Please replace Vigilence inherent with something that lets us slot intelligently

I'm sorry. I seem to have confused you. I was talking about a team, not a walking disaster area or 8 people soloing the same map at the same time.

That's certainly doable but could be fairly complex or have other implementation problems. I prefer simple solutions.

In the closed beta where defiance 2.0 was being tested my suggestion for defiance was a toggle. When it was on it gave the blaster 25% more damage and 25% more recovery and when it was off it gave the blaster mag 4 mez protection and 100% higher regen.

When a mez hit the toggle would drop (this was back when any mez, even a fraction of a second one still dropped toggles) and break the blaster out of it at least until another of the same type mez was stacked on it and the blaster was frozen in his tracks. Simple and I thought elegant.

The devs went the complicated route though and gave us what we currently have instead. Chances are they would do the complicaed thing again.

I will be. Any new non-controller buffer/debuffer I create will be a redeemed corruptor unless the only place I can get the Primary/Secondary I want is as a defender (and I've all ready done all of those that I care to).

First on my list is a Fire/Dark.

If you are on a team and the whole team is taking almost no damage:

• You should consider moving faster.
• You should consider turning the difficulty up.
• You don't need any more power.

"My defender's team rarely takes any damage therefore my defender needs to be improved," does not seem like a compelling discussion point. You might want to drop that angle, for a few reasons.

That is hyperbolic (and the ?!?!?!?! makes it look like hyperbolic hysteria ). The maximum benefit is normally irrelevant, since you can get significant aid from Vigilance even with light damage on a small team.

It has always been nonsense that those who heal can gain more benefit from vigilance than those who cannot. If there is a disparity (and I am not saying there is), those who can heal probably gain less from vigilance (since every defender with heals also has ways to prevent a significant portion of incoming damage on top of being able to remove their own vigilance buff).

Since the folks I run with move at near top speed and typically at +4 mobs without the buffs from my defender I agree. It's also the reason that I only play my defenders now in certain special circumstances such as Hami and Ship raids. Most of the time I'm better off with a controller or a blaster since my actual contribution to the team with my defender is typically less than with one of my controllers or one of my blasters (especially in the case of my buffing defenders. Not so much with my debuffing defenders but most of the defenders I play are buff oriented.)

This is mainly due to the use of IO set bonuses with the players I typically run with. The defender buffs are typically overkill and corruptor or controller buffs are adequate even against +4 mobs.

Sadly it's not my defender that is allowing this but set bonuses and lower powered buffs from other buffing ATs instead. I wind up playing a toon that has high powered buffs wasted in overkill and low damage contribution. This is the reason that all my new buffing characters after GR comes out will be Corruptors. Adequate buffs, extra damage, and scourge. I may actually enjoy playing a buffing character again.

Perhaps, but maximum benefit comes from having an 8 man team with one or more heavily damaged/defeated teammates, something that typically happens only on a team that is composed of new or poor players. You can buff your inherent into oblivion and the more experienced you are and the more experienced your team is the less you get from your inherent. Hyperbolic or not that is exactly backwards of what I expect out of an inherent. It should be just as good at level 1 as at level 50, should be as good for a 60 month vet as it is for a 1 month vet, and it certainly shouldn't give me less benefit the better I do my job.

The maximum benefit is normally irrelevant but so are the mid and minimum levels of benefit. If you slot your defender so that you can perform without, or with few, endurance issues, whether you are on a 2 man team, or an 8 man team, all levels of benefit from vigilance are virtually irrelevant, which I believe is the point that Talionis sought to bring up with his OP.

Actually I believe that the issue is more one of those that can heal and choose not to for the sake of reduced endurance costs for themselves. While that may be the exact attitude you would expect from a Corruptor it is the exact opposite attitude you would expect from a Defender.

I believe the inherent should reward you for doing your job well, instead of giving you higher rewards for doing your job poorly.

Empathy cannot reduce a significant portion of incoming damage. The only defense/resistance buff in the set is Fortitude which prevents a lot of damage on a few teammates but by no means the entire team.

In general I would say Defenders fall into three categories where Vigilance is concerned:
1. Those who gain no benefit since their powers are aimed at preventing damage from occurring in the first place (FF and Sonic are the prime examples but honestly a lot of Defender sets fall into this category)
2. Those who benefit and can counter it (primarily Empathy and Kinetics). These sets have limited methods of preventing damage from occuring but can heal it afterwards with spammable powers (the ones that benefit the most from endurance reduction).
3. Those who benefit but can't do anything about it (TA and Traps are the prime examples). These sets aren't really focused on damage prevention (although Traps does have quite a bit of damage prevention) so they are likely to benefit from Vigilance to some extent even if they are playing well. However when Vigilance kicks in their options for countering it are pretty limited. They have no direct healing so they have to rely on mezzing or killing the offending enemy which is pretty dependent on what powers they have ready at the time (since a lot of their powers have long recharges). Additionally they lack the spammable powers which really benefit from end reduction.

