Dev Response - Defiance

Low-end game(tested up to level 10):

Solo- Defiance has practical applications. I can control my hp well, and make use of its bonus.

Team- Defiance is most useful. I can coordinate with teammates to distribute aggro, and can more easily invoke the damage bonus with less risk.


High-end game(tested at level 50 and exemplared to 45):

Solo- Defiance provides no practical bonus. There's no reason to bother with it when soloing missions: the villains are arrested before it comes into play simply with the tools blasters already have. If my blaster drops into defiance, I need to run(if I'm able), not fight. If I hit 40% hp, I've made a mistake that defiance doesn't help to correct.

Team- In practice, no benefit. On a well-functioning team, my health will never drop into Defiance. If it does, I'm likely mezzed, and unable to act. On a team where my health could drop into Defiance, the battles will be so erratic and uncontrolled that I would be dead before I(and the team) could benefit from the buff.

*note: flying to a great height, popping a handful of luck inspirations, and falling/AoE'ing was the best way to use defiance late in the game.


What's the difference in the high-end game between a defiant teamed blaster, and a healthy one? The battles end a couple of seconds faster(test it yourself).....and nobody notices or cares. Defiance may look like it provides a bonus on paper, but from a practical perspective, it does nothing to enhance blaster survivability, and makes no meaningful contribution on a team, beyond shortening a fight by a (very)small margin.

It is valueless in the late-game, where blasters were encountering problems.

I'm not motivated to court Defiance on a team, because its contribution is nominal when compared to the danger my blaster is exposed to. The team functions equally well or better with a healthy blaster. You might be thinking, "well, the team just hasn't adapted to the playstyle necessary to accomodate Defiance yet." Why should they? In a best-case scenario(when my health drops and I live), Defiance isn't tide-turning. A blaster at 100% health could defeat villains that a Defiant blaster arrests only a few seconds faster. There's no reason to ever want it.
Teams already have the tools they need to quickly dispatch mobs without it. Solo, you move at speed without it.

Defiance(late in the game) is analogous to raising the mez protection on stone/'s Rooted by 60. What a great buff! Of course, you weren't getting mezzed with the old rooted, and you'd never notice any practical difference between the two.

This is a terrible power...kind of like anyone other than a tank (or maybe a scrapper) getting skills from the presence power pool...its a death wish. Sure it may help below lvl 10 where u solo and can take a couple hits at low health...but was that realy the intention for this? To give lowbies a hand? There are no practicle uses for this in a team or even solo at higher lvls. If you are a blaster and your health is low...it probably means you have drawn too much aggro, doing more dmg will only INCREASE the aggro! You will die, because its only a rare instance where it is just one enemy kicking your butt and dmg buff may actually save u. While defiance may help kill that one enemy...there are about 12 other guys who are pissed at you and aren'y gonna sit around and let defince help u. If you want a practical power give blasters the full buff at 40%, cause chances are that they won't be alive much longer anyway.

Honestly...do the devs even play this game?

My thoughts are pretty much in-line with everyone elses. And note, this was all tested with a low level (less than 10 actually :/) Sonics Blaster. Defiance simply kicks in too late in the battle to be useful. It either a) needs to kick in at 50% health and give more of an attack boost, or b) needs to give a boost to accuracy and defense. Kicking in at 50% health would allow it to play a strategic role and possibly actually save a blaster's bacon. The boost to accuracy and defense would allow a blaster to be able to actually connect with it's upped power, and the defense would allow it time to survive long enough to use it. As is, Defiance is not that helpful for the lower levels, and going by what I've seen in the later game (my main's a 37), completely useless in the lower to mid 20s and up. A change is drastically needed before I5 goes live, or this will become another Arena; An awesome idea on paper, but not implemented correctly and launched before it was ready.

