Defending the Team: A Defender's Guide to Battle
By
BlackSly,
Posted on: 2005-09-16 10:28 in Player Guides
Sorry, it's a guide - I'm going to nitpick: Dark PIT, Tar PATCH.
/pet peeve.
Currently: 50s (5), 40s (3), 30s (5)
Red and blue side, mostly Infinity, Virtue, and Freedom.
[ QUOTE ]
Sorry, it's a guide - I'm going to nitpick: Dark PIT, Tar PATCH.
/pet peeve.
[/ QUOTE ]
Hehe, whoops. Didn't catch that.
I rather like your guide. Very common sensical, which makes it very much needed.
Still pertinent. BlackSly, this guide is incredibly informative. The tactics you wrote about are sound. I follow these guidelines when I am on my Emp/Dark Def at all times. When teamed with another Emp, I let the other Emp provide the base heals and I buff and blast then back-up heal.
When I am alone as sole healer, I have to use my head. I buff, then heal and then apply a hold or two (dark pit and tentacles). Usually that leads to Fort recharging and I apply that to another teammate. I continue that cycle, all the while watching bars and applying CM's as needed (or I sometimes stack em up on the main puller).
Anyway, thanks for confirming some ideas and thanks for inspiring new ones. 
My first toon was a Defender, and I can see how this guide would be useful, especially for players coming from another archetype. That may be even more difficult than starting out as a Defender. One suggestion, though: instead of abbreviating powers, please type them out. Even as a Defender involved in the forums, I had no idea what EF, LI, or RI are. I think your point can be missed because we don't know what those powers do, or even their full names. If you're intending this as a beginner's guide, you might also want to lose some of the other abbreviations like AoE and AT. Great guide, though.
I agree with DarkBlue with regard to the abbreviations.
And I agree *very much* with your comment about having fun.
I have a lvl22 empath, and it can get boring at times, especially late at night if the team is mostly cruising through missions and spamming a few heals is all you *need* to do. That's when adding in the attacks adds to the fun, even if the group didn;t really need you to join in the blasting.
It can also get very exciting when the team tries to chew more than it could take and you can't heal/buff fast enough even with Hasten up.
Overview
There are many types of defenders, and there is also the debate between pure Defenders and Offenders. For these two reasons, the "how to" guide is, of necessity, broad and usually not very specific. In addition, we need to define what the guide is for: This is not a guide about how to play. You play for fun, that should be your overriding concern. And since each person determines how they find it most fun to play, writing a guide for that would be pointless.
No, this is simply a guide regarding how to be most effective for a team in battles. Effective is not always most fun. Effective is not always most appreciated (players notice heals more than the damage you may do, so they'll appreciate ineffective healing over effective blasting). But it's there, and you should at least consider it so that you know exactly why you're not doing it, before dismissing it. I feel everyone is free to play in whatever style they want, however inefficient it is, but I prefer that they do it knowingly rather that out of ignorance of what may be efficient.
The Balance
The eternal Defender's dilemma: how much to blast, and how much to defend? You have a problem with trying to do both:
1) You only have so much Endurance to spare.
2) You can only activate one power at a time. You may have 2 blasts and 2 heals ready, but with a mob in your face and two teammates in the red, you cannot fire a heal in each direction and the two blasts in front of you. Activation time is a major issue, in many ways more than Endurance.
I have a very simple view on this issue, though of course specific circumstances may occasionally change your power choice:
Blasters unique AT function is to AoE blast.
Controllers is to AoE control.
Tankers is to grab aggro.
Defenders is to buff and to AoE debuff.
Given a choice between fulfilling your AT-specific primary function and a direct damage attack that is near the lower end of the damage scales compared to Blaster, Scrapper, Kheldian, and even Tanker AoEs, it's more effective for the team for you to buff (heal) and debuff.
Am I saying "never blast"? Heck, no. What I AM saying is that your main function is to lay down debuffs, to make sure that everyone is buffed, and to fire heals when people are damaged and the heals are ready. You should most certainly blast, but not blast when instead you have an AoE debuff ready to activate. Or a heal ready to use on an injured teammate.
Generally, buffs aren't a problem. You should put them up before battle, and thus not have to worry about them once the battle is started.
Debuffs, however, are generally AoE. It is more valuable for the team for you to lay down an AoE debuff than an AoE attack, and certainly more effective to lay it down than a single-target attack. Debuffing 8 mobs is better than shooting one.
Also, ironically, if you concentrate on debuffs and heals, it takes less of your time. This seems counterintuitive, but bear with me:
-if you concentrate on blasts, quite often, it's possible to fill up your activation times with no breaks, just with attacks. In a large team fight where AoEs are a good option, and adding in single-target attacks when the AoEs aren't recharged, you can blast to the point where you're constantly blasting. Thus, leaving no room for the buffs/debuffs/heals.