*shrug* Just my thoughts on why Vigilance is less than useful to a majority of Defenders.

I am sorry Adeon, you are partly right in that Fortitude cannot provide "preventative" protection to the entire team, but through proper application to the "most likely to get harmed" members of your team, Fortitude provides a HUGE preventative benefit to a team. What is more often a challenge to my defender is when the team splits up too much OR, the most likely "squishy" team-mates changes frequently or is greater than "4". Thats when my "empath" starts to feel a little more like a "healer" and less like a "buffer". In the Case of Kinetics, the only real Healing I do is when I need to heal myself, which occurs from time to time due to being in melee/AoE range alot.

I'm not so certain about the claim that no defender benefits more from vigilance than another. I haven't run the numbers to check but from playing both:

My Emp/Dark/Dark doesn't run out of endurance unless he is solo even when RA is down. He's a high recharge build having AB set up for perma. I can't remember a time any where with in the last year that he was teamed that his end bar was down more than 25 endurance. He runs his epic armor, Tactics, Manuvers, and Assault. He has Stamina 3 slotted but doesn't have any of the Uniques in Health.

My FF/Dark/Dark is a high defense build. I don't have or run hasten and I have set bonuses that give me a total of 28% global recharge. I have health slotted with Miracle +, Miracle Heal, and Numina +/+. Thunderstrikes give me recovery bonuses, Gift of the Ancients in the grantable shields give me more recovery and increase my max end. I have stamina 4 slotted. 2 level 50 generic endmods, a level 50 performance shifter end mod and a level 25 performance shifter proc.

I run Dispersion, Manuvers, Assault, the Epic armor, and Hover. Even on a team of 8 after I've bubbled the team if they stay inside dispersion I can run through an entire bar of end just from blasting, drop in and use Dark Consumption, and empty out the bar again and finish the fight just floating in the air waiting for my end bar to recover. That's not a rare occurance that's a common occurance happening at least once in a typical defeat all mission and happening nearly every time in an AV fight or Multi EB fight that you can get on ITFs.

Unless by "even when RA is down" you mean "I don't use RA" I think that's the issue. Your FF defender has higher toggle costs (assuming similar toggle slotting) but this is presumably offset (if not more then offset) by the superior recovery bonuses. However, I have found builds that have "free endurance" powers (recovery aura, power sink, energy absorbtion, etc.) are EASIER on the blue bar as you rack up recharge bonuses rather then harder like most builds. If you have AB at perma then (hasty math but I think I'm about right) you can have RA up 3/5 of the time. Averaging it out over time (admittedly not the best measurement of RA) thats the equivalent of +120% recovery, which I'm pretty sure is impossible to get through IOs.

I was not implying that all defenders benefit the same from Vigilance on a team, just that I dont think anyone has proven that its a large difference from set to set. Logic will say that a set like forcefields will benefit less than Empathy, but from personal experience playing my Kinetic, Empathy and Forcefielder (recently) on teams of various make-ups, I honestly cannot see ANY difference in their endurance use from one team to the next. I would expect that one defender would have more trouble with endurance than another (Forcefields), but having concentrated on endurance efficiency for his build, I almost never run low, and he has NO +recovery powers like Emp or Kin and actually spends MORE time blasting than the other two.

P.S. I probably should add that when I run teams with my guildmates (which is the majority of teaming I will do), there is never a shortage of Defenders/Controllers. I am almost never the "sole support" for a team. I could envision a situation like that being more favorable to "Vigilance" than my typical teaming situation.

I'll disagree that defenders are balanced relative to heroic ATs. Defender damage was balanced against blaster damage at launch. Every AT has received damage buffs since then, while defenders have not. I think this pretty clearly leaves them slightly underpowered.

I agree with this.

If playing a defender well means that your teammates never take any damage, then they don't need a buff.

With SOs you are a couple of seconds off perma on 4 characters. My emp typically keeps it up on 6 (hasten and IOs).

Not an entire (full) team for sure but 50% (or more) is normal, and it can easily be the entire team is the team is 5-6 folks.

In this case we won't know till Going Rogue comes out if Defenders are underperforming. I'm concerned the Defender Archetype will be dead or on life support after Going Rogue.