I gotta say, after checking it out on the Test server with my 34 ice/ice blaster and a lvl 1-5 sonic, that I really don't like Defiance. First it can be a very fine line between Defiant and Dead . Anyone trying to purposely make use of Defiance by letting their health get down is going to spend a lot of time kissing the sidewalk. It takes so little to kill most blasters that as soon as their health gets low enough to use Defiance, they are one hit from dying. Also the bars for health and Defiance do not update quick enough, leaving you not knowing how much your damage is increased at any one time. I found that Defiance also led me to playing recklessly, running from one battle to the next in order to try and make use of my lowered health, sometimes endangering any teammates. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the Dev's are looking into the needs of the blasters, I just don't really like Defiance as a fix for those problems. I think blasters should do more damage but not have to die to do it.

Let me see if I get this right. I've spent a ton of time getting My blaster to 50 and no sooner do I get him there you decide to basically ruin my build. Nerfing cloaking device and my power pool defenses and giving me increased damage when I'm below 40% and adding 100 hit points?. Yeah that sounds like fun. Let me just micromanage my health bar. A blaster in the red is as good as dead. This benefit is all but unusable the thought of an archetype purposely having to take damage to be effective is absurd especially a blaster.Then you decide to to nerf our AOE's as well.

You guys have to get this right and quit nerfin everything every other month its getting very old. I play this game to have fun not micromanage a power set that changes every other month. I'll probably get a free respec but with nothing really published I'll really have no clue how to fix him unless I spend hours searching this forum to see exactly what happened and really it won't matter anyway cause he'll get tweaked again when the next issue comes out. You guys need to fix this balance thing quick you simply cannot change the rules to your game every month it drives people nuts. They spend 100's of hours on characters you destroy in an instant. I know in your mind I'm just another whiner who doesn't know anything so you'll do whatever ya please anyway just a shame a game I once enjoyed has turned into nothing but frustration for me. Will you guys have it about right now? Look how many times you've nerfed Regen. Do whatever you gotta do to get it right and LEAVE IT! I'm One more nerf away from leaving the city I once enjoyed and I know I'm not alone on this.

I'm a number cruncher. An extrapolater. I may not min/max to it's full extent, but I'll do my damndest best to *think* about it. There is no substitute for experience, but nor is there any substitute for the ability to foresee a situation before experiencing it. As such, I have not tried Defiance at ALL on the test server. However, I have more than ample experience as a blaster, and while it is *technically* true that Blasters die a lot when their enemies are pretty close to dead, increasing their damage when they're about to die will have little effect. Why? Because when they're about to die, it's not because their next shot didn't do enough damage, it's because their previous shot didn't do enough damage, or because they're in some way being controlled. Holds, immobilizes, heck even the knockdown, the blaster is a couple of seconds from an unlucky death at any given time.

No blaster with an ounce of common sense is going to hang around when he has 40% or less health left. Regardless of the HP increase, that's simply one hit from death. I'll grant you that Defiance certainly doesn't hurt you a whit, and I'll even grant you that over the life of a blaster, Defiance is probably going to save his life more than a few times. I'm a blapper, and I've wagered my life on a melee hit more times than is really wise. But Defiance is still an incredibly dumb power. Stupid and unuseable in any tactical sense.

The idea of a "desperation attack" is innately an appealing one, but it simply doesn't hold value to a blaster where a chance of coming out victorious pales in comparison to the debt incurred if you die once. If Defiance were so powerful that it saved your life 4 times out of 5 when you were about to die, a coldly rational blaster would still run away in the vast majority of situations because it takes dozens of victories to equal one death.

Shrug, I'll take it, it's still *something*, but it's current incarnation seems like a waste of a good idea. As other have said, I'm sure a tanker would appreciate the power much, much more.

"Stay out of range of the Area Heals once you are in Defiance range to ensure your damage buff stays around...enter a battle first to take a load of damage, then have a Tanker come in and taunt (or punch-voke) enemies off you once you are in Defiance range."

Statesman,

With all due respect.... could you come to test server with a Level 45-50 Blaster (you can pick the power sets) and jump on a team of 6 or more in an indoor mission, and demonstrate this tactic for us?

We obviously do not understand how to make this work for us. After you show us how it's done we will see where we are wrong, and we could embrace this new ability.

