Damage output?

Too low based on what? Given the mitigation provided by defender primaries, I can't even see what case you could make.

What's even stranger, unless this FF/Ene def's soloability plummets after 22, I might just keep it.

Other posters solod the same mob with an Energy blast defender with no debuffs.

End of discussion.

Okay, no screenshot, but I just tried this mission with my level 43 FF/Sonic Defender.

Difficulty: +2/x1 player/Bosses Yes/AV Yes

Cat Burglar spawned as a purple conning Elite Boss.

I went in running Dispersion Bubble, Manuevers, Tactics. My attack chain is shriek -> scream -> shout -> shriek. I don't have hasten nor do I have much in terms of global recharge.

The build *does* have 45% ranged defense, 33% AoE, 25% melee and good endurance sustainability.

Tactics: Clear the annoying German soldiers with their defense debuffs, defeat the Gestapo Agent, find Cat Burglar and pin him against the wall with Force Bubble.

With soft capped ranged defense and Force Bubble pinning him against a building, the fight was completely lopsided and unfair...to Cat Burglar.

I did not run out of endurance even with Force Bubble (and dispersion, cj, tactics, manuevers) running the entire time. I did use two small green inspirations only because I got caught with two lucky hits of Focus and Aid Self was still recharging. Most of the time, Cat Burglar did nothing since the only time he could attack was with Focus. Occasionally, Force Bubble knocked him down.

I'm positive I can beat him without using such "cheap" tactics. However, the other method I would use is simply using force bolt to keep him ragdolled while I beat on him. The net result would probably be the same, maybe it would work even better.

I'm also positive I could make the fight even more trivial if I leveraged inspirations more. Use a lot of reds and some oranges to take the sting out of the focus attacks. I could even get a global recharge temp power from the base if I felt like it.

Yes, my secondary is sonic so I do more damage than energy blast, so to compensate, I played at a higher difficulty. I think with my build though, a +4 Cat Burglar EB would be very doable. However, I'm pretty convinced that a FF/Energy with the right slotting could easily take out this EB. I don't even have Assault, and an aura that provides 18% more damage would make up the difference I'm getting from sonic -res.

Force field doesn't have a lot of ways to debuff enemies or self buff, but it has so many tools to keep you safe (PFF, Dispersion, Force Bubble) and ways to mitigate damage (Force Bubble, Detention Field, Force Bolt, Repulsion Field, Repulsion Bomb) that a fight of this nature only comes down to whether or not your build has decent endurance management.

One note: my FF defender is built for teaming, and hence is not optimized for soloing. If I were to build her as a soloist, I'd be running a far stronger and higher damage attack chain, have much more global recharge, better endurance management and have hasten.

I think it's the OP's build.

4 hours on patrol 100% solo
Level 10 reached after soloing Frostfire
Frostfire defeated me three times before I took him out
That was without the use of vet powers. I do have sands of mu, but I knew better than to get into melee range with him where he and his imps would tear me apart in seconds. At level 9, you can only carry 8 insps.
I didn't even look to see what FF spawned as. Scrapperlock had me. Good thing I had ninja run to get me back to the mission quickly.

At 10 I took power burst

That's about twice as long as it takes me to solo a brute to 10. Sounds right to me so far.

[QUOTE=Ultimo_;2482870]If the devs are saying different, then they're wrong too. QUOTE]

Good luck with that one.

I still don't get what the problem here is.

EBs were never meant to be soloable, yet you cry about being unable to solo a (relatively) very powerful EB you made yourself with a weak soloer.

Beats me.

As a side note, Bill, do yourself a favor and pick force bolt up at some point. The damage on it sucks, yeah, but the 100% knockback is just glorious. It's super accurate, recharges fast, and doesn't cost that much end (and if you want there's an uber-cheap KB set damage proc you can stick in it). Sure, the energy blasts can often pull off the same thing, but you just know that if you give him a chance, Mr. Murphy will step in and stop the KB from proc'ing just when you need it most. When you want to bounce the baddest **** in the room in the corner until he dies, there's nothing better than force bolt. And you should have the power room if you're setting up a soloing build and not taking the shields. Nothing says you have to cut into your DPS to use it when you don't need it, but when you *do* need it, it'll be there.

And yeah, dispersion bubble is hold/stun/immob *protection*, not resistance. Isn't it awesome? Once you get yourself softcapped to ranged, it just gets silly. Force bubble + softcapped ranged defense + partial mez protection feels just *wrong*, and yet oh sooo right. It's a pretty sick combo - if I were you, I'd start lowballing thunderstrikes now, so you can whack in 3 sets once you get to 30 or so. 6 red fortunes in dispersion (and maneuvers, if you get it) would also be helpful. Combined with a pair of BoTZ in each of fly/hover, that'll get you quite a bit of ranged def. I don't remember - are you allowed to run hover and CJ at the same time? If so, that'd also be pretty good. It's just amazing how survivable a defender you get with that much ranged defense.

