Miladys_Knight

I have a squid and a couple other Posi level toons on Triumph. You can send me a tell too Goat.

No, which is the problem. Rad/, Dark/, and FF/ are the primaries which can do this. Just about anything paired with /Dark has the potential. To be honest defenders should have been buffers and debuffers should probably have been split into a different AT.

That said, yes there is a way to normalize vigilance across the ATs. You decouple it from team health first off. Then you grant a global +rech and global -end cost (a vigilance buff) each time a defender activates a primary or secondary power. Each buff lasts for a set amount of time and there would need to be a maximum amount of allowed buffs to stack.

In this way it would be up to the defender which way they want to emphazise their inherent. A toggle heavy defender could empahsize end red, while a long term buff toon like FF or sonic could focus on recharge or some combination of both. It would be decoupled from team size, composition and skill and would be entirely in the defender's hands. In this way it would reward the skillful player and the benefit would be transparent and consistant.

Depends on what you want to do. Mitigation is what you need while soloing. For primary sets that means Sonic or Ice is best. For secondaries, Ice or Devices. Another potential primary choice would be energy and slotting FOR KB. This isn't every one's cup of tea though.

Good choices for solo is Ice/Ice, Sonic/Ice, Fire/Ice, Ice/Fire, Sonic/Energy, Ice/Dev, Arch/Dev, and Ar/Dev.

For teaming raw damage output is always nice, Fire/Energy, Fire/Fire, Rad/Fire, Fire/Mental are all excellent choices.

If Dual builds had been introduced in the days of SOs only, yes this would be the way to leverage it. It was, however, released in the post IO set days. This means that to leverage vigilance you must create 2 builds, a large teams build and a solo/small teams build, especially in the case of a buffing primary.

Most other ATs can leverage their powers and abilities without taking this step. The solo build works fine for team play and vice versa.

In the days of IOs this is a double $$$ ding for the defender.

EDIT - If dual builds had been set up in such a way that IOs slotted in Build #1 were also available for use in build #2 without buying them again this would not be an issue.

My FF defender's Light Fairy survives quite well. Since, just like the rest of the team, it's defense is soft capped with Manuvers, Dispersion, and the grantable shields. One hit is usually all it takes to knock it out but it's usually not targetted by the mobs and is only killed by collateral damage from AoEs which only a relatively small number of PVE mobs have access to.

AoEs tend to do less damage than single target attacks and I've had the fairy survive single AoE hits and live long enough to regen all it's health.

Some of us try to get the most out of everything an AT offers. We may not have selected the AT for the inherent but we leverage it all the same. (I'd venture to say that there are some that do select a particular AT for the inherent and it will become an even larger reason once GR comes out. I forsee more people creating blue brutes than red scrappers and more blue corruptors than red defenders). You are right that it is a nice extra and I would say that is the case with every AT save HEATS, Defenders, and, marginally, Tankers.

There are some players that do plan around their inherent. I tend to optimize my blaster's attack chains for defiance buffing. I get anywhere from 12-25% more damage output compared to my non-optimized chain. Perma Doms are built with IO sets with priority focus on their inherent power.

Odd that you should mention not playing defenders after the first one. When GR comes out all my new buff focused toons will be redeemed corruptors or controllers unless neither AT offers the primary and secondary set combination that I want.

Uninteresting is probably one of the biggest problems. The devs are "happy" with the balance of the defender AT. The players for the most part are not (just take a look at population numbers if you think that's not the case). The dev insistance puts me in mind of a vintage collector totally pleased with the perfection of his highly polished, mint condition, black and white console television with it's built in mono-channel speaker. Blindly insisting that it is perfect as it is and completely ignoring the 72" Hi Def, LCD, color, flat screen, with surround sound, state of the art set that the non-vintage collector is wanting.

No that's not the only way. All you have to do is take powers and slot them as if you were going to play solo so that you have enough end red and recovery to keep your blue bar topped off. Then no matter how much damage your team takes you still aren't using more end than you recover.

Also I'm not saying no benefit I'm saying no useful/measurable benefit. My FF/Dark/Dark is a perfect example. I can keep the entire team at (or above) the soft cap. That means that a mere 5% of incoming damage (less than that if they've selected any powers that give them resistances) is being applied to the team. The base amount of regeneration (no health from the fitness pool, no set bonuses, no other outside powers to provide regen) is almost enough to totally eliminate what little benefit is gained from vigilance. My personal end red and recovery slotting DO eliminate what little benefit I receive even if I am the only buffer on the team.

Which is exactly why I think that it is broken and needs a rework. Your inherent should reward you for doing your job well or at least be transparent and funtion all the time like scourge and scrapper criticals.

It shouldn't work better the worse you play.

