New efforts!

[LadyVamp]

I kinda stopped making Defenders once Corruptors were available Blue Side. In fact I would have more than likely would have re-rolled all my Defenders into Corruptors..

The cors were quite fun blueside.  My primary solo cor was a fire/rad.  The group primary was fire/kin cor.  Park myself over the team on hover, fulcrum shift, and drop death from above with the aoes.  A buddy of mine would jump on his ice troller and drop the ice patch on the mobs. 

[Azrael]

The cors were quite fun blueside.  My primary solo cor was a fire/rad.  The group primary was fire/kin cor.  Park myself over the team on hover, fulcrum shift, and drop death from above with the aoes.  A buddy of mine would jump on his ice troller and drop the ice patch on the mobs.

After getting 'Going Rogue' and finally being introduced to 'Red Side' somewhat late...there was no going back to 'Blue Side' types after that.  Here you had archetypes that had circumvented the 'design flaws' or had simply eclipsed the utility of the original archetypes. 

Though, caveat...I did go back to my Ice Blaster to get it to L50 because I felt it was 'dominator' esque without a 'Domi/End' button of course.  An Ice/Ice blaster had mitigation care of its controls.  Ice cage.  It's slows. It's slow aura toggle... (expensive that was...3 End Reds on it and it still sucked end...)  And, of course, Ice Mat.  Great power!  Blast.  Pull to corner.  Mat awaits.  Fall over...hit with ice breath/snow storm, ice nova with Aim/Build up etc.  Could only imagine Ice/Ice blaster after the I24 changes.

...and I did go back to an Invul'/En Tank.  Very elegant build.  Cheap at '1 Billion' (or less was it...?) and it had bags of res/ and scaled past the soft cap for defence.  Diamond hard.  Or 'well 'ard' as they say over here.  I just wish I had put the alpha slot in it to help recharge bring 'Dull Pain' around much faster...  It could last ages with several mobs around him.

Once I discovered Dominators there was no going back to Blasters bar the 'game changing' Water Blaster.  Kudos to the dev's that finally kicked the blaster into shape for Issue 24.  Too late though... :P

As an aside.  A bubbled blaster?  Sure.  It was great! :P  I only wished for that option to self buff in the Epic FON set...rather than the Personal F.Field.  *shrugs. 

I did get a FF/En defender to L50...once...I think...enjoyed it.  IO's didn't seem to help that much with a Defender's basic problems.  But I didn't have the most tricked out build.

A few ideas I have for Blasters? 

'Shell Shock' - i.e. you hit with a snipe?  The mob is 'hammered' and you disorient them with a hammer blow blast which confuses them and as a result are immune to disorient/hold or meZ fx.  So you are rewarded for taking on bosses or dangerous mob enemies...  Really beefs up the new 'insta snipe' and helps offer mitigation through offensive means rather than trying to 'just' claw back regen. 

(Though, clawing regen back should be part of the self buff attack aka the water set had...in addition.  So you get meZ and heal claw back through attack two different attacks!)  Ie.  Attack is buff. 

NEW INHERENT!  Adrenalin!!!  It rocks!  So instead of Defiance where you get something at the bottom which is very reactive and useless and you're...er...'dead'.  You are rewarded for attack (as Scrappers and Tanks are...)  So it's preventative, tactical and on the front foot. Blasters have a higher metabolism and this INCREASES the FASTER they attack.  A higher recharge rate for Heal from a standing start and higher still HoT for attacking...  And the faster they attack the faster they heal?  (Of course...you roll the dice with stuff like that...)

So...what you get is a rebirth of the snipe because it's now insta snipe and promotes 'leading' the attack with the tank to follow instead of the 'Plan A' of the Tank grabbing 'all' the aggro first...all the time.  It echoes the old...this mob is too big and we can pull a minion thing the blasters used to do.

But this new way...you can take on the boss from the apex of the mob group...dis him and have meZ protection...and then go crazy with AoE to get your HoT going to absorb initial alpha.  Varies according to size of the mob of course...

