Praetorian Zone Events, Badges, and Healers

An "Empathy Defender" is not a powerset. It is a character - a *complete* character. Empathy itself is a powerset. If you aren't using the secondary, you're only half a character.

And for "at least one foe targeted power?" You have an *entire secondary* that targets enemies. Not only do you do damage, but every single secondary has SOME sort of secondary effect. Emp/sonic? You damn well better be attacking, I want the enemies not just taking damage, but getting the stacked -res on them, too. Electric? OK, drain's not spectacular in most instances, but you'll have more of it going on. Not to mention at least one hold - stack it, lock down that Sapper, help stack with the Controller on that boss. Dark? -tohit. Which means you'll have to spend less time healing, because they'll be hitting less. Rad blast? Foe -defense, so they'll be dying faster... and so forth.

I suggest you go to paragonwiki.com and look over Defender secondaries to see just what you're *not* doing.

Hell, by the time my Empaths (talking defenders, here, a */emp *controller* that didn't take the primary so they could "just heal" would be even worse) got into the 40s, I rarely had to heal much of anything. Zip in, combat buff, lay down some debuffs, update a buff on someone else, attack.

Being blunt? Those people saying that are idiots. Why? See above. There's ... let's see, I can think of exactly *one* situation that sticking heals on auto and "just spamming them" was good, and that was the old hami raid. Maybe if you have a horribly laggy mothership raid. At which point, stand in the middle of the bowl, and go watch TV for half an hour. So... two? And you're still not doing the debuffs you could.

See my Guides and Tutorials

Again, no, we are not. We are talking about a build that is OBJECTIVELY and DEMONSTRABLY sub-optimal for the game you have chosen to play. True, SOMEONE made some value judgements as to what build is 'good', but that was the devs who created the game.

The game is what it is. If you are failing because your build is inconsistent with the design intentions of the game, work around it. If you actually want that badge, make the effort to get it rather than defending the build THAT IS FAILING YOU.

I think you've already found one. The participation metric in the event you were failing.



If you want to twist what I said around to make it sound like I was calling you an idiot, fine. I'm not going to stop you. But that's not what I said or even implied.


On this subject, my mind's wide open. But an emp defender with a single attack and a monofocus on healing powers is ludicrous.



Bullseye's primary power is his aim.
He's also got an adamantium-reinforced skeleton (but not to Wolvie's level).

Mr. Fantastic's primary power is his stretching. It's been implied that his stretching and elasticity have also allowed him to augment his already ridiculously high intellect. He can also alter his size and mass (note, size alteration can be just inflation, mass alteration isn't, think Banner ==> HULK, that's mass alteration).

It still doesn't sidestep the issue that you've only chosen to develop half your powerset, essentially (at least) halving your effectiveness on a team.


Sorry, but the question is a valid one. Is this what happens on missions when you're not required?


My main is a tank. He mixes it up fairly nice. He's no scrapper, but he IS an excellent meat-shield who can output non-trivial amounts of damage when he feels like it. If someone kills one of my opponents, I simply move onto another. I don't go "Hey! That was MY baddie!"
And yeah, occasionally I get a string of killsteals in a team where I activate a power and someone else nukes them down before the power actually connects. It happens.

I don't sit there and simply burp at them (taunt) and then try to hold them there for others to whack down. That puts me in more danger of a streak of lucky hits, and puts my teammates in more danger. Yeah, I'll pop a Destiny here or there if someone is getting mauled. And yeah, I occasionally forget to toss my Lore pets out. So my tank controls aggro, does damage, buffs, heals, etc. I'm contributing more than just the bare minimum of "Aggro control" that the Holy Trinity requires.

You can't say the same with your monofocused "healer".


I can talk for days about the people I team with. For the most part, everyone I team with is at least "okay", with lots of "good" and "really good" players. And there's actually a significant group that are so good, I feel like a fifth wheel sometimes. But yeah, there's a small group of people who I have had the misfortune of playing with who, even with slow, painstakingly detailed instructions, couldn't find their *** with two hands, a map and a guide, let alone from one end of the mission to the other.

