Luminara

The bonus shouldn't be significant enough to compensate for the time, effort and risk it takes to leverage it. It should be significant enough to help a struggling defender. With the right mechanical design, it's not as fine a line as it appears to be on the surface. Combat Jumping has a small Defense bonus, right? It's not enough to warrant six-slotting the power for +Def, and doing so doesn't really pay for the slot investment in the same way that more accessible and lower slot-cost set bonuses would, or the way putting the same slots into a stronger Defense power would. You can six-slot Combat Jumping to maximize its Defense, but why bother? There are better ways to get that Reactive Defenses 8.75% +Recharge bonus, better powers into which 5/6 Red Fortune can be slotted, better choices for boosting Def (All). That's how the +/-Special should pan out. Something beneficial, but not so much so that players deliberately build around it or try to leverage it. Your optimally slotted (3x +0 Defense Buff SOs) Deflection and Insulation Shields offer 23.4% Defense, and your Dispersion Bubble slotted the same way grants 15.6% Defense. If we peg the +/-Special at 10%, that would mean your "My team is really in trouble and my inherent is at full strength" Shields would then buff Defense by 25.74% and the Bubble by 17.6%. That's a total of 42.9% Defense you're giving your team, up from 39%, 17.6% of which scaled up on the fly because it's a toggle (you'd have to re-Shield your teammates to gain the benefit of the 10% increase on those powers). If you take that same build and add Maneuvers, slotted in the same way as the other +Def powers, your teammates' Defense goes up to 44.46% right now, no new Vigilance, no +/-SpecialSauce. 10% would push that up to 48.91%, and I know that you're already hammering that quote button and typing in ALL CAPS that it's overpowered... but it isn't, because that would only be 48.91% versus +0 minions. You and your team aren't fighting +0 minions, you're fighting a mix of minions and lieutenants and bosses and probably an AV at some point, and they're all going to be +2-+4 (or higher) to you. In other words, you're only soft-capped if you're playing solo in "story mode" (default difficulty). A +2 minion facing off against you with this +/-Special active would have an 11.09% chance to hit, not a 5% chance. A +2 lieutenant, 18.59%, and a +2 boss, 26.09%. The AV is going to have a minimum 36.09% hit chance. Taking that same character against those foes without the +/-Special, the +2 enemy hit chances are 15.54%, 23.04%, 30.54% and 40.54%. If the +/-Special capped at 15%, the same powers would grant 26.91% and 17.94% Defense, bringing the total up to 44.85% when you/your team are taking a lot of damage and the game "sees" that you need some help, a net increase of 5.85%. Throwing in Maneuvers (6.28% at 15% increase when slotted in the same way described for other powers mentioned in this post) nets you a total of 51.13% Defense for your team, and drops those +2 enemy hit chances to 8.87%, 16.37%, 23.87% and 33.87%. Again, that character without the +/-Special would be facing +2 enemies with the following hit chances: 15.54%, 23.04%, 30.54% and 40.54%. Versus +2 foes, the +/-Special would cut minion hit chances by half, lieutenant hit chances by a third, boss hit chances by a fourth and AV hit chances by a fifth. That's neither overpowered nor insignificant, despite being small. It's exactly what I described in my first post in this thread, a chance to turn a bad situation around. Not a guarantee of success, just a chance. And in contrast to the -End, this actually does something, rather than exist for the sake of existing. When you re-Shield your teammates with the +/-Special active, you're putting better Shields on them, not just refreshing the same buff with a lower cost and praying that a miracle occurs. And that's why the +/-Special can be small. It's not applied to one power, it's applied to all of your relevant powers, buffs and debuffs in your primary, debuffs in your secondary and pool buffs and debuffs. It's a cumulative benefit, not a single burst to a single power. It can be small and still be effective, and being both small and linked to team health keeps it from going into godmode territory. It doesn't need to, and shouldn't, double the strength of a defender's buffs/debuffs, because that would be overpowered. You can do the math for +3, +4 and higher spawns, and add Grant Invisibility if you want to know what kinds of totals you'd see with maximum buffs and the hardest foes. The net result will still be the same, you will be buffing your team more with +/-Special than you would without it, and it won't be turning you and your team into gods who are soft-capped against everything all the time. To more directly answer your question, yes, you would see an increase to the Defense provided by your FF/Beam character, just as I'd see an increase to the -ToHit provided by my TA/Dark, and Defender Dave/Diva would see an increase to his/her mitigatory capabilities. That's the entire point of the +/-Special, to make defenders, all defenders, better at being defenders, but doing it without making them OP and accomplishing it in a way that doesn't give them an always-on benefit which they can game. I would not add DDR to the +/-Special, that's something that needs to be controlled, not handed out freely, to keep a leash on creep.