I think everyone accepts that the current Vigilence does nothing. No one in this thread has even remotely shown that current Vigilence is valuable. I think fixing the broken Vigilence inherent gives an opportunity for the Dev's to more clearly show the difference between Defenders and Corrupters.

Think about the difference between Brutes and Tanks. Basically thematically they are the same almost all Tanks can be made as Brutes and vis versa. Its Gauntlet versus Fury, that makes the real choice for people which Archetype to use. Gauntlet has become a very good "control" power that is extremely useful on teams. Fury allows for sick things for damage output. The difference between the two like Archetypes is obvious mostly from their inherents.

The other point to my thread is that I think a simplier more balanced fix to Gauntlet exists. My suggestion would basically allow what the description of current Vigilence is only changing the mechanic. I'd like something done, and I feel the more realistic and balanced our suggestions are, the more likely the Dev's are to listen to them.

You can argue this one either way since it is extremely situational. Solo a defender is pretty low in effectiveness but a team of 8 Defenders is one of the most effective out there (assuming a reasonable mix of primaries). The primary issue with suggestions for boosting Defender damage do partly come down to the fact that a Defender only take is horribly OP for anything except AVS (and even then they can take down most of them).

That is a very simplified view, the changes in the buff numbers between the classes are pretty major (although damage is similar until you factor in Fury).

I should have left the paragraph I wrote in there refuting this point about 8 defenders:

You can stack defenders, controllers, and corruptors to fairly similar results. If you boost defender damage to make soloing easier (esp. for those with primaries that don't boost damage, like Emp, FF, or Sonic), you're not going to make life significantly or probably even noticeably easier for teams of 8 defenders. I don't even see why people bring up the 8 defender teams, because there's no way for 8 buffers/debuffers to be anything but ridiculously overpowered, and by the same measure, controllers, corruptors, and masterminds need a nerf to bring their damage into line when you stack 8 of them together in any combination.

I do realize that the other three ATs have lower buff/debuff numbers, but that's fundamentally irrelevant when you stack enough of them.

Ok, I see what you're getting at now. Put that way it does make sense. Brute/Tankers/Scrappers/Stalkers have inherent powers that enhance their difference but Defenders/Corruptors don't (well Corruptors do but Defenders don't).

First your statement is a false extrapolation with a non-sequitor as a conclusion.

If playing a defender well means that your teammates never take any damage, because your teammates are heavily IO'd....

If playing a defender well means that your teammates never take any damage, but you can't defeat an AV because your damage won't over come their regen..........

If playing a defender well means that your teammates never take any damage, then the defender doesn't need a buff even though a Controller or Corruptor can do just as good or better a job AND contribute more to the team.......

The problem is the point at which no damage occurs. If all 3 ATs can do that but the Corruptor or Controller can contribute more to the team after that point is reached, then yes the defender needs changing since the other ATS in question actually do a better job, taken as a whole, in the team role that the devs have tailor made for the defender. Clearly the primary is not in need of a change but the secondary power set needs to be improved in this case.

Let's not make the mistake that a buff is what is being asked for. The needed change may be a buff in the end, it may not, but what is being asked for is for the inherent power to actually make sense.

Let's change the perspective on the issue shall we? Let's look at blasters for a second. How much sense would it make if the blaster inherent made it so that the faster your blaster defeats things (due either to increased player skill, higher character level, or to the slotting of beneficial IO set bonuses) the less overall benefit defiance gives. Clearly if you are defeating things that quickly and are still maintaining adequate health then you don't need all the extra damage and hence no change is required.

Vigilance is broken in just that way but in regards to endurance usage rather than damage dealing.... and yes, it needs fixing.

What I mean by "even when RA is down" is that on a team of 2 or more, I don't need RA for myself at all. I cast it for the rest of the team.

My FF defender does have higher toggle costs but has much more extra recovery than is required to "make up the difference" and the blast sets and epics are identical.

The FF uses (and needs to use) Dark Consumption frequently. (It's on a base 360 second recharge as compared to RA's 500 second recharge) Had I built for +rech rather than +defense I would still bankrupt my self. I'd do it faster and still need Dark Consumption more often than it's available.

The Emp doesn't even need to have Dark Consumption in the build (except when soloing)

You are starting to argue semantics, a good sign that your points may have less merit than you believe.

It is not a fact that a controller or corruptor adds more to a team after mitigation is nigh total. Defender damage buffs, resistance debuffs, and defense debuffs are higher which makes their offensive contribution potentially larger than the other two. Defender blast sets will generally provide more damage to a team than most controllers will bring. Corruptors have the damage edge, as intended.

