The Unrealized Power of the Defender

My time on CoX has been limited to only two and a half years, but I have played computer games since they were invented in the early 70’s, online games starting when they were invented in 1983. It was a game called, “P-51”. A dogfight simulator between two players over a modem or it could be played between two computers via a null modem adapter. This was a 4 pin serial cable with wires 2 and 3 swapped. Your opponent’s plane showed up as a white dot on a black screen. The bigger the dot became, the closer they were to your plane. This doesn’t seem like much for graphics, but it was pretty amazing 26 years ago. Our computer club held tournaments for six months. The tourneys ended when I figured out how to win the game in just 2 minutes, instead of 45 to an hour.

You see that has been my hobby for the last 27 years. To figure put what a program will do beyond what it says it can do. In 1999 my brother gave me Asheron’s Call as a Christmas present. It was one of only 3 mmorpgs at the time. It had a level cap of 126 (4 billion xp) and an expansion came out for it a few years later that increased the cap to 275 (trillions of xp). So now when I play games like CoX and WoW and see a level cap of 50 and 80, I realized why so many players had many 50’s and 80’s. It was because this was a low level. It took me two years on Asherons Call to get my archer to level 165 (16 billion xp). Since every 10 levels your “power” is increased by 4 times, you can understand what the power of a 165 was like. Let alone a 275.

Anyway back to the Defender. Last night I was in a mission with my level 17 scrapper. There were three others on the team. Two Defenders and one Controller. One of the Defenders cast a FF shield on me which is nice. The other Defender had no buffs for me being a dark Defender. As we were fighting, my health was going down pretty fast (we were fighting purples). I checked my defense stats to see what percentage my shield was. The Deflection shield was at only 15%. This was a level 20 Defender. This 15% is the unslotted base. So I look at his info. He trained only two of his PRIMARY powers??? Which were of course unslotted or not used at all. Most of the trained powers were the blasts. He should have rolled a Blaster that has these powers as a Primary. Which as you know are 20% more damaging then the Defender’s Secondary blasts.

When my FF/Dark Defender reached 50 (never killing a thing to get there as he was pure player support as he should be), I respec’ed him to kill stuff. He was horrible! New players see the Defender and think, why should I play a Blaster. The Defender has all the blasts that a Blaster has, but I can heal myself. This is a huge mistake as those blasts they are thinking of are 20% less damaging. For the most part a Defender’s blasts are not designed to do damage. They are debuffing blasts. Lowering the defense, accuracy, regeneration, etc.

Yes, you “can” play the Defender like a mini-Blaster, but why would you want to? Even if a Kinetics Defender casts Fulcrum Shift, Aim, Assault, Build up and even Power Build up, the Blaster will still do 20 to 25% more damage without FS.

Now there is an exception to this as the title states above. If you have a team of Defenders with certain Primaries and Leadership, the stacked buffs will bring damage to an extremely high level. This team of Defenders could fight +6’s with ease and wipe them out in a fraction of the time that even Blasters or Scrappers could do. Plus the team wouldn’t get a scratch. Their defense would make a Tanker drool. I once tried to organize 7 others to try this, but they all thought it was a joke from the start and the team broke away before we even started. I have spent hundreds of hours studying this and building an epic team of Defenders.

On World of Warcraft I came up with a similar approach. By grouping a mage, druid, priest, paladin and warlock, the buffs made us much more powerful. We started at Level 1 on a Monday evening after dinner. We played for 4 hours every evening Monday through Thursday, then 7 hours on Friday, all day on Saturday and half a day on Sunday. On that Sunday afternoon we were all level 60 (this was done before Burning Crusade). This experience was reported on the forums and 99% of the responders were so close minded, they said that it would never work and soloing was the fastest way to level.

The Defender can be the most powerful class on CoH (Corruptors on CoV). But you must play as Defender as a Defender. Its right there in the name. A Defender’s job is to defend (not to fight). To buff, debuff, protect and to heal for the rest of the team. Playing a Defender as a Blaster is like using a screwdriver as a hammer or chisel. It “can” be done, but why would you want to?

If there are any serious minded players out there that want to experience first hand just how much more powerful a Defender can be, just let me know and we’ll set up the team. But there are ground rules that must be followed. If the rules are ignored, it will surely fail and the team will break apart before level 10. That would be a waste of my time and yours. However if the rules are followed, you will witness a team with unprecedented power and speed like you have never seen before.

