Miladys_Knight

I found that combat jumping and swift plus the Raptor Pack and the Zero-G jump pack were enough travel on my shielders until I hit level 30 and picked up the travel power.

Brutes have it even easier villian zones are smaller and they can get the Raptor Pack, Zero-G pack, Gold Bricker Jet Pack, and can pop over the Grandville with 10 k inf in their pockets and get a new raptor pack any time they want.

I wouldn't pick up Slash unless you intend to use it while leveling and then respec out of it at level 22 or unless you intend to use it as a set mule for the shield breaker set.

With the exception of Grant Cover you will want to pick up all your secondary powers pretty much as soon as they open up for you (put Phallanx Fighting off until level 22 so that you can get stamina at 20)

Prior to SOs and Stamina you will get more useable defense per end spent out of Parry (and you'll be doing some damage too) than you will out of Deflection. In situations where you are facing mainly melee attacks, and/or lethal damage you can keep Deflection turned off and rely entirely on Parry to conserve endurance.

While a shield duo looks good on paper in actual use it is much less than stellar. My wife and I are able to coordinate verbally real time since we are in the same room, system lag can easily account for being more than 15' apart, as can sprite collision resolution on the server.

Using follow with any kind of travel power, even sprint, can easily separate you by more than 15'. This is especially troublesome during the alpha especially if the mobs you are facing are defense debuffers.

Bottom line the coordination required in a duo is not something you will get on a PuG and will even be hard for SGs not using ventrillo or skype.

The best use of GC is the newbie tactic of rushing into the middle of the room and standing there side by side in total scrapper lock. That and Phallanx Fighting are not powers that lend themselves to skill or experience. They are best when selected, left with an LotG +7.5 in the base slot and then forgotten. Which, in my opinion, is a bad design for most powers in the game.

While its true that the shield wall was one of the greatest military defense strategies of it's era there are several problems with the theme here in CoX all of which were brought up during beta.

1) Thematic use of phallanx tactics requires a Spear melee primary that CoX lacks.

2) Phallanx formations were notoriously short on offensive capabilities. The offense was provided by soldiers in the back ranks that would attack through the phallanx defenders and by javelineers in a third row behind them. Thematically phallanx/sheilds should be very low damage.

3) Shield wall tactics are rarely employed in comics and even then usually by hordes of low wattage villian henchmen not by the hero(s) or super hero(s).

4) Phallanx tactics being the theme of shields is much too narrow a focus since it encompasses only a very small portion of history or the planet. Players may conceive of Norman or Saxon Knights, a Zulu warrior, a fanstasy Dwarf character, A native American warrior with shield and tomahawk, or even a sheild using comic hero like Captain America, and a whole plethora of other historical or modern ideas none of which have anything to do with Greek or Roman Phallanx tactics. The shields and graphics available allow many many of these concepts to be created while the power set itself fails to allow these concepts to be built. The shield defense set should allow the expression of all these concepts rather than the much much narrower and constricting Phallanx tactics.

It's still a problem in the 16'-24' foot range and all the shielder has to do to cause a problem, intentionally or not, is move.

My blapper runs ~7% defense to all and is built for recharge, recovery, and knockback. My best mititgation by far is not staying in one place for longer than it takes to animate an attack. Consequently I'm rarely near any shield users and when I am it's the 16'-24' range rather than the <15' range. As far as my blapper is concerned the shielder on the team could just as easily be replaced by just about anything else and it would be a greater benefit.

My kin/ice defender has the same issues. My best place to be is near melee which means I'm usually in that 16'-24' radius with the shielder. Melee defense is tough to come up with in set bonuses for most defenders since the set IOs that they can slot tend to provide ranged and AoE defense and not a lot of melee defense.

I tried that on my BS/Shields "Paladin" secondary build and regret having done so. The secondary build has GC slotted up and uses manuvers instead of combat jumping. I have slightly lower defenses (43%) and more end issues than my primary build for very very little extra team benefit. It was also more expensive than my primary build and I like it less and have used it only rarely since having created it.

