Defender Tier 9s need Balance

This.

The defenders inherent rewards them for playing badly or having a perma dead second account that they recall friend on. Even with a full suite of debuffs their damage output is so anemic you are most likely to be killed by real life interruption

Hideously irrelevant hypothetical. But... I'll take it on. I wouldn't. I wouldn't want to lose the option of the T9 because in each respective set, their T9 brings something special to the set (well, except maybe Traps but seriously, that's because Time Bomb has long since been known as a gimmicky power before Traps was made--but it's hardly unusable). I honestly tried to give an option but my thoughts always came down to "Well, if I had that, then I'd lose that set's T9 which would suck ***". Except maybe Storm but then, I was never all that much into the zappy fart cloud and I would take Heat Loss before anything else in that regard. And even then, if I did that, well, I may as well just roll Cold Domination since I'd be 9/10ths of the way there, so I guess no, I wouldn't trade for FS on other sets.

Tar Patch buffs everyone's damage. Acid Arrow buffs everyone's damage every time. Assault buffs everyone's damage--even more all-the-time. Wtf is the point of this complaint? Sonic Attack buffs everyone's damage AND deals damage at the same time.

Oh? Well, that's lovely. I don't know what it has to with making the two best (instantaneous that it--V. Gases is in a class of its own) AoE holds in the game four times better than regular AoE holds (twice the duration, half the recharge, four times the effective area...).

Who are you playing with? Does your Sonic just use the large bubble and that's it? If you're getting complaints when you pull up a Sonic, you honestly need better teammates because they don't know what they're missing--or you're not giving them what the set has to offer. And on a Defender...if you enhance the -ToHit on Liquefy, you can reverse soft cap your team's defense. On a set that already halves incoming damage.

The only complaint I have ever had with the set is the endurance costs of the powers but even then, they're easy to deal with.

No, it's because you make sweeping generalizations about game balance and "despite" your 50s (which don't make for high degrees of experience), seem extremely disconnected from what your suggestions would mean to the rest of the game.

And it's not you I'm mocking, it's this strange opinion you've cultivated in your 'experience'.

That wasn't your argument, your argument was that they needed copious amounts of buffing. Now solely for reduced recharge times...that's a different argument that others have played out, and I'll add, have been played out more eloquently than I could ever do the same so I won't try to butcher them here.

So you want reduced recharge but are now okay with reduced effects?

FB has a radius of 50'. I'm rather doubtful there are that many ranged attacks that are incapable of getting past that. They're there for sure, but it hardly breaks your character, if the actual effect you claim is anywhere near that bad.

PFF and Force Bubble are entirely exclusive situations. One helps the team, the other does not (directly). After FB's relatively recent nerf, the ticks between repels are actually short enough that reduced size would damage the strength of the power.

As for soft-capping defense on a Bubbler...that's a min-maxed build. The game isn't balanced around min-maxing (sort of), or at least it's the official position on the matter. If you're going to include min-maxing into the balance, you've gotta include it in your evaluations of other Tier 9s--which get significantly more powerful as their recharge goes down--more so than Fulcrum gets.

Since you said you haven't played the set, I'll try to make it easy to get...but try doing the same herding you can do with Force Bubble with Hurricane. It's much more demanding of training and learning and is effectively what you're suggesting.

Controllers wouldn't choose FF for the hold--they would choose it for the invincible pets (teammates or otherwise) and their own strength (particularly the anti-mez, granted, the Psychic APP overrides this at extremely high levels of recharge but anyway). Force Bubble also acts as an excellent positioning tool for Controllers because of their immobilizes (or other movement-impairing mezzes). (This also falls under the Cottage Rule but I won't get into that.)

In general, choosing sets based on their Tier 9s is where you're starting things off on the wrong foot. You should be choosing sets based on the merits that each particular set has to offer with the Tier 9 being the epic usage of that particular set's abilities. And epic doesn't mean it's the best, just that it's of special note for what it can do.

I see where this is going...