I try to be patient with people like this. Some are simply new and overwhelmed (hey, I was dumb and initially six-slotted brawl too). Some are simply overwhelmed period. But some of them are just flat out...well, let's just say that I am wondering what game they THINK they're playing.

Wonder all you want. Hell, come on over to Protector and play with some of us. We're always willing to teach those that actually want to learn. Or just kick butt and have a GM follow us through the game taking names.

This stuff isn't "hard". The Really Hard Way? That's hard-ish. It's all about understanding how the game functions and the best ways to exploit that functionality (exploit in the non-negative sense, as in "develop").


I'm not saying "never rock the aura". As you said, there are times when there's good reason for it. What I'm saying is, even on high difficulty, there's better uses of your time and endurance in a good chunk of the content in this game.



Another analogy. You're sticking your finger into a failing dike.

Yes. You're "helping", but not necessarily in an appreciable, or even effective, way.


Occasionally there are deaths. It does happen. Hell, on my monday night Fire/Rad team, deaths are like bonus rounds! Vengeance, stacking Fallout, Mutation. We're stronger, they're mostly dead, and the corpse ain't dead anymore.

The problem is, you're using it interchangeably with your AT, your build, etc.

Sorry if it irks you that I'm being so didactic on this point. But it is important to make the distinction. Lots of sloppy thinking and sloppy usage of language goes on otherwise.



Sorry, that's not how this works.

You made the spurious claim

It's on YOU to back your spurious, statistical statement. It's not on me to prove or disprove it for you.

No, you were expressing an opinion as if it were a quantifiable fact.

This is what I'm talking about with sloppy usage.

I stress again, Empathy is only ONE of your TWO primary powersets.
Again, you continue to ignore the fact that you are not an Empathy/NothingElse defender.


Sorry, but you still didn't learn the lesson properly.

You're never a Primary/NothingElse AT.

What you've done is NOT "taken your primaries first". You've taken your primary and ignored your secondary altogether.

Additionally, a tank who's essentially ignored their secondary is, eventually, going to die anyhow. Regardless of how tough their primary is. Because they're not outputting enough damage to kill enemies before those enemies overcome them.

I say again, you are NOT an Emp defender.
You're an Empathy/Secondary defender. You've ignored half the equation in a fit of colossal monofocus.

The healing Ancillary is just that. An ANCILLARY pool. Not your secondary.

Tell that to the cop who stops you and asks for proof of insurance.


Way to completely miss that "healing is not mitigation".



I say again, BULL SCHNITZEL.

Not all of them do it in the same way Emp does. But for the most part, every set is doing a good portion of the same thing you are, with some near-100% overlap on several.

Pop mids and check them out again.

Yep. So what? Simply because Empathy contains no attack power doesn't mean you're SUPPOSED to play it with no attacks from your secondary. The fact that, due to teaming, you CAN and HAVE gotten as far as you have is a testament to the flexibility of the teaming system in CoH. NOT your skill.




Simply because you contribute "a little" doesn't mean your build isn't gimped. You essentially HAVE to team in order to achieve goals in reasonable periods of time.



Blasters kill enemies alongside the tank. They can still manage (depending on the powersets) debuff actions in addition to raw damage output.

Controllers lock down and kill enemies alongside the brute. They still manage to buff and control when doing damage.

Why's it so hard for YOU to heal AND do damage to the enemies?




Let me stake down these moving goalposts for ya!

You didn't just choose one or two ancillary powers in lieu of a secondary power.

YOU IGNORED YOUR SECONDARY.

Flat out. Full stop.

BIG, BIG MONSTROUSLY HUGE DIFFERENCE!



Because their understanding of the game's combat systems is deficient.

Or you get pulled over and required to show proof.