Please let us know the date and time, so we can observe and learn from your knowledge and experience with how Blasters perform in the game. It would make a world of difference.

Thank you.

I'm in favor of having defiance give us limited status resistance, like a scaling accelerate metabolism. The fewer hit points we have, the quicker we shake off mez effects.

We don't need more damage. At higher levels, defiance will give us the extra fraction to hit the damage cap. It's not a big boost unless they're going to allow defiance to act outside the cap.

Sorry, but any feature that encourages the squishiest AT in the game to not be healed and to take on aggro is flawed. Most of the previous posters seem to agree with this. Thanks for trying an interesting idea, but please scrap this one and go back to the drawing board, like you did with the inheret Tanker power. I know you can do better than this.

Thanks for listening.

All thoughts about whether or not this power is useful put aside:

This is too buggy to test at the moment. Not only is the Defiance bar too slow to update, it is also effecting my Health bar. I would be falling to my knees while still appearing to have some health left. This new ability is currently more of a hinderance than a benefit.

OK, so back to usefulness. Taking into consideration that the above problems are bugs and will be worked out. I can't see how this new ability will help Blaster survival much. One bad hit can take me down to 40%, in that situation, I'm not going to stick around for another 60% worth of damage. Just not going to do it. Every time I tried on test, I died before the damage bonus kicked in. 6 times, 6 different spawns of varrying difficulty. Actually, to be honest, in one test I think I got a 20% buff right before I died.

Yeah, I know it wasn't a very big test, but 6 of 6 is not good odds. I will test some more, but the Health bar lag was really getting on my nerves.

Some people (mostly non-blasters) have been saying that this new ability is just gravy. They say that it won't harm, just help. Not much help, but some help. Actually, if it encourages Blasters to stick around when they should run, it is doing more harm than good. If it encourages healers to not heal the Blaster, it is doing more harm than good. Any Blaster that thinks it's a good idea to take the enemies alpha strike against team-sized spawns, really needs to get their head checked.

This is a bad idea. Accuracy would be a much better thing to buff... what possible use are huge damage increases when they miss? Restating what others have said... it encourages recklessness, and I really could believe what some are saying, that you only want it to take longer to get to the higher levels. Between this power, the active encouragement of tactics guaranteed to result in face plants , and massive slashing of defense and aggro management abilities of tanks and controllers, there will be plenty of debt. Sure, run in, take damage so you can deal more, and let the tank grab the aggro. Of five targets. Don't worry about the rest of the villains, because, your part in this particular scenario is now over. At least the end came quickly...

Sorry guys, but you lost a bit of respect from me on this one, as I cannot fathom who would seriously try to implement a change like this.

So the buff kicks in at 40% health eh? Well, I hate to let you guys in on the global secret of the blaster powerset, but at 40% health, all it takes is one good shot from a boss or a couple of well timed shots from an Lt. or two, and you're toast.

If you're going to implement these changes at 40%, dont waste the time loading it onto the live servers. id rather you spent the time elsewhere fixing some of the other things you have nerfed so badly.

Seriously guys, this is more a joke than a good idea. If you guys truly want to make an impact on blasters, and make it so they are not easy cannon fodder, implement Defiance when we get to 70% health, and make it a permanent buff until we are healed above that point. From there you can implement the buffs in increments of 10, so the buff increases at 60%, then at 50%, 40%, then finally at 30%.

That would be a more logical way to do it, and have it make a true impact into making blasters what they should be- fearsome killing machines. There should not be a scrapper, controller, tanker, or defender that can keep up with the nuking power of a blasters. Period.

Ive yet to see you guys implement this set with the balls they deserve.

I love this new feature and it seems to be kicking in later then it should, but I'm sure this lag or whatnot will be fixed later on. My only suggestion is that as your defiance kicks in, could an accuracy buff also begin to build up? I mean the extra punch is awesome, but it doesn't mean anything if it misses.

