Vigilance

I don't think Vig is encouraging Defenders to let their teammates die. Doing that gets the Defender kicked.

Vig is just rewarding being... somewhat slack in mitigating the damage. To not pull off that heal until teammates are in the red, or not reapply that shield quite right away...

Which is, by my reckoning, the wrong message to send.

That confuses me. How is teammates dying the defenders fault? If a blaster wants to absorb the alpha, and a scrapper splits off and takes on a group solo and dies, then a defender should get kicked?

In my experience, if the team doesn't work with the defender, then the issue is with them. On my emp, many times a player has ran off around a corner and I lose LOS so I can't heal/buff them if needed so that they end up dying. If players want to scatter away from my target or me when I play my kin or dark defs and miss the heals, then they get no heals. I won't bother to chase the player down if it means the rest of the team suffers. In other words, I let them die.
Other times, the team is way in over its head. My defenders can mitigate damage, but not 1000's of point of damage coming in. No one player can do that. I do my best to slow down the deaths, but in the end the teams dies because there is no way to mitigate that much damage. I don't see an issue here that a defender should be kicked because they let them die or they are being slackers in any sense.
The only message vigilance sends me is that I can get a little boost if the team is having a hard time and I can get a battle rez in or toss in a few more buffs/heals to prevent a wipe, which is perfect in my opinion.

Assuming you're replying to me? That's why it would be +Recharge and +Recovery. You'd get to use your powers faster, and your blue bar would recover just as fast. The +Recharge would give you faster endurance usage by letting you apply more buffs, more debuffs, more heals, or more blasts as needed to salvage the situation. The +Recovery would be there to actually make the +Recharge worthwhile, simply by balancing out how fast you'd burn endurance. This wouldn't change how any powers work, but it would give the player more options simply due to making their effective slow-recharging powers come up more often. Make it a sliding scale based on the HP of the defender and their team, giving more of a benefit as people become closer to making out with the floor, and tweak until balanced.

If you need a thematic reason for it, this might work: Defenders wind up in a state of perfect focus when they or their teammates are in danger, becoming more in tune with the nature of their powers than they would otherwise be. This enables the Defender to use their powers more often and with less of an energy drain when themselves or their teammates are hurt.

I like it, but I suspect it would be a point of contention. Only two other ATs have "free" endurance management in the form of +Recovery (Kheldians in Nova/Dwarf form and Soldiers of Arachnos), and both of them are restricted to players who have leveled an appropriate character to 50. If defenders received "free" +Recovery, it would almost certainly result in some very long and angry debates.

I do think the status resistance is appropriate, thematic and worth considering. It's not outright status protection, so it wouldn't leave the other "squishy" ATs feeling slighted and it also wouldn't remove the element of risk from playing a defender. However, I also think it could be argued that, since status resistance already exists for defenders (Accelerate Metabolism), the argument could be made to "just roll a Rad", perhaps justifiably.

Also, one would have to consider how this would empower Rads, since they already have such strong status resistance with AM (216.25% Hold, Stun, Immob, Sleep). Stacking even more status resistance on top of that, in conjunction with the change which ended toggle drops (for toggles which do not affect enemies), may be too much of a balance shift.

+Regen would be useful for some primaries/secondaries, but is it "vigilant" in a team scenario? How does recovering HP faster reflect a defender's attention to the team? Or, for that matter, him/herself? If he/she is taking damage, wouldn't that imply that he/she is not being properly vigilant?

Again, I do like the idea, but as much as I'd like to see all of these things, I have a feeling that they're not what the developers would consider if they were to do a pass on Vigilance.

I honestly have no clue what would be useful for all primaries, thematically appropriate and usable without being overpowered. A Power Boost type effect wouldn't be useful to "cast and forget" sets like FF or Sonic. Status resistance wouldn't be useful for Rads. The ability to use tier 1/2 powers while Held/Slept/Stunned wouldn't be useful for TAs or Stormies. A damage increase tool like the old Defiance wouldn't be useful for players who don't attack (as much as it pains me, i have to consider those types of players as well). A recharge booster... not helping FF or Sonic, again.