Actually it is relevant and Castle and perhaps other devs are aware of the situation. The other thing is that as time goes on more and more loot is generated. This means that favored or main toons will eventually accumulate every thing needed for top line builds even for casual players.

The other thing that is important to consider is total defense set bonuses available. It is not at all expensive to gather up set bonuses that grant an additional 12-15% defense to all positions. For an un-armored AT an additional 15% defense cuts incoming damage down by 33% that's pretty significant for an AT that previously had to use inspirations to do that.

For an armored AT that means they go from a challenge to virtually unkillable unless a mistake is made. That 15% defense is also pretty much the difference between fully enhanced /FF controller buffs and fully enhanced FF/ defender buffs.

As far as getting things changed I'm not really interested in changing inventions. I like all the levels of character customization available. First it was costumes, next it was enhancements, and finally it is power effects. These are all good things.

The problem is not the availability of individual customizations, the problem is that the original defender concept no longer fits well in the game as it has evolved. The near future will bring even less need for defenders unless defenders are revamped to accomodate the changed game environment. That is actually what I am more interested in and I have proposed several things including a different defender inherent.

You also said they weren't going to do anything about it. Did they say why?

Also, do they think it's a problem because it renders teammate buffers less useful or because it renders squishies too un-squishy when solo?

Yes. So loot may become prevalent enough for the devs to act upon sometime in the future even if they never change their threshold concerning when to act. I'm aware of that. It doesn't change the present.

Ironically, this improves the value of, say, getting a +30% Defense buff from a teammate.

The problem is the two combined, not one or the other. Changing either would fix it, though we all know how players react to nerfs.

I do, however, still think it's entirely relevant that if the devs balance based mostly on SOs, nothing will be done.

Yes. Why waste my time with FS when I can get Soul Drain instead and still have more choices for my primary tier 9 power?

No, it does not. It doubles damage for those who are limited to 400% damage caps and who don't use other Damage buffs and who are in the appropriate area to receive the buff.

Which, in practice, is not even remotely close to everyone. Some ATs have higher damage caps, all ATs have their own Damage buffs (in addition to Rage class inspirations) and getting everyone organized so they all receive the buff is like herding cats more often than not (and frequently pointless).

It seems that way because you're overemphasizing the importance and contribution of FS. It's not that spectacular. I have a level 50 Kin/Elec, I know what it does and how it works.

Good. That's what should be happening when you play well and/or with good players who cooperate. Tier 9 powers do what they do and have long recharge times because they're not intended to be used frequently. If you never have to use them, that's a good thing. FS is different because Kinetics is different (no other AoE debuff, no Defense buffs, extremely limited Resistance buff, no other team-friendly damage mitigation other than the heal, Repel and FS).

Liquefy has a 35.7% ToHit Debuff.

Sonic Dispersion is a PBAoE toggle.

The same argument is used about the armour sets tier 9.

Some people prefer a limited but faster recharging (Such as willpower, MOG), other like the massive boost occasionally for tough foes like AVs (unstoppable, elude). Other still get timebomb (rise of the pheonix, soul transfer )

MOG is the only one on that list to have lowered recharge significantly for a much shorter duration. Whilst generally accepted by the /regen community as a good thing, it was a move that was not universally accepted, and some people did indeed complain that the older way was better.

Huh?

It's a 50 foot radius from your position.

Are you saying no defender or controller has an attack with a range of higher than 50 feet?

The vast majority of defender and controller attacks have a range of at least 70 feet. There's no way Force Bubble puts them outside your range unless you have been seriously range debuffed.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

This I would have liked to have seen. Was the key waiting for the mobs to die of old age or something?

Was that pre aggro cap so you would herd the whole map up then set the power on auto?

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No, Castle didn't say why and there could be many reasons.

They didn't say but I'd guess that it's some of both.

While that may be true it should be brought up and at least discussed by the dev team. To use a driving metaphor if you are driving on the Freeway at 70 MPH and there is a traffic jam or accident ahead it may not affect you this very second but it will affect you in the future. It's best to be prepared to handle the situation.