It was the parallel to focus that I felt would drop a big enough hint to Bill on its its usefulness.

And yes CJ+Hover can be run simultaneously.

Back. Hopefully my exam turns out well, it seemed to go ok.

Anyway, to comment on the posts in the interim...

Bill:
My build IS designed for soloing. I have all the blast powers (not Power Push, which seems redundant, and not Snipe, which is useful, but I couldn't fit it in anywhere), all slotted for damage. I don't have Aim or Build Up, there just isn't room in the build. However, I have inspirations to compensate for that.

If the problem is me, why does this subject keep being brought up by others (for years before I started doing it - and for the record, this is the first time I've brought up defender damage).

Psycho:
Rad debuffs the enemy resistance, effectively increasing damage.

Arcana:

I just took my 50 FF/nrg and soloed the arc. He's got a few more powers than a mid-30ish def would, but most of those are defensive in nature, and the offensive ones (PBU, TF) I didn't use on the bosses (I don't have conserve power, either). He usually runs on the standard difficulty, but for this I turned on bosses so that the EBs wouldn't be downgraded.

Catburgler spawned right on top of me (was that intentional?) and surprised me, but as soon as I got my bearings I just hovered over his head and hit 1, 2, and 3 until he died. He healed twice, but I was able to overpower that. I used 1 medium blue after I realized that using energy torrent to fill out the attack chain was costing too much end, and one medium green when he got lucky and hit me twice in a row with focus. I brought some yellows to see through his stealth, but found I didn't need them as I could still target him for a few seconds after he hid and so was able to knock him right back out. My end was certainly low at times, but I never bottomed out.

Fight!
The end of the Catburgler

The rest of the arc wasn't overly difficult either. I just used PFF when the boss in the third mission hit BU, and used force bubble on the boss in the 4th so he couldn't close with me. The final boss was more challenging, but with some purples to overcome his pets' 75% base tohit and defense debuffs, some greens for the hits that leaked through, and some blues to counter the end cost of the AoEs I was using, he went down.

The final soldier drops

The arc was pretty fun, by the way. The customs were well done, and the difficulty wasn't too over the top (at least on standard difficulty, although non-flying+softcapped characters would probably have had more trouble with the melee-heavy bosses). I especially liked the map choices, I thought they were very atmospheric. Also, I like the fact that the boss in the 4th mission had fly (which I think is sadly underused) - it made the battle feel much more epic to be dashing all over the sky with him.

I only had a couple nits. The Ubermenschen and russian soldiers were missing descriptions, which may be a file size issue (heck knows you've gotta be pushing 100% with all those customs), but I did notice. I didn't mind the first kill all very much since the map was small and it made sense, but the last one felt odd - the briefing sounded like my objective was just the boss. Finally, I think it would spice things up a bit if the patrols said something when they spotted you - the arc is a bit light on dialogue, and given that (I assume) they're all a single detail it wouldn't cost much space to have them shout 'Achtung!' or something when they see you, and it would add to the atmosphere. Those are minor, though, it was really pretty good overall.

Returning from the threadjack/impromptu arc review, I don't necessarily disagree with the idea that it's a mite unfair for lower-damage ATs to pay more for the damage they do get. I'm not sure it rises to the level of a full-fledged problem that needs to be dealt with, but it did always feel a bit odd to me. One possible issue does come to mind with the idea, though, if we just simply lowered the end costs on ATs like tankers and defenders. Given that all the damage scalars start out at 1 and then diverge, at low levels they'd effectively be doing the same damage as blasters, but paying much less end for it. I'm not sure if the devs can make end costs that also scale by level, which would be the way I would fix that issue.

Ultimo, if you don't want people to fixate on the example, it might indeed be good to just not give one. The problem is that you often give examples that are pretty obvious edge cases, so of course those that disagree are going to focus on them since discrediting them is a way to argue against the suggestion. This would have probably worked just as well if you had simply said: "It is my experience that defenders often have endurance issues solo, and I think it comes from the fact that they pay more end per point of damage than higher damage ATs. Perhaps we could... " etc. You'd still get people saying 'my defender doesn't have end problems', but I think as a whole it would stay more focused. If you do want to give examples, It'd probably be good to make a conscious effort to have them be as 'normal' as possible to avoid people attacking them for being edge cases.

(As an aside, I'd never actually bothered to use detention field on an EB before, and was surprised that it didn't work. I understand that acc/mez hamis raise the magnitude of the OnlyAffectsSelf status - does anybody know how many it would take to make detention field work on EBs?)