I will not argue against increased defender (and corruptor) damage, I think both of those ATs could use something to put them more on par, perceptually, with MMs and controllers.

Meh. Rising to the challenge when the fit hits the shan works for me. I liked old defiance and I enjoy vigilance as is.

I'd be OK with that. It is like that now, really. At the lower levels, +35% damage from defiance has much more impact than +35% defiance will have on a level 50 with +99% enhancing and 17% global damage from IOs (or larger outside team buffs you do not often see until the later levels). Think about trying to build up high levels of defiance when whole spawns wipe with just FSC+Fireball+teammate's contributions (most people don't fight +4s all the time, although vs. +4s, in my limited experience, defenders shine nicely).

A good kin on a team can render all of defiance pointless with just ID and FS. Does that mean defiance is useless and needs to be changed?

Your claims that IOs (your own and teammate's) make defenders and the defender inherent less worthwhile are exaggerated. The fact that only a very small amount of people can run as you outline below renders the line of reasoning you are pursuing an outlier, and one that should probably be ignored.

Just as people suggest we should not "nerf" the standard game due to IOs, I'd imagine that philosophy extends the other direction. Defenders do not need to be changed because all your SG plays is super IOd characters who have capped defense and high order defense debuff resistance (or avoid the more difficult enemy groups, choosing to fight less annoying mobs at +4 instead).

I have never met an IOd character who couldn't use bubbles at +4, despite having seen defense capped Shield scrappers tank Lord Recluse on all scrapper STFs and IOd Stone tankers in granite surrounded by Arachnoids.

Maybe its because I seek out Carnies, Malta, Arachnos, Arachnoids, Knives, Rularuu, and challenging customs in AE. This could render my experience as an outlier, best ignored as well.

Hardly. Merely attempting to clarify the situation. I was presented with a misleading statement of the type that is X+Y always = Z. When the truth of the matter is that sometimes X+Y = Z but only if we omit B, C, and D and add in E.

Once you get to that point which isn't all that hard for many buffs sometimes needing only 1 or 2 buffers to cap it out (Forcefields and Kinetics being 2 excellent examples) There is absolutely no advantage to having a defender over another buffing AT and the defender inherent means that you can actually be at a disadvantage compared to another buffing AT. No matter what argument you present, that is not the place that the AT that is designed as the top support AT in the game should find themselves at.

I would venture to say that you are one of few. As you'll recall one of the reasons old defiance was changed was because it was counter productive. Current vigilance is the same. I can imagine Statesman saying something similar about vigilance as he did about defiance.

For Blasters, "just ask the defender not to heal you."

For Defenders, "just don't heal the blasters...."

and again you would be one of few.

Not really. Until you hit the damage cap 35% more damage is 35% more damage. It's not a dimishing return as it is for vigilance. With vigilance, the harder you work, the more experience you have, the more you develop your character with IOs, the less you get from your inherent. It is actually the perfect tool for leaving an AT at static levels of benefit. A very non-rewarding place to be and not the reason that most folks play CoX.

Against harder content you can't wipe whole spawns in the late game with just FSC+Fireball+teammate's contributions. ITF's are excellent examples of this. In most missions spawns are at +1 level anywhere from 33-50% of the time. Even setting difficulty at +2 will allow you to build up full defiance nearly every spawn.

A very hyperbolic arguement. Having a good kin on a team happens about as often as getting a consistant return from vigilance. (ie: rarely)

Except that it's not an exaggeration. You don't have to have massive set bonuses to get that kind of performance from IOs. Simple and cheap Franken slotting (or comparatively inexpensive uncommon sets like thunder strikes, doctored wounds, red fortunes, titanium coating, etc) could be done by everyone with only a small amount of effort. In many cases this is enough extra performance to make the difference in buff values nearly a non-factor. 3 sets of thunder strikes are not at all hard to come by for anyone making an even moderate effort on slotting IOs and that alone gives you excellent personal numbers on acc, dam, rech, and end for the power slotted with these sets but the defense set bonuses completely eliminate the difference between controller insulation shield + controller dispersion and defender insulation shield + defender dispersion when slotted to the ED soft cap.

That's not an outlier or a non-factor. That's easy to do and should be taken into consideration, not blithely ignored.

Except that you don't have to be super IOd to obviate defender levels of buffs. Uncommons and franken slotting are all that is needed to make controller or corruptor buffs adequate in places defender buffs were needed/desired previously.