While this too may be true it does make the 45% that the FF/ defender can provide no more valuable than the 30% that the /FF controller can provide. The defender's strength and team role is providing better buffs. IO set bonuses mean that the defender advantage is completely lost in "overkill".

Exactly which is why I suggest that the Defender AT get a revamp. The game has changed tremendously the Defender AT is due for an update. Blasters have been buffed recently. Dominators were revamped. In my opinion Defenders need looked at in the same way.

Unfortunate if true but we also know that the devs don't balance entirely on SOs they keep what can be done with IOs in the back of their minds when planning things. Shields is an excellent example of this. If Shields had been released into the pre-IO environment it would never have made it out of Beta the way it did. It's a pretty good example of the devs balancing around what can be done with IOs rather than balancing purely around SO use.

I'm wondering why nobody gets my point. Hand clap is a knock back that stuns. It doesn't do damage.

I've been thinking about this statement for a while, and I've decided I strongly disagree. In fact, I think this statement is misleading.

I play a lot of heavily IO'd characters, running the gamut of the usual design goals, such as +recharge, +defense, and high endurance/recovery. Yes, those benefits often allow me to do things that I could previously only do with the help of a Defender.

However, there's a world of difference between being able to do things a Defender used to be needed for and not wanting a Defender. Adding the benefits of a Defender on top of my IOs still makes my characters significantly better the majority of the time. I'll always happily accept more +recharge and recovery. We all know IOs don't add much in the way of +DR, so Sonic and Thermal shields are always welcome. IOs don't add mez protection except Knockback/down, but Defenders can. IOs can't replicate the sustained DPS increases of things like Tar Patch or Enervating Field, or the -Regen of Howling Twilight or Lingering Radiation. And heck, when it comes down to it, there's nothing in IOs that can match the healing of the Defenders who can heal; as much as I'm big on "healers aren't needed", their damn handy when you do take a face full of smackdown.

About the only time a Defender can't improve my characters is if I'm adding a FF Defender to a defense-capped character. I don't have a lot of defense-capped characters, though, instead having a lot of characters with +def in the 15-25% range. So instead of finding something like +def useless I find it incredibly beneficial, since just one can drive my characters near the soft-cap.

There's a world of difference between being needed and being helpful. Defenders are still incredibly helpful. People still want them on teams because they still have multiplicative effects on the team's effectiveness and divisional effects on foe effectiveness. Queue the regular debate about whether Controllers do this better, but that's not relevant to whether the benefits still exist and whether Defenders can provide them.

The lightning bolt that LS fires is actually a small AoE. The problem with LS in its current incarnation is that you can no longer increase its attack rate via IOs or your own powers (LS inherits buffs and debuffs from its caster). Previously, you could make it attack faster, meaning you'd get more mileage out of the large chunk of endurance it cost to cast. Now, however, it fires maybe five or six bolts while it's active but generally the action will have moved on. If it was like an actual cloud and, y'know, moved with you, I think much of the complaining would be eliminated.

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That could be problematic, though, since a lot of stormies I know cast it in the air 10 or so feet in the air to minimize the knockback on teams. At the very least, it takes a bit of thought to place that a pet using the standard 'walk after you and shoot anything that moves' AI doesn't have. Particularly on maps like Oranbega, where an unintelligently-placed cloud can knock enemies into giant pits. Maybe if the change included making it over directly over the caster's head all the time so that it was still mostly-controllable...

/thread

Fire/Kins are good at a very narrow band of the game. Very good at that narrow band. They, however, get a lot of publicity from it because of just how good they are at that narrow band and how easily they can be made to demolish that narrow band. Outside of it...they're not any better or worse than other available sets. The dumbest aspect of that narrow band? Any set can destroy it as well. Fire/Kin just gets strong publicity.

And secondly, it's not a problem of Kinetics, it's a problem of Containment.

