Defenders balance

No, there are threads by Emp/* "healers" who skip everything but the first attack in their secondary and complain about how difficult it is to solo. There are threads by blasters who come over to defenderland, skip almost the entire primary and complain about how hard it is to solo. There are threads by dishonest people who deliberately misrepresent their experiences (such as willfully playing a defender poorly in order to make a skewed comparison to a well slotted and played scrapper) in order to generate complaints about how hard it is to solo.

Legitimate, realistic complaints about difficulty soloing are rare, and when they do crop up, they're typically because it's a new player who knows nothing about the game, or how to slot/use enhancements.

Unlike you, I do read the defender forums frequently, and I do pay attention to what's being posted, and I do see more than my own personal agenda. And unlike you, I'm not seeing "endless" complaints about defender solo performance. But go ahead and prove that I'm wrong, post a list of those "endless" threads.

And they also have more access to damage improvement tools, and the highest modifiers on those tools.

And they also have wider access to defensive tools and the highest modifiers on those tools.

What numbers? Yours? Yours have been proven time and again to be fabrications designed specifically to show defenders in a poor light.

Go ahead, roll out some numbers for us. Show us some more of that "proof" you've become so famous for.

More Ultimo FUD. How shocking.

You obviously werent around when it was City of Defenders, then.

See. Our buffs are fine. but if our damage starts becoming even slightly comparable to scrappers or blasters..then Scrappers and Blasters are largely useless in comparison to a defender.

Have you even tried to solo a Kheld? Defenders do not solo with greater difficulty than controllers. Try soloing a Ice/ff and a Rad/sonic and see how much crappier the defender solos. It won't. Some defenders runs circles around controllers for soloing. Some controllers run circles around defenders for soloing. Controllers as a whole likely do solo easier than defenders, but by no means do they do it with greater less difficulty as a whole for the AT.

No, Ultimo, this assertion is wrong. It shows, very clearly, your narrow play experience with this game. By your own admission, you have played a limited subset of Defender powersets (and even potential builds within that) and extrapolated a broad-brush statement about archetype-wide balance based on that limited experience.

Yes, some Defender powerset choices are among the poorest soloers in the game. The AT has the 2nd lowest base damage scalar and no AT-inherent way to increase it the way Controllers do. That means that if you choose a powersets that are not generally force multiplicative, you will have some of lowest damage output of the game, which is limiting for solo play.

However, concluding that, therefore, all Defenders solo poorly, or even worse than all other builds within all ATs, is being too general. There are poor soloers in other ATs as well. For example: by no means do all Controller powerset combinations "solo well", and I would question the assertion that even a majority of them do so.

Another problem with the assertion is that your claim regarding soloing capability is very vague. What is the definition of how well something solos? How many foes it can fight at once and win? How much XP/hour it earns? Whether it can take down anything it meets, be it a boss or an AV?

And so this variety of performance within all ATs lies the crux of the issue. Defenders, broadly, are intended to be weak when alone because a team that includes them is significantly enhanced. But not all Defenders are that weak in practice. Campaigning then to "fix" the entire AT is going to either significantly overpower those strong soloing Defenders or lead to some core change in their powersets to try and keep them where they are while bringing up the weaker builds. Neither outcome is likely to be desired by the devs or players of those powersets, respectively.

You'll certainly still get disagreement with your thesis, but you'd at least get less broad-based disagreement if you at least argued from a position of seeking to shore up just those powersets that solo less well.

100% lockdown + massive damage on a single target makes it pretty damn easy for a controller to outperform defenders solo even with the worst primary (Grav). Also soloing a Kheldian is incredibly easy compared to a defender even if you when human form only.

The only defender blast set that runs circles around anything is Sonic Blast and that's because it's greatly overtuned compared to it's alternatives.

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Which you probably wouldn't be doing if sonic wasn't your secondary. That's like saying Ice Melee is fine because your fire/fire tanker solos just fine, besides the AT they have very little in common with each other as is the same with Sonic Blast and every other defender blast set.

How many Controller powersets get 100% lockdown? How many get it with 100% uptime without heavy IO investment?

I've soloed +4 EB Rikti Suits in the RWZ with Dark/Psi.

Edit: I've done it with Dark/Dark too, which is actually probably more impressive. Psi popped in my head as a reply just as a strong single-target oriented set, making it more comparable with /Sonic.

EVERY control set gets a ST hold which allows them to lockdown a single foe which is what I said.

Ah. That's not what I think of as "100% lockdown". You have to do something with the rest of a spawn while you defeat the one you have locked down.

You're simply using the defensive extreme with Dark miasma to endure much as the same way Granite Armor tanks would. It doesn't help you burn down the foes any faster than other AT and builds that can endure that kind of punishment. It's also an unrealistic scenario for normal play since you're not going to be fighting +4 EBs that regularly compared to the hordes of minions and lts. and bosses you'll burn through.

