Defender/Controller Theorizing

ICK ! No, Please No.

In the early days I went to controller-land to get my support fix and deliberately (before Containment) chose a non-pet Controller (Mind-Empathy).

With minor exceptions like Masterminds, Storms, Voltaic Sentinel, pets are Sooooo.... non-comic for me.

So if they count my Vote, Just say NO TO PETS !

Hehe

I approve this message.

The only problem is that this is the intended role for controllers. Though I think we're at the point now where rocking the boat is just a bad idea.

The overpoweredness of Defenders multiplies with Controllers. Ignoring khelds, that's 40% of the player base in a perfectly even distribution. In my experience, teams where 3 of players are competent controllers/defenders the Risk/Reward ratio goes straight out the window. So if it's an even distribution on the average team, the risk/reward curve fails in my book.

Not to say that I believe the man is trying to keep us down. I'm just saying it.

The difficulty with looking at it this way, and a major reason that Spitting's hypothetical mathematical analysis of controllers vs defenders might verge on the impossible, is that the two overlap, depending on primary/secondary combo.

My rad/rad defender can solo in the Shadow Shard. My grav/FF controller has never been able to survive more then about 5 seconds past the duration of his AoE Hold, if that. In addition to that, the rad defender (at 50) has a wider variety of team friendly control then the grav does. The grav cannot even keep one spawn perma out of action, the rad can do that (mass hypnosis) plus do a very effective job of holding an active spawn via EMP and even has a ST hold to stack on bosses, plus a ST stun so, like the controller, can perma control 2 bosses. And thats without the debuffs.

Admittedly thats an extremely good defender power combo, and arguably a bad controller one (grav/FF fit the character concept, so sue me ) but it shows the difficulty of ANY universal comparison of the two ATs.

And the AoE advantage defenders may have is a substantial one, at least for AoE heavy blast secondaries, since leveling on a team is usually so much faster then leveling solo. It feeds into the niche mentioned of "players who want to play very highly team focused characters". I suspect that is a small subset of players, but for the subset that enjoys it (I happen to be one) I doubt that they'd want to give up team focus for solo focus, given the abundance of ATs that are better soloers.

And with Castle's comment one time about the difficulty they have balancing content for stacking buffs/debuffs (sorry, don't remember the exact comment) I doubt they'd want to improve defender solability without some kind of tradeoff. I think they don't mind groups like Repeat Offenders for the same reason they don't mind using Shivans, *occassional* abusive success is fine if you have to put some effort into it.

Though I do have some hopes that Arcanaville's low level soloing project may convince them to improve DPE a bit for defenders, she said they are the worst off that way.

I agree as well.

One thing that seems rather conceptual to me is that Blasters and Scrappers (being what they are) needed to have high DPA while Tankers and Defenders should be very sound on DPE. Scrappers and Blasters would need to build endurance savings into their builds (too avoid getting tired), while Tankers and Defenders (who thematically should not get tired) would have to work Damage into their builds. This would just feel right to me.

Notice I left out Controllers, Their original design seems to have had horrible numbers in both areas. As far as Themes go, I have already stated my opinion that we should have started with only 4 ATs.