Skipping the shields on FF

Pugs, unsophisticated ones at that, are the ones looking for "healers". Let me assure you the crew I run with are quite content to not have a "healer" to be found and the tfs we run... they are fast and efficient. I have a lot more datapoints to reference than "I just ran 2 tfs...". I'm not going to be suckered into a "h34lrs r neded" debate. That's been settled long ago with more sophisticated techniquites than "I just ran 2 tfs".

You keep talking about "bubbles aren't needed". Show me, with a quote from somewhere above, that someone said "teams need FF bubbles". You know what's needed? Nothing! Nothing but enough team members to begin a tf/sf. If you think h34lzorz are needed, well, that says something about you.

I agree the "healer" debate has been settled. Healers won. By a landslide.

On the other hand, I agree with you that there are other ways to run a team and those ways have their own advantages. That's one of the nice things about this game. And it's the reason I have a "Canonical Build" for all my FFers that includes little bubbles and power boost, even though that build isn't usually needed. In situations where's it's useful, it's extremely useful.

The entire topic of this thread is whether or not FFers should take the little bubbles. If you can't demonstrate improved performance in common situations coming from those bubbles, there's no reason to take them.

Anyway, I do agree with you that pretty much any combination of powers can be used successfully in this game. And that's yet another reason why there's nothing wrong with skipping the little bubbles. And it seems that Paragon Studios also agrees that pretty much any combination of powers will do. If they didn't have that belief, they wouldn't be introducing the "queues" in issue 20 where random collections of players get put on a team together. If I understand the concept correctly, you don't even get to select the AT let alone ask for players with certain powers.

Unfortunately this means jack squat. We don't know the composition of the two teams. What if the first team was semi-deficient for defense and your bubbles made the difference? And then the second team was all a bunch of defense cappers and buffers who kept everyone else up?

Anecdotal evidence...isn't.

Learn to read already. Nobody said they were "needed". Merely that they're superior to healing.

Because you weren't looking and don't do the math. So why should anyone take your word over those who HAVE done the math?

Ah, I see. You're attempting to morph into one of those things that lives under bridges and is afraid of fire.

Yep, like you, they're stupid.


And we're pointing out to you that it's irrelevant what people who don't understand the game do. Simply because there are lots of underinformed people looking for "h3@l0rz" doesn't mean healing is superior to buffing and bubbling. Please, allow this time to penetrate.

Yep. Not a clue to be had here.

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Still don't get it do you.

Heals are a third or fourth-rate form of keeping your people upright and fighting.

The healing also adds nothing to their gameplay.

Bubbles and buffs make it harder to be hit (or in the case of sonic, reduce the damage taken), you regen faster (therefore have less need of heals), etc etc.

Bubbles won't turn a bad team into a Steamroll team (well, it MIGHT). But it'll turn a fair-to-middling team into one.

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Do what I do on raids. Bubble only the ones you consider "important" enough to make sure that they HAVE to stay upright. Then reactively bubble if you see someone getting in trouble.

Those that don't need the bubbles will never miss them. Those that do need them will thank you for saving their bacon. And you fill in the spaces between with lots of butt-kickery!

Yeah, on a MM, you being alive and all your pets kacking every fight should cause you to rethink the build a bit.

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No. It is the way SOME teams are run. Please make at least a PASSING attempt at understanding this. It doesn't mean they're "right".

Remember the old saw about "if everyone jumped off a bridge"?

It applies here. Simply because you see lots of this activity does not mean it's not ill-informed or misguided. It most CERTAINLY does not mean that healing is a superior form of support on a team. No matter how much you try to insist it is.

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Coccaine is a hell of a drug!

Your problem is you can't prove or disprove it. You can only go "My Magic Green Numbers Sez!"

In common situations, damage prevention trumps damage repair. Flat out.
In corner cases (very high def teams), additional defense can be superfluous (though extreme levels of defense can help offset massive defense debuffs and massive to-hit buffs (i.e. Triple Digit Defense numbers on an MOSTF).

Wrong? No. If you wish to play a sub-optimal build that isn't contributing to the team as much as it could?

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What if no matter how many examples are provided showing you to be wrong, you're going to go on defending your point of view no mater how many improbable scenarios you have to invent to do it?

Look, you want to take the little bubbles on your FFer, go ahead and take them. It's not a big deal. I have them on the main builds of most of my FFers myself. And on the alternate builds for all my FFers who don't have them on the main build. But not taking them doesn't hurt the team. Ever single example of actual game play presented so far demonstrates that, including the original post on this thread where the OP wondered why a player wouldn't take them.