...it could still be 'suicide' to do the above...but it would add buffs and meZ protection, inherent heal faster with other 2ndary buffs that were to come in issue 24.

Azrael.

[LaughingAlex]

NEW INHERENT!  Adrenalin!!!  It rocks!  So instead of Defiance where you get something at the bottom which is very reactive and useless and you're...er...'dead'.  You are rewarded for attack (as Scrappers and Tanks are...)  So it's preventative, tactical and on the front foot. Blasters have a higher metabolism and this INCREASES the FASTER they attack.  A higher recharge rate for Heal from a standing start and higher still HoT for attacking...  And the faster they attack the faster they heal?  (Of course...you roll the dice with stuff like that...)

So...what you get is a rebirth of the snipe because it's now insta snipe and promotes 'leading' the attack with the tank to follow instead of the 'Plan A' of the Tank grabbing 'all' the aggro first...all the time.  It echoes the old...this mob is too big and we can pull a minion thing the blasters used to do.

But this new way...you can take on the boss from the apex of the mob group...dis him and have meZ protection...and then go crazy with AoE to get your HoT going to absorb initial alpha.  Varies according to size of the mob of course...

...it could still be 'suicide' to do the above...but it would add buffs and meZ protection, inherent heal faster with other 2ndary buffs that were to come in issue 24.

Azrael.

Defiance 2.0 was a fury like passive that gave the blaster small damage buffs from just attacking, and also let them fire the tier 1 and 2 primary powers as well as the often ignored tier 1 secondary.  It was save for the later not so helpful effect, a big improvement over the original defiance as you were in fact rewarded for launching attacks and being proactive.  The only thing I did not care for was the tier 1/2 attacks being free to use while held/stunned ect.  The fact was the dps under such a state was still low enough that you were at risk of dying and certain to die in solo play.  It only helped in teams when you were caught in an AoE hold and was not being targetted by anything and even then it was better to hit that "i'm held help me" bind.

[Arcana]

Funny, I always thought it was Defenders who were forced to "stay that way". It took many many issues before Defenders got their inherent which was an end discount if their team was taking damage. I always thought that was a strange inherent... If you let your team take damage their is an end discount in it for you.
They did get a solo damage buff that didn't take into consideration their low damage ceiling nor really the fact they had a low damage modifier to begin with.

With Blasters, the devs made several changes to help them out. True, most of them didn't exactly work as intended but the intent was there.
Seems that they wanted to make more damage (or more consistent damage) the answer for blaster issues. They upped their modifier, then gave them a damage increase when taking damage and even gave then their first 3 powers mez proof.

The devil is in the details.  When you say that Defenders were forced to "stay that way" in what way do you mean?

The original design intent for the archetypes was that (except for Scrappers) each was supposed to be very strong at one thing and weak at something else so that they were difficult to solo, but meshed well together on teams.  Defenders were supposed to be the ally support archetype, Tankers the aggro control and damage absorption archetype, and Blasters the offense archetype.  That means each was supposed to be good at that thing, and bad at the other two things.  Confinement to those rules doesn't mean that if people are unhappy with Defender damage then that means Defenders are being held back.  Defenders are only confined to those rules if there's an obvious problem with them and buffing the other two things is out of the question, or if there's obvious attempts to change the archetype over time to more closely match that description.  Both statements are false for Defenders, and for that matter Tankers.

Its obvious with Tankers: the devs decided that Tankers had issues that increasing offense would address, so they did it.  That basically tosses the Tanker design rule out the window.  Its less obvious for Defenders, but its important to realize that Defenders didn't actually have a problem that needed addressing at release.  They soloed more or less fine as an archetype.  And the reason was because Defenders were not just ally support from the beginning.  From the beginning, they were also the foe debuff archetype which helps self just as much as ally.  And a lot of their buffs affected self.  Because of that, Defenders were broken at launch in terms of their design intent.  They were never the ally support archetype only. 

