a bug - one which should have been fixed by now. What is the actual reason for downtime? Backups? If they can't be done live, then it's poor design. Resource leaks? These are bugs.

But granting that apparently regular downtime will be scheduled, it is completely unfair for one segment of the customer population to shoulder all of the burden. Perhaps if the downtime were scheduled for peak North American times, there would be more impetus to find solutions to the problems that are causing the servers to be taken down in the first place.

Grumpy in Australia.

I'm amazed by the rank closing and hostility to Ultimo. I'm amazed at the support for Luminara, too, who is simply being rude and unhelpfully argumentative.

It really is common knowledge that Defenders do not solo as well as many other ATs. People, myself included, have observed how much easier solo play is with e.g. a Scrapper. It's just true; no matter what else is debatable, you cannot argue that an individual's personal experience simply did not happen.

You may think that nonetheless Defenders are fine or balanced, or that the fact that some powerset combinations allow a Defender to solo adequately is sufficient. That doesn't excuse the abject dismissive and rude responses.

So please, a little less hate.

Oh, and to Luminara, if they are bothering to read this: don't take my lack of response to your posts as conceding a point or agreeing with your argument; rather, I simply can't be bothered debating with someone who is as rude and as juvenile in tone as yourself.