Every time someone starts calling for this nerf, they are either an awful Kinetics or they made the quintessential Fire/Kin and went after the narrow band of simplicity. Every time. This is anecdotal and insulting to say but it repeatedly holds true...particularly with the other most vocal guy in your camp.

No, but it makes the set a bigger pain in the *** to play because now you can't just fire Fulcrum and move on, you've gotta sit there and spam Siphon Power over and over on each mob in-between uses. After that, Fulcrum does not keep you alive by itself when you dive in to use it. Heat Loss can do that. Liquefy can easily do that. EMP/Arrow can do that.

After that, with Siphon Speed...you're changing the power just to spite the player. 300/(1+x) = 90, with x = 2.33. Subtract 1.00 for slotting, so 133% more is needed. Go look at the average farming build and tell me what their global recharge is before Siphon Speed. Now add Siphon Speed 3x over. Doing this would just to spite the player.

... Seriously? Yeah, you keep giving me a better picture of why you make the claims and statements you do. As for why most don't use it... Kinetics has a habit of living within the mob it is fighting. Sending those targets away, particularly when there is a great need for said "buffs/heals" to succeed, tends to not work in your favor.

After that, despite its name, Repel only has Knockback. Wanna know who gets screwed over in that regard? I'll let you guess. And what's fascinating about this is you say the self endurance recovery is sufficient to cover the cost. Have you used the power? I have. It's barely enough if you're swamped by more than 3-4 targets. And the power itself is worthless when you factor in latency and your own movement--they generally still get the melee hit in anyway.

Another irrelevant hypothetical and I already covered the stupidity of 300/90 ratio on Fulcrum when compared with Kinetics' capabilities and other sets.

Ooh, a segue into "defender damage sucks". Dead horse isn't dead enough. In regards to the inherent...there are better arguments out there. Search for them. They're pretty easy to find right now.

Quickdraw!

No.

Well yeah, SB, Transference, and IR would be largely meaningless to such MMs and the rest of the powers would result in a rather anemic support secondary for a large chunk of the game. And it's not like MMs are incapable of accessing Kinetics--it's called a team. They aren't even particularly impressive with capped damage. And the situation would be especially unimpressive when the set has effectively no means of keeping the pets alive long enough to utilize said damage (ID and healz0ring only goes so far...for the pets you send into melee). You have to remember a lot of the pets take more damage than you per hit and they even might be taking some damage from you for Bodyguard, compounding the situation.

Yeah, Melt Armor would be so overpowered, it's a great thing that they don't put that power into ep...wait. They do. They just lower the effectiveness and it happens to be part of a theme. Fire. Water. Electricity. Wind. Heart. Perhaps Kinetics can be part of power mastery...but then, each epic seems to be limited at 5 powers as of yet. Perhaps it just hasn't come.

But you know what? Gale isn't in any epics either. Hey everybody, nerf Gale, it's obviously overpowered because it's not in any epics!

You can get the same recharge bonus from Adrenaline Boost by using two Kinetics Defenders as early as level 12. And it gives basically infinite endurance as well. Nerf Adrenaline Boost. Dispersion Bubble gives more defense than two Maneuvers. Nerf Dispersion Bubble. Those powers both do more than two players ever could with equivalent powers in a single package, thus they're broken.

You don't use quotes for an entire paraphrase. English Composition fail.

Ah, so your analogies, anecdotes, claims, opinions, and examples are the only valid matters here. Anything not 100% directly completely pointed is invalid. Sorry, I forgot this was the Internet.

What ones don't? FS effectively doubles any properly-slotted character's damage. Some ATs have a damage cap of 400%. That is: 100% base + 100% enhancement. Fulcrum doubles that (and does just that). Some have a maximum of 500% with which they get other toys and amusements to work with (Buildup, Defiance 2.0, Criticals--although except for BU, this doesn't really add to the actual damage improvement) but even if you disregard those, the maximum it is doing is 2.5x damage. For Brutes with their cap of 850% damage, you're looking at an enhancement between 2 and 2.5x (assuming Fury).

