Skipping the shields on FF

I think the his main problem is he's claiming without reservation that FF is unneeded or useless on a good team. While if he'd just said "The healing sets also have debuffs and buffs, whereas FF's powers besides the shields are kinda weak sauce" he might have got general agreement.

The whole Heals > FF argument is pretty weak nevertheless. I've been on plenty of teams where my bubbler was obviously responsible in a great part for making things easy. One TF the Dark/ Defender even commented "Forgot I had a heal button" because up to that point we just hadn't needed it.

Lots of anecdotal evidence points to how useful FF is. I've been on teams where we were just rolling over everything, then I had to go AFK for a bit, and when I come back one teammate is dead and the rest are at half health. After rebubbling and get the dead guy back on his feet, we have no problems again. And I'm sure that team did have a "healer" too.

Heals are good, but the bubbles make everyone's job easier. It's not an either/or situation for me. Both are good and you can easily have both, though bubbles do seem to make a "dedicated healer" unnecessary.


Therefore, back to the original topic... is there any good reason to skip the small bubbles? Is there anyone (outside of Larker, who's said his piece), who it's this is really a viable power selection strategy to skip the individual shields?

Looking at the numbers, if you look at slotted shields the 'little bubbles' make up three-fifths of the defense numbers. This is deceptive, because the difference in survival between a 12% chance of not getting hit and a 30% chance of not getting hit is big.

Ignoring numbers, I know for a fact my Bots/ff mastermind rolls with the toughest, most durable pets in the game with little bubbles up. I also know that if I slack and let those go down, I will start losing pets where I would never before. The fact that they can go an entire mission with minimal healing set at +1/x8 tells me the little bubbles help a ton.

If I'm on a team, I know that if I keep those up people will need to be healed far and away less often, meaning that my team can do more difficult things, or just work faster as they don't need to hold back as much.

If two little powers constitute 3/5ths of the direct contribution a forcefielder can contribute, should they use them? Yes. No if's, or's, or but's. You have a big way to help your team, and it is these powers. Defense rigs dice on the chance of being hit, and if you're not wanting to rig those dice, you are not looking after your team as well as you could.

This would not be so big if it weren't for the rest of forcefield. While other sets offer side benefits, many of the other forcefield tricks have less direct, and far less prolonged benefits in normal circumstances.

Forcebolt makes many foes less of a threat for its knock duration, but they are the same threat again in seconds. Replusion field, same thing. Detention removes a foe, but protects them too. So it just puts off a threat rather than removing it. Repulsion bombs nullifies threats for a few moments, and helps with damage, but has a lower prolonged effect as well. Personal forcefield nullifies 2/5ths of your defense assistance to your team, but helps you. If just you surviving but removing defense/mez shields from friends is useful in a situation this is big, but in standard combat this is less useful. Force bubble does help a lot, keeping foes at range, and allowing for players to decide where they want their enemies to be.

The thing is, the majority of prolonged survival assistance that you get from forcefields is found centered in 3-4 powers. You can help by knocking things around, but that requires a lot of direct interaction and observation, helping friends in moments while layering defense would help them for longer times and not be hampered by mistiming and location.

With traps around, there's an option for those that like the big bubble but not bubbling. For non-bubblers, this is even better in some ways as it won't go down when you snooze, and offers many other fun toys to be preoccupied with.

Simply put, people get upset with forcefielders that don't bubble just because they aren't helping the team as much as they could, and because the help they could be giving requires very little skill or bother. Just 2 animation per team every 4 minutes? In a game that often requires powers to be clicked over and over sometimes seconds apart, this is not a big inconvenience, and just shows the player is less concerned with those they are assisting. They're the empath that skipped its buffs just for heals alone. They're ignoring some really nice tools.

I always find something has to give, so I tend to skip my tier 1 henchmen on a /ff build. On a team, I'm not going to maintain shields well enough to keep those guys alive anyway. Either that, or maybe I just like the challenge.

Also, I'm sometimes too lazy to actually put bubbles on everyone, so I just focus on keeping the tank(s) and brute(s) perma-buffed. Always fun to take a guy who's at 30% and push him over the top.

Skipping henchemen is another no-no around here, but I think it's also a discussion for another thread.

Suffice to say that I don't skip any pets. I do forego summoning them sometimes, or let them die, but they're always just a click away.

On Topic: No, you shouldn't skip the shields. You can skip trying to keep every henchmen and team member bubbled at all times, but skipping the shields is not recommended.

Off-topic: All arguments about Heals vs. Defense Buffs are moot because you're arguing two different forms of mitigation: Reactive Mitigation and Damage Mitigation. Heals vs Regeneration is an argument. Defense vs Resistance is an argument. Arguing two things that don't have similar mechanics, only similar results, is silly.

So, wrapping up, here's my final reply (ignoring the collection of morons who are intentionally mis-representing what I've said)...

1) Should you take the little bubbles?
The default answer is yes. There's a reason why FFers are called bubblers and not knockbackers.

2) Do the little bubbles always contribute to a team?
No. It's quite common for teams to run just fine without little bubbles. For an unsolicited example of this, see the first post in this thread.

3) Should you bubble a team that doesn't need it?
No. Pretty much by definition, if the team doesn't need little bubbles (which is, again, a common occurrence), your time is better spent doing something else, like contributing to damage.

4) Is it ok to have a build with no bubbles?
Yes. This is one of the nice things about having dual builds. If you're on a team that doesn't need the bubbles, you can switch to that build designed to operate best without them. For example, perhaps that build has extra attacks.

In fact, it's fair to say that an FFer _without_ a "No Little Bubbles" build is short-changing the team by being unable to contribute to the team things they actually need to the best of their ability.

5) But what if a team is reaching for "greatness", like on a master of Statesman TF?
An FFer with power boosted bubbles can make significant contributions to such teams, but solely in terms of team safety.

A better team can always be (and usually is) made using healers rather than an FFer. A team filled with healers can match everything a FFer can do, plus much more. And you want the healers anyway for fighting AVs.

No.

Stop trying to rouse this conversation.

No one wants it here.