Membrane Exposure and Shield Defense

While a shield duo looks good on paper in actual use it is much less than stellar. My wife and I are able to coordinate verbally real time since we are in the same room, system lag can easily account for being more than 15' apart, as can sprite collision resolution on the server.

Using follow with any kind of travel power, even sprint, can easily separate you by more than 15'. This is especially troublesome during the alpha especially if the mobs you are facing are defense debuffers.

Bottom line the coordination required in a duo is not something you will get on a PuG and will even be hard for SGs not using ventrillo or skype.

The best use of GC is the newbie tactic of rushing into the middle of the room and standing there side by side in total scrapper lock. That and Phallanx Fighting are not powers that lend themselves to skill or experience. They are best when selected, left with an LotG +7.5 in the base slot and then forgotten. Which, in my opinion, is a bad design for most powers in the game.

While its true that the shield wall was one of the greatest military defense strategies of it's era there are several problems with the theme here in CoX all of which were brought up during beta.

1) Thematic use of phallanx tactics requires a Spear melee primary that CoX lacks.

2) Phallanx formations were notoriously short on offensive capabilities. The offense was provided by soldiers in the back ranks that would attack through the phallanx defenders and by javelineers in a third row behind them. Thematically phallanx/sheilds should be very low damage.

3) Shield wall tactics are rarely employed in comics and even then usually by hordes of low wattage villian henchmen not by the hero(s) or super hero(s).

4) Phallanx tactics being the theme of shields is much too narrow a focus since it encompasses only a very small portion of history or the planet. Players may conceive of Norman or Saxon Knights, a Zulu warrior, a fanstasy Dwarf character, A native American warrior with shield and tomahawk, or even a sheild using comic hero like Captain America, and a whole plethora of other historical or modern ideas none of which have anything to do with Greek or Roman Phallanx tactics. The shields and graphics available allow many many of these concepts to be created while the power set itself fails to allow these concepts to be built. The shield defense set should allow the expression of all these concepts rather than the much much narrower and constricting Phallanx tactics.