The question is whether the devs, seeing this, tried to put the genie back into the bottle.  And the answer is: exactly the opposite.  Looking at the first two new Defender primaries created - Trick Arrow and Sonic - and you can see if anything the devs acknowledged that in the future no Defender primary should be too focused on ally-only buffs.  Sonic, pattered after Force Fields, nevertheless has a foe resistance debuff in tier 1.  That's not a coincidence.  Trick Arrow is practically all debuff, which makes it a dual self/ally beneficial powerset.

Really, there's two Defender primaries that stand out as being more ally and less solo-beneficial and those are Empathy and FF.  But even Empathy has implicit self heal in HA and both RAs affect self.  That's way more self buff than the archetype should have if it was following the original design rule.  Its really only FF that sticks to the original defender design rule, and rightly so that was pointed out repeatedly over the years.  But one powerset does not prove the assertion that the devs tried to keep Defenders in their original specialization.  In fact everything they did since launch proves the opposite.  Its just that they didn't do it with any special archetype-wide changes.  They did it in the design and balancing of Defender powersets.

And a word on inherents.  The notion that Defenders were ever "left out" of having an inherent is a pet peeve of mine.  The notion of "archetype inherent" is a fiction.  Archetypes were never supposed to have "special inherent powers."  The term "inherent" refers to a special group of powers intended to be granted to all players, like Rest and Sprint.  That group of powers was later used to hold powers intended to be granted to large subsets of characters, like all tankers or all blasters, when the devs got around to trying to fix perceived issues with them.  Tankers and Blasters got "inherents" specifically to fix problems.  When players started demanding that other archetypes get "an inherent" that was literally like someone seeing someone walk around on crutches and demanding to know why they were being left out.  The Scrapper inherent isn't even a real thing: its literally just a placeholder power that puts the little icon in the power tray that says "your powers all perform critical hits already, so shut up about it" and does nothing else.  I'm paraphrasing a bit there.

[Arcana]

Defiance 2.0 was a fury like passive that gave the blaster small damage buffs from just attacking, and also let them fire the tier 1 and 2 primary powers as well as the often ignored tier 1 secondary.  It was save for the later not so helpful effect, a big improvement over the original defiance as you were in fact rewarded for launching attacks and being proactive.  The only thing I did not care for was the tier 1/2 attacks being free to use while held/stunned ect.  The fact was the dps under such a state was still low enough that you were at risk of dying and certain to die in solo play.  It only helped in teams when you were caught in an AoE hold and was not being targetted by anything and even then it was better to hit that "i'm held help me" bind.

Since there was a target cap by then anyway, I once suggested that the tier 9 novas be also triggerable when held and have 175 feet of radius (at the same time as D2.0).  That's not a typo: that's deliberately sniper range.  Not a snowball's chance in hell, but I tossed it out there anyway.

[pinballdave]

I remember the early game. I preferred to group up. So many fire blasters, so much debt. Two rains of fire on separate vahz groups in the sewers, followed by pleas to 'heal me! heal me!'

I remember the early game: three defenders and two blasters rocking a Sister Psyche TF after the melee members quit after the big outdoor instanced missions. Can't touch this! Forcefields, Darkity dark, and my debuffing team-oriented stormy. I know the numbers work, but in my head 4 corruptors didn't have the sizzle of 4 defenders.

[Azrael]

The devil is in the details.  When you say that Defenders were forced to "stay that way" in what way do you mean?

The original design intent for the archetypes was that (except for Scrappers) each was supposed to be very strong at one thing and weak at something else so that they were difficult to solo, but meshed well together on teams.  Defenders were supposed to be the ally support archetype, Tankers the aggro control and damage absorption archetype, and Blasters the offense archetype.  That means each was supposed to be good at that thing, and bad at the other two things.  Confinement to those rules doesn't mean that if people are unhappy with Defender damage then that means Defenders are being held back.  Defenders are only confined to those rules if there's an obvious problem with them and buffing the other two things is out of the question, or if there's obvious attempts to change the archetype over time to more closely match that description.  Both statements are false for Defenders, and for that matter Tankers.