It's not mud, it's uranium ore beneficiated via froth flotation that I'm attempting to refine manually since no-one will let me use a gas centrifuge. I'm making a boom-boom. I'd already be finished, but teacher keeps taking away my uranium hexafluoride and telling me not to blowedy uppy anyone's head.

There's no encouragement to exploit it. Trying to keep your teammates' HP bars in the orange or red while mitigating damage is self-defeating, they're going to improve and you're going to lose the +/-Special. Trying to game it by under-enhancing your powers won't work because the +/-Special would apply to the enhanced totals and fail to compensate for the under-slotting. And downed teammates wouldn't count toward it, so it'd be even less worthwhile to try to manipulate to any significant degree. And we're not talking about a bonus large enough to permit players to remove one or two SOs from every damage mitigation power, it's a 10-15% improvement to the powers. Not enough to replace SOs, or even DOs, and if they did try to use it as a replacement for a lowly DO, they'd be disappointed (refer back to sentence 3). There would be ways to leverage it, because there are always ways to leverage things. Everything can be leveraged in some way, by someone. But the ways I can conceive wouldn't be very palatable to teams, or individuals, and wouldn't be very popular or encouraging. For instance, I could talk one team member into taking a lot of damage and sitting out every fight, only stepping in to take more damage and ensure that his/her HP stays deep red, but I wouldn't be getting much out of one teammate's low HP and I'd be making another person very unhappy by treating him in such a poor manner, forcing him to stop playing so I can have my little 1-2.5% increase. Or I could withhold my buffs/debuffs until my teammates were in trouble, in order to maximize the scale, but in doing so, I'm risking losing the scale entirely if my entire team is defeated, not to mention making myself unwelcome on that team because of my selfish behavior. "Hey, great, thanks so much for using Flash Arrow just as my HP went to 1%, Lum. Remind me to hold a fucking parade for you later. Twat." Essentially, it doesn't prompt players to do stupid things like this because it's too small when it's not heavily leveraged, and too risky when it is heavily leveraged, it's not enough to justify the risk solo and it isn't the kind of effect that miraculously saves a team. It should (theoretically) function best in the mid range of team HP, where it's next to impossible to maintain a team if you're actively defending, evening out the large HP swings to smaller HP swings. This wasn't designed for the min/maxing exploity exploiters, like me, who spend a week in Mids' rebuilding a character to squeeze out 3.75% more global +Recharge or 15% more +Slow Res without giving up anything. This costs if you try to exploit it, and it doesn't give much back for doing so. It's for average players, new players, players on low level defenders and defenders struggling to add something meaningful to a team in big bad hard mode content. It's for defenders who need a little help, not defenders posting pylon and Trapdoor times. Also of note, the +/-Special I proposed doesn't include -Res or +Dam (or -Dam, but that's a given with how that debuff functions), so it's not a combat efficiency effect, it's purely a mitigation effect. RO isn't going to be flooring AV Resistances because they found a way to leverage the inherent, or hitting their damage caps with fewer AMs or Forts, it just doesn't do those things and can't be made to improve those abilities in that way. Saying that we shouldn't do this because there might be more than one defender on hand is ludicrous. Not one other archetype is penalized, in any way, for being present on a team in a number greater than one. Scrappers don't lose a percentage of their crit rate when other scrappers team with them. Brute Fury meters don't cap at a lower number than 100 when other brutes are on the team. Dominators don't lose 1 mag for every other dominator on the team. Why should the defender inherent specifically be designed without a useful tool like +/-Special simply because another defender might be present? Jesus' little brown nipples, the more defenders there are, the less likely they are to even need, much less even gain a fraction of a percent from, the +/-Special! The less it's needed, the less it does, and with multiple defenders, it's obviously less needed. There's zero power creep or risk of further overpowering the archetype here.