By the way, when I was on Asheron’s Call. My level 15 walked into a dungeon with level 40 creatures in it. Players would run up and see me sitting on the floor with a level 40 creature standing behind me and I was perfectly safe. These players were extremely confused and the event was posted on the forums for years, trying to figure out how I did it. After two years I explained it all which really shocked everyone. Especially the developers.

When I was level 80, the developers came out with a new creature that had such a high level of magic skill, that it would take over 50 players to kill it (half of the players died in the process). A few months later I showed my guild friends something very special. I cast some spells on that creature, then walked over to it. The creature tried in vain to kill me, but it was as helpless as a puppy. Told the others to approach me. They were hesitant at first, but finally walked over to it. Told one of them to hit the creature one time. One of them hit the creature with his axe and it died. The xp from this creature was over a million. The reason why was that the developers created it to have to be killed by 50 or more players and to spread the xp among all of them. I killed that creature for a couple months and made 165 very quickly. After that I was bored with the game and moved on. My character was so powerful that I resisted 97% of all magic and 99% of all melee damage. When I told others how I created my character I was told that it was just too extreme. That was my intention 

At the end of 165 levels and two years, that character showed a report of only 16 deaths. Over half of them were caused by lag. We went into a dungeon one night. I was level 32. The others were level 60 to 90 (no such thing as being sidekicked – I was still only 32). We were overwhelmed with level 124 - creatures. When everyone ended up at the lifestone from being killed, they started to realize that I was not among them. They asked where I was. Told them that I was still in the dungeon toying with the NPC’s. This is because I studied the artificial intelligence of the creatures and discovered their weaknesses.

See you in game!

Actually, the power of the Defender is in equal use of both Primary and Secondary. If you do not use the Secondary, you only have half the power.

You mention Corruptors, but would you recommend not taking the blasts from the Primary? Or, for that matter, taking the Primary but not the buffs from the Secondary?

I would also be cautious about talking about the use of -- eh -- "bugs" to easily defeat foes and rapidly gain XP. While I don't see any harm about talking about such bugs in other MMOs, discussing such techniques in this game on this board can get you banned from the board, and even from the game. Whether you would call it this or not, you certainly run the risk of having your -- um -- "technique" labeled an exploit.

So what I think your saying is that a full team of defenders is very powerful. This is already a fairly well known point. At least in the forums. Repeat Offenders is a group that was created to demonstrate this.

Defenders (as well as Controllers and Corruptors) are force multipliers.

When you bring a Blaster onto a team, you get a Blaster's damage output. Just for argument's sake, let's say that output is 50. They also bring a small amount of force multiplication where they improve the overall performance of a team by (again, for argument's sake) 20%.

Now, the Defender will bring less total damage output (say, 35) but brings a much higher multiplying effect due to the debuffs and buffs. Let's put that around 50%.

So what happens when you get a team of 8 Blasters?
(50 x 8) x (20% x 8) =
(400) x (1.6) = 640

And what of the Defenders?
(35 x 8) x (50% x 8) =
(280) x (4) = 1120


So while Defenders solo, or just in small numbers, may seem rather meh, when you bring like-and-like (in this case, more force multipliers) together, they make for a very potent combination.

Still waiting for his Official BackAlleyBrawler No-Prize

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6skxcQCV2GU

Buffer Overrun used to do it, but they allowed controllers as well.

~Jade Dragon
If an energy Blaster's base damage if Energy Blast is 102.6 and a Defenders Energy Blast has a base of 59.3, I would hardly call this equal.

Another example: Rain of Arrows: Blaster 225 -- Defender 146

No way is a primary power equal to a secondary.

I didn't say that a Corruptor shouldn't train their blasts. You must have been skimming my article instead of actually reading it. Just as I said that a team of Defenders would be very powerful, well a team of Corruptors would have have the Defender like buffs with a more powerful set of blasts. These buffs are 20% less than a Defenders and their blasts are 10% less than a Blaster's, but under those circumstances it would be the best that could be done on CoV.

And I never said anything about using a "bug" to gain an advantage. Again you didn't read the entire article. I said that that I learned the artificial intelligence of a npc and discovered its weakness. This does not work on PvP, because your opponents will all be different and ever changing PvE npc AI's are constant.

Would you consider changing a rotation of powers an exploit? How about using IO's instead of training enhancements. Oh yea, that's an unfair advantage since a new player could not afford it, but an exploit?