Its obvious with Tankers: the devs decided that Tankers had issues that increasing offense would address, so they did it.  That basically tosses the Tanker design rule out the window.  Its less obvious for Defenders, but its important to realize that Defenders didn't actually have a problem that needed addressing at release.  They soloed more or less fine as an archetype.  And the reason was because Defenders were not just ally support from the beginning.  From the beginning, they were also the foe debuff archetype which helps self just as much as ally.  And a lot of their buffs affected self.  Because of that, Defenders were broken at launch in terms of their design intent.  They were never the ally support archetype only. 

The question is whether the devs, seeing this, tried to put the genie back into the bottle.  And the answer is: exactly the opposite.  Looking at the first two new Defender primaries created - Trick Arrow and Sonic - and you can see if anything the devs acknowledged that in the future no Defender primary should be too focused on ally-only buffs.  Sonic, pattered after Force Fields, nevertheless has a foe resistance debuff in tier 1.  That's not a coincidence.  Trick Arrow is practically all debuff, which makes it a dual self/ally beneficial powerset.

Really, there's two Defender primaries that stand out as being more ally and less solo-beneficial and those are Empathy and FF.  But even Empathy has implicit self heal in HA and both RAs affect self.  That's way more self buff than the archetype should have if it was following the original design rule.  Its really only FF that sticks to the original defender design rule, and rightly so that was pointed out repeatedly over the years.  But one powerset does not prove the assertion that the devs tried to keep Defenders in their original specialization.  In fact everything they did since launch proves the opposite.  Its just that they didn't do it with any special archetype-wide changes.  They did it in the design and balancing of Defender powersets.

And a word on inherents.  The notion that Defenders were ever "left out" of having an inherent is a pet peeve of mine.  The notion of "archetype inherent" is a fiction.  Archetypes were never supposed to have "special inherent powers."  The term "inherent" refers to a special group of powers intended to be granted to all players, like Rest and Sprint.  That group of powers was later used to hold powers intended to be granted to large subsets of characters, like all tankers or all blasters, when the devs got around to trying to fix perceived issues with them.  Tankers and Blasters got "inherents" specifically to fix problems.  When players started demanding that other archetypes get "an inherent" that was literally like someone seeing someone walk around on crutches and demanding to know why they were being left out.  The Scrapper inherent isn't even a real thing: its literally just a placeholder power that puts the little icon in the power tray that says "your powers all perform critical hits already, so shut up about it" and does nothing else.  I'm paraphrasing a bit there.

A very insightful post and one I enjoyed reading regarding Defenders.

My pet peeve was force folders didn't really have sufficient self buff...as defenders!  Should have had loads of layers of self stacked protection like tanks or scrapppers did.  Especially with the lower hit points.

Force 'bomb' - meh.  I'd rather have had a self buff of deflection and Insulation shields.  That would have rounded out f.f than p.ff or ex bomb.

I like Defenders.  My first roll was a Defender...FF/En... ;)

Azrael.

Since there was a target cap by then anyway, I once suggested that the tier 9 novas be also triggerable when held and have 175 feet of radius (at the same time as D2.0).  That's not a typo: that's deliberately sniper range.  Not a snowball's chance in hell, but I tossed it out there anyway.

Radical.  Shame there was too much Developer noodling rather than radical extension as if set in ones ways...  The blaster issue24 .... Was a case of seeing the light too late.

There were plenty of areas in the game that needed this kind of radicalised rethinking...to make things 'new' again and the original archetypes needed dusting off.

As for a F.F, dark, rad and sonic four way defender team?  Ownership with a capital 'P.'

[LaughingAlex]

I was really looking forward to the tier 9 blast powers going from "Awesome but impractical and thus generally useless" to "Simple yet awesome" in issue 24.  Especially Inferno and Nova.  It's kind of become a pet peeve of mine(along with pigeon holed roles) to see anything in a game that falls into that little trap.