In the comic books the final shot from someone that's about to die doesn't go ::whiff:: and miss and the bad guy. I would expect that at less than 5% your accuracy would be like 95% or something so that that last shot wouldn't fail to miss and save your butt. Thanks again for this new feature.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAA .....

HE WANTS YOU GUYS TO GET HIT UNDER HALF HEALTH AND THEN GET SOME BONUS TO DAMAGE!!!!!

oh man .... please tell me that this is a joke. I just don't play blasters. but i play a defender and we have the same hitpoints .... and i debuff the crap out of guys ...

so it's like .....

BLAST!!!!!!!

"i sure nailed that guy"

OUCH!!!!!!

"well getting to 40% is even easier than before now that all the defenses and resistances have been dropped ... and now for my big DEFINACE!!!!!"

(which by the way is a great word and name. i'm sure every one will be feeling all kinds of rebel without a cause before)

OUCH!!!!!OOOOOOooooOOOooOooOoOoOo

(later in the hospital)

"i was about to give those ruffians WHATFOR .... right before the second one shot me".

oh man .... and then i couldn't find it but did statesman actually come out here and tell you guys you should GET HURT as to abuse the defiance?

I played with this on test. I find it very useful if you are less than level 10, but then again no debt till then either.

I tried blasters at higher levels, and the higher I get, the less use it seemed to be.

All in all my reaction is "meh", but its better than a sharp stick to the eye.

Well my update on the issue: I had hoped that defiance would have a decent impact on my blaster, and the answer was-that it did not . In about an hour of play-My 35 AR/Dev probably unleashed a handful of defiance boosted shots (no idea what % boosted-couldnt watch the bar that closely). It felt like popping a red inspiration now and then. Unfortunately, my expereience was overshadowed by the loss of defense (cloaking) and offense (Full auto), the loss of which I noticed almost every battle as i took increased damage (the first barrage of which was offset by increased HP) and less damage output (I only have an attack chain of 4 powers, and since I can't survive battles that take long enough for FA to recycle, I now have only 3 attacks to cycle which really stinks. Less offense, less defense, I feel squishier than ever. Sorry devs-I've defended the I5 boosts to blasters on the boards, but the truth is the two nerfs actually exceed the two bumps for a less-favorable playing experience.

On the other hand, my baby blaster noticed the boost quite a bit more. Mobs dont hit as hard at lower levels, and theres no debt so i ran around Atlas "in the yellow" shooting anything that moved with my defiance boost and extra HP-that felt pretty good!

So just to be explicit- I have supported the changes to def for tankers and scrappers (I have inv and ice tanks and an SR scrap and feel the hurt there. For the tanks, I still have way more defense than I need for soloing so that it felt more like just giving up some of my surplus. On test, I need group support more to function in a group-whereas before I was relatively self sufficient in many groups. However, I do not think that defenders/troller/blasters should be seeing these changes. Squishy classes beg, borrow, and steal trying to get 25 to 40% defense to get SOME survivability (and by default some ability to avoid status effects), and taking this away is gutting these toons.

FYI for this particular blaster, fully slotted cloaking device and hasten gave me I believe about 25% def. I typically hunt mobs I can lay the smackdown on fast. Groups of yellows (with an orange LT) are perfect. Trip min at the feet, flamethrower, FA, cleanup with two single target attacks. However, flamethrower and FA lock me in place for about 9 sec onds, unable to heal or take any evasive action. ON live, These mobs have about a 30% chance to hit me. I take about 1/3 to half of a bar give or take during this excersize. On test-they have about a 60% chance to hit. So I take 100% more damage with but 18% more HP to offset this. As you can surmise, I was going in the red a lot. I died twice in battles I win on live servers handily. My down time was higher. i could not risk bigger groups for fun-this was it. Whites were safer (and believe me-after blasting yellows in Atlas-no one wants to gain 35 levels to end up back at whites. I'm getting hammered on test, and this toon is by no means boosted in I5. I hope you read this and see the logic of what I'm putting forth here. Many of the global changes hit specific builds and classes very hard and I believe the defense boost may have "overreached" its intent. I DO believe you were trying to boost blasters, so I want you to know that mine is actually weaker on test. Play an AR/Dev yourself and verify My recommendations would be:

1) Dont kill the defense on any of the squishy primary/secondary powers. Do as you feel you must with the melee balance, but stealth/invisibility/def powers for squishies are not at all overpowering and are much needed (dont know any squishies that are anywhere near "capped" and would still benefit from force field help on a team.

