Is There Any Point to Playing Level 50 Bubblers?

I think the question of whether you should play a set is different from whether you should invite someone else playing one. I don't practice much selectivity with powersets; whoever is in is in.

But IMO that is an entirely different situation than opening your character select screen, seeing the level 50 Force Field Defender sitting there, and deciding other characters do better. The reason this is such a relevant question is that a previous siginificant benefit of Force Field was providing mezz protection to the caster.

Force Field isn't useless. It's actually fantastic between levels 20 and 40 or so. But it is definitely a low performer in the end game. This isn't to say you shouldn't invite one, because there are only so many ways you can get shields. But it does mean that if you have something else to pick from in your stable of characters, at that stage you are probably better off with that. Force Bubble in particular comes across as a "so potentially powerful it would be broken if there were ever a situation you could really use it" power. Stopping minions who can't fight back is not really what I'd have in mind there.

Even if nothing else changes, changing the size of Dispersion Bubble from 25ft to 50ft would make it clearly the king of AoE defense, which IMO it really should be. The graphic even exists already.

I think the problem on trials, and especially BAFs, is that everything dies too fast, and has its aggro spread out among too many people, to make throwing bubbles on people (at 2 seconds per bubble) a better use of my time than throwing my defender damage at the AV and hitting all the adds or whatever with my cones. Deaths are so uncommon, even when I stop bubbling all together, that it just isn't worth the time. It isn't that everybody is always already softcapped, although that's certainly true sometimes. It's that the trials are really easy and safe (at least in all the pug trials I end up in; and yes, I know they weren't always so trivial, but they are now).

The only time on the trials that I like to put bubbles down is just before the split on Lambda, because sometimes some people seem to be at some risk during that phase, and def buffs can help a bit. On BAFs, if we're pulling the AVs, I also spam bubbles while we're waiting for them, but just to kill time.

To be clear, I'm not talking about enjoyment here. I still have fun running trials, and I still have fun playing my FF/Dark. I'm just talking about usefulness. Obviously, usefulness isn't all there is to the game. But still, it's unfortunate when, given the state of the game overall, a powerset is mostly useless in the latest endgame content. (Not entirely useless! Dispersion bubble is certainly helping a bit. The individual shields can make the Lambda split a little safer for squishies without stealth or whatever. Force bubble lets you be a pseudo-controller on the BAF prisoner phase. And, again, I'm not saying that FF is totally useless in isolation. Def buffs do help a little most of the time. It's just that they help only a very little on most of the trials I've been on, and even just a little damage almost always seems to me to help more. Sorry. I think I'm repeating myself.)

I suspect this thread is going to change direction very shortly.

Clarion can also give +special, and you can stack it with PBU/PB for crazy numbers(though they don't multiply each other).

I feel your pain here. I made a concept toon. She is a Force Field/Psi. I really like her on pen and paper you could say, but on teams or trials I am not bringing much to the table anymore. It make the game a bit depressing when you have a toon you like, but doesnt work they way you would like. My defender attacks might as well be me throwing a pillow at someone and I seem to take a lot of hits even with dispersion bubble up. I noticed that the game really gives tons of benefits to melee within the IO sets and such. IO selection does nothing really to increase are defense, magnitude of mez resist, or really make are damage shine. Again I completely understand what your saying. I just wish the devs would.

As others have said, the abundance of defense from multiple sources and the ease of affording IOs mean that modern builds benefit from forcefields to a much less degree. The more mobile style of modern CoH makes it hard to keep squishies under the dispersion bubble, and the prevalence of autohit attacks and massive defense debuffs in newer content negate the huge amount of +Def it brings to the table.

Forcefields is too specialized, and this game has never rewarded crippling overspecialization. In most situations, it has very little way to boost the team's damage and its mitigation largely hangs on +Def and mez protection. Compare a much more well-designed set, Dark Miasma, which uses a combination of -ToHit, -Dmg, mezzes, heals and minor +Def/+Res to protect the team, and debuffs resistance on top of that, increasing your own and your team's damage. Compared to other sets that offer less potential +Def but are more versatile (e.g. Cold Dom, VEATs), FF has little going for it other than subjective personal preference.

Forcefields should be buffed to make it more versatile and relevant throughout the level range, whether solo or teamed, and in a wide variety of content. I would make the following changes:

a) Make the shields grant debuff resistance. I would probably add recharge and tohit debuff resistance to Insulation Shield, and defense debuff and regeneration debuff resistance to Deflection shield. This gives Forcefields more unique tricks of its own, and may make the shields valuable even in situations where defense (or passive mitigation as a whole) do not work.

b) increase the radius of the dispersion bubble to 60ft, as suggested above;

c) increase the damage and recharge of Force Bolt to match that of a T3 blast (e.g. Blaze) from blast powersets. This makes up for the fact that the rest of the powerset does nothing, outside of highly situational cases, to boost your damage or the team's damage. Turning force bolt into a valuable attack also makes it worth using other than for the KB alone and will go some way to making the set more active.

FF was never all that useful IMO. But then again, I play a lot of scrappers and brutes. When you play a melee toon, support characters are just your entourage.