Protection Field bubbles?

colonelmarik

I've been tinkering with my Mage character, and I've been toying with the Protection Field bubble. However, I'm not finding it very useful. Even at L3 it gets taken out almost as soon as its cast.

Is it even worthwhile? The goal of the character is to be able to provide great defense and healing for a team (but to still be capable on his own).

What do you think? Any suggestions?

roughbearmattach

To make those bubbles really good, you need stats and items to boost it. Presence boosts the strength of shields, as do items with a healing bonus. Finally, there are specializations that increase the protection value of bubbles.

Without these, those bubbles aren't so great.

beldin

roughbearmattach wrote: »

Without these, those bubbles aren't so great.

Yepp .. without that they are not worth it, especially not if you use a defense passive like invuln.

The main reason is, that they take all damage before your protection, so they they are down after maybe 1200 damage, while your character however would only have taken 300 damage without the bubble.

colonelmarik

Ya, this is what I'm finding. I cast the bubble, it gets knocked out immediately.

And that's built FOR supporting those things. My character is set up as a healer/supporter. Presence and Ego are his main stats, and I take specializations to support healing and shielding.

So far, though, I haven't seen any worthwhile shielding.

I guess I'll drop it from the build.

selphea

Well it's a 0.83 second cast with no cooldown, not sure what kind of miracles you're expecting from it If that bubble covered 1.6 Empathic Healing ticks' worth of damage, it's already paid for itself.

beldin

selphea wrote: »

Well it's a 0.83 second cast with no cooldown, not sure what kind of miracles you're expecting from it If that bubble covered 1.6 Empathic Healing ticks' worth of damage, it's already paid for itself.

You forget the energy costs. The only reason i use it from time to time is simply the look .. its such a classic Green Lantern Power .. but so useless compared to Bionic Shielding.

selphea

beldin wrote: »

You forget the energy costs. The only reason i use it from time to time is simply the look .. its such a classic Green Lantern Power .. but so useless compared to Bionic Shielding.

You get the energy back when it gets damaged

sagewithbubbles

For anything more than a brief moment of protection, you really have to build for them. Heavy bubble use is only really worth it when you're supporting a team, as there are less build-intensive ways to gain more durability than you do by spamming bubbles.

And if you're using them on a team, you'll probably want to layer some combination of Protection Field, Mindful Reinforcement and Bionic Shielding (mainly to combo with MR, that way no matter what happens, the protectee gets healed).

My main's a supportive bubble spammer. The defense from it comes from being able to stack shield HP faster than the incoming attacks can deplete it. To do that requires an incredible amount of available energy.

I'm currently running Int/pre/end (gear focus mainly on Pre), Support Role, Cost Reduction gear, AoPM and a few short cooldowns with MSA. Using Inertial Dampening Field can greatly extend the lifespan of your bubbles against weak attacks. Compassion will buff shield HP, but it's hard to build Compassion stacks if you're heavily relying on bubbles for mitigation. IDF's less work to use, even if it does tank your damage.

+Healing% gear (specifically and only gear, Seraphim won't work) will buff the shield strength too, but I like to have the illusion of being able to kill things myself, so I have some crit chance gear instead.

Spec-tree-wise, you'll want Int or Pre major (I suggest Int), Sentinel and one other of your choice. Overseer has some decent stuff if you want to squeeze out a bit more shield HP, but I generally go with Vindicator or Guardian, because I like the illusion of being able to make my own kills in PvE. (and occasionally you need to be able to solo something)

You could also try Aura of Radiant Protection or Aura of Ebon Destruction (since you're going to have a metric ton of Presence and likely to be in support role), but AoPM helps with the energy consumption, and is the only passive in the game to buff shield strength (indirectly, by buffing your Presence).

Sentinel Aura's nice upkeep for small chip damage that gets through while you're doing your bubble rotation. You'll probably want a direct heal somewhere. That and a rez power (Redemption's easiest).

I can post a build if you want, but at the moment I'd be posting my personal build, and it has a few suboptimal things in it that I chose for flavor/coverage of things I like doing.

TL; DR version: Stack two of MR/PF/Bionic Shielding. Have enough energy to stack those without a problem (I went with Int/pre/end, your mileage may vary). Use IDF if you want to protect against smaller hits, or Compassion if you're using them to shield against bigger hits. You want a lot of Presence (and preferably Support Role), but you may not necessarily want Presence as your main.

lokaidraxmartis

colonelmarik wrote: »

I've been tinkering with my Mage character, and I've been toying with the Protection Field bubble. However, I'm not finding it very useful. Even at L3 it gets taken out almost as soon as its cast.

Is it even worthwhile? The goal of the character is to be able to provide great defense and healing for a team (but to still be capable on his own).

What do you think? Any suggestions?

stack presence, and get talents to boost shielding. Shield on my level 25ish support character is around 75% of my actual life. Most of the time my shield wont even drop all the way before the fight is over. I often toss shield on my friend and i never worry about him dieing(do to my build, i give him alot of damage reduction on top of the shield). Though i prefer the shield from mental over force simply because animation is screwy on the force bubble.