Maybe you should start reading the whole sentence instead of jumping to conclusions after the first 2 words.

Let me do a little highlighting for you.

In other words, your sentence structure didn't make completely unambiguous how the words "single target" related to the rest of what you were saying.

Try thinking about the possibility that you weren't actually clear instead of jumping down the throat of someone because they don't agree with you.

I have no idea why you felt the need to stress the word "solo", since I don't see what relevance soloing has to the need to lock down a spawn. Even solo characters face spawns of 3 or more foes.

1) This was in response to whether someone could hunt hard targets with something other than Sonic. The answer is an obvious "yes".
2) Dark Miasma's defensive abilities are heavily skewed towards -toHit debuffs, which are heavily attenuated against a +4 EB. Defense buffs for self, damage debuffs and a self heal are favored here. That suggests to me that Force Fields or Kinetics might be able to do the same, especially with IO builds (which most ATs need in the general case to toe-to-toe with this foe).
3) The fact that it's an unrealistic scenario is the point. The ability to beat down a +4 EB is clearly indicative of capability to beat down far more normal foes.

It's not relevant at all when we're talking about damage capability. A granite tank can solo a +4 EB easily but doesn't make their damage capability good.

I can only boggle at how you can dismiss an example of high damage output as "not relevant" in a discussion about damage capability. I had to be able to dish out significant damage to defeat an +4 EB in non-geological timeframes. Especially when the foe is mobile and runs away at low HP.

"Good" is a meaningless term, and it diverts attention from the thread's claims, which is that Defenders are poor soloers.

One of the consistent claims in this thread is that a Defender cannot deal enough damage to defeat a foe in the time their mitigation can buy them.
I very much contest this for any effective DPS capable of defeating a +4 EB even in the vicinity of 5-10 minutes. I think claiming otherwise significantly weakens any validity of your position by making your bar for "good" look very high.

As an aside: Have you seen a "Granite Tanker" try to solo an Assault Suit? Let's look at a Stone Tanker in Granite's major benefits.

1. +DR
2. +Defense
3. +Regen
4. Lots of HP

A Rikti Assualt Suit can literally nullify benefit (2) on a melee opponent. Once a laser hit lands it means that the suit will probably cause cascade defense breakdown because Granite does not provide -Def resistance. This leads to the nullification of benefit (1) with the fusion blasts, which also deliver significant -RES. So basically a solo Stone Tanker running Granite in the face of these things can easily end up dead.

I read this and I see absolutely no sense at all.

If I can both stand before and defeat a +4 EB, how is this unrelated to my ability to stand before and defeat far lesser opponents, even in greater numbers?

Because against minions/lts./bosses it's not about how much damage you can endure, it's about how much damage you can dish out effectively. Sure you can take down a +4 EB eventually because your defensive capabilities are so high but you still are awful at burning through mobs of minions compared to other ATs while solo. Now ask yourself, how often going from 1 to 50 is anyone going to fight a +4 EB compared to any con of a minion?

It'll be totally different, because its not like your damage mitigation is aoe or more effective on both lower con foes and lower teir foes. Your damage is also going to change *alot* going from plinking on a +4 to a +0 or +1.

You have to throw out a +4 EB because something like a fire blaster or spine scrapper could two shot the aoe limit of +0 minions in roughly 2.5 seconds, while it may take 10 or 15 seconds on a defender with decent aoe right?

I'll be responding to several people, but I'll start with Talen.

Take your own advice and read what's said. I didn't say Defenders can't solo. I didn't say they can't solo as well as Scrappers (specifically). I said they solo with greater difficulty than anyone else.


Luminara:

It's not only about Empaths, and it's not about people skipping large chunks of their power sets. I've seen it said over and over in thread after thread by poster after poster. Defenders don't solo as well as any other class. It's said over and over that they're "not supposed to," that "they're a support class." It's not just disgruntled Blasters. I'm not making stuff up, any brief browse of the Defender forum will show that this is true.

You're simply being dismissive, declaring that anything that you disagree with isn't a "legitimate, realistic" concern.

Attacking me isn't going to strengthen your position. I'm not about to go looking for threads, there are many to choose from, find them yourself.

SOME have damage improvement tools. Those that do (excepting Sonic, since that's apparently broken to some degree) STILL have lower damage than anyone else.

Kinetics can boost damage by 25% (making the effective damage 0.65+25%=0.77, which is better, but still lower than anyone else).
Radiation has multiple debuffs to reduce enemy defense, making them easier to hit. With accuracy a limited problem, this is actually a limited benefit, and doesn't actually increase damage output much.
Trick Arrow has a couple of debuffs to Defense and a couple to Resistance, to the tune of around 25%. Assuming a foe has resistance to debuff, this is a boost comparable to what Kinetics provides.