2) No idea where the idea/need for the FA nerf came from-it hardly an overpowering ultimate power. I would say-this should not go live. IF you disagree, you need to compensate somewhere. Greatly lessen the "frozen" time (maybe 3 seconds top) or increase the damage. The DPS loss for me is brutal, for a build that already suffers from damage output compared to its counterparts, because the Smash/lethal resists on mobs far exceed the cold/fire/energy resists encountered by other blaster types.

Thanks and good luck to the rest of you. Keep up the testing and try to stay positive...

I Tried my 39 Elec/dev blaster in Brickstown to see how this felt. I was fighting 4 to 5, -4 mobs (IE four or five 35's the reason being is that smaller numbers of higher levels cause too much damage per hit and 4-5 of -4's are needed to work the hit point down.

From what I can tell defiance is not very usefull. Even with a staged environment anything less then 20% health was death (I died several times during testing). I never saw the defiance bar go above 50%.

My only question would be how does this work with a nuke when you die during cast. Last night on live I was trying to save my team by nuking a lot of baddies arround a portal. I died during the animation so the bonus might have been a nice funeral gift. (Everyone died the nuke only brought the +2 mins to 20%)

Bob

Considering this is one of the most dramatic game changes in I5, and it is one of the response threads with the most player comments, *and* it seems to be universally hated by the players...

...I'd *really* like to see the devs actually *respond*, sometime soon.

I tested w/ my lvl 50 fire/ice blaster. It was fantastic. I purposely kept my blaster at around 10-15% hp w/ respites while taking on a lt and the damage was incredable. I have been playing since about a month after COH came out and if this power was out in the beginning it would have saved me many a death!!!


I really wish the above was true however a trip to the hospital several times was the result instead. Honestly this is a fantastic CONCEPT. I heard about it and it really seemed like a very cool idea. However in practice its terrible. Nice try guys but not a useful power.

I like the concept but I would rather see an ACC buff than a DMG buff. With the AIM / BU combo my blaster was always near the cap regardless. If it comes down to fleeing or staying in the fight when my health bar gets red, I would rather know that I am not going to wiff.

I really doubt that a lot of players are going to regularly manage their health to keep in the difiance range. In fact most deaths occure so quick that we won't have much chance to decide one way or the other or even notice if we are doing more damage.

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I really wish the above was true however a trip to the hospital several times was the result instead. Honestly this is a fantastic CONCEPT. I heard about it and it really seemed like a very cool idea. However in practice its terrible. Nice try guys but not a useful power.

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I have 2 potential alternitives to defience as is. option 1, have defience start ramping up the damage from the get go ie, 99% health= damage increase. option 2 is a bit more drastic of a change, instead of damage, have it be a scalling def/recharge buff that starts around 50% health. the more your hurt the faster you can dish out dammage and the harder it is for the enemies to finish you off. those are my ideas. comments, espectially from devs, welcome.

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Considering this is one of the most dramatic game changes in I5, and it is one of the response threads with the most player comments, *and* it seems to be universally hated by the players...

...I'd *really* like to see the devs actually *respond*, sometime soon.

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It amazes me that the developers think were so stupid. They expected this to go over BIG. It's clear to me that they don't have an INKLING of how this game is played. Hell statesman actually suggested we start combat and take a TON of damage.... then slink back so that the tanks can take control of the situation.... you know. the same [censored] ing tankers with nerfed taunts? And for what? a blaster who lives through an engagement is going to deliver more damage than one who faceplants trying to exploit some bugged game mechanic.