Even when taken as a whole. Of all the powers in /shields the one that both myself and the team get the least utility out of is Grant Cover. Of all the powers in the secondary to give up this is the one that hurts the least. I provide much more mitigation to my team by operating a little way out from it, turning mezzers with AoE controls around so that squishies aren't affected and prioritizing the dangerous targets first.

If all I did was have a bad case of scrapper lock, fight in the tanks butt all the time, and only focus on the bosses in the spawn, yeah it might be a really good power but having a blapper as my main taught me better and more effective ways to assist the team than stand there and run a short radius PBAoE defensive toggle.

Mixed teams, no. Mixed duos, no. Shield duos, no. Super teams where there are multiple shielders running Grant Cover and you are more likely to actually have a buff since you are all in melee range, sure.

My wife and I tried a MA/Shields duo using SOs only. It was a pretty miserable failure. If you are within 8 feet of each other you soft cap each other. If you are in 15 feet it's still not too bad. If you move out of that 15 foot radius you both will drop pretty darn fast.

It makes mobs that prefer to stay at range, especially defense debuffing ones, the bane of that type duo and there are lots of mobs that have ranged defense debuffs in the game. That 15 foot umbilical proved to be just too short and we actually earned more debt on that pair than on our dual AR/EM blasters. So much so that my wife refuses to play that duo or roll another sheilder ever again and she is very much a scrapper/brute/tank player.

There is a big difference between taking advantage of a buff and needing that buff at all times to survive. If you need it at all times you need to re-examine your build/playstyle which was my point to begin with.

Fixed that for ya!

Yes, running Grant Cover gives YOU 13.84% defense debuff resistance AND 13.84% resistance to slows and -rech. Slotting Grant cover with defense enhances the defense debuff resistance provided and (IIRC can't remember for sure would have to test it to see) slotting Grant Cover with recharge or movement (as in the case of a microfilament) boosts the slow resistance.

Wait there's more. Grant Cover also provides those same benefits to any team members in the radius. Clearly the most overpowered power in the game especially considering the cheap end costs. How did the devs balance it? By making the radius so small that almost no one is in the radius EVER and by coupling it with a taunt Aura in the secondary so that AoE splash is sure to hit any targets near you. So instead being one of the best powers in the game it's one of the suckiest powers in the game instead.

The numbers are really close but you are actually better off soft capping your defense so that defense debuffing attacks don't hit you in the first place rather than having lower defense and lots of extra defense debuff resistance.

What about the teammates that are saved by the buff you say? Greedy Scrapper you say?

1) Since you have a taunt Aura being 25' away from squishies is 100% mitigation (especially from AoE) for them. Being 16'-24' away from squishies means that you are dropping extra AoE splash on them with out buffing them at all. Being 15' or less away from them you increase their chances of being hit by splash damage by 45% per AoE using MoB while giving them only 13.84% additional defense.

2) Low personal mitigation means that when the chips are down and the team needs the group buff the most you'll be down and not providing it.

3) Any other melee teamate that needs your CG for them to survive needs to re-examine their build and playstyle because when you aren't there (which will be most of the time) they won't survive.

A month or so ago I got 3 purples in the final mission of an ITF. The bad news..... I was on the test server at the time.

Well we are somewhat straying from my point that any place that you have duplication you have options (more options even with Unique IOs and IO set bonuses)

Earth/TA is another prime example:

2 Slows - Quicksand and Glue Arrow. Quicksand is area targetted which in my book is more useful than Mob targetted. Quicksand has a built in defense debuff, Glue doesn't. Both have -fly. Quicksand recharges faster and lasts longer. Glue has a -rech built into it but usually all I need the slows for is enough time to keep stuff out of melee range until I can lock it down. For me winner is Quicksand and Glue Arrow can be replaced by something that the power set combo doesn't have.

Stone Prison - I really really don't need another single target control, especially a soft one. I don't need the defense debuff in it since I'll have far more than I need just stacking the other more useful controls. That makes a pool attack's front loaded damage more useful and I'm not paying the extra end cost of the soft control in the tier 1. That's another free slot.

PGA is another no brainer for me. I don't need to debuff the damage dealt by locked down Mobs, The sleep is mag 2 and is another soft control, its got a decent radius but it's chance to occur isn't 100% and is virtually useless since Stony, Oil Slick Arrow, Earthquake or just about anything else that I and the team are going to do is going to wake them right back up.

