Changed Defender inherent for i17

any change to vigilance or any inherent done from now on should not have anything to do with team size or how well/bad said team size(including yourself) is doing.

Change is good, if you don't Adapt to Change, you be left in the Dust.

And it doesn't. Look at my defenders. I take all or most of my primary, AND all or most of my secondary. Granted, my dark defender didn't pick up a travel power till 30, nor did my TA/A defender. The TA/A one though has more attacks due to not needing stamina. Solo, I can go slow enough that endurance isn't an issue. In teams, endurance isn't an issue.

So your argument that you're not bad solo is that you can solo so slowly that you don't need stam? Really? That's the comment you want to make?

Last I checked, defenders already have the same damage mod as tankers. Namely 0.65, so what are you wanting exactly here?

I don't solo slowly. However unlike in most teams if I need to use Rest, I can when solo. When solo I chew through most mobs fast.

Group 1: OSA>Disruption>Ignite> Fistfull of Arrows (to finish off any LT left standing)
Group 2: PGA>Glue>Disruption> AOE minions to death>blazing to finish off LT
Group 3: OSA>Disruption>Ignite>imob melee boss that's still alive and any LT>snipe boss>aoe remaining foes

The only time I have any trouble is vs high damage mobs that heavily resist lethal damage and imobilize, such as warwolves.

Then you need to check again. Tankers have a 0.8 melee damage modifier.

Yes, some defenders can solo moderately well, no one has ever denied that. The problem is that not all defenders can solo well. The primaries that are mostly focused on debuffs do solo reasonably well, but other primaries provide very little advantage to a soloing Defender.

The fact is that Defender soloing ability does suck compared to other ATs, primarily Blasters and Scrappers obviously but Tankers also have better damage and Controllers have moire capability to prevent damage to themselves when soloing. The game was designed around the idea that team support ATs (Defenders, Controllers and Tankers) should have poor soloing capability (a hold over from older MMOs). Since then the devs have made changes to both Tankers and Controllers to increase their damage and make them solo better. Now it's the Defender's turn.

Even the primaries that don't help soloing don't hinder it THAT much. What does hurt soloing for defenders IMO? The "healer" mentality that says your secondary should be avoided or barely slotted. An empath who doesn't neglect their secondary can still solo. Maybe not fast, but they don't suck at it either.

By the way, saying it can't solo well implies frequent deaths. If your dying that often, maybe your secondary is underslotted. Maybe you need more attacks. Or maybe you need to rethink tactics.

having more attacks doesn't, by any means, make you solo better.

Well apparently we have different definitions for "solo's well". While dying infrequently is important it is not the only requirement. To me speed is probably the most important factor in determining how well a character solos and there Defenders clearly drop behind the other ATs.

It doesn't matter how many attacks you take or how well slotted they are the simple fact is that a defender will take more attacks to kill soemthing than a Blaster or Scrapper. SOME Defenders have -resistance or +damage abilities to rectify this a little bit but even then they generally don't get the same speed.

Overall I would say Defenders are the worst soloers in the game. Controllers have slightly worse damage (at least until they get their pet and their APP) but they have a much more consistent ability set that they can rely on for safety.

... that got changed a LONG time ago. I want to say "2004" but I'm too lazy to check the old patch notes.

I want that statement to be true.

Last time I checked was a few years back. At that point in time it was still 0.65. My ice/mace tanker still feels like he hits things with a heavy feather. One which he can barely lift but doesn't do much damage.

I used to judge soloing ability very heavily on "chance of death", but there are so many ways to avoid death and tactics to help ease through an encounter that you cannot strictly base it off "death rates".

What I find frustrating on my Empath is that to solo at even a "reasonable" pace (to me), means that I have to turn Bosses off. This is a significant problem to me, since it changes the quality of prospective drops. Additionally, I cannot even imagine running difficulties over +0/x3. Even against the easiest Foes, larger spawns contain multiple "mezzing" mobs so that its extremely risky doing this. I agree that some ATs should solo better than others, so dont try and say that I expect "scrapper-like" soloability. That is simply not true.
But I expect that each of the diffierent varieties of Defenders should have "roughly" similar performance, much like how the different varieties of powersets in other ATs do.

