BurningChick

I dozed through the Praetorian AVs on my Traps / Dark, a combination that is not optimal for AVs. IIRC, this toon can drop two pylons in something like 4:30 (it's been a while).

Just IME and all that, but Traps has enough -regen, -resistance, +defense, -damage, and places for damage procs (and ability to set off Reactive at the Incarnate level) that your secondary choice is largely irrelevant for soloing AVs. Some combinations will be faster, but none will be incapable of soloing AVs.

I find it spooky that I can be in a zone, supposedly well-populated, and shoot out something like "/b Hero tips team LFM" ... and get no response. It makes the game seem emptier than it really is.

Anyway -- I like the suggestion of having a LFG channel that's open to everyone.

Ridiculous amounts of inf, you say?

Fire / fire / fire dom with perma-hasten

You'll eventually end up with a blender that walks an interesting razor's edge of being insanely over-powered and squishy -- you have to be situationally aware to make sure that everything that can be mezzed is mezzed.

And what makes fire / fire / fire so expensive? There's not much cheaping out -- no sleep sets, no confuse sets. No, you're mainlining some of the most expensive IOs in the game to reach perma-Hasten.

No joking -- it's in the store, and I just made a wp / kinetic tanker.

They might be up, but, IME, there are some eye-bleeding graphical glitches that make the game, hmmm, not all that enjoyable.

My client just crashed (perhaps NCSoft took the servers down), but today's patch has some showstopping graphical bugs.

First, the humorous -- a coalition-mate claimed to have a tentacle coming out of his toon's head. Yeah, I know, great for RPing a certain flavour of anime. But ... that ain't right.

Second, the OMG nausea-indcuing -- I don't consider myself all that prone to strobing lights, but, OMG ... a FF defender (yay, found one!) cast the small bubbles on the team. Upon entering the mission, they changed from their usual translucent teal to electric green, strobing monstrosities that nearly had me tossing my cookies. Upon exiting the mission, back to the usual, calming teal. Back inside the mission, instant headache. Buffs wear off, no more strobing green.

Third: the same bubbler's dispersion bubble, inside the mission looked ... warshade-y, dark purple, covered only the caster, with some bits along the floor. It did not look like the usual DB I've grown to love.

The game's not playable in this state.

I'd work in Leadership for Tactics, Maneuvers, and Vengeance. Tactics because a lot of your powers require ToHit checks and missing sucks, Maneuvers since it's always good to add +def, and Vengeance 'cause sometimes the poop hits the fan, and it's one of the best buffs in the game.

Hi Bill,

I love your tone of condescension -- it's charming from someone who didn't know the difference between KB and repel

Now.

On to brass tacks.

I know how to use KB. On my bubbler, I used hover to limit KB. I know how to pulse Force Bubble (I was one of the first on the forums to suggest that use, BTW) for positioning. I know how to stack Force Bolt and Repulsion Field (it has a duration in PvE) to overcome KB resistant mobs. I know how to push mobs into corners with Force Bubble, I even used to use the old Repulsion Bomb to good effect while dumpster diving.

I know the tricks.

And, when a ff defender can give 45% def (to everything there is defense) to a blaster... those tricks just aren't that great compared to simply firing attacks. And that soft-capped number? My bubbler gives it without IOs or Incarnate powers.

Also ... it's awfully tough to line up Force Bubble and Irradiate. You tend to need a short ceiling and a corner. I mean, it's a neat trick, but walking into melee with Force Bubble on when the mobs would ... you know ... walk into melee on their own seems a little odd.

Hi Bill,

Bonfire is superior to Repulsion Field since it doesn't have an end cost / mob, does damage, and is stationary -- i.e., it's better for blocking. It can even be used to knock mobs towards the caster.

As for me and my FF defender? When i5 hit, I spent hours trying to work out how to use FF's Final Three and got, IME, pretty good at using for positioning mobs on teams (mob position is largely irrelevent to my FF / rad, but more useful for controllers). Here's what I found ...

Solo, Force Bubble dropped incoming damage by about 20% / second, but it would take about 33% longer to finish a given mish (Force Bubble pushed mobs out past the standard range of Cosmic Burst, Haze and Irradiate). The net effect was a significant drop in my DPS AND an increase in total damage dealt to my bubbler over the course of a mission.

Repulsion Field reduced incoming damage by an even third ... but it was impractical to use because of the 1 end / hit cost of the power (digression: because of the way the power works, using it on a group of mobs that have been granted kb protection by a controller is one of the game's fastest ways to drain yourself of end). On the bright side, it didn't have such an intense effect on my dps. But, again, missions went slowly because I couldn't deal with the end drain.

Repulsion Bomb, until its most recent incarnation, was useless to me.

Detention Field should have been a toggle.

It's great that you can make FF work with your toons, Bill. But my defender doesn't have any patches to push mobs into. And keeping mobs at 50' invalidates some of my secondary. Defender FF does not play at all the way it should. And some of the parlour tricks people talk of with mob positioning and such just aren't all that important when your teammates are soft-capped to everything for which there even is defense.

Howdy folks,

Pressed for time, so I'll just toss some things up ... errr ... out.

One of the design problems with FF is that, the more def it provides, the less good the rest of the set seems. I.e., a blaster bubbled by a defender running maneuvers has, IME, more survivability than my WP scrapper. The same buffs used by a controller or MM have less than HALF the effectiveness. When I see mention of how effective FF's non-buffs are, the comments disproportionately come from non-defenders, in part, IME, because they have to look elsewhere to provide survivability to their pets and teammates.

The way FF's buffs work for a defender allows her blaster pets to become borderline unkillable blappers -- and blappers have some of the best raw DPS in the game. Anything to disrupt the blappy goodness is ... unfortunate. One of the best things in the game is teaming my bubbler with a nub blaster ... and watching him slowly realize that he can get scrapperlock and just run around punching mobs in the face without consequence.