Multiple defenders benefiting from increased damage mitigation due stacking from different sources (MOAR DEFENDERERSES), thereby keeping their HP at or near full and denying themselves the benefit of +/-Special scaled by HP losses, would be "more overpowered"?

There's a bit of temporal overlap that leaves some wiggle room. Phillip II (Phillip of Macedonia) folded significant territories into Macedonia's control, including the whole of Greece, and led to the Hellenistic era of ancient Greece. Not much later, Alexander III's (Alexander the Great) successes cemented Greece as the foremost nation of the region. This empire forged by Greece interacted with and was later consumed when the Roman Republic (preceded by the Roman Kingdom, and precursor to the Roman Empire) conquered Greece in 146 AD. For centuries before and after Greece ruled the Mediterranean region, Greece was the center of the enlightened world. A hunger for knowledge, and trade routes, spread Greek influence throughout the region, bringing travelers, intellectuals, philosophers and even kings and other notable people to Greece, and sent Grecians all over the known world, too. So there are actually several hundred years during which it wasn't unusual, or even uncommon, for a Greek person to be in Rome, or a Roman person in Greece. The two countries are only a stone's throw across the Med from one another (so to speak). And, of course, all of this eventually culminated in Rome's dissolution of the republic and formation of the Empire, the process of which was responsible for the death of Cleopatra VII (yes, that Cleopatra), who was Greek, a direct descendent of Ptolemy I Soter, who assumed the throne in Egypt and declared himself pharaoh, very shortly after Alexander died. Around the latter half of the last century BC, Greek, Roman and Egyptian histories are all intertwined so tightly that they become one. It's fascinating to trace the threads of each nation through the tangle that crops up in that time, forward and backward, and see how events influenced one another and led to the world we live in today.

City of Data shows it as auto-hit, too. For @Captain Powerhouse's sake, I hope it's a bug.