(with all of the nonsensical jargon and changes in the name of balance that don't even support each other from explaination to explaination or even concept to concept .... thepunishcrime's eyes glaze over .. and something inbetween his ears finally makes an audible "SNAP!!!!")

screw it ...... i'm getting provoke ...... ain't no tanker going to steal MY DAMAGE BUFF!!!!

ps - just a little thought to the tankers out there since we all play a variety. i do intend to go on back and be a "launch tank" with provoke. i know i can make the numbers work with stacking and stacking, and min maxing, which it is sad that cryptic never wanted that .. and now it is all they push with their game changes.

but i'll be a bad bad man. and you know what? suddenly that seems like the easiest way for me to take my tank role back ... by just doubling up what they tried to take away. sure it is five, but now it's five, and five, and probally five again right away with hasten.

now ... if only i weren't going to be such a wussy

This is my first time spending any substantial amount of time on the test server. I was so curious about Defiance (and, I'll be honest, a bit skeptical) that I just felt I had to try it out. I'm not a big number-cruncher--or at least, while I can be, when it comes to a game I just prefer not to do it. So this report will be a bit impressionistic, but I hope still helpful.

The character I was playing was a level 32 Energy/Energy blaster. I decided to try this out first in an outdoor mission of my level, set on Heroic. As a matter of fact, it was the War Wall Defender mission, since I happened to have that one, so it was against Rikti, generally white minions and yellow lieutenants in small groups. I had two goals. First, to try to see Defiance in action at each boost level. Keeping the threat level fairly low would, I thought, give me more control over the damage I took than something higher. And, second, I wanted to compare a normal mission with Defiance to one without. While on live I believe I did War Wall with a team, I've soloed several missions just like it on Heroic, so I'd be able to see how it compared.

Also, the train station entrance is conveniently near the hospital. Unfortunately, that proved to be important.

One overall comment to start out with: it's impossible for me to tell how much of the trouble I was having with using Defiance was due to the lag on the updating of the status bars. There were a couple of times when, according to the info on my health and Defiance meters, I should have gotten a boost, but didn't. My assumption is that my health had already regenerated enough at that time to take me out of Defiance range, but that it had not yet registered on the bars. Would my testing have gone better without that lag? I don't know. I tend to doubt it, but I just don't really know.

Second overall comment: my health bar had to be at a truly scary level (yellow, verging on orange!) before Defiance started to kick in. After playing a blaster for 33 levels (and some of them debt-filled levels, since this is my first character and I'm still learning), a yellow health bar is enough to trigger an almost instinctive response to run or seek a heal. It was very hard for me to suppress that response so that I could experiment with different damage levels. I realize that this doesn't prove anything other than that trying to use Defiance as suggested would necessitate a huge change in my playing style, but still, there it is.

One more overall comment I just remembered: the scaling of the Defiance bar was really confusing to me. .0.1, 0.3--what do those numbers actually mean?

Now, on to the mission. It was fairly easy (once I got over that instinctive thing) to get Defiance into the 0.1-level boost range. After a bit of practice, I found that I could even keep it there for a fairly long period of time, say several minutes. I did notice a damage boost--however, it wasn't enough of a boost to decide a fight, or even shorten it. What I mean here is that, for example, if I could have defeated a mob with two shots without Defiance, it still generally took two shots with Defiance. The difference would be that the sliver of health he had left after the first shot would be smaller with Defiance. Unfortunately, that wouldn't stop him from being able to do just as much damage, so it didn't help much.

Another thing is that it was very difficult to do this--sustain the affect, I mean--if I was facing more than one guy, or two at most. The reason is that, with one, there would be a reasonable amount of time between taking hits for me to evaluate how damaged I was and do something about it, if necessary, before I could be defeated. But if there was more than one, there was a pretty good chance that they'd hit me simultaneously, or close enough to it not to matter. In that case, I'd go straight from my 0.1-level boost to being dead.