Nor have I but to be honest you don't have to hit the hard cap on defense. Soft capping gives you 45% defense and it's possible to exceed that by a few percentage points. All you really need to make sure that you don't ever drop below 45% defense, even in a high defense debuffing situation like an ITF, even without any DDR is another 25ish defense. Once you get to that point you only take 5% total of all incoming damage. It's not that hard to survive against 3 or 4 +2 or +3 level 8 player spawns with that kind of mitigation especially since most ATs have some resistance under all that and the wedding band is a cheap and easy, endlessly renewable, accessable by all, way to get lots more.

You don't need a defender to get those values, an /FF controller can get your that, a widow or 2, or even 2 or 3 teamates running manuvers.

I play it all. My weekend SG typically picks oro arcs at random and the coalition and global channel I hang out in does Hami and ship raids 2-3 times a week (or more) and there's usually a shard TF at least once a month.

That aside I can see how the defender is getting dinged. IO sets, the seldom useful and conceptually backwards inherent, and Going Rogue on the horizon all taking their respective bites out of the defender AT. I believe that it's time for the most dev neglected AT to have an update.

The statement, IMO, still applies generally. If playing a defender well means that your teammates never take any damage, then they don't need a buff.
Trying to add qualifiers that are less common than the norm or just don't matter all that much doesn't make that statement untrue. Yes, obviously there are situations where things are different,exceptions, but the statement is not misleading, it is generally true.

First, controllers are designed as the "top" support AT, not defenders (although, I really like the philosphy that all ATs are support ATs).
Second, once you get to the point where more mitigation or more damage buffs are unnecessary, controllers are in no way more desirable than defenders, because defenders do better AoE damage (with a few exceptions late game). Stating that higher defender buff values are not useful while at the same time arguing that controllers bring more to a team after max mitigation is reached is silly. Who the hell needs to mez enemies when the enemy can't hurt us anyway? Why would I want animation time spent on Flashfires and Stalagmites when I could instead have highly buffed (and enemy resistance debuffed) Ball Lightnings, Irradiates, and Energy Torrents?
Third, I find value in the greater defender buff/debuff values in many cases, although certainly not enough that I would reject a corruptor, MM, or controller to take a defender instead (although it is enough to make me look for defenders as a preference).

Damage buffs do indeed yield less percentage increase as you approach the cap. If an attack deals base 100 damage and is unenhanced, a 35% defiance buff increases damage of that attack 35%. If the attack is now enhanced 116%, a 35% defiance buff only increases damage by 16%. While Build-Up is active, that defiance buff only increases your damage by 11%. The harder you work, the more you enhance and develop your character with IOs (and even just SOs) and powers, the less defiance does for you.

Actually even at +2, on the type of teams you are discussing, I find that enemies die very, very fast. Sure, solo or on a small team, +3s take a bit to kill, but we have been talking about teams here where the better defender buffs are rendered irrleveant and corruptor buffs would do just as well. Most teams like that have high order damage on top of great mitigation, IME.

On small teams, those better defender buff/debuff values matter more, just like defiance might matter more on a small team.

I am not entirely convinced that simple IO slotting that gets you to ~12%-15% defense to a few types all of a sudden makes controller bubbles as good as defender bubbles.

I also contend that defender secondary powers provide significant levels of contribution to a team. You cannot just say that controllers buff good enough and on top of that they can control stuff too! Defenders buff better and on top of that they shoot stuff too!

The only place I have seen this even attempt to be argued is with Defense and even then I am not convinced. These comaprisons always include Dispersion Bubble. If a teammate (heaven forfend!) wanders out of DB, the increased value of the individual buffs from a defender is actually magnified due to the mild IO slotting.

My experience with defense debuffing leads me to believe otherwise. I have seen 70% defense drop below cap often enough to not discount any extra benefit.

This fixation on Defense is noteworthy. Defenders do other things besides give out defense buffs and to-hit debuffs. You brushed aside my point that defenders bring higher resistance, defense, and damage buffs, stating that once you get to X point, it doesn't matter. Allow me to brush aside higher corruptor damage and controller controls the same way.

Once spawns are dying fast, who cares that corruptor base damage and scourge make them do slightly more damage? Why lock down spawns that can't hurt your team? Usually, those lockdowns just keep spawns spread out and less susceptible to AoEs anyway.

While I agree the devs could consider making an improvement to defenders, I have no problem with vigilance as it stands. It is not conceptually backwards, unless you also agree that Mutation, Fallout, Self-Rezzes, RttC, and Vengeance are conceptually backwards.