Defenders Damage

One thing I find modestly sad is that many defenders may actually choose to buff their Lore pets instead of teammates. If you are using your AB to buff Vicki's damage instead of blaster A, that kind of makes me sad.

Once on a large team/league, my scrapper's Lore pets are likely gonna be buffed to the gills too, so while it is true it is the defender/controller/corruptor/MM doing the buffing, the scrapper and his pet is still bringing tons of damage. I am not really seeing the Lore pets as evening the playing field even after 50, although I do agree they are a nice power and very useful.

So fire imps don't count as the controller/dominator doing damage?

I will always, always buff Vicky over a blaster in an AV fight. The extra DPS the team gets is much more significant. Outside of AV fights, in normal play, the Blaster will have AB on him all the time so he can nuke freely.

I don't like the "once in a league everything is buffed to the max so nothing matters" approach, but hey, YMMV.

It is to me!

Here are my feelings about pets and defenders and corruptors.

At least I was not crazy when I said what I said 2 years ago.

Lore pets aren't perma though, else there would be very little reason to play anything other than defenders(and it would suck becoming a pet based AT, not what I signed up for).

Maybe someone has already pointed this out, but I wanted to come back and address a big fallacy in this post (focusing on the bolded text)...

When most people think of a Defender, it seems that people automatically think of Empathy. And, while Empathy is certainly a power set seen more on Defenders than their Controller friends, there are quite a number of other sets available to defenders. In fact, except for 2 defender primaries, almost all of the defender primaries are quite heavy on "debuffing." Yes, even Kinetics, which does a great job of buffing damage, uses a lot of debuffs. Only Force Fields and Empathy lack any real ability to debuff enemies (but thanks to Interface even someone with one of those 2 sets can bring debuffs just by being on the team).

Given that fact, I think it is rather ignorant to say that defender damage needs more help. Sure, it may be "sub par" in terms of comparison with other archetypes. But, defenders get their blasts as a secondary set, which means that the "numbers" will "suck" comparatively. However, it can be argued (quite well actually) that debuffing a target can effectively increase your own damage. The enemy loses any amount of Defense or Resistance and you are causing them to take in more damage.

However, I would not count Empathy or Force Fields out of the contest just yet. Due to their ability to be quite self-sufficient in terms of their own survival, they, too, can boost their damage (indirectly). There are many ways that an Empathy or Force Field defender can increase their damage output (though not quite as much as others can). In fact, my own Empathy/Dark defender is no sloth in damage when I want/need it.

And, when you consider the boost defenders get from their buffs/debuffs coming as a primary, stick them on a team and a defender's impact is amazing. Just add one Empathy or Force Field to a team (where no support is present) and the effectiveness of the entire team multiplies by leaps.

Well, to make a long story short, people who post stuff like the OP did clearly show how much they do not understand what defenders can do...

�If we would come together and be great role models, it would be amazing to see how the next generation turns out.�

I want to elaborate a bit on this. I have a lvl 50 Sonic/Pain Corr and a lvl 50 Ninja/FF. I brought up /Pain because Pain is mostly resistance set with constant healing to back it up. I brought up Ninja/FF because I use power boost to boost my force field shields even more.

While it is true that /FF doesn't bring any "direct" +damage or any debuff, the fact that you can now cast and "forget" actually INCREASES your dps. I don't know how many times I play sonic/pain in trials, I get into this "healing lock". There are always some non-level shift lowbies who get hit a lot and being a nice teammate, I always try to keep the healing on which HURTS my Sonic Blast. Of course I have the choice to use mostly sonic blast and ignore healing but that may defeat the purpose of me choosing /Pain.

With the recent aoe group buff, /FF has become more "offensive" because you spend way less time on bubbling. I literally just hit power boost + ff shields before every spawn and rarely need to re-bubble again during the fight.

I am not saying Defender has high damage. I just think Defender's buff value is so high that the need for constant healing is less than on MM/Corr.

Edited: Another reason why SoA is so good because their buffs are mostly coming from leaderships. You put them on and just focus on fighting. No need to click teammates to support.

I didn't know until recently. I put my Ninja/FF on shelf for 2 years because at that time Upgrade is still one-at-a-time and I need to apply 12 bubbles. I am amazed that I even level ninja/ff to 45 two years ago... I had a lot of patience back then.

Now with power boost + ff, my Ninjas are running well over soft-cap with my Dispersion. I've checked Defender's power boost + ff values...it's SICK.

Edited: Power Boost FF Shield is a bit tricky. You won't get the power boost effect if you put PB + FF after a set of FF is already on the target. I've tested this before. Say you cast non-power boost shields first and then you remember power boost. The target will not get power boost value even after the first set of shield has expired. This means if you cast non-pb shields first on accident, you have to wait until the first set wears off and then you do pb + ff.