I never was able to sustain any other Defiance level for long enough to really evaluate it. I did get to see a bit of the 0.3 and 0.5 levels--but only briefly. I was able to see that the 0.3 level boost really was helpful, or could have been. With that boost, I was able to one-shot a guy with an attack that wouldn't normally be able to do it. Of course, immediately afterwards, his buddy came up and whacked me over the head, and I died.

And that's the problem. The next step after that was death. At 0.3 Defiance-boost health level, it actually only took one hit from one of these guys to kill me--and remember, we're talking about white-con minions.

I went on a second time, the next day, to check this again: was I imagining things here? But the second time I did confirm that yes, when I was in the 0.3 level Defiance range, an even-level Rikti Infantry could indeed kill me with one hit. An even-level Headman could take me from 0.1 to death in one hit. And finally, a slap from a Rikti monkey took me from 0.5 Defiance level to death. Really. A monkey-slap.

Of course, that is all assuming that the numbers I was getting from my Health and Defiance bars were accurately reflecting the situation, which I'm not at all sure of. You really, really need to fix that, and then have people test again to see if it made a difference.

Now, all of this was solo--I haven't tried it in a team situation. With what I've seen, I've tried to come up with what sort of team makeup might make this feasible to use. I could come up with one or two possibilities: if another player was buffing my damage resistance and/or debuffing the mobs' damage, then I'd be willing to give it a try. That could potentially help with the one-shot-away-from-death problem. Buffs to my defense or debuffs to mobs' accuracy? Probably not enough--still too big a chance of taking that one hit. Maybe, if I was with a tanker or controller that I absolutely trusted to keep everything off me....but then would Defiance ever have a chance to come into play at all?

A word about the avoiding being healed idea. I could very quickly go from a low level of Defiance buff to dead so quickly that I never even had time to react. Can I really expect a Defender to have those kind of reflexes? On top of everything else they're trying to do in the middle of a battle? It doesn't seem fair to even ask them to try. Same goes for the idea of going in and taking damage before the tank takes the aggro from me: that tank would have such a narrow window of opportunity in which to do this that I just don't think I can realistically expect it.

So, overall opinions. Is Defiance a good power? That really depends on what it's meant for. If it's just meant to give blasters a little extra, fun thing, then it succeeds admirably. It's a neat idea.

If it's meant to give blasters more survivability then......maybe. I think there are situations where that damage boost might make the difference, even if those situations are rather limited.

But if it's really meant to be something that we deliberately make use of, then I have to say, I couldn't make it work for me. I really did try. Certainly it's possible that it's a flaw in my playing that made me unable to do this. But come on, newish or not, I'm not that bad a blaster! The difference in health level between getting the boost and being defeated was just too small, and unless I had lightning-fast reflexes, I don't see what I could have done. Trying to keep it at that line earned me more debt than I've ever seen before.

This reminds me of my initial reaction when hearing about the power: "Well, I'm not sure whether or not it'll really do that much good, but at least it can't hurt anything." But I think I was wrong. It can't hurt anything UNLESS my future teammates get it into their heads that we should try to deliberately use it--like not wanting the defender to heal me, or getting mad at me for using a respite. I am very uneasy, seeing that things like this have actually been suggested by the developer team. If ideas like that really start to gain currency, then it seems to me that Defiance is going to do vastly more harm than good.

My apologies to the originator(s) of the idea. I don't want to belittle your efforts. I just don't see this as workable, at least for me.

.......Wow........
Sorry this was so long!

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ps - just a little thought to the tankers out there since we all play a variety. i do intend to go on back and be a "launch tank" with provoke. i know i can make the numbers work with stacking and stacking, and min maxing, which it is sad that cryptic never wanted that .. and now it is all they push with their game changes.

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Seriously, I had the same thought. Since Provoke is random, it should now be better than Taunt. It won't hit the SAME 5 targets each time, but a random 5 targets, and thus will overall hold more targets better.

Off topic in this thread, but I just wanted to say I made the exact same leap in logic. Hopefully the devs will see the problem before we have to resort to that. (I gave one solution, which is as simple as all get out, just have Taunt skip anyone already taunted)