My view is, if it's so difficult to use as to be completely unusable don't bother including it in the game.  If it's in the game it should be a helpful tool for varying situations, an option.  Like a recent example of a useful weapon in a game; Fallout 4's missile launcher.  Upgraded and with even demolition expert, you can get up to 300-600 damage and get four shots off before reloading.  Now it weighs a ton, but it more than makes up for it's weight by letting you dish out a lot of damage very quickly against a heavy enemy.

There is also the GEP Gun, an awesome and re-usable weapon in Deus Ex.  Need a door blown open?  Blow it up.  Tough armored robot in the way?  Blow him up.
Bombs in terraria; great for opening big chasms and blowing up small obstacles.  Later replaced by rocket launchers.

But the you have the weapons that bother me in all of these games just for being there, because they suck:
Fallout 4's Minigun; it cannot scratch anything, weighs as much as an upgraded missile launcher or fatman, requires heavy weapon specialization.  Enemy armor renders this thing useless after level 10 on ANY difficulty setting unless you get ultra lucky and find an explosive legendary minigun(which is a random chance item with a very tiny % drop chance by the way).
The Deus Ex LAW: Unless it's next to something you wish to blow up anyways, this won't ever see time in your inventory, even if it's half the size of a GEP, it only gets one shot.
The snowman cannon in terraria falls under this unfortunately.  Sure, fires twice as many rockets and they are homing but, really you need wave 15 to even get only a 20% chance?  Not gonna happen in solo.  I'd love to use it but it just isn't even obtainable due to RNG effects.  Better off sticking with a rocket launcher for blowing terrain up.

All three cases are either very luck oriented, or the mechanics render them useless mechanically, or a combination of the two.  Sure, you  can save a GEP rocket with the LAW, sure you 'may' get lucky and get a snowman cannon but unless you are teamed up with people and really intimately know the mechanics of the game you won't likely see it.  Minigun in F4 course suffered the same flaw the new vegas weapon suffered, with armor rendering it useless.

And I was so, so happy to see in city of heroes that tier 9 end-crashing blast powers were getting a change to make them usable.  I didn't care that you lost only 20% damage, the fact is you also did not end crash any more, so you could go right back to blasting away.  This made tier 9 powers far, far more effective.  An inferno on a mob and then going to another and rain of fire/fire breath/fire balling them only seconds after?  You saw a significant jump in firepower RIGHT THERE.

The design philosophy of every later introduced blast set in fact became "make the tier 9 usable".  You can see this with first archery and assault rifle; both sets had a single minute cooldown heavy hitting attack.  They still costed a good amount of endurance, but the lack of a crash made the full set amazing.  Even though archery had otherwise weaker AoE prowess earlier on, only matching maybe energy blast in AoE, it's rain of arrows was absolutely devastating and it was a working power.  Full auto made an already impressive AoE set hit exceptionally hard.  But many legacy power sets except for fire blast could easily fall behind.  Simply because their tier 9's would leave you without any endurance for ten seconds.  The tier 9's in those sets just as well not have been in the game to me.  I used them at first for craps and giggles, but then I abandoned them later and never had a problem for it, and in fact did MORE damage for not using them.

I know some people would prefer the old, but in reality when you look at faster paced gameplay, the newer design kept up with everyone.  And let you do far more.  And the developers were fine with designing AoE tier 9's differently, to.  Water blast I recall had an actually longer tier 9 recharge than dual pistols or archery/assault rifle, but it to me had more up front AoE and the tier 9 hit harder at the same time.  They were beginning to experiment with making sets work fully both up front(fire blast) and in the long run(archery).  Newer sets looked more like they were getting the best of both worlds; working tier 9's without needing to wait until late game.  It was something I was looking forward to with the blast set overhauls.

[Arcana]

I like Defenders.

