Here we go again...

Yes, I know I post a lot of these, but they do serve a purpose. First, they let me vent my frustration; second, they promte discussion and exchange of ideas. I realize there will be the temptation to troll, but I hope you will all try to be constructive.

It began like this:
I was redesigning my costumes on some of my characters, and played each of them a little after doing so, to see how they look in action. I began with the Stalwart Star, my MA/Shield Scrapper. He is just a blast to play. He can dive into groups of foes with a decent expectation of survival, dealing and recieving damage well. He occasionally uses an inspiration here or there (usually blues - with 7 toggles, he burns a lot of endurance), and even gets defeated once in a while. The point is, he's a lot of fun to play.

The next character I played was Technaught, my FF/Nrg Defender. Nothing makes playing this character less fun than playing the Star right beforehand. Technaught is virtually incapable of handling even smallish groups of foes on his own. He has dismal damage and dismal defenses, even WITH all the available pool defenses. He's tedious and depressing to play, especially after the Scrapper.

Now, some will say that Force Field as a set isn't intended to defend the Defender. I say this results in a character with no offense OR defense, which is unacceptable. You have to have higher offense or you have to have the defense (survivability) to survive long enough to employ a lower offense. A Force Field Defender has neither since Force Fields does nothing to boost damage (as some Defender sets do) and nothing to boost the Defender's own defenses (as other Defender sets do). Debuffing sets generally work well. The reason is that debuffing the enemy is a benefit to the Defender whether solo or teamed. Buffing sets like FF generally don't perform as well, because the Defender can't buff himself.

Some say the Force Field set has mitigation tools in the form of Force Bolt, Repulsion Field and so on. These tools are helpful, but are of very limited value. I'll elaborate further momentarily.

Some have suggested increasing Defender damage across the board, and I think a SMALL increase is in order. However, we have to be very careful of this since there are sets that already boost Defender damage. Universally increasing Defender defenses isn't the answer either, since not all Defender sets operate in this way. This means addressing specific shortcomings in specific sets.

Here is how I view Force Fields, power by power.

Personal Force Field: Very useful, this power is kind of odd. I don't think it needs to be changed, really.

Force Bolt: I like this power, I just wish it would do a little damage. It's of limited use for mitigation as it's only single target and doesn't affect many foes.

Insulation/Deflection Shield: These are your bread and butter on teams. However, I have concerns about the balance of these powers, and I'll discuss them in more detail later.

Dispersion Bubble: Your only personal defense, it provides decent defense as well as status protection, but has a fairly high endurance cost.

Repulsion Bomb: The only real attack in the set, it's lowish damage, but is AOE and has a nice long stun effect. Good mitgation against minions and Lts, but that's about it. You might knock down some bosses, but they'll get back up and paste you before it recharges. It might be nice to see a little more damage, but it doesn't need anything.

Detention Field: I've never seen a Defender actually take this. It's uses are limited, and while you can freeze that AV for a few seconds, it's not much use if you're going to be killed by his thugs. To make this more palatable, I'd make it a toggle with a high endurance cost, like Telekinesis.

Repulsion Field: Some describe this as a mitigation tool, but it really isn't. Foes run in, hit you, then get tossed away. If they're hitting you, it's not mitigating anything. Worse, it's rather endurance heavy, and is very similar to Force Bubble.

Force Bubble: This one confuses me. It pushes foes away, out of range of your attacks, but still in range of THEIR attacks, so you get chewed up from far away, while being unable to counterattack. This also does very little to mitigate damage.

With so little mitigation and so little health, FF Defenders are at a severe disadvantage. Here's what I'm thinking of to help this situation.

The Defender needs a personal defense, but we don't want to change any of the powers too drastically because people like many of them. For example, if PFF was altered, people would scream about it. The trick is therefore to make a change without changing things for those who like the way things work now. My suggestion involves Insulation/Deflection Shield.

Allow the Defender to use these powers on himself. This would require a slight modification to the power. It has been pointed out that most personal defense powers are toggles. Thus we should allow the bubbles to be used as toggles. However, they have to be clicks for their use in teams. Thus we should allow them to be used as clicks AS WELL.

When targeting another person, the power would be a click, operating just as it does now. However, if targeting yourself or no one else, it would actvate as a toggle. Recharge after a click would be as it is now, recharge after detoggling would be lengthy. The idea is that you would be able to use the bubbles on yourself or on others, but not both at once.

Now, it's been suggested that this would be unbalanced, that the FFer would be able to soft cap himself too easily. I can see that, so I propose the following, a significant change that I think is overdue anyway.