Well, to begin, I note the use of a single shoulder item on the side opposing the shield. Nice. I do that with most of my weapon- and shield-using characters, too, so I'm delighted to see that I'm not the only one making good use of that new feature. I go a bit further for the Shield characters and use the Barbarian Leather shoulder item on the shield arm, to prevent chaffing when the shield rubs against the upper arm, and a fingerless glove to give better grip, whereas my archers use the Small Gladiator on the arm not holding the bow and Small on the arm with the bow, plus glove options to reflect modern protective gear (specifically the arm guard, either the Dragon or Cloud bracer on the bow arm, and a glove of some kind on the draw hand to protect the fingers, because drawing and releasing a bow without protective gear is painful, and can rip the skin right off of your arm and fingers if it's powerful enough). 👍 Since we're obviously not reaching back to the most ancient of Greek history, I'd say we're working around the beginning of the Iron Age, before they were swallowed up by the Roman Empire, when the hoplites were the premiere soldiers of the region. The cheapest, and most common, was simple linen armor, called linothorax, but only the lowest ranked soldiers wore that. Hoplites, which is what your character would be, wore bronze armor, either a heroic (muscled) cuirass or a bell cuirass (the Black Knight cuirass without the StarkCo arc reactor). They had greaves (lower leg armor) and helmets as well, so you're good there, but they didn't use armor on the forearms or shoulders. So for historical accuracy, you'd have to go with bare arms and shoulders, and tint the chest, legs and helmet bronze (near gold, not the stained bronze common in modern sculpture. shiny and bright). Sorry, I really hate telling you not to use the asymmetrical details, but you did ask. 😞 Cavalry soldiers wore lighter armor, but we don't have horses. And we're not looking at the commoner in linothorax, so we'll move on. Under the armor, they wore a simple long tunic or toga, with long sleeves. The tunic would cover their butts and groins, like a skirt, but they wouldn't have had the leather Roman skirt we use. You might try a different skirt option, or see if the toga in Unique Tops allows the use of the cuirass detail pieces. But if you decide to keep what you've got, match it to the color of the top undergarment and it's fine. The shield should be round. They only used the hoplon (large round shield, from which the hoplites took their name, also called an aspis) in ancient Greece. It was the single most important piece of defensive equipment they had, because it protected not only the bearer, but also the people near him when used in formation (the phalanx). You can still use that shield, though, simply add a line in the bio to explain that it's the remnant of a hoplon broken in battle and repaired to be used again without restoring its original shape. Ancient Greeks were no less superstitious than anyone else (even today), and it wouldn't be unimaginable for a highly decorated veteran to continue to use a broken hoplon if it continued to serve its purpose, especially if it saved his ass from certain death. I like the belt, too. It's not standard military issue for ancient Greece, but it damn well works. It's a shame we can only use a single chest detail, because a simple bandolier would really bring the entire look to perfection. Since we can't, and you need something to hold your gear, a belt it is. All of that is assuming you did mean Greek, not Roman. Roman armor is comparatively accurately depicted in the game (could be better, but could also be a lot worse), and you could just stick with what you have for a Roman general. As for the rank of your character, I believe what you're looking for is the polemarch. Each polis was independent and self-governing, and had their own customs, social hierarchies, laws and perspectives, but one of the things universal to all of ancient Greece was the concept of military leaders, the polemarches. Polemarches were appointed leaders of armies, basically generals in the modern sense. There were several in each polis, they weren't supreme leaders or singular overlords of armies. They were extremely powerful men, like modern generals, and part of the elite in the social structure of every polis, so they were both citizens and upper class. They weren't Caesars or Alexanders, they weren't the rulers of their people, they were men doing a job. Your character wouldn't be a Spartan polemarch, though, because the upper class of Sparta were legally barred from doing any work other than fighting as soldiers. They didn't value land or money, they valued physical prowess, and they didn't work the fields during times of peace, they were supported by the metis (the middle class), the lower class and serfs, slaves or subjugated people. Pick any other polis if you want your character to be "landed gentry", Sparta would be off that list. In summation, lose the shoulder and glove armor, change the color on the chest, helmet and legs to bright bronze, slap a skirt on that bad boy (if there's a decent one available, if not, work with what you have now) and call him a polemarch of PickAPolis and you'll have a reasonably accurate interpretation of an ancient Greek general.

I typically forget they're there until after I'm doing my best impression of a rug. If they were removed from the game entirely, I probably wouldn't notice unless I read the patch note.

Two things whipped out and shown off... this thread just went 18+. I approve. Continue.

This icon of a thing doesn't want to show itself, it wants to hide until the beta begins. It'll leak if it has to, but it's vulnerable out in the open.

https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Attack_Mechanics#The_Streak_Breaker

No, and if it were retained, I don't believe it should remain in its current form because it incentivizes bad play. A reward for allowing teammates to be and/or remain injured isn't evocative of "defending", or the kind of behavior the game should be prompting. We tried to explain that to Cryptic when they initially added it to the game, but they ignored us. In their defense, they didn't have anything like +/-Special at that time, but anything would've been wiser than actively encouraging defenders to fuck their teammates over. If defenders are uniquely impacted negatively by endurance costs (which i don't believe to be true), then there should be a balance pass on defender powers to bring the costs down to a manageable state, not a tacked-on effect which they can only benefit from if they're incapable of defending or deliberately withholding buffs/debuffs. We're not trying to build a power set here, the inherent doesn't need to be extraordinarily dense with options. Status Resistance and +/-Special interact with the primaries and secondaries well enough, interact with each other in a way which makes both worthwhile without taking the archetype into rare territory, and make the archetype better at what it does. That's enough for an inherent.

Resistance would work. It might need to scale more at the low end of team size, as smaller teams would lean more heavily on a defender, but I wouldn't have any objection. There wouldn't be any need for a lockout or a check interval if it were Status Resistance.