I like blasters.  My main was a blaster, from launch to I23.  Some people even liked the fact that Blaster mitigation was impaired, because it posed a unique challenge.  I could respect that.  But if the devs specifically stated that Blasters were intended to be the only singularly difficult archetype to solo, then they would be designed correctly.  They would then have to publicly justify that position.  But they did not.  They explicitly stated that every archetype should be able to solo reasonably well, and within reasonable limits.  They did *not* have to be exactly the same.  But since that was their stated goal, I felt it was completely fair to point out when the game failed to meet their own explicitly stated design requirements.

Put it another way.  If Blasters were datamined to solo 20% worse than everyone else, the devs would have considered that a low priority problem to address.  That's within the reasonable range of variation for the archetypes.  As I understand it, it wasn't even close to that.  Blasters could have been the hard one to solo at 20% worse than average, and Scrappers the easiest at 20% better than average, making Blasters dramatically harder to solo than Scrappers and everything would still be reasonable.  So this wasn't about trying to homogenize the game.  It was about trying to make the ridiculous somewhat less ridiculous.

One more thing to consider, and this one is one that I explicitly considered back then and discussed with the devs.  Suppose that the reason average Blaster performance was bad only because some combinations were bad.  Suppose Fire blasters were kicking it all over the place, and AR blasters were killing everything in sight and Sonic/Ice blasters were practically immortal butt-kickers.  Its just that other powersets like */Fire were dropping dead so often that they pulled the average way down.  If that were the case, then its possible many blaster combinations were just fine comparatively speaking.  However, that's *not* what the devs saw.  If they did, they would have tried to adjust the underperforming powersets.  However, all of them were underperforming, some more than others, but all of them below average significantly.  And that's why the devs tried several times to address the problem with archetype-wide buffs.  Defiance 1.0 and Defiance 2.0 are the signal that there were no good and bad blaster powerset combinations: all of them needed help.  I was explicitly told that if it was just a few bad powersets or powerset combos, the devs would have targeted changes at those underperforming sets.  Targeting the entire archetype is what they did when they believed everything needed the help.

Think about how bad the *worst* Blaster powerset combos must have been doing, when Sonic/Ice and Fire/Energy were doing significantly more than 20% worse than average.

I think its also important to recognize that what we power users perceived and what the average player was suffering under often bore no resemblance whatsoever to each other.  When forum posters claimed something was fine because they played it just fine, more often than not they were just proving they were not representative of the average City of Heroes player.  We lauded our casual friendly nature, but we didn't always fully understand what the capabilities of the average casual player actually were.  The average casual player solos Fire/Energy blasters slower than Empathy/Archery defenders, because the Emp/Arch defender simply doesn't die as often because it has a self heal.  Those were the players we were supposed to be trying to help.

[Arcana]

My view is, if it's so difficult to use as to be completely unusable don't bother including it in the game. 

Well, in beta Total Focus stunned yourself.  The legacy of that is still in the original description of the power.  The devs designed powers based, I think in part on a mental picture of superheroes fighting one single powerful enemy in a long-drawn out fight.  And then placed them in an MMO where they had to kill a thousand things to level.  The mental picture supports powers like Unyielding rooting you, Total Focus self stunning you, Nova exhausting you.  But those are impractical things in fluid one verses the world combat.  That's a mental model they had to break fairly quickly, and to the devs credit they did so, albeit over time.

[brothermutant]

Ok, who here wants to put together a Blaster-only team for leveling and TFs for a specific day of the week when the game comes back? I for one, would love to see Blasters own TFs with just a little teamwork (Maneuvers/Tactics/Aid other/etc).

[Sinistar]

Ok, who here wants to put together a Blaster-only team for leveling and TFs for a specific day of the week when the game comes back? I for one, would love to see Blasters own TFs with just a little teamwork (Maneuvers/Tactics/Aid other/etc).

I'm down with that

[Sinistar]

The Death of Statesman.

I'm trying to remember, was this done to actually advance/modify game lore or was there some type of mandate to purge lingering Jack Emmert characters from the game?