You've basically bought an expensive new car and only gotten liability insurance on it. And you insist that you'll never break any glass. You'll never get hurt yourself in a collision. And you'll never total your car and require a replacement vehicle. Heck, you're assuming you won't need to finish paying off the car even.




Apparently you're still having trouble reading. One of a tank's myriad tasks is damage output. It isn't his ONLY one. Nor is simple aggro control.

And a blaster who nukes an enemy in a group before I can establish control of them is going to have to deal with some aggro themselves. If they can handle it, cool. If not, they need to review their strategy.

Yep. Luckily I team with very few such masterminds. Most have a firm grip on their power sets (both primary and secondary) and don't need to waste time constantly resummoning and buffing pets.

You've, ostensibly, been playing for nearly 8 years and you haven't figured this out yet?

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

It doesn't need to be though. There is already a notification about the metric on the page for the event itself. And the badge is awarded for completion of the event.

Well dang, if only you had had more time to heal were it not for all those danged attack powers in your way...

In a way, this is the core of the problem you have. A comic book is not a game. The writers can stack the events of the comic in favour of the hero, and make sure they come out on top. It doesn't matter how one-trick the pony is, because amazingly, it will always turn out to be the trick that's required for the pony to save the day.

Here, however, you're playing within the constraints of the game engine, and the basic assumptions of the gameplay. Assumptions like: people will take powers from both their secondaries and primaries, and use them in play. The game can't take account of your special circumstances when checking your participation score, because it doesn't know about your character backstory.

You're playing a niche concept build which limits your effectiveness in game. It says a lot for the forgiving nature of both the CoX game and players that, usually, you can still contribute to a team in a pretty okay way. Still not as well as if you had a more mainstream build that used all the tools available, but okay. However, sometimes you're going to run up against situations where your niche build shows its weaknesses. That's just the price for deliberately reducing the toolset available to you in the pursuit of concept.

Kin is a lot busier than Emp. Dark and Rad arguably are too if you try to always keep your toggles up.

I'd argue Force Field, since skipping repulsion bomb or even force bolt is doable without gimping the set. And depending on how technical you want to get, Pain Domination doesn't have any foe-targeted powers (though Anguishing Cry does affect foes, it's PBAoE).

On a competent team with a couple of support sets buffing them, people rarely die. If they do it's usually because they ran off on their own ahead of the group.

And when they do die, they pop Return to Battle, or an Awaken, or combine some insps, or get rezzed if somebody has one (even the temp power). It's no big deal and debt is usually gone instantly as the team finishes off the group that killed you, assuming patrol XP didn't eat it.

The game even has a few amazing powers that are only usable when someone is dead. I've been on a couple teams that were built that way, with everybody's trigger fingers itching and waiting for somebody to die. When they do? Excellent! Fallout, Vengeance, Soul Transfer. The enemies are stunned (mag 30!), nuked, and the team is buffed to nigh-invulnerability.

I actually don't see many Empaths these days -- the sets with a mix of buffs and debuffs tend to be preferred as they stack better with each other. Most people, at least on the servers I play on*, have figured out the power of buffs in this game and just how far behind the "healer" really is. A well-played empath, especially one that's a Controller or a Defender who takes advantage of the stacking debuffs in their secondary is always welcome, but is decidedly middle of the road when it comes to support sets.

* (Triumph, Pinnacle, Justice, Protector, Liberty, Victory)

Originally Posted by EarthWyrm But I do understand that there is an internet rule that any bad idea must be presented by someone at least twice a year to remind everyone who hasn't already read every previous thread on the topic precisely why the idea is bad.

I have a Demons/Thermal Radiation Mastermind. So at any time I am:
Watching for targets to heal (both AoE and single target heals)
Watching for allies that need a mez broken
Keeping track of Forge and recasting when it's up (similar to using Fortitude but it's a worse power)
Making sure all my teammates and my pets are fully shielded
Manually positioning and ordering my pets

And despite all of that I still have time to use my personal attacks. So don't give me that "Empath's don't have time to blast" BS. If you want to play a character that is truly busy play a Mastermind.