I've been surprised by how much I'm enjoying my Dark/Martial dominator. I just don't enjoy dominators, but I wanted something Batgirly, punchy punchy, kicky kicky, whizzing Batarangs, and nothing else in any archetype came as close as Martial Assault. I almost gave up on it at level 47, after fighting tooth and nail to make World of Disappointment work, but I eventually went back and revised the entire concept without Confuses. Much more enjoyable. Stare or Heart a spawn, jump in and start unloading the kicks and shuriken (i do use other Dark powers as necessary, but they're rarely necessary). I restyled her to a Huntress (Helena Wayne) look, including the purple (i never use purple), and now I'm playing her constantly. Martial Assault isn't great, it burns through endurance like candy and it took a pile of +Damage to catch up to what I can do with other characters, but it is stylish and enjoyable. And that's really all I wanted out of it. Anyone who wants a Bat family type of character should give it a shot.

Beast Run does that. Are you using Beast Run?

12.5% allows it to easily scale up to a full team. 8 * 12.5 = 100. I like keeping it simple, and varying the chance wouldn't be simple. Complex maths should be reserved for advanced character design and refinement, not basic play. A new player should be able to log in, make a defender, and just play without having to break out a spreadsheet and calculator to figure out what his/her chance to escape a mez is going to be every time the team size changes. As for when, it should check the character's mez state every 2.50s (most toggles have an activation interval of 0.5-2.0s and duration of 0.75-2.25s, so 2.50s lets the mez drop/suppress toggles and allow critters a shot at pwning the character/team. if it took 9 seconds to pop because the defender was mezzed 1s into the 10s timed check, the fight would probably decided by that point and the entire purpose of the effect would be moot), then, if the character is mezzed, roll for Break Free. If there's a need for a lockout, make the effect wipe the mez state on activation, rather than a continued override like existing status protection, then cancel itself and lock itself out for X seconds.

