Friday 14 May 2004

Pic of the day: Mahajnana, a dark dark defender with a healing aura.

CoH: Helpful Hellspawn

We are all heroes here, even those who just happen to have horns and a tail. Dark powers, or more technically "negative energy powers", are fairly frequent in "City of Heroes". Perhaps the most counter-intuitive of these heroes are the dark, dark defenders.

I use the word "dark" twice for a reason. There are two dark power sets for defenders, a primary and a secondary. As with all defenders, the primary powerset is protective and the secondary offensive, roughly speaking.

Dark defenders are decent solo characters. Their ranged attacks are second only to blasters, with a good ranged damage-over-time available at level 2 and a strong long-range (sniper) attack at level 4. All dark attacks reduce the victim's accuracy as well.

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Perhaps surprisingly, dark defenders can heal. The dark primary power set has as its first power Twilight Grasp. It drains a victim of mental acuity and converts it to health in a radius centered on caster. The health effect is somewhat more moderate than in the empathy power set, and I am not sure if the radius may be smaller as well, but it is still a decent group heal. It also requires less stamina than the empathy heal, and has the nice side effect that your victim will become less accurate in his attacks for a while. In fact, after a series of such heals you can typically stand right in front of an enemy and he will not be able to hit you either with guns or hands.

(My low level dark dark defender would beat up lieutenants with just brawl and Twilight Grasp, for fun. Not so good against multiple enemies, obviously, since the effect wears off, but you can keep two of them in the dark by switching targets.)

The best use of Twilight Grasp however is in ranged combat. Due to his ranged capacity, the Dark Defender is very well suited to aid a blaster team in a shoot-out with ranged enemies such as cadavers or clockworks. Not only will he heal the blasters, but the more he does it, the less likely they are to be hit at all.

In a team with mostly tankers and scrappers you may want a kinetic defender instead. Their heals center on the enemy rather than on the caster. A dark defender, or an empath, will have their area heals centered on themselves. Empathy defenders however also have a ranged individual heal, so they can heal both the blasters and the tankers even if these are in different parts of a field. Finally, the Storm Summoning power set has ranged heal but no area heal.

A common mistake among team leaders who come from other games: They are used to thinking of "clerics" and will invite a defender with a lower level than the average of the team. This works fine with empaths, but not with dark or kinetic defenders. Both of these need to hit the enemy to do their area heal. The individual defender can do his part by putting at least two accuracy enhancements on his Twilight Grasp power; this will increase his chance of hitting enemies even if they are somewhat higher level than he is. But the team leader should also be aware of the limitation and not fight enemies that are too high level for the defenders to hit. I have witnessed people attack enemies way above their level and then cry "Heal! Heal!" even though there is no empath in the team. That's pretty pathetic, you know. (Not that I haven't done similar things in real life, but that's outside the scope of this entry.)

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In conclusion then: A dark defender is not necessarily a healer, but usually he can be, if you place him close to the people who take damage and fight stuff close to his level. Dark defenders should be the highest level member of their team, and will transform a team of blasters from fearsome chickens to bold eagles. Their heal is quite energy-efficient and unlike empathy defenders, they directly weaken the enemy while healing their allies.