~Arondell
I have actually heard of the "Repeat Offenders". They proved it could be done and I wish I could have been part of that group. It would have been interesting and fun.

CoX has been around for almost 5 years? So posting an article like this may be a little late. But when you still see level 20 Defenders playing their character like an underpowered Blaster, you might actually regret recruiting them on a team. On WoW, if certain DPS players are too low in damage, they will not be invited back.

Like that team last night fighting the purples. I watched and it took over a minute for a Defender to kill one npc. The while time he was fighting , his health was getting lower and mana was very low. There would be no way to continue to the next npc. Fighting a group of a dozen purples takes the average team about 30 to 45 seconds. but after 5 minutes we were only a third of the way through. It would have taken us hours to finish the mission. When I died after getting no support from the defenders (the FF def did not recast the base deflection shield), I went to the hospital and quit from that point. I had tried to explain why, but the Defenders said they would make that build work. I guess I am just more efficient then that.

~Rush_Bolt
Very good analysis!

~brophog02
I can see that you were thinking what I was

~Atropos_NA
Great video -- I can see you also like to think outside the box -- wish I was there!

Great posts from those that read my posts and fully understood where I was coming from

~Scientist
I go along with training blasts up front, but there is a better and faster way and you don't have to respec later on. When I started my FF defender, the first blast was not filled with any enhancement. It wasn't even on the power bar.

If I couldn't get on a team by saying, "L2 FF defender lft", then I play a scrapper, get on a team and then later ask if they would mind if I switched to my Defender. This would usually work and my FF Defender became my main and went to 50 without ever killing a thing.

Players liked the fact that my shields and leadership were fully enhanced. I trained the medicine and Teleport pool powers which could throw in a heal if needed and if there was a wipe, I would teleport to a safe spot and rez who I could.

I was a team player and was asked back again and again. By 35 I was part of a nightly group until 50. I did the reactor trial 8 times one Saturday and 11 times on Sunday. Players would come out saying they had failed when the reactor blew, and I offered to make sure they all got through it.

Like I said, I didn't ever have to use blasts to level. Why would anyone else except as a debuff as it was intended?

~Psylenz

Enjoyed your reply

I think our own Jock Tamson said it best when he described Defenders as the Combat Medic that would toss you a band-aid at the same time he was shoving a tongue depressor down a Nazi's throat.

Or something like that.

Whatever happened to that guy anyways? I miss him.

LOL

A) the rules I was mentioning in the original post were not rotations. They were that we all would level together. No playing that character when the rest of us are at work, etc. We would set up a time when everyone could participate and stick to it. They were also on what to train and when. And especially how to slot them, but this wouldn't be a problem, because when the others would listen to me on skype explaining the goal, they were very excited to be a part of it. Just like you might have seen on that video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6skxcQCV2GU

B) When I was teaming with my FF defender, I wasn't just standing around for 4 minutes waiting to recast the shields. I was also playing healer and sometimes even stopped a wipe from happening. Like if everyone's health was very low due to an ambush, I would use team teleport to get everyone to a safe location to heal.

Now this defender was played before ED and my shields, tactics and maneuvers were 6 slotted. This made the team nearly invincible and the to-hit buffs were so high that they could hit +6's with ease. Team Teleport was slotted with 6 range extensions. We could travel across a map in seconds. This was 250% faster than every over travel power. It was an experiment to see if it could be done and it was highly successful.

My BIO was telling players his abilities. All other FF defenders back then might put 1 or 2 enhancements in their shields and the rest in their blasts.

Once I have used the search function to find a defender for the team it's nice if something of a defender shows up so none of us feel conned.

It's upto the player what they want from their character and I am sure if those players cared to know what most other people thought then they wouldn't already have only 2 primary powers, several blasts, flurry, jump kick and whirlwind .

Not paying for their account I don't have a say.

The blasts are more important to those who find themselves on all supporter teams than to those who find themselves on all offense teams.

Someones character could of been built to work well with all the players they had been with up until they joined the team I am on and yet their build could be all wrong to the norm. Should they be expected to change it because it isn't popular? Should I share with them an opinion?

If someone wants a true medic, a modern day combat medic that more than satisfies the rules of the Geneva Convention as best possible in this game they should have one. If they want to blast but do little support then they should have one without my opinions. If I want to remember their names for any reason, like "omg we got conned" and choose someone else next time a defender is preferable then I will.