Further, I've seen mention of bots / FF as an effective combination. My rejoinder? Bots are ranged. They have additional (de)buffs to fill in FF's gaps. The two were designed to work together, thematically AND from a min / max perspective. That kind of synergy is completely lacking between FF and any defender secondary. FWIW, the classic bots / FF combination is one of ... what ... 20 different possible FF combinations? Again, it points to the idiosyncrasies of the FF that the set FF works best with is one designed to work with it.

Some other things ...

Force Bubble was designed to be an always on power. No, seriously, it was. It was NEVER intended to be situational. FF, as far as I can tell, was supposed to go from a buff set to a distance / buff hybrid, the way Empathy evolves from heals to general purpose buffing.

In this view, the squishies would huddle around the bubbler, protected by distance and Dispersion Bubble. The original 3 ST buffs (fire / cold and NRG / neg would collapsed into Insulation at release) were on 2 minute timers -- i.e., it was the BUFFS that were supposed to be situational. My guess? Just the melee toons were supposed to get the ST buffs once Force Bubble was out -- they honestly didn't need much more to be unkillable at release.

Further, mobs tend to get spread out by Force Bubble. Remember me saying that Taunt was single target also? I'm going to say that the design was for the tanker to hunt down and taunt the boss in the spawn, everyone else would focus on taking out the mobs at the perimeter, sharing the non-boss aggro. Anyone, at the time, under Dispersion Bubble could take hits from a ranged mob and survive. Anyone. And, FWIW, an overachieving tanker with Provoke could grab /ranged/ aggro from other mobs, leveraging the game's innate 20% non-lieut damage debuff from distance.

This game was single target, tactical, and would require some degree of understanding and cooperation.

Much of this isn't really speculation -- it comes straight from Castle and Jack, with sides of info from people who did beta.

By about 2 hours after release, the game had become an AoE-fuelled zergfest. And one of the first tanker buffs nearly eliminated high mag tanker KB. And the devs have never, AFAIK, increased a power's KB mag.

And Issue 5? When the devs capped AoE targets, Jack came onto the forums and pitched FF's non-buffs. Interestingly, he didn't mention positioning mobs -- that was never a design feature of FF. Instead, he talked up distance as defense. Caging a problematic boss. Saving a squishie from melee with the old, ally-targetted Repulsion Bomb.

The devs got FF wrong because they got their game wrong. If the game were about small numbers of strong mobs (say, 2 or 3 at a time), FF would make more sense. But it isn't -- it's about mowing down huge numbers of ridiculously weak mobs.

And then devs went for theme over performance (what does FF do? it shields and keeps stuff away!) ... and FF went along for the i7 def buff ride.

What should the devs have done? When the I5 feedback was in, the devs should've had a long look at the set and tweaked the set to better fit in with the game the players were enjoying. But, instead, they crossed their fingers and hoped that they had created the tactical game they had intended.

And, with all that said and done ... FF has a lot of cool powers -- Force Bubble is spectacular. But "cool" and "useful for how most people play" are sometimes different.

Short on time, Bill, but ...

I was replying to other posts where people mentioned detaining entities that buff AVs, the early Incarnate TF where you can use Force Bubble to push away the dots o' death, etc. Those places? Yeah, FF shines. Your examples? Other powers sub in reasonably well.

Sonic Repulsion, Repulsion Field, Repulse, etc. are KB, not repel. The game only has, IIRC, three repel powers (Hurricane, Force Bubble, TK).

Zwillinger,

Are there any updates for ATI video cards + 64 bit operating systems?

FWIW, I have the "leaked" 11.9 drivers installed, as clean as possible (uninstall, reboot into safe, driver cleaner, CCcleaner, reboot, new drivers) and ... still crashing. I've also tried the 11.8, 11.7, and 11.4 with loads of crashing. Supposedly 11.3 might be better ... but, well, you get the picture.

Until someone does this (Arcanaville's scrapper secondary comparison) for defender primaries, the devs are most likely relying on in-game performance metrics (i.e., datamining) to gauge defender effectiveness.

And ... my gut feeling is that there isn't a whole lot of difference. Some sets clearly do better in some situations than others (1 bubbler and 7 blasters v. 1 kin and 7 blasters -- I know which team I'd rather be on).

There are nuances to defender performance that columns of numbers don't clearly show: a bubbled blaster has good odds for surviving an AV-level alpha -- a SBed blaster doesn't; a ringed blaster is not as likely to be mezzed as a cracked up blaster, meaning that the blaster can unload an interrupted chain of damage. And so we the players need to look elsewhere for performance metrics. And ... we the players don't have access to "elsewhere".

So why don't we see more ringers and bubblers? I don't think it comes down to just numbers. I think we have a situation where players want something a little more for than themselves (these sets are more team-centric than, say, Traps). They want powers that are a little more interesting than toggles and ST buffs. Caging powers don't fit well into the game.

Other sets in the game offer similar benefits (cold to FF; thermal to sonic), but with a more engaging bag of tricks to help keep the player's interest. No amount of tweaking the current numbers on Sonic's buffs will make the set popular. FF's buffs (at least from a defender) amount to an I Win! button for much of the game's content, but FF is among the least-played defender primaries.

There's more to making a set entertaining to play than just numbers.

There are some problems with sets that the devs can't fix without redoing the set ...

The bright side is that the devs learn from their mistakes, and subsequent defender sets are, generally, better designed than FF and Sonic.

Edit: something else to consider -- FF and Sonic don't have many interesting slotting options. Most powers, save Liquefy, are single function. And many, arguably, don't benefit from slotting. There's a whole meta-game that other sets have access to that Sonic and FF don't.