Yes all the tiny bit of the post that you clipped does is that. Try reading the rest of the post.

Hyperbole eh? Your own post proves you know that it's not and that you agree at least to some extent.

You obviously realize that a well played defender gets little to no benefit from it especially if they have slotted for end red. ie: rewards poorly played defenders. It certainly doesn't reward well played defenders which is exactly opposite of what it should be doing.

You should get out more, try a few PUGS from time to time. Simply because you have never seen a million dollars doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

I have seen defenders dragging a corpse around simply for the endurance discount.

I have seen Defenders that should be buffing their team neglecting to do so for the express purpose of gaining an endurance discount, and then when a team mate dies using that teammate for vengance.

All you have to do to make vigilance redundant on a team is slot for the amount of end red and recovery that you need while solo.

While that can true for an empath played as a h34l0r, it's not so true for any other set, especially debuff sets. (Think TA)

I've had that happen too. Once the slick failed to burn (it always lit just didn't do damage) it never burned for the rest of my play session. Restarting the client seemed to help as the oil slick would light and burn for a while and then would fail and not burn consistantly until I restarted again.

So far every time I've been on a Numina TF, OSA won't burn in Boomtown, and I have to log off, restart, and return for it to work again.

Try it with a fire controller using char. Char is so slow that you can out run it with Sprint + Swift.

What you are missing is stubborn, obstinate, developers at least where the market is concerned. We have been told by them that there is no disparity in potential earning speed because all the merit rewarding content on both sides has been balanced around a mean time/merit rate.

Implementing your idea would first take an admission from the devs that there is a disparity in the red side ATs merit earning potential.

What that means is that it LOOKS like there is a disparity when there is not. Virtually all villain story arcs run in the same zones they start in where as hero content can take as much or more time traveling than actually playing the mission(s). Dr. Q is notorious for spending significanly more time traveling that fighting. If you want to speed up your merit earning blue side you need to leverage the fastest travel powers; range boosted Teleport or Super Speed.

The real disparity in the sides are:

1) The amount of content available blue side is much greater though extremely old and in dire need of revamping. This gives more opportunity for things to do which relieves some measure of boredom.

2) Merit rewards/time are greater for TF and SF content than for story arcs. This means that since blue side has more TF content and it is available in multiple level ranges that there is more potential opportunities to earn merits on the blue side.

3) All villians are built to solo. Villians are all generalists. This means that common drops like salvage and junk recipes are more available on red side because many people solo their villians (soloing you get to keep all the drops from mob defeats rather than sharing them with the team). The best rewards in the game at this point in time are PvP IOs, Pool C IOs purchased with merits, purple drops, and HO/SHOs. Purple recipes are the only case where there are likely to be more drops earned on the red side than blue as that is the only thing that most villians will be able to solo rather than have a team.

4) Heroes are specialists. That means that many AT choices on blue side need to team to perform well. This means that more team oriented content (TFs) are run on blue side. Higher population on blue side also make this more likely to occur.

Your solution doesn't fix the root of any of the problems and won't solve the real problems on red side.

Fixing 1 and 2 require a huge amount of development time for redside only content, an expense we have been told won't happen. New content will be co-op or mirrored on each side.

3 and 4 can't be fixed since it's designed into the very fabric of the game. GR will fix this somewhat by allowing AT bleed through but it won't do any thing for the population disparity and most likely will increase that disparity by allowing villians to move blue side where there is more content available and more opportunity for teaming.

A market merger however fixes or smoothes over many of the problems.

If heroes out number villians by 3 to 1 (which at my last spot check they did) then merging the market increases villian access to goods by 300% while only boosting hero access by 33% (a win/win for both sides with the villians coming out on top by a significant margin).

A market merger means that more purple recipes will be available to heroes which will make money flow from hero side to villian side. At the same time merit reward goods will be more available to villians (especially in the case of non-level 50 IOs) which will make the money flow back. Rare salvage, and goods like pool A and Pool B recipes, are more prevelant on red side where there is a higher preponderance of soloers, netting red siders a positive cash flow. Perhaps most importantly, since a significant portion of the toons played on red side are master minds, is what are essentially junk and fodder blue side (pet recipes) will be greatly available at much much lower prices to red side master minds.

Isn't that a double ding, or will that really smooth things out, since doing a shield charge inside the radius of AAO has the potential to give a huge damage buff while doing so outside of AAO radius even with long distance factored in could be a huge difference in damage.

Yes, please. It's beyond Uber with IO sets and sucks hard with SOs. I think that was all mentioned in the Beta test.

Actually anything that survives probably will be fighting back. It will be bosses and lieutenants and the reason they will still be alive is that you missed them with one or both attacks. So the bosses won't be stunned and the lieutenants may be.