With Defenders, this is absolutely not the case. The "range" of solo performance between defenders primaries is ALOT wider than the range that you will see with Tankers or Scrappers. And I will always advocate improvements rather than nerfs, so what I hope to see is that Forcefields, Empathy, Sonic and even other sets that most folks feel are just fine, get looked at and given "slight" enhancements to make them perform a bit better solo.

I want my Empath to be a Super-Hero, not a Side-Kick

I disagree. I recognize that trying to change this aspect of the game at this point would be impossible but from a game design point of view this never made any sense to me. In my opinion all characters should be able to solo effectively and conversely all characters should have soemthing to increase the effectiveness of their teammates.

I too think its way too late to ask/expect for AT to AT parity in regards to solo and teaming capabilities. In fact in every MMO that I have played in the last 10 years, its fairly common to find ATs/Classes, which for whatever reason are better suited to teaming because their tools/powers contribute more in a team environment, that often suffer in their abilities to solo. And by the same result the powers afforded to other ATs/Classes which give a better "solo" experience often have fewer tools to contribute in a team setting.

Honestly, I dont know if that's by design or if it just happens thru the course of game development and the actions of the player base. Because you "Know" players never find ways to focus their skills/talents/tactics to do things "unexpected" or "unforeseen" by the developers. Not to mention that once a game has been around for awhile, every player "knows" which ATs/Classes are needed to maximize the success in certain endeavors.



My remaining hope is to see some improvements in parity between the different Defender primaries . I think its completely unrealistic to expect parity between all ATs. Even if the developers felt that way, I think we would have seen alot more effort over the years to move the ATs together. Judging by the state of Empathy as compared to when I first rolled one back in June 2004, Its kinda obvious AT to AT parity is not the design goal, and perhaps not even Powerset to Powerset. The later I refuse to believe, and instead like to think they just havent got around to reviewing Defender Parity with an "eye" towards soloing. Probably not high on the list of things "to do"

My WP/Mace tanker feels like he hits things with a giant freaking warhammer. The AoEs are beautiful. I haven't even squeezed in Clobber since they buffed it and I am very happy with his damage vs. survivability.

Defenders have less survivability and less damage. They have slightly more team utility than tankers.

Give defenders and corruptors a buff, I say.

I can balance out both defender ability to solo and the powerset imbalance with one change - you can target yourself with ally-only abilities. Sure make them have only 1/3 effect so it's not too disgusting, but it helps most exactly those ATs who are worst at the moment. Emp drops from 6 useless powers when solo to 1. FF gets a weak blaster who might be close to the def cap when solo. Several def sets get short duration mez protection.

Only downside is that MMs go from being earthbound demi-gods to immortal death machines.

I pray daily for such a change. In one fell-swoop, Defender parity would be much tighter.

Alas, this could spark some pretty dramatic changes to alot of things we might not all like, but if the end result is good, I will be a happy Defender.

Also, this could be something that only occurs when you dont have any team-mates or pets. If you have no team-mates or pets in play, any ally buff you cast basically effects you. You could leave the strength alone, but limit this to only ONE buff at a time. As soon as you summon a pet or add a teammate or cast a different ally buff, this shadow buff goes away. So, for example, my empath would have to choose whether he had "Fortitude", "Clear Mind", or Adrenaline Boost" in effect. This creates some tactics as well. You could switch buffs based on the encounter type, or even during the encounter as needed.

This mechanic could be made to work for Defenders only, so it wouldn't have to be extended to MMs.

It doesn't work for many defender sets, however: Trick Arrow, Storm, Traps, Dark Miasma, and Radiation Emission would get nothing (or next to nothing), because they have one or no ally-only buffs.

I proposed something similar: in addition to being able to use a single-target buff on yourself, using a debuff on an enemy would put the opposite of the debuff on yourself. Some Kinetics powers already do a version of this (Siphon Speed speeds you up and slows them down, Siphon Power increases your damage while decreasing their damage, etc.). But that too would benefit different defender sets differently.

The inherent has to benefit all members of the AT equally, and that's pretty much true for all the other AT's inherents. All defenders, however, do not benefit equally from the current Vigilance. Kinetics with Transference get very little.

However those sets already benefit from their own powers which helps a lot when soloing. Personally I think two changes are really needed for Defenders. First a change like this to even out the soloing capability of the different sets and secondly something to make Defenders as a whole solo better.