Make single target, quick recharge buffs PBAOE's.

I agree with Bill, especially the bolded part.

Angel Red
"We're heroes. Fighting injustice is the thing we do." ~Rebel Scum

Ignoring the rest of your post, which I think has good arguments, this part doesn't really fit. It's not fair to add ideas you dislike, and then tell me you dislike the suggestion because of the things you added. That would be akin to me serving you a meal, you pouring a bunch of salt on it, and then telling me you dislike the meal I gave you.

Obviously I think we'd all dislike it if they nerfed the power, but that wasn't my suggestion at all.

As it stands, I'd probably ditch my idea as well and just increase the duration to 5 minutes or so. Anything that accomplishes the goal of me spending less time buffing my party every other battle is a win in my book. Which is not the same as me saying I cannot keep up with a 2 minute buff, just that I'd rather not have too.

You miss his point. If the powers are balanced as they are now, changing them to be more convenient for the players would likely mean that the powers would drop in effectiveness, in order to maintain balance. As such, his point about the powers likely being nerfed if we saw what you proposed is not that out of line.

Fair enough, he has a different opinion on what is balanced than I do.

It's not "opinion," it's what I'd expect to see from the dev team if they did change buffs this way, given past experience. Assumption, perhaps. Opinion is covered solely in the "no" and "it would make it less fun for me," not in the bulleted points themselves. (Yes, I know I added the "imho" at the end. That's the separator, where the opinion *starts,* with the likely rebalancing that would be done *before* it.)

In other words:
Expectation, based on observation: The strength of the buffs would probably drop for this "convenience."
Opinion, added as an aside to the mention of conveneince: I don't think the idea as a whole is all that convenient.

Edit:
Honestly, I think they'd be less likely to adjust the powers noticably downward (in either lower effectiveness or higher cost) with your "Just make them five minutes" you mentioned later.

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It's still an opinion. All opinions derive from experience. An educated guess is still an opinion, never mind that I disagree with your assessment of the Devs based upon the same experience you have. Unless you can get rid of personal pronouns when detailing something, it is an opinion.

"i think the devs..."

is not the same as

"the devs will..." (which you cannot know, because you cannot predict the future. Or at least I don't THINK you can)

I agree that simply buffing the amount of time they stay applied is probably the best course of action, as well as the easiest to implement.

I don't beleive I ever included this as part of my change? The buffs still wouldn't effect you.

Oddly enough, I always thought the best part of Speed boost was that it made the person I cast it on violently arch back as though I had just hit them with a giant, lead pillow.

Perhaps that says something on what sort of activities I find 'fun'.

Point remains, for whatever reason, I find reapplying buffs constantly to be annoying. Perhaps because there isn't a real challenge in it. It's just a constant, mundane, task that I wish could take care of itself while I go do something more interesting.

This is exactly how I feel about the situation. One of my favorite toons is a dark/kin corr and this is exactly how I play him. I couldn't have said it better myself.

Putting aside that I personally don't like chasing down enemy runners, there's also the fact that blasting enemies is a simpler process: you know the enemy needs to be blasted because it's standing up and damageable. Keeping track of who needs what buff replenished is a process of varying complexity depending on what buffs you're using and what other buffs are showing up on the team bar. Tiny little icons, sometimes barely distinguishable from each other, blinking woefully like laser beams of despair into your brain. It doesn't bother me too terribly, save in the aforementioned specific instances, but I can see where the distaste might come from.

1. Use CM reactively instead of proactively
2. Use CM only when facing a group that includes mezing enemies
3. Don't use CM on Scrappers and Tanks unless you're about to fight Ghost Widow.

Too impractical in most cases.

Why ?

Outside of any debuffers, toggle dropping. (which is why i do tend to be pro-active with them). There is little loss to the team of a few seconds on inactivity.

Heck blasters keep blasting with their tier 1 and 2 attacks through the mez these days.

Try changing the buff icon display to numerical. For one thing it gets rid of the annoying, blinking and far too long string of Vigilance icons and for things like multi Heat Loss and Fulcrum Shift, it can make things a whole lot easier to see.

I enjoy my Kin a fair amount. For a start he's a Kin/Sonic/Energy so he can actually help out quite a bit in protracted battles with damage dealing. My Rad is awesome but mainly because he lays on the debuffs (and is a Rad/Dark so further -ToHit is always nice) and only has the one team buff - Accelerate Metabolism - which I often have to operate on an "Announce to gather. Announce to gather a second time. Just click the damned buff icon." I had one complaint once and explained that despite numerous calls to gather before a mob, teammates were running off and out of range.

I also used to have an Illu/Emp controller but found on several teams that it was better off using Adrenaline Boost and Fortitude on teammates who actually knew what they could do, rather than just buffing the primary damage dealer/Tank/Scrapper/Dwarf Kheldian.

Anyway, tangent corrected, I would be against changing ST buiffs to PBAoE because, well, we already have those anyway. Experience tells us to avoid casting Speed Boost in old-style caves (Inertial Reduction is much easier for those final rooms with wooden struts and layered caverns anyway).

The PBAoEs make sense - Recovery/Regen Auras, World of Pain, Inertial Reduction, Accelerate Metabolism etc. Just in the same way that Fulcrum Shift and Heat loss, for example, don't need to be PBAoEs.

If Speed Boost (for example) were a PBAoE there would be the same 'Gather round' waiting for buffs, the same with the shields. It means, as a Defender, Controller, Corruptor and (to a lesser extent) an MM, that you have to work hard and pay attention. And sometimes the focus on buffing and debuffing needs to be greater than that of attacking. If you want mindless aggression then Brutes, Scrappers and some Blasters are the way forward. Even Tanks have to pay close attention to what they're gathering aggro on.*

* whether they do or not is another matter ^^

Quick recharge single-target buffs like the 2 FF bubbles can be stacked after zoning. IIRC, this is because the games doesn't track who applied a buff through zoning. So at the least, increasing the duration significantly would require adding the code to track buffs or remove all buffs on zoning. Otherwise, it would be possible to zone repeatedly and build up a ludicrous amount of DEF. In fact, a quick-moving team would accumulate multiple buffs anyway.

It's too impractical to use it reactively simply because tracking who gets mezzed visually in the chaos of combat is usually impractical, and asking for CM every couple of seconds is impractical and annoying.

And it's too impractical to use proactively due to the far too short duration.

As to End costs and various forms of click-bubbles: they could get rid of the End cost altogether and it'd hardly affect anything. Honestly, there are many powers that seem to have an End cost solely to appease some balance-crazed codemonkey slobbering over a spreadsheet in a dark basement somewhere.

Since when? It's never been all that difficult to do.

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I find it quite difficult much of the time. The chaos of combat obscures much, and many times the mez effects aren't particularly striking amidst this visual noise. For instance, in my experience many times being held visually consists of the held person simply standing stark still. Doesn't really stand out. Nor does stunned movement necessarily stand out, if the stunned character even bothers to move. And then there's the not-particularly-striking sleep slump (not striking unless accompanied, say, by the electric ball-cage, that is), which is the mez I most often see people calling out and simultaneously the most pointless as it tends to quickly resolve itself.

If you're referring to people saying "zzz", in my experience people use that to indicate ANY mez, not sleep in particular.

Yep.

Also, seeing how I can pretty much keep CM stacked on a team in RV, while avoiding stalkers, . . . yeah not seeing how its all that difficult to PROACTIVELY apply it in PVE, let alone reactively do so.

And as others have pointed out, the cost of such a change is not something I want.