This same reasoning makes Salt Crystals useless and with all the lock down in the 2 paired sets you can get away with out Earthquake as well. If you need Knockdown you have it in OSA and OSA does bunches of damage Earthquake does none. That leaves the to hit debuff and and the defense debuff in Earthquake. The hit debuff you don't really need since you can get it in Flash Arrow and quite frankly you have defense debuffs a plenty in your other powers.

You can also get away without Flash Arrow for the same reasons that you can get away with out Smoke from Fire/.

This leaves you lots of options for other things that you just can't get from your Primary and Secondary. You could for example take the entire leaping pool.

Jump Kick gives you your pool attack to replace the tier 1 primary.

Combat Jumping gives you immob protection, a bit of defense, unsupressed movement, vertical movement at practically no end cost.

Super Jump gives you the second easiest travel power in the game.

Acrobatics gives you KB protection and Hold protection.

So in just one pool you have 4 powers that give you much more benefit than many of your primary and secondary powers and those abilities aren't in your primary or secondary and I still have several other pool power picks available to me Fitness is an easy choice and I still have a couple options for utility that my primary and secondary fail to provide.

It was a GAN (Global Arcane Nerf).

A stealth IO in the base slot in sprint does practically the same for you with out costing you either a slot or a power pick, and it costs no endurance (toggle on then toggle off = stealth for 120 seconds) doesn't require a hit check (controller version in PvP, blaster version in both PvP and PvE) and has no worries when you miss one or 2 due to spread out mobs and range.

It's not that smoke doesn't have its advantages on occasion, it's just that there are other things that are more advantageous more often.

Usually things that you don't need.....

From all:

Single target Immob. (Once you have vet attacks and global accuracy this is pretty easy to drop.) Most pool attacks are pretty close on damage dealt, cost less endurance, and recharge faster and the pool attack is all up front instead of a long DoT.

From Fire for example:

Smoke - 3 slotted it gives a -7% to hit, against +4s its down in the 3.5% range and it costs ~.13 end .sec for that hit debuff assuming the mobs last 60 seconds. Combat jumping gives you almost 3% defense with just a Def IO in it and it costs only .07 end/sec plus it gives you immobilization protection.

Bonfire - Pretty easy to skip if you have your controls properly slotted.

Alot of controllers also skip powers from their secondary. With enough +rech some powers are redundant and some ally only buff powers can also be skipped if you are actually doing your job and controlling things.

With powers that take a long time to cast you can actually have stuff sitting in your tray you never use because you've all ready accounted for all your cast time. This is easier to do with lots of recharge.

MOST ATs have a couple powers that you can easily skip and some you are even better off skipping to pick up pool powers especially with sets and set bonuses that are now available

As an FYI and case in point.....

It isn't the auction house that's broken, it's the players. The content that players choose to run determine the drops that make it into the game. If you spend all your time in the AE you will never get a purple drop, never get a costume recipe, never get a respec recipe, etc.

If you spend your time on boss farms and constantly exceed the ticket cap to get influence you (and every one that plays like you [note that you is a generic you not targeted at the poster I am responding to or any specific player]) is reducing, not only the goods I mentioned above but, salvage, bronze rolls, gold rolls etc.

Reducing supply while increasing influence generated leads to inflation which for most folks means high prices.

If you want to make sure that the Auction House is broken beyond repair AND that Chinese RMTers become rich, then price caps is exactly what you want.

The day that a price cap is put into place is the day that only a fool will sell anything in the Auction House. I personally (and there are others that would do so as well) would put in hundreds of price capped bids hoping to snag something from one of those "fools" and then turn around and sell it for 3 times what it is actually worth in the REAL (virtual) Black Market global channel that would spring into existance.

Things would only get sold in tells, or globals (destroying the cross server function of the market) and bartered or traded only in person (remember before I9 and trying to trade Hamis? Same thing all over again), requiring both the seller and the buyer to be online and in the same zone.