I think Vigilance has lasted in its current form for as long as it has simply because there may be no single solution which is applicable to all primaries. It may be that the only way to create an effective and universally satisfactory Vigilance is by giving each primary some kind of additional thematic bonus, like the secondary effects in the blast sets, and simply referring to it globally as "Vigilance".

I don't know, maybe something as simple as a charging power like Domination, but which acts as a Break Free or offers a combination Hasten/Conserve Power effect, would be enough. Base it on the amount of damage prevented and/or alleviated (i don't think code exists for this, but it couldn't be based on frequency of power usage or FF and Sonic defenders would either gain no benefit, or all defenders would be able to exploit it simply by spamming powers with fast recharge times, so it would require new code), make it account for the solo defender, not just teammates, and call it a day. There may be nothing that all defenders benefit from, or we may be overlooking something. *shrug*

The +recharge makes sense, but the +recovery as well, that sounds a bit too much to me. Maybe -end cost for your primary set, but Blasters might moan that much of the time Defiance isn't as useful if they see Defenders going round blasting like there's no tomorrow and not suffering for it. As of course, most Blasters teamed with a Defender reach their peak performance and could probably use a little more +recharge themself.

/sidetrack end

No, not much. Even if the third tier power were allowed, TA still wouldn't gain any appreciable improvement, and Sonic would have absolutely nothing. If something like this were implemented, it would have to apply to specific powers in each powerset, not be generally applied to tiers.

Maybe they should just rework Self Destruct, add a "teleport to nearest group of enemies even when affected by status effect" function and let us pop into a spawn and blow ourselves to bits when the poo hits the fan. Heck, if nothing else, it'd at least be more fun and noticeable than an endurance discount reliant on teammates getting beaten down, and probably a lot more popular.

As long as it's ''affected by buffs/enhancements'' I'd be up for that ;-)

Hm. On the one hand, an end reduction on the primary set would reinforce the purpose of this theoretical Vigilance, but at the same time there are some primary sets that can't do a lot to affect things that aren't your teammates. Maybe keep the all-powers -End that Vigilance has now, but tack on an additional -End and a +Recharge that just affects the character's primary powerset? That way you'd have your primary powers up faster and using less endurance per shot, without being able to just blast your way out of trouble with your secondary set.

Status resistance is an interesting idea and it would help solo and on a team. Certainly worth considering.

No fear of it stacking with AM though. AM is already so far over the cap of 100% that it doesn't matter.

The status resistance cap was increased to 10,001.01% in I13.

Pair a Blaster up with a --/Emp Controller and thats even better as the controller can heal and keep the enemy from attacking back. Controlelrs have a edge over us in that catagory

Are they the slowest and hardest? Of Course!


We need a change to vigilance to omprove our soloing. its that simple.

So AM alone divides the time mezzed by ~3? Nice. I missed that change.

This sounds almost too good to be true. I would prefer a +recharge instead of +damage however, it would help "keep up the good work" with the buffs/debuffs.

And your point?

Of course, my D3 defender would run circles around my ice/ice tank or grav/ff controller.


It is simple to keep as is. There are defenders that solo well and other not as much. Maybe I should start a thread that corruptors need more because my dark/therm corr was hard to solo. My ice/cold, son/kin, and fire/rad corr's would love the buffs for their soloing.

The more the Defender uses their primary powers, the bigger End discount they get?

That'd pretty much be the same idea as the current, as in the more trouble you're in, the bigger discount you'd get. Because when the Defender really starts spamming the primary powers, the fight is probably pretty fierce. Could also be a damage boost, but I doubt we'll get that.

This would help out all Defenders, some more than other, but that's numbers to tweak, and it's useful solo where the Defender End problems are worst.

I kind of like it.

The problem with this is some sets have toggle(s), others have none at all. If toggles gradually generated the new Vigilance, these sets would have a (slight) edge. I'm thinking more Storm, Dark, FF, Rad, Sonic. But if toggles *didn't* generate the new Vigilance, sets full of clickies would have the edge..