We could still get the Statesman's Pal badge from Flashback but as I recall in the game's present that mission was changed to Positron's Pal badge,  and of course the States TF becomes Ms Liberty TF and the Master of Badge from that was retconned/renamed into Master of Ms Liberty TF, and States was even taken out of the hero spawn in Recluse Victory.   Also Sister Psyche was killed off, wasn't she also  a creation of Jack?

[Zombie Hustler]

The Death of Statesman.

I'm trying to remember, was this done to actually advance/modify game lore or was there some type of mandate to purge lingering Jack Emmert characters from the game?

A bit of both, as near as I can recall. Paragon was looking for a way to provide some new content and some ongoing additions to the lore of the game, primarily. I recall them stating that one of the goals was to try and bring the Players to more prominence in the game world and give them a greater feeling of agency, and removing the most prominent "Superman" analogue kind of went along with that philosophy.

I do seem to recall hearing/reading that there was a sort of sense of get rid of Emmert's character as well, but I think that was very much a minor aspect of it.

(Of note, too, I was disappointed that the Who Will Be the Next Freedom Phalanx Member? contest never quite came to fruition. I recall asking Black Pebble about it not too long ago and he confirmed that it was pretty close to happening. That would have been another stage in the involvement of the player base in the lore.)

[Fanta]

Ok, who here wants to put together a Blaster-only team for leveling and TFs for a specific day of the week when the game comes back? I for one, would love to see Blasters own TFs with just a little teamwork (Maneuvers/Tactics/Aid other/etc).

For fun, yes. For leveling, no way. Wasting all those power choices on things that could easily be replaced by adding one defender seems counter productive to me.

[HEATSTROKE]

Even Sonic Blast Defenders?

yes..  I wasnt a fan of Sonic.. tried it.. hated it for numerous different reasons..

Rad/Sonic
Sonic/Psi
Sonic/Dark

Sonic/Dark was good.. hated the sounds..

[blacksly]

My pet peeve was force folders didn't really have sufficient self buff...as defenders!  Should have had loads of layers of self stacked protection like tanks or scrapppers did.  Especially with the lower hit points.

It was quite clear that self-buffing would not be allowed for Defenders if it were even close to the same level of power at which they could buff others. Empathy, for example, could combine Regeneration plus Super Reflexes, with better Recharge and far better Recovery bonuses. Plus some other benefits. Allowing one set to equal multiple other sets in the name of "but allow them to self-buff" would be ludicrously bad design. So either they would have had much weaker buffs with self-buffing, or what they had without self-buffing.

What I really wonder is whether the Devs may have been open to the idea of allowing AoE ally buffs like many of the single-target buffs became, to affect the user at 1/4 to 1/5 of their normal values.

[HEATSTROKE]

Ok, who here wants to put together a Blaster-only team for leveling and TFs for a specific day of the week when the game comes back? I for one, would love to see Blasters own TFs with just a little teamwork (Maneuvers/Tactics/Aid other/etc).

Ive done all Blaster ITF's.. they are fun... Nukes everywhere

[HEATSTROKE]

...and I did go back to an Invul'/En Tank.  Very elegant build.  Cheap at '1 Billion' (or less was it...?) and it had bags of res/ and scaled past the soft cap for defence.  Diamond hard.  Or 'well 'ard' as they say over here.  I just wish I had put the alpha slot in it to help recharge bring 'Dull Pain' around much faster...  It could last ages with several mobs around him.

Alpha slot not necessary for Perma Dull Pain...

My Inv/Nrg Tank original build had Perma Dull Pain before Incarnate existed with no purple IO's.

[Fanta]

yes..  I wasnt a fan of Sonic.. tried it.. hated it for numerous different reasons..

Rad/Sonic
Sonic/Psi
Sonic/Dark

Sonic/Dark was good.. hated the sounds..

Had a Traps/Sonic as my main. I got used to it because of what it could do. It would still be the first thing I rolled if the game came back.