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.

You won't have Scrapper level DPS.

Because the Scrapper is buffed and his target is debuffed, which increases the Scrappers DPS beyond even the best Pylon times.

And that Scrapper can also have a pet, being buffed and debuffed.

Unless you want to count that added damage as "yours" for debuffing/buffing.

No one can say your Defender isn't providing an immense amount of benefit to the league, that's not something I would not say.

But in the situation above you may have moved into "scrapper level" DPS in terms of beating their pylon times while solo and now bringing that to the league, but the scrappers raw DPS has now moved into a completely different zone in the buff/debuff situation.




Ultimately, even though I managed a 42s pylon time on my Fire/Rad Corr with T4 Cims, I know its not "his" DPS - or at least I don't consider it such. (going to have another go once I have ageless )

Same Corr managed 4 mins 1 s with no Cims out, but I've made some build revisions and will try again with the aforementioned ageless - even then its still not raw DPS, because the target has -res and -regen debuffs on it.


This is just my arbitrary distinction.

I like to think about what a character can accomplish, for example your Defender soloing Chimera, in terms of their overall package.

And then I also like to have an idea of what their straight, raw DPS is - without the effects of things like -res or -regen. Of course I still count those effects, but I tend to consider them as part of their complete target take down capabilities.

Congrats. Out of curiosity, how long did it take you?

Perhaps, but my pets will have an easier time staying alive than other pets and AB+Fort is still buffing only them and no other pets. Also, I can't say I fully agree that everything will be buffed as that hasn't been my experience. Oftentimes people get lazy with the buffs in AV fights or you simply don't have a kin in the league.


Quite a while. Would have been faster if I had T4 Reactive and not T3.

Do you know approximately how long?

I see the first point, it makes sense that if your team is dying it makes more sense to shrug of mezzes to protect them. The second I don't see a need for a solo discount, if defenders get them then everyone should since everyone needs end.

The increase to -res doesn't make sense, most -res primary powers already do more -res then their counterparts. There are just a few pets that are outliers and should have a different version for defenders. For example Sleet uses the same pet for defenders and corruptors, but freezing rain uses different pets with the defender version having stronger debuffs.

I also do don't see the need for controller mods for controls. You say defenders have very few controls, but if that was true the change would have no effect. The truth is there are several controllerish sets available to defenders with dark leading the pack. I can see making sure all primaries have higher base numbers before AT mods come to play, but I do not see a need to increase the mod. It would be like saying corruptors should be better at debuffs then defenders since they are an AT based around corrupting others.

I reckon about 30 minutes or so, but he was bugged so he couldn't attack.

I do have a new video project almost completed, for soloing a level 50 Chimera with no Lore pets(and no bugs). I'll start a new thread for that.

Reactive and Clarion are two Incarnates EVERY Empath should take.

They are that good.

I imagine any Defender would want them as well. Cannot think of any reason not to take them.