RMT would then switch from influence sales to "item" sales and they too would be making huge (real world money too) profits from the price cap. They can have someone on line 24/7 and a $10 server transfer fee would be a very cheap way for them to move a bunch of goods that they have stockpiled on one server to another server for sale to multiple clients.

If you want the prices to drop ask the devs to increase drop rates in regular content enough to get part of the player base out of the MA and back into regular content.

Ask them to bring parity between merit values and ticket values (you get much less of the same goods from an hours worth of merits than you do from an hour's worth of tickets. You can easily get enough tickets in an hour's worth of play to make 3 gold rolls. An hour's worth of Merits is 1 Pool C roll.)

Every time someone says price caps, someone somewhere, kills a kitten or kicks a puppy and I cringe.

You'll need Hasten to double stack Active Defense for the extra defense debuff resistances (Membranes in Active Defense, Grant Cover, and Hasten are all required if you want maximum defense debuff resistance which is slightly less important for the DM/ primary but is critical for all the other primaries). If you are wanting to avoid Hasten I'd go with /SR instead of /SD.

Better than Masterminds master.... (oh, I am so not going there.)

Don't neglect Teleport as a possible travel power. All it takes is a bit of practice to use and you can "suddenly appear" in the middle of the spawn with both hot feet and choking cloud (Lockdown proc is really nice) running.

Immobilizes don't bother you since you can still teleport even when immobilied and can actually benefit you. If the immob you are hit with has -KB the mobs actually GIVE you KB protection.

Which is exactly the reason that Dark/Shields is a beast and an outlier like Fire/Kin.

Bottom line is shields is under-mitigated and is "too high" on damage, the "balance" of extra damage for less mitigation is a bad one since what it does it cause frustration in the low levels and for the players that are SO only users, some of these players then try to fill the mitigation gaps with IOs. Most of which are not in high enough supply for the majority of players to do.

It's also the reason that so many players were skipping the team buff power in the Beta test and even after "buffing" GC is still the power I see that is skipped by the majority of shielders.

I could tell before I got in closed from the numbers that the dev vision for shields and the player vision for shields were not congruent. The problem is the same for all power sets like this where player vision doesn't match the dev's vision. After a couple years of data mining the devs will look at it and say, "oh you guys aren't using this the way we intended, that's why it doesn't work."

We will say, "it's not fun the way you designed it, it's more fun when we do X."

Then because the players are using it the way they intend, instead of the way the devs designed it, its underperforming except in "x" situation (in this case the "x" is being heavily IO'd) where it way overperforms. After another couple years of kicking it around they'll finally get to the point where they "balance" it so it isn't a frustrating debtfest in the early levels or without the best IOs but by then even the average player will have had time to load it up on uber IOs and then everyone will scream about the damage being nerfed to bring the mitigation up.

Got it thanks. I see where I went wrong on my calcs.

That to me it still too much incoming damage especially when compared to how the other secondaries fare. Only SR "can" have that much trouble in the early levels and it's alot easier to soft cap, gets higher defense debuff resists, higher slow resists, and the scaling resistances give much higher values than /Shields gets on its own.

I'm still of the same opinion that I was during the closed beta. Sheilds was balanced with what IOs "could do" in mind instead of on what SOs actually do.

Alot of folks may be basing their idea of shields on what a Dark/Shield can do. In my book that's like basing your opinion on fire controllers by what fire/kin can do. It's the scrapper outlier in the same way that Fire/Kin is the controller outlier.

You didn't take into account the defense debuff from the first hit in your calculation above. That's why your numbers don't match mine. Your numbers are only accurate if the first attack missed but aren't accurate if the first attack hits and lowers your defense to subsequent attacks.

That's true for lieut farms (per the OP) but doesn't work on boss farms. They still do too much damage.

I completely agree with Muon's entire post (I skipped the same powers) save this small bit here.

If you can get the recharge on Sirens down to 7 seconds (hasten and/or global +rech) you can have a seemless AoE attack chain that goes like this:

Shockwave > Howl > Psi Scream > Sirens.

That knocks the spawn back into a wall, then allows you to deal damage twice while they are regaining their feet, you get to put them all to sleep again just as they are getting close to melee range and then you get to start the sequence all over again. It works great even solo.