12.5% chance for a Break Free on the defender when afflicted by Holds, Stuns or Sleeps, increasing by 12.5% per living teammate; +/- ?% Special (Defense Strength, ToHit Strength, +Resistance (not -), Heal, Absorb, Regeneration, Endurance, Recovery, -Recharge (not +)), scaled by both defender HP and team HP (multiply one by the other to determine final effect). No-one sleeping on the job can be considered vigilant. The purpose of the Break Free effect, though, is not simply to adhere to a word. Words can change. The name of the inherent can change. That's not what's important. What's important is that a defender who's doing nothing but watching is a defender who's not playing, not participating, not engaging, not contributing. We log in to play, not to count the seconds while watching a critter beat the green out of the green bar. There's nothing participatory or engaging about that. It's not even dramatic or fascinating to watch, the enemies don't suddenly go into incredible animations or stop to monologue as we crumble under their assault, like a movie, it's just frustrating. And we want our teammates to contribute, and we want to contribute when we're teamed. A mezzed defender contributes diddly squat, making more work for the rest of the team, not only forcing them to fight harder and longer to finish, but also to protect or resurrect the defender. The defender is there for a reason, that reason is not to freeload or put an extra burden on others. Note that this is not true status protection, and it doesn't nudge the archetype out of balance. The Hold/Stun/Sleep has to occur before the Break Free effect applies, which means enemy-affecting toggles still drop, go into recharge and have to be restarted, and self- and ally-affecting toggles still suppress momentarily. It's also a very small chance when solo, so it's not like defenders will be emptying their inspiration trays of Break Frees, but it is still a chance, and because that chance scales with team size, it gives players a better encouragement to team than a shitty Endurance discount. It's not status protection, it's a chance to not have to sit out 5-10 seconds of mez, a chance to persevere despite having been mezzed, a chance to do something other than scramble for the Break Free key or Rune of Protection or... whatever. We might still have our large intestines removed and used as garlands, but at least we'll have a chance to go down fighting. But that's not enough, because simply being capable of acting doesn't imply defending. I've advocated stuffing some +/- Special into Vigilance in the past, so there it is. It fits the thematic nature of defenders, but in this case, it's also beneficial in both solo and teamed environments. It should scale with both the defender's health and the team's health to make it work that way. That makes it at least somewhat useful solo, but gives it real impact on a team, and reflects what a defender is and does. The odds are against the team, the chips are down, things are starting to look grim, and the defender is stepping up with stronger powers and helping the team turn the tide. Making the Special affect both buffs and debuffs is critical, though. It has to be as good for that Force Fielder or Empathy defender as it is for the TA. As buffs and debuffs use whatever scales and modifiers are in effect at cast time (unless they're pseudo-pets), utilizing the bonus would require re-application of buffs/debuffs reactively, and that requirement provides the necessary restriction to prevent it from being unbalanced. But it also provides incentive to use the secondary sets. Blasting with /Dark would impose slightly stronger -ToHit, /Elecs would drain a bit more endurance or impose slightly greater -Recovery, sets with -Recharge would delay enemy attacks by another fraction of a second or longer, et cetera. +/- Special isn't perfect in the case of secondaries, as there are some with flaming bags of dog shit for a secondary effect (like Archery), but it would give every defender something, either in their primary or secondary, that benefits in some way. And, again, that's better than shaving a couple of points off of the cost of powers which defenders had no reason to use, or couldn't use because they were put in a time-out for existing. Essentially, everything a defender is doing should, in some way, reflect being a defender. This would take a big step toward accomplishing that. Furthermore, since the defender's enemy-affecting toggles have dropped, even if they're on a full team, when they've been mezzed, that creates an advantage for the enemies and gives impetus to the defender's immediate action. Those debuff toggles aren't going to be recast instantly, but every defender has something else he/she can do, and this gives him/her both reason to do it and the expectation that it will make a difference. Fall back to plan B, whether that's using another toggle right away, or blasting and relying on increased debuff strength, or whipping out that Aid Other you've been denying you had in your build. Whatever the defender decides to do, it's going to have more weight, and it helps buy time until they can lay down the stronger effects. I have no issue with Vigilance as it stands, though. I have no issue with defender damage being the lowest. I have no issue with toggles dropping. I have no issue with being mezzed for a week or carrying 20 Break Frees just to play a character. I have no issue with buffing defenders being restricted in a way debuffing defenders aren't. What I have an issue with is all of these things collectively applied to defenders and corruptors. By themselves, each individual restriction is reasonable. All of them together, they're repressive and detrimental to both archetypes, and to the players, and to the long-term health of the game. Making Vigilance more appropriately reflect the concept of defending, as it applies in Co*, could be sufficient to resolve most, if not all, of my complaints about the archetype as it exists in the current game, and that scaling +/-Special should go a long way toward improving the archetype for others in end-game content, where a lot of complaints have been seen. Taking defenders over the top has never been my goal, I just want the act of playing a defender to stop feeling like a punishment for selecting an archetype still saddled with restrictions designed for an entirely different game. And if you want to shuffle off the 30% +Damage at that point, fine. I'm not going to grab my crossbow, chainsaw and meat grinder and start looking for people. I wouldn't have to, because even one fewer Break Free in my inspiration tray is one more Rage I can carry if I decide I need a little more damage. I can live with that.

Just use the Find Contact button in the Contacts window. First and Night Ward contacts come up in that for everything I've played.

*issues @oedipus_tex parking validation voucher*

Steps 2 and 3 are the farmer's responsibility, you can't just foist that off on the riders, they could suffer exhaustion or something! Think of the children!

Talons of Vengeance are not Knives of Vengeance. You're most likely facing Knives of Vengeance in that mission. Go to the south end of First Ward or Night Ward and pick off some Talons of Vengeance there, see if your badge counter twitches.

Don't they already just stand there while the farmer does everything? What is it, two mouse clicks, one to exit the mission and one to enter, that's the sum total of effort they invest... and that's a hardship? Man, I feel sorry for those people. We really need to do something to help them. Maybe we can talk the HC team into randomly assigning a different AE building as the entrance for every mission. That would help them get some wrist and finger exercise so they'd be healthier and wouldn't be struggling with two mouse clicks. Our health is all we really have in this world, after all.