The problem with the math you present is it's not relevant. I've already explained this. It doesn't matter what the stats are on the little bubbles. What matters is what the team needs.

And despite the ridiculous claims being made on this thread in defense of a flawed idea, some how, some way, nearly every team in the game manages to kick <bleep> just fine with no bubbles at all.

And, again, it doesn't matter what you or I say. At the end of the day, teams are looking for healers, not bubblers. They do that because they know darn well they need healers. And they know darn well they don't need bubbles.

And teams ignoring your own personal point of view (which is what the vast majority of them do) doesn't mean they're wrong. Their success in mission after mission, day after day, year after year, demonstrates that conclusively.

It doesn't. It never has. And it never will. If you keep taking mitigated damage, there's a good chance you're going to die. If you keep getting healed, there's a good chance you're going to live. Simple as that.

At some point in a discussion, both sides have had their say and it's time to just agree to disagree. I think we've reached that point. 'Night.

This is what we've been trying to tell you. Yet your hands are still firmly clasped to your ears.

No matter how much you try to claim "this is the way of the world", you're still incorrect.




Still having trouble grasping that a steamrolling team is a steamrolling team period.

Also still failing to grasp the difference between killing things and killing things faster.

That usually happens when you're correct.

Correction, SOME teams or relatively unsophisticated players are looking for healers, not bubblers. Please try to confine your arguments to things you can actually prove, not your opinions.

The same way people "know" they need a smoke break. Or the same way people "know" that throwing salt over their shoulder prevents bad luck. Or the same way people "know" that putting expensive high octane fuel into cars designed for regular fuel is "good for them".

Bad habit and silly superstition.


Hello?

Clue?

I didn't say the teams don't work. So stop trying to put words in my mouth.


With shields, if the damage is mitigated YOU DO NOT TAKE IT.



Yeah, I'm sick of bouncing my head off a brick wall of idiocy here. End of discussion.

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Speaking as somebody with a Dark and a Traps and an Empath and a Thermal and a FF and a Sonic and a... well... you get the point:

You can safely assume that PUGs are stupid and don't know what they really want.

That goes for Mission teams and TFs.

I wish I had a penny for every time I've volunteered my Sonic/Elec Defender's services to a team requesting a "healer", and never once had to use "Aid Other" on them... and Sonic/ isn't even one of the highest damage-mitigating Support sets!!

Now if you've raised multiple FF toons to 50 yourself, and use Bubbles regularly yourself, then I'm sure you notice this trend... so I'm hoping I'm preaching to the converted here. But I have a problem with your statements above:

Firstly, saying "teams are looking for healers, not bubblers" might be true, but only in the same way that someone might look for a bucket of water instead of a hosepipe - whilst you might get a more impressive splash out of the bucket, the hosepipe will keep flowing long after the bucket has run dry.

Secondly, saying "If you keep taking mitigated damage, there's a good chance you're going to die. If you keep getting healed, there's a good chance you're going to live. Simple as that." Healing IS a form of mitigating damage. And it's the least effective form because it doesn't scale up with the rate of incoming damage.

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PUGs like to have someone there who has powers that allow them to take more damage then they usually would be able to survive.

If those powers are highly-visible (Read: GIANT GREEN NUMBERS) then a person with those powers will tend to get more recognition than a person with powers which are less obvious graphically, but produce more more effective results.

In other words, Spamming Healing Aura might recover 250 damage every few seconds, which is a nice safety net for PUGs, and is fine if you're fighting even-level foes that only hit you for an average of 50 damage every second. However if the difficulty ramps up and that PUG starts fighting lots of foes at once, or an AV, then they can start receiving hundreds of damage every second which no amount of healing can keep up with, but which could be drastically, even exponentially, reduced by applying stacked Defence or Resistance buffs.

+ Both Direct Heals and Regeneration mitigate damage - This is called "flat" mitigation. It mitigates a set amount of damage. If you can heal/regen 100 damage every second, you heal/regen 100 damage every second. If you get hit for 100 damage within one second then you will take 100 damage and heal 100 damage. If you get hit for 1000 damage within one second then you will take 1000 damage and heal 100 damage.

+ Both Defence and Resistance mitigate damage - This is called "scaling" mitigation. It mitigates a varying amount of damage. If you can dodge/resist 50% of incoming damage, you will avoid taking 50% of all incoming damage. If you get hit for 100 damage within one second then you will take 50 damage. If you get hit for 1000 damage within one second then you will take 500 damage.