SOME have access to defensive tools, but these tools are either debuffs, which provide less mitigation than anyone else has, or they're buffs, which the Defender can't generally use on himself. Coupled with less health, this is less defense than anyone.

Cold Dom has several attack rate slows, which helps survivability over the long haul, but is of limited value against groups of foes or foes with strong single attacks. IT has Benumb, which reduces incoming damage by 62%, which is quite good, actually, but it's a single target power with a long cooldown. Outside of that, there's Arctic Fog, which provides 7% Defense and 20% Resistance. 7% is nothing, and 20% is less than TOUGH provides.

Dark has a variety of powers reducing enemy accuracy and damage. It also has a couple of Fear-type holds. As a result, it actually provides fairly decent defense. However, if the foe DOES hit, the Dark Defender has only 7% Defense and 31% Resistance. Darkest night reduces enemy damage by a further 37%.

Empathy has a self heal, and two auras, one for endurance and one for health. It has no other powers that help the Defender. Of course, the Regen Aura is pretty strong. Unfortunately, having very low health means the Defender cannot withstand damage long enough for the regeneration to help much. This is helped somewhat by the secondary, but if hit, the Empath has NO Defense OR Resistance.

Force Field has Dispersion Bubble for personal defense, and several powers to toss foes around. However, these powers are not always reliable, leaving the Defender open to attack while having only 15% Defense and NO Resistance. He does have the PFF for emergencies, however.

Kinetics can debuff foe damage by up to 25%, and has no other defensive measures.

Radiation Emission has a small heal, and powers that debuff enemy to-hit and damage, and even a hold. that makes it one of the most effective defensive sets. However, it has limits. RI reduces To-Hit by 48%, which is pretty decent. However, if your foe DOES hit you, you have no defenses. Fortunately, Enervating Field reduces damage by 25%. The other drawback is the extreme endurance cost. Before Stamina, the endurance cost of running these toggles and attacking is prohibitive.

Sonic has only the Sonic Dispersion Field, providing 23% Resistance, but it does have the stacking Resistance debuffing, which can increase damage output where the foes have resistance to debuff.

Storm fares rather well, actually. Hurricane is nearly all it needs, as it just floors enemy accuracy (-58% to-hit). It also has Steamy Mist, providing 7% Defense, and 31% Resistance to Energy, Cold and Fire. Outside of this, it has a number of powers to knock foes around, slow them down and so on. The irony of this set is that it spreads foes out, making it less useful in open areas, such as outdoors!

Trick Arrow also has a variety of powers to reduce incoming damage, but no direct defenses. There's a hold in the Ice arrow, but it's single target. Poison Gas reduces enemy damage by 31% and Flash reduces to-hit by 10%. None of these are staggering numbers.

Only Blasters have less defenses, but they are compensated by having large damage, meaning they are taking less damage (defeated foes do NO damage). Defenders have less damage, limited defensive options and less health.

Not my numbers, the numbers I'm referring to are from Mid's, and from threads like this one.

I don't know what a FUD is, but I assume it's just an ad hominem comment, so I'll not address that further.


Amy_Amp:

I find my Controllers are rather binary, at least at lower level. If they can control their foes, they're gods. If they miss, or can't control their foes, they're dead. There's little middle ground. My experience with Defenders has been that there's no higher ground to speak of. Defenders are either struggling, or they're dead (or they're on a team).


Uberguy:

The assertion is not just mine. I've seen it said repeatedly all over the boards.

This low damage, coupled with low defenses and low health makes Defenders harder to solo than any other AT. Of course, this is a generalization, as you say, but that doen't make it invalid. Either way, I've been pushing for the BUFFING sets to be examined, as the debuffing sets tend to do satisfactorily (I'm still not sure I agree, but it's debatable).


Combat:

If you look back, you'll see that I've been arguing for endurance equalization for ages. That is, if a power is going to do less, it should COST less. Both the Blaster and Defender pay 5.2 endurance for their Power Bolts, but the Blaster does almost TWICE as much damage. That means the Defender is using twice as much endurance for attacks AND has to run toggles and such. This is also a Tanker issue.

Are you missing the part where I defeated the EB?

Are you assuming it took me like an hour or something?

If I can survive the concentrated fire of a +4 EB while I defeat it, how does that fail to be relevant to how fast I would defeat far less durable foes?

I don't even understand how we can be having this argument.

Because fighting a +4 EB isn't relevant to solo performance. Any blaster solos better than defenders but can't take down a +4 EB. They are two totally different scenarios with fighting +4 EBs making up less than 0.5% of all foes encountered in the game.