A New Defender Idea

Hey all while im not much of a fan for defenders since i started playing COH around 4 years ago, i must admit taking one on a stroll down the park seemed different and fun, i saw a recent thread that was discussing about possible buffs for defenders, well it went on from 2009 so i can see, and i got to thinking, i thought of an idea while playing a defender, the inherent power for defender is obviously vigilance which is ok, im not sure on the unmbers for the amount of discount of endurance you get for it while your team mates are injured and/or about to die, tbh it seems like a useless inherent power, a waste of the defenders potential, so i vote that we either come up with an idea nad maybe show it to the devs, or we could just discuss about it here, but im anxious to see your ideas, my personal idea is that a new inherent power called [Protection] where the more people you protect and apply shields to the more chance you have of dodging attacks and increasing your will of fury to give out more damage, additionally your health will go up aswell slightly, what do you guys think?
i really like the defenders now that im starting to take notice of them where as before i thought they were silly and weak, they are not weak, they are pretty decent if not very capable AT's.
Hope to hear some legimate responses on this and see where this goes.

Many thanks for your time guys.

Sypher V.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

vig·i·lance
noun

1. state or quality of being vigilant; watchfulness: Vigilance is required in the event of treachery.
2. Pathology . insomnia.

Synonyms
1. alertness, attention, heedfulness, concern, care.

The current vigilance mechanic has absolutely nothing to do with being vigilant since the defender that gets the largest endurance discount is the lax, inattentive, unheedful, unconcerned, careless buffer or the reactive, healing focused defender. None of which make good defenders and actually rewards poor play while penalizing good play.

Vigilance in it's simplest terms means being prepared. That means a proactive defender, buffing the team before a fight or surveying the field for the best places/targets for debuffs and applying them with aplomb.

A better mechanic (or one that would at least match the name given to the inherent) would be:

Each time a defender uses one of his/her primary powers they get a small self stacking boost to their global recharge that lasts for a moderate amount of time (a max of say 5, 5% boosts that last ~20 seconds). Additionally each time that a defender uses one of their secondary powers they get a small self stacking endurance discount (again a max of say 5, 5% global discounts that last ~20 seconds).

Viola' "vigilance" the proactive vigilant defender is rewarded, the negligent reactive defender is penalized.

For me a simple way to make defenders more unique would be to simply increase the secondary effects % for the blasts. This would lead to more debuffs and add to the overall team's effectiveness.

The tricky part is coming up with an idea that works for all Defender primaries - the support sets are the most diverse in the game in that they all work using very different mechanics.

For example, Sypher, your idea has a bonus that happens when you apply shields. Only a few sets do this: Force Fields, Sonic, Cold, Thermal, Empathy and Kinetics. Some debuffing sets do "protect people" in a vague sense eg Storm and Dark have +defence/resist auras, but how would you apply this bonus? What about Trick Arrows, which does absolutely nothing to any ally ever?
For the sets that do have shields. Doesn't this encourage spamming of shields to up your bonus? The alternative would be to only give the bonus if the shields weren't already on the target, but this encourages bad play too in that a Defender is rewarded for letting their shields lapse.

Milady's Knight - your idea of using your primary powers suffers the same problem. How do you differentiate the spamming of shields or rocking the aura from legitimate use of primary powers? I guess the maximum number of stacks help, but its still going to lead to some power spamming between fights.

The current Vigilance (end reduction and +damage in small teams/solo) is fine by me. It's very plain, but at least it works for all Defenders, since all Defenders use endurance, and all do damage.

The only vigilance buff that I ever thought of that I could get behind was status protection if a member on your team was dead.

I really enjoy the current inherent abilities that Defenders get. They are able to solo efficiently (in most cases) and perform extremely well on teams.

The way I see it, if it's not broken don't fix it. The devs could be using that time bringing us cool new content or updating the older stuff that needs it.

The one part of Vigilance that I thought was unfair was the fact that the end discount (on teams) actually gives an unequal benefit. If you are running a Sonic/ defender, you don't stop damage, you just make it lesser via your resistances (one of the reasons I love the set actually ). This gives them a huge end discount most of the time. On the other hand, a good Dark/ defender might go through a large amount of endurance simply because they have things locked down too well and the team doesn't get hit.
It can get even worse if you are running a lazy defender. Your team get hit hard cuz you aren't doing your job and you get rewarded with an end discount.

I would actually reverse this and throw in a small (mag 3) status protection. The idea is the more damage your team takes, the less discount you get and you lose status protection. It maintains the idea of vigilance and actually enacts it more appropriately. Unfortunately, the Sonic/ defender would take a hit with this route, but most other sets would benefit (not sure about Emp/ though).
If you wanna get really tricky, add a recharge bonus as the team takes damage. It would allow the defender to take a last stab at keeping the team from the faceplant.

And slightly off topic, but take out the end crash on defender nukes. They don't do a lot of damage anyway and they can make things hard if used at the wrong time.

It's a concept thing for me. When I've got a concept fleshed out and it combines ranged attacks with buff/debuffy stuff, great, I'm very happy, because I have two archetypes to choose from.

From there, I look at which inherent is less bad for my concept. I think to myself, is my concept going to be overkilling stuff with random crits (often when I don't need them, but nice against AVs), or is my concept doing nice damage solo but inexplicably becomes weaker in a team? Those are the two inherent effects that matter; nobody builds around Vigilance's endurance discount for the same reason that nobody built around having Instant Healing as a "sometimes on" expenditure and nobody was going to build around Hybrid as a "sometimes on" expenditure.