I knew that right off the bat, hence why I answered your post in full seriousness. You're basically trying a "foot in the door" method, albeit very poorly.

You make the same claims and whines that others have made before but never really substantiated. Dead horse is dead and in fact, dead horse never existed except in your own distorted opinions.

Well not to pick nits Uber but there is a difference between wanting a defender and needing a defender. Without going into the whole defender/controller buff debate again I go back to your own point of builds that are so bad that they need a defender being the worst of the non-optimal situations for defenders.

IO set bonuses take non-optimal toons or even ATs that usually lean on defenders into a new plateau where they have no need to do so. New difficulty settings are also partly to blame here. The -1 setting coupled with an increase in the number of mobs is almost like adding your own defense and damage resistance.

I don't NEED to softcap to dispense with a defender's services. All I need is enough benefit to hit what I tend to think of as the inspiration cascade point.

That's the point that I have enough mitigation and damage to pop/combine inspirations as fast as they drop. For me that happens on a non-armored toon in the neighborhood of 15% extra defense.

Define "enough".

You seem to feel you no longer want a Defender when you can get along without one. I think that's ridiculous. I want a Defender until there's no more meaningful benefit that one can offer me.

Let's see the difference in your team of IO'd non force multipliers and mine with some Defenders (or Controllers or Corruptors) on it. I think I know with a great deal of certainty which will go faster.

I'll never understand why people think Fire/Kins have to run inside some sort of narrow band of content in order to be extremely potent. Fire/Kins are great. I hate teaming with a lot of them, because so many people have made one, that a lot of people play them badly (law of averages and all). But they work great in almost all content. Massively better than other sets? Well, Fulcrum Shift and Speed boost are very, very good and what they bring to any team, in almost every "band" of content is fabulous.

Containment is not the issue, since every character I play that benefits from Fulcrum Shift (which is every character I play, since they all have powers that deal damage) has incredible killing power. You do not need containment to obliterate.

I would think an awful Kinetics would not be calling for a nerf, instead thinking the set sucked. I never understand why people think FS is only worriesome on controllers. When I play my Kin/Elec the team obliterates. Speed Boost is huge, but FS is also a big part.

I always view this issue in the opposite light. If you think FS is only super-strong on controllers (and then only on some controllers), you must be an awful Kinetics.

Melt Armor apparently would be grossly overpowered, since they changed it from a useful power on corruptors to a massive end cost EMOTE when they added it to APPs (although perhaps a low damage tanker gets more mileage out of it).

I think its foolish to argue that FS is not over the top. It is over the top. Is it over the top enough to warrant a change? Is Granite? Is Fortitude? Is a FF defender? Is a Fire/Fire blaster? There are many, many potent combinations that can "break" the game. Is FS (especially when combined with the other 23 powers that character has, and even more so when combined with other players) more egregious than others? Only the devs can know (unless they tell us). It is certainly worthy of discussion, in my opinion, and there is plenty of room for disagreement and discourse.

Shouting it down and claiming it is a non-issue and that it is foolish to even discuss because it is perfectly and finely balanced as is doesn't seem reasonable. Neither is starting a nerf-herding thread with obfuscation.

Enhancements are overrated.

My solution to the 'issue' of containment and /kin.

Using Fossilise as an example:
Currently:
* 30.59 Smashing damage PvE only
* 30.59 Smashing damage PvE only, If target is Contained (Immobilized, Held, Slept, or Stunned)

A better containment:
* 30.59 Smashing damage PvE only
* 61.18 Smashing damage PvE only, If target is Contained (Immobilized, Held, Slept, or Stunned) [Ignores Enhancements & Buffs]

(adjust the buff between 50-100% as balance dictates).

Seem fairly straight forward to me. At 100% its actually a significant buff to the lowbie (pre-SO) controller damage, and then for controller without a self +dam, works out roughly the same come SO time.