Reduce the effect of the bubbles to around 15% Defense. Coupled with the Dispersion Bubble, this would provide about 30% total Defense, which is good. Other ATs are capable of this. Also, change the way the bubbles stack. It has always been my position that they should have diminishing returns as it is. This would mean the Defender can't make his team into indestructible gods by himself. This in turn would not margnialize other FFers on the team.

The only other option as I see it would be to change Force Bubble/Repulsion Field so that one or the other becomes a personal defense.


To summarize, what I'd do is this:
-Add a small amount of damage to Defenders across the board.
-Increase Defender health to Blaster levels.
-Change Deflection/Insulation Shields to toggle/click combo powers, such that the Defender can use them on himself as toggles or on others as clicks.
-Adjust the amount of Defense generated by the bubbles to be more balanced for both solo and team use.

Westley in 10

I would agree that Force Fields needs a little help to solo. This "can" be found in IO sets. I have a FF/Dark/Dark that hovers and is soft capped to Ranged and AoE. My melee defense is in the mid 30s and is adequate for the rare times that I wind up in melee range of a mob.

I would agree that force bolt should be at least scale 1 damage but that's not really an issue. The issue is that buffing defenders with potent ally buffs don't get to use their best powers while solo. The converse is not true. Debuffing defenders get full value from all their Powers.

The answer is to have an ally that the defender can use those buffs on. When solo this would mean that the defender would need a pet. This could be added to the Defender Epic powers as a level 41 power choice. It would also fill the bill on balancing buffing sets with debuffing sets. A debuffing defender would get a little use out of a pet but a buffing defender would finally be able to use all those ally only buff powers while solo. I feel that this would do much to balance the discrepancies between buffing and debuffing defenders.

To contribute.
I would like FF shields and Dispersion to grant defdebuff resistance so it would have something unique.

EDIT: Pet sounds fun, might even play another sonic.

An interesting idea, that. I think if a pet were introduced it would have to be sooner in the original set. After all, most of the character's life is spent prior to L41. Perhaps you could replace Repulsion Field with a pet of some kind? Not sure what would be an appropriate FF pet, though...

I find the situation you describe sort of disingenuous; are you really shocked that your scrapper (of any flavour/colour) handles things better than your ff/nrg defender? Also your supporting info is weak at best:

I don't think that there is an easy fix for FF. Like several other sets it suffers from being one of the first sets designed before game balance was really sorted out. Essentially Cold Domination is FF done "right".

Personally I think FF needs two things, better personal defenses (or other mitigation) and some form of increasing damage.

For the first the suggestion I like (stolen from someone else) is to increase the defense of Dispersion Bubble while decreasing the defenses of the individual bubbles by about the same. This means that teammates see the same total defense (as long as they stay in the bubble anyway) while the Defenders gets more personal defense. Traps defenders have a base of 13.3% defense for FFG which when three slotted with SOs gives them about 5% more defense than an force fielder dispersion bubble (plus they have lots of other cool toys for both attack and defense). My suggestion for FF would be to switch the defense values on the shields, instead of 15% on the personal shields and 10% on the dispersion bubble give 10% for the shields and 15% for the bubbles.

I don't really have a good suggestion for increasing FF damage (other than just saying that FF can only be paired with sonic ). A simple solution would be to give Force Bolt a Resistance debuff, it would be virtually unnoticeable on teams since it's a single target attack but solo it would be an easy way to increase the FF's damage against LTs and Bosses.

Ultimo,

I also believe that FF could use some help, along with Sonic Resonance and Empathy.
However, I doubt we will see anything happen, so mostly these things are just ideas to discuss and express our varied opinions and viewpoints. Dont be surprised if people disagree.

Personally, FF and Empathy need something to help their dps a little. Whether that is some kind of -res, +dmg or a generic defender boost would not matter to me. It would just be nice to have a boost to speed up fights solo. For FF I have seen a suggestion to add -RES to forcebolt and I liked it. To me that would be a cool way to assist in the dps area for FF.

It was also suggested in this thread that the Bubbles have +DefDebuff to assist in defense failures. Considering how critical defense is to FF which has no healing or resistance to back up their survival, this is a GREAT Idea.

But one big question I would ask you, based on my own defender experience is; What secondary are you using ? How are you leveraging that in your survival ? Every character I make now (after my Solo Quest), I try and analyze how both the primary and secondary interact with each other and determine what will control the battle more.
I seem to recall that you Play FF/Nrg. If I played that combo, it would be a hover blaster capped for ranged defense and I doubt seriously anything would get close enough to lay a glove on me.