-if, on the other hand, your first priority is to buff/debuff/heal, you know what? You do not have a full activation chain of those, except perhaps if you're Kinetics. So you can drop all of your debuffs, or fire a heal in one direction and an AoE heal in another, and be left with time on your hands while waiting for your primary powers to reactivate. In the case of Rad, as an example, after you fire EF, RI, and LR, you won't put them up again until several seconds after your anchors are killed. You may fire a heal, but even doing that still gives you several seconds of standing around.
Thus, I see that a defender who primarily buffs/debuffs/heals will still have time to blast without interrupting their primary activity, whereas one who primarily blasts will have to interrupt their primary activity in order to blast/debuff/heal.
So IMO, the proper "balance" to achieve is to use AoE buffs/debuffs and heals first, then AoE blast, then single-target debuff and single-target attack.
The Opening
Many defender powers are used at the beginning of combat, and not used again. And at the beginning of combat, you have all of your powers recharged (generally), and full Endurance (generally), thus the limitation on what you do is activation time. And, in addition, the first few seconds of a combat are extremely important.
So, what do you do in order to be most helpful early on? Well, that largely depends upon your set. This is a place where generic instructions may not be that helpful.
Overall, you want to first activate powers that defend. First make sure you're defended from return fire, then put down powers that help you hit harder. RI is more important than EF or LR, for example. Darkest Night before Tar Pit.
However, if you're on a team where you're not worrying much about defense, then you might skip the defensive power.
Also, you want to prioritize fast powers over slow ones so that you get more debuffs out sooner. So by that measure, EF should be dropped before RI since it activates much faster. But RI should be dropped first because it's a better defensive power.
One way to get around the timing issue for ONE power (such as RI) is to get used to the team timing. When the tank is rushing in, if you see that he grabs aggro within the first couple of seconds, then you can safely start RI as he's rushing in. By the time RI is up, the tank has the aggro, and you got effective use out of those two seconds while the tank rushed in. If you had used EF during the same time, it would have activated first, and drawn aggro (and a salvo) at you. So it's possible to use a slow-activating power as the opener if you time it right.
Another way is if you're really doing the actual opener (I define the "opener" as the power that draws the return alpha strike from everyone that survives and isn't controlled). Then it doesn't matter how long the first power takes to activate, since combat won't start until it's aggroed the mobs. In this case, certainly, RI > EF.
A side note is that in an AoE heavy team, or when teaming with powers that cause scatter (Burn and all rains), an AoE -Slow power may be very effective if put down before the AoE scatter power is used. Mobs slowly trying to run out of rains are usually little danger for a while.
Empaths and openings: An Empath has no real opening power in their primary. In general, someone else on the team should be initiating battle. However, taking the alpha strike is often very dangerous, and an Empath (or a Stormie) should have whoever is opening pre-targetted so that they can heal him immediately as he's taking the alpha strike.
Endurance, Blasting, and your blue bar
Your most efficient use of Endurance is to use your Defender primary, rather than blasting. In a tough fight, especially pre-Stamina, when the team is in trouble, and you end up with no Endurance, it's better if you spent all of it that you could with your primary rather than your secondary.
However. Efficient use of Endurance is NOT always the most efficient. How is that? Well, an endurance-inefficent blast that takes down an enemy Ancestor Spirit before he can drop your Blaster's health by 50%, is actually more efficient for the party than having you heal the Blaster, and then the Blaster take down the Spirit. Blasting is not Endurance-efficient, but shortening the battle IS. This is why I strongly advocate that you remain active in a battle, especially early on, rather than hanging around waiting for your heals and debuffs to recharge.
You should start conserving Endurance when you're below 50%. At this point, if the battle is still going heavy, it's a good likelyhood that it will go past the point where you're bottomed out, if you keep blasting. However, until you reach 50%, as long as you're not holding up your buffs/debuffs/heals by entering an attack animation, it's often more helpful to blast in order to get mobs down sooner, than to save Endurance for a later heal.
There will be many teams that just roll through a mission. If you see that you're not doing much defending, then prioritize your blasts a little higher... perhaps even forego some of the defensive layers. One of the main strengths of a Defender is the ability to switch tactics within a fight, a mission, or a team, while other ATs would have to reslot if they wanted to go for more offense at the expense of some defense. Don't overlook this strength... if you see that the team has too much defense, then it's time to start using blasts. This is the main reason I always suggest that every Defender takes and slots 2-3 single-target attacks, and 1-2 AoE attacks... because there are times when your defense is just not needed, and it's a shame to sit around not contributing.
In the end
In the end, Defenders are the one AT which has the most fluid role. Blasters always blast, Tankers tank, Controllers control first, etc... Defenders can go from 100% offense to 100% defense, or in between... and with balanced slotting, the same character can do both jobs in the same mission. This is why they have the most difficulty in finding the right balance. I advocate a mostly balanced approach, leaning primarily towards the Defending powerset rather than the blasting, but that's not always the most effective for that particular team, fight, etc.
So take this guide with a grain of salt. It's a guide only, and it's a guide to balancing the most fluid AT. If you attempt to live strictly by a guide to being efficient, you will ironically end up as less efficient in the end. Take this as a guide, but model your approach to each mission based on what the team's needs are between offense and defense.