FF needs love

Other than its activation, it's not.

My $0.02:

FF suffers more in the high level game more than it does the low or mid game. The ability to softcap the defense of a team isn't quite as useful to the players when some AT's can do that on their own without the FF powers. Yes, Scrappers, Tankers, and (to a lesser degree) Blasters I'm looking at you.

Design problems with FF include having a tier 9 power that has Repel power with a radius of effect greater than the range of an attack power in the Defender's ranged powerset. You can't use the short ranged powers against a target that is being kept at the radius of your power. The only ways to over come that is to push the character into a corner and advance on your target until the power is in range, or to slot for range in the attack power. That's an ugly set of choices IMO.


- B.

wanna know why FF is not very solo friendly?

cottage rule.

blame this rule right here.

FF is not hugely solo friendly because its very team friendly.

From level 22, you're pretty much guaranteed to transform all your teammates experience at an investment of about 1/8th of your playtime. Unless they're all Tankers.

Its not the worst solo set for Defenders. Empathy and Sonic have it harder, but any FF Defender on their own is a decent enough armoured light cannon, especially with a small IO investment that's cheap in terms of both slots and inf.

Well I think at least part of the issue with Force Field is you are basically a walking anchor for the team, and that competes with the positioning you need in order to take advantage of your knock and repel powers.

The only change I would suggest is a longer duration on the shields and faster animation for shielding. Compared to Thermal, Cold or Sonic the FF shields take a long time to animate. I love the animation for how you shield people, I just wish you could shave off a bit of time.

The knockback powers could use an extra secondary effect, but in general I really enjoyed Force Fields as a set. It is really fun to play and offers a lot of protection for the team.

You just have to really enjoy blasting, thankfully with /AR and Repulsion Bomb, mine was a little AoE queen.

The key and source problem with FF is that it lacks variety, specifically it lacks -dmg/+res/+recharge/-recharge/+dmg/-Res/-Def/+tohit/-tohit effects, pet AoE soft control (ice slick for example), and non-phase hard controls (like any ST hold/stun/confuse/fear).

Why does it lack so much? The culprits are Repulsion Field, Force Bubble, Detention Field, Force Bolt, and Repulsion Bomb and how they redundant in addition to requiring too much user input (IE: positioning, animation time, situational awareness, etc.). The redundancy of the over-protectiveness of the set hurts the set mid to late game when other sets have bloomed and are stacking a variety of effects in addition to +Def, where as FF only gets more knockback effects on top of knockback effects. If FF had at least one late blooming power that was at least somewhat offensive, the defense/KB redundancy wouldn't be an issue.

It also doesn't help that none of the FF KD/KB effects are fire-and-forget type powers like Sleet and many trap abilities. Instead they require more work on the player's part with situational/spacial awareness in regards to abilities and position without any greater results to justify the work. Case in point, spamming Repulsion Bomb is less effective than casting Ice slick one time, you trade a good amount of animation time and endurance for the same or less of a result. If Repulsion Field and Force Bubble weren't player centered toggles and weren't as previously stated redundant in effect, this wouldn't be as big of an issue.

Narrowing it down, if you get rid of or dramatically change either or both Repulsion Field or Force bubble to be offensive in someway and more fire-and-forget, then FF wouldn't feel as underwhelming compared to every other support set mid-late game.

Hm.

What if Repulsion Aura dealt damage and/or a debuff to each target it kicked? The conceptual rationalization being that you are using your force shields offensively to slam enemies away from you, which ought to hurt somewhat. Right now the endurance cost for Repulsion Aura and the superior size and effectiveness of Force Bubble make it an underperformer, but using FB and RA to cram enemies into a corner and crush them to death sounds like it could be quite a bit of fun...

How would I fix FF?

I would add a small but stackable amount of -regen on force bolt.

While FF is an awesome buff set, it, like empathy, really lacks in the debuff department. Being able to stack -regen on hard targets would make FF much more soloable and make it much more desireable to have on TFs.

If you were building a team for a TF, do you limit the number of emps and FFers you invite or at least think about it? Would you ever place a similar limitation on rad?

What Umbral said. They've completely removed and replaced powers in the past that were widely considered redundant or underperforming, as is the case with Energize replacing Conserve Power when the set already had Power Sink yet lacked a heal. he could easily look at FF and say, "well Force Bubble and Repulsion Field in the same set is kind of redundant." The reason we haven't seen anything looked at is because support sets tend to get listed after everything else on Castle's todo list, mainly because they are more complex (see castle's frustration with Oil Slick Arrow).

I think people have been saying FF (and sonic resonance) need love since their creation...

mabye one day that'll happen*


*most likely never