Well Ultimo I don't know where we are deviating here, but I have to report that my playing experience with ff is apparently kicking the crap out of yours, meaning it's treating me a lot better than you report. I solo and have soloed most of my levels (save a couple here and there which I got doing TFs) and although my ff fender doesn't solo as fast as my bs/sd scrapper or my plant/storm controller, she gets things done.

Your comments about Force Bolt in particular caught my eye because you say

I would just as soon see the forcefield primary pick up defense debuff in certain powers like repulsion bomb, repulsion field, force bolt as opposed to tweaking the damage in the secondary. Mostly I think it would be easier to implement. I am a firm believer if you are knocked off your feet you should have at least a wee bit more vulnerability to a follow-up shot.

I agree too that Force Fielders need help.

I've played a Force Fielder to 50, and through use of IOs from very early on built up 38% vs Melee and 45% vs Ranged, AoE and Psi defence. This plus mez protection made up for the lack of offensive buffs or other utility powers in my opinion - I'd chosen to play a ranged tanker who could turn teammates into tanks too, and thats what I got. I wasn't gimped or overpowered - fights would go quicker on my Kin/Elec but not as safely.

I had to spend millions and wait a long time to get this though.
FF already has a niche as the Defender who can soft-cap teammates at level 22, the Blaster's best friend in Talos Island and so on. I'd like to extend this to the Defender themselves.

I dont agree with lowering the ally bubble values - I think that your primary role as a Defender is to protect the team still, and since you do that one way only, you should do it well and early.

I would:-

- Give Dispersion Bubble decent Defence Debuff resistance - this is a great idea.
- Move the End Drain resistance from Insulation Shield to Dispersion Bubble, so the user is protected too.
- Add some more personal defence somewhere. I've suggested before adding +Melee Defence/S/L to Repuslion Field, and +Ranged/AoE/E/N/F/C to Force Bubble, maybe of the order of +7.5%?
- Remove the sleep hole. This doesn't seem like a big deal, but having Lost, Rikti, Tsoo, Devoruing Earth, Freakshows, Carnies and Crey suppressing your defences constantly is a sizeable portion of the game.

This would give a FF-er about 30% Defence to all positions just from slotting Dispersion, Repulsion and Force Bubble, similar to what a SR scrapper gets. They can easily make up the difference with Hover/CJ and Manouvers and maybe Weave, or easy to get IO bonuses.
I'm talking Thunderstrike, Red Fortune etc rather than Blessing of the Zephyr.

You also get an interesting bit of "gameplay tension" ie decision making via Force Bubble - it will draw aggro and push bad guys around while you boost your defence, so you won't just want to leave it toggled on at all times.

The answer is to have an ally that the defender can use those buffs on. When solo this would mean that the defender would need a pet. This could be added to the Defender Epic powers as a level 41 power choice. It would also fill the bill on balancing buffing sets with debuffing sets. A debuffing defender would get a little use out of a pet but a buffing defender would finally be able to use all those ally only buff powers while solo. I feel that this would do much to balance the discrepancies between buffing and debuffing defenders.[/QUOTE]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the intent here. (That happens on a constant basis) But a FF with a pet? Wouldnt that be a controller with a FF secondary? Ill/FF? etc? or Worse, a MM? There are already two different ATs that do the pets with forcefields thing. And do it better. I'm not sure thats what we need.

In other news, a pickup truck has worse cornering than a Porsche 911, worse gas mileage, it's worse for picking up chicks and neither one has a back seat. If it wasn't for the ability to throw 1500 lbs of bricks in the back there'd be no reason to buy one at all.

Force Fields is a flawed set that I love. I just ran through a Positron with my latest lowb FF and two blasters.

We cleared several missions in under four minutes.

I know, I know, where are you going to find Blasters that appreciate force fields?

A definite no from me to fixing the problem with a pet, especially one that isn't concept neutral like a Coralax or Tsoo Ink man.

This is one of the reasons I play Defenders over Controllers - I tend to make Marvel/DC style superheroes and having a visibly bipedal pet of some kind really messes with the concept but a major part of the gameplay equation for those powersets. Abstract pets like Singularity or Voltaic Sentinel are OK I guess, but still not the best.

Well it's a GOOD thing that we've been through this before.


EDIT: And APPARENTLY Ultimo_ is FULLY AWARE of the thread and just wanted one for his very own!