Did you not read the thread? No, the badge is NOT awarded for completion of the event. If it were, I would have already had the badge, and there would not have been a discussion. The badge was awarded for completion of the event AND SUCCESSFULLY MEETING THE PARTICIPATION CRITERIA!!! I completed the event four times, but was only awarded the badge on the last time.

See my Guides and Tutorials

It wasn't a 'sucker' suggestion, but an incomplete one.

You posted this under the "Player Questions" forum. The one where players ask other players for guidance. In your particular case, from the outside it seems reasonable that the tone is "I can't get meet the metrics used for getting this badge" so players let you know what you needed to do to get the badge - namely your build.

My understanding (and I will admit I'm not enough of a forum poster to be 100% positive, others will probably correct me if I'm wrong) is that the devs don't spend a lot of time in this section of the forums.

If you would like to suggest to the devs to fix what is used for the metrics or to remove the metrics all together aside from running the event to get the badge, then another forum (probably the Suggestions forum) would be more appropriate for having their eyes catch it.

From the page:

If you did not get the badge, you did NOT meet the "participation criteria" for the badge.

That doesn't mean you didn't meet the participation criteria for the "booby prize" for simply showing up.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

But, in the end, that's what this actually came down to. Your build couldn't qualify for the participation metric in the game. Hence, you didn't get the badge.

It wasn't a "bug" in the game, or some nasty confluence of game mechanics. It was the fact that your particular build was flat out incapable of meeting the minimum participation metrics for the badge award.

And when you were told this, you argued about your play style.

Then, when you finally took a modified, more balanced build into the event, you got the badge.

Que surprise.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

I think the disconnect here lies in the section I bolded. Many of us may question the usefulness of a dedicated healer in a game where buffs multiply survivability exponentially and heals, while situationally useful, amount to little more than placing a band-aid over a crack in the wall. But that is another discussion for another thread.

And the reason that discussion is bleeding through is because despite your frequent assertions, [EMP DEF] is an entirely different creature than a [Healer]. An EMP DEF can be the platform on which a healer is built, but it is so much more - it has blasts that have ways to mitigate damage on top of its primary abilities. If you had to change your playstyle to "blaster" then you've gone too far in the other direction. You're looking at this in In black and white, while the majority of posters on this thead (with varying degrees of snark and derision) are telling you to look at all the lovely shades of grey! Change your playstyle to that of a defender.

And it started because you (yes, you) claimed that the participation metric means "Empaths always seem to get the short end of the deal." which is patently false. Sure a healer gets the short end of the stick, but only because they've chopped off half of their own end. And if you want to fight crime with that half-a-stick, and are otherwise happy doing so, by all means, go right ahead. But when it comes time to measure everyone's sticks, do not - DO NOT - claim your half-stick is the same length as everyone else's and proceed to kvetch when the measuring tape says it isn't.

Actually, in my opinion your regular build is the selfish build. It's not terrible at healing, but that's like building a Rad/EM Blaster as a Stunner. Taking only attacks that can stun whenever possible and slotting them solely for stun effects and avoiding any abilities that don't help you stun in some way whenever possible can make you fairly effective at locking down a boss, but it makes you very nearly an impediment on any team where stunning enemies isn't very useful.

Past the teens that's pretty much what a healing-focused build on any AT amounts to for the most part.

But i'm fine with you playing that way if that's what you want. i've joined PuGs with Empaths who took Medicine, and if i'm looking for entertainment i might stay around for a few missions, but otherwise i generally make a polite excuse and leave the team as soon as it's convenient. Simply put the build you apparently consider non-selfish is relatively ineffective past 16 or so. Then again so are MAN builds, but at least those are intentionally sub-optimal, and the players playing them are usually skilled enough and self-aware enough of the build they're playing that they're still good teammates. Players who think focusing on healing makes them the lynchpin of a team, or even especially useful are, to put it bluntly, not.

