Does Defend always have to be "called out" when a charachter is adjacent to another who possesses the power or is it just "assumed/implied"? After being healed by Dr. Thomas Wayne, (who used defend to lower the target charachter's defense in order to heal him), my opponent attacked me under the presumption that my defense was still at a 14. He said that I didn't "call out" that my defense was back to normal. What's the ruling here. I just assumed that OBVIOUSLY my defense would take the higher value. I remember that Stealth once had this issue back in the day with the constant "activacting/deactivating" of the power in order for friendly charachters to draw a line of fire to perplex them. Hence, the reason they changed the wording. Please help.

With Stealth you have no choice about it. It's always on.

Defend is a may power since at one instance you may want a lower value when using Support and in another instance you may want the higher value when attacked. Most of the the time it's a no brainer but sometimes you may want to take that damage because you're trying to land on a cool click (Spider-Man 2099 comes to mind with his "cosmic" stop click/powers).

So yes, you need to call out your Defend whenever you actually want to use that ability. If you do not call it out then your going by whatever is the current value so your opponent was incorrect in assuming that your Defend is applied until said others. It's actually the opposite of that.

You apply replacements/modifiers, per game effect and per value that is needed. They (more or less) "reset" per game effect.

In short, you were right and your opponent was wrong.

Defend
Any adjacent friendly character may replace its defense value with this character's unmodified defense value.

So any time your characters would use their defense values, you can decide each and every time if you wish to replace the defense value. Nothing is ever locked in; you are never forced to keep a previously used DV.

From what I understand by listening to the ClixCast on HcRealms, Stealth wasn't "always on" like it is now. You had to call out your deactivation of stealth so that friendlies could draw a line of fire in order to perplex that charachter and then afterwards they would have to "call out" the activation of Stealth again. Thus now, the wordings says, "when it is not your turn..." to eliminate the mess. Anyways, I was just using that as an anology to explain the same dilemma that I think Defend is having. I would think that it is common sense that when you move into an adjacent square of a charachter using defend that naturally you would take the highest defense value. Maybe, I'm wrong.

Like I pointed out in my earlier example, this may be true 99% of the time but you might actually want a lower defense to entice your opponent to attack you so that you may land on a better click. Because of this, Defend is only ever on when you specifically say so for each action where this would matter.