Even with this analysis, surprisingly, I still roll defenders from time to time. I've got a Jekyll and Hyde concept that's perfect for that debuffed-while-teaming inherent. And a few of my concepts aren't aggressive enough concept to be doing crits.

But is that the direction the defender archetype should be going? Hydes that revert to Jekylls just by being around other powered individuals, and semi-pacifists aggressive enough to have a ranged damage set but not so aggressive as to be critting people in the face?

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Anyway, just for shiggles, here's how it went down in the alternate universe where I hit the Mega Millions jackpot and bought City of Heroes out. Vigilance is gone, poof, kaput, rolled into a small defender damage scale increase from 0.65 to 0.70, still lower than corruptors', and melee damage scale is brought up to match ranged. New defender inherent is called "Inspiration"; inspirations received by a defender as drops or rewards are converted to a character-bound team version of the same strength. You're welcome.

But here in the real world, I wonder why the devs didn't just make it a toggle. Call it Caution/Passion. Turn it off, get +endredux, turn it on, get +dmg. Least that way we'd get to pick our bonus rather than being at the whim of things beyond our control, like how big the team is and how suicidal the blaster is.

Which reminds me... is it possible to workaround Vigilance's debuff in league content by going solo within the league?

Turning the defender into a tank is a bad idea.
You are supposed to be the weak point in the team...if the enemies kill you first, the team is that much easier to kill. classic.

I do think the current inherent is going in the right direction. When solo, the defender needs something to make up for not being able to use an array of his own skills.

The endurance discount is fantastic for a suffering group and at the very least, lets you 'go all out' in an attempt to save the team. That is a team bonus though...defenders are already pro teamers. Personally I dont think this should change.

The SP bonus is +30% damage with -10%[capped at 0%] per teammate. +30% damage is NICE, +20% and a friend is even more amazing...but it does not make up for the fact that I have two bubbles, or a pile of heals/buffs, or what-have-you, that I am unable to use on myself. I don't think defenders should turn into juggernauts just because the suck when solo [comparatively].

TBH, I can come up with 20 ideas to fix the problem, but I have managed to pick them all apart while writing them. Having them get a similar bonus to buffs from any source as their offense bonus was one. +30% bonus to all buff effects with -15% per teammate. Sounds neat, but then you have to go through and see all the ways THAT can be abused to hell and back. This game tends to be super easy and leans far more towards casual, unfailable gameplay, so making the defender a tank when solo might be a viable route...at least it is somewhat thematic, but dont make them a wall of immortality when teamed, that is just silly.

In other MMO's the Defender could easily be paralleled to a healer, most of which tend to wear heavy armor types and are far from squishy.

The issue is that in other MMO's when the healer gets focussed on they have to heal themselves, they are not likely to die, but they stop being of much other use to the team for that time. Here if a Defender could take the hits there wouldn't be much stopping them from still doing whatever they were doing before getting aggro so giving them survivability is too much.

It might be a good idea to give defenders a 'switch' that changes them from 'help the team' mode to 'help themselves' mode. This could change their buff and attack modifiers and give some resist/defence so they essentially have to give up buffing in order to gain survivability and damage, but can then flip back to buffing once it is safe.

I didn't think that through though so as with most ideas I am not sure how it would apply to all defenders.

To stop abuse of the switch it could only be toggled into defence mode at a certain level of health (60% or such) and then only back on once above a different level. Or be given a fairly long timer if you do use it outside of these situations.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aggelakis PrincessDarkstar: "RAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH SOMEONE IS *WRONG* ON THE INTERNET!"

If anyone has ever tried soloing Bosses on defenders (most primaries), then you would know that making a defender more "tank-like" is not much of a risk of A) even occuring or B) drawing more players to the AT because suddenly they are too powerfull.

The real differences between defenders has little to do with the "inherent" (which was recently improved) and more to do with "parity". That is, some powersets are better at supporting teams, while some are less effective. By the same token, some are better at soloing, and yet others are not so good (or even bad) at solo-ing.

If the developers really, truely, wanted to balance defenders, this is where I would like them to start. Make the primary sets that are not as good at team support better at it ! And then, for those primaries that are not so great at solo-ing, make them better at it. In the end, the goal would be to lift the "under-performers" in each catergory into the middle of the pack. There would still be sets "better" at team support, and sets "better" at solo-ing. But we should do away with the fact that some sets are not just "worse" at solo-ing or team support, they are "worlds-apart" from their brethen in the same categories.

Ok here is a crazy idea...

Vigilance is about being alert and proactive according to its definition, but in its current form it is reactive and not very useful to many primaries correct? How about vigilance is about being "ahead of the game" in terms of damage...

What if vigilance was a power that automatically buffed whatever ally the defender was targetting... you don't turn it on or off, its just auto-fire but only affects friendly targets... This power would somehow buff the target (ie +def, + res, +status prot, + regen?)...

Essentially the idea is that as long as the defender has his eyes on the ally, that person would receive those buffs to be proactive about the damage! This would be great too because almost every set could benefit from keeping a single teammate extra safe and I think thematically fits in well with the "assistance" role that the archetype naturally plays!