With "Flat" mitigation you usually do not need to worry about low amounts of incoming damage, as it will rarely overcome your healing rate. However you will get killed very quickly by large amounts of incoming damage, as once it overcomes your healing rate anything extra will hit you full-force.

With "Scaling" mitigation you are far more effective at surviving against large amounts of incoming damage, but you run the risk of getting "pecked" to death from lots of little hits.

The most effective method of enhancing survivability is to layer mitigation - first adding scaling mitigation to vastly slow down the rate of incoming damage, then applying flat mitigation to cancel out some or all of the "bleed through" damage that is left over after the first round of mitigation is applied. This is why Good Empaths will tend to try to keep Fortitude on as many teammates as possible...... and is also why a Bubbler with "Aid Other" will have an easier time than either a Bubbler without "Aid Other", or a toon which has Aid Other but no Bubbles.

It's worth mentioning that since every AT comes with a small amount of inherent base regeneration, adding scaling mitigation is actually the BETTER option since you are usually able to regenerate faster than the "trickle" of hits from smaller amounts of incoming damage, and can survive for far longer against higher rates of incoming damage. THAT is why you'll find the vast majority of informed players (note: not the larger, unconnected mass of uneducated players) prefer buffs over healing: Healing only beats buffs for very low levels of incoming damage, and most toons can mitigate such low levels of incoming damage themselves without any outside help.

TL;DR - "/JRanger"

This is slightly wrong, I would word it: If you do not like buffing, DON'T PLAY A BUFFING SET.

I find buffing very frustrating (at least I do with the way it's implemented in CoX, but that's a separate issue) yet I have 5 characters from support ATs and enjoy playing all of them. If you dislike buffing but want a support AT then Traps, Trick Arrow, Storm, Dark, Radiation Emission and Poison are all sets that provide good support with minimal buffing (Storm and Poison have a couple of powers that require you to target an ally but the others don't even have that).

Because teams don't need shields.

Seriously, this talk of "sub-optimal builds" is just wrong. There's not too many things that are more sub-optimal than spending your time doing things the team doesn't need. And if you're spending a significant amount of your time bubbling toons that don't need bubbles, that's what you're doing.

They're definitely not. If you honestly believe that, you should probably play a Cold toon. It has basically the same little bubbles and provides several other nice powers as well.

PFF and dispersion bubble are the strength of FF. Dispersion bubble prevents the team from getting stunned or held. And it does it without the FFer having to constantly spend time passing out powers like CM. PFF provides survivability to the FFer, which let's him continue to do his job when things get rough.

Where FF excels is in difficult situations. The knockback and repel powers which are, quite frankly, terrible in common situations shine when the team aggros too many groups or is just in general getting hit with too much damage. The easiest way to grasp this is to see it in action, so I put together a video of using chaos control in FF. It shows soloing a 7 man team on unyielding using only FF powers, Aid Self, and a resistance shield available to FF ATs as part of their epics. It's here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gebY_SwaCWA

The little bubbles are nice powers. Nothing great, but no one ever complains about getting a bubble. But, in all honesty, if your toon needs little bubbles to do its job, your toon sucks.

Sonic does the same thing, and does it while providing shields that give Resistance instead of Defense, and increasing team damage. By your argument you should never choose FF when Sonic is better.

If all you're getting from an AT is that you don't get held or stunned, that's not much of an advantage. Three and a half powers out of nine does not make for a full Power Set.

No PFF in sonic.

PFF is perhaps the most underrated power in the game.

PFF shuts off the ability for a MM to command their pets.

Which would be one reason why you don't just turn PFF on and leave it on. You use it when it's needed.

So a what would a MM do instead of using the bubbles? Sit around and force bolt and repulsion bomb things to death? Their personal attacks are laughable, and MMs with dead pets don't do much damage.

EDIT: And you know what is better then PFF for MMs? Bodyguard mode with softcapped pets.

What you're getting when you invite an FFer to a team is a toon that doesn't die, even in tough situations. They can go on supporting the team, mitigating damage, and providing damage for a very long time.

I'll grant you that many FFers don't know this. They skip PFF on their masterminds, grumble about knockback, etc, and pass out bubbles no one needs.

But a well built, well played FFer should be up with the scrappers, brutes, and tankers in terms of survivability, all while helping the squishier toons to survive as well.

Okay so you're basing your opinion off a defense capped stone tank?

Because everything else in the game is that durable right?



HELLO! Wedding Band IS A TEMP POWER. It works for a set amount of activation time THEN IS GONE FOREVER. Relying on that as a defensive strategy is lunacy.

Still missing the point between having "some" mitigation and having "enough".

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