If you've got a group of players that your playstyle works well with and who place great value on your contributions i would say you should hold onto them with all your might. All too often they lose that certain charm as they learn more about how the game works and increase in skill. A player who maintains the initial mindset is a rare thing to have. In the end it's about having fun, not whether the team can crank things above base difficulty.

"There's villainy ... and then there's supervillainy. The difference is performance."
-Doc_Reverend

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

If you were told that the magic formula for enacting changes to the game was to simply get a Dev to read your forum post, you've been severely mislead. There have been reams of forum threads by people asking for the moon (sometimes literally), and evidence that a redname saw the post, but the majority of those ideas got the attention they deserved.

They will change things that need to be changed, and only with sufficient evidence that the need outweighs the time and effort to make the change. You managed to stumble on a severe outlier, and outliers rarely get things changed. Playing outside the boundaries of normal gameplay is Play At Your Own Risk for not reaping the same rewards. It's like trying to use a metric wrench on a standard sized bolt. You might get close enough to make it work, but they're really not designed to be compatible. You could probably earn the badge with your main build if you keep trying, but you gave up because you thought it should be easy. Your build of choice won't make anything easy but keeping your team alive if you're paying attention.

Okay, I'll ask it, because I don't see where anyone else has: If you're such a good healer, why do you need 4 rez powers?

I don't ask that to be snarky. My point is this: your build seems to have a lot of redundancy.

I'm sure you are a good healer. Heck, with 8 heals, it would be hard not to. That's part of the redundancy right there. I know many CoH players say "you don't need a healer in this game," or that "healing is overrated compared to defense, etc." I'll gladly admit that healing can be very useful, and I'll always find a player with lots of heals welcome on my teams. But 8 heals? I can't ever remember a team that needed that much healing to stay alive. And since you have more than enough healing to keep the team alive, why do you need 4 rez powers? Sure, one or maybe two for the occasional "oopsie", but 4? All that over kill is limiting the usefulness of your character. If 99% of the time you could keep the team alive with 5 heals and 2 rezs (and that should be plenty for even a decent healer), that's 5 addtional powers you could have taken that would help your team in other ways.

Now I did see where you mentioned this is a concept character. I respect that. I also have concept characters that others might consider "gimped." And I've teamed with players with "gimped" concept characters, and had fun doing it. But when you design a character around a concept and make build choices that are less than optimized, you have to accept the consequences of that decision. There are no "wrong" builds, but there are builds that are definitely less effective than others and will have more difficulty achieving certain rewards. That's just the way it is. You may have to decide what's more important: staying true to your concept, or accomplishing those goals that require a more balanced character.

Fortunately, the dual build system offers a decent compromise, and I'm glad to hear you were able to get the badge by using a 2nd build. I think that's the best solution because it allows you to play the build you want most of the time, but switch in those instances where your concept just isn't working.

I'd just like to point out that none of those characters are "one-trick ponies." If you are familiar with any of those character, you will know that while their powers stem from a specific ability, they use that ability in a variety of ways, both offensive and defesive, with a variety of effects. Mr. Freeze, for example, would be well represented by a corrupter with multiple powers chosen from Ice Blast and Cold Domination. Such a character would hardly be considered a "one-trick pony" just because all the powers are cold themed.

What you seem to still not understand is that your BUILD was the problem IN THIS SITUATION. No one is telling you how to build or play your toon (well, most of us aren't). But you came here and said "I have this problem and here's the background (including my build)." And we advised the build was the problem FOR THAT BADGE SITUATION. And guess what, you changed your build for it and that solved the problem instantly.

Now, to generalize a bit, I will tell you that your original build is sub-optimal for this game. You will run into other situations where a more versatile build will be demonstrably better than your narrowly focused one. Okay, you have a concept for your build. Cool. But that means it's not going to work well for SOME content. And this was one of those bits of content. That's all we're saying.