Had Defy down for almost 3 months at two different houses I bowl with, both have different house patterns. Have tried a couple different sport patterns with Defy down. This stuff transitions significantly different from any other oil I've bowled on, and not in a good way. Yes it self heals, but it self heals itself all over the place. The dry plays drier and the wet plays wetter. Here's how it normally goes. Get about halfway through the first game and all the sudden the ball doesn't want to hook anymore. Get a little bit of carrydown, and the oil starts self healing itself down onto the backend, which makes it worse. It doesn't heal fast enough to prevent track burn, so after you have moved right to get the ball to hook, a few frames later you have to move back left to avoid the track burn. Then the next problem aside from dealing with some sharp over/under before you're even out of the first game is that eventually the oil does start to self heal, but it thins the volume out across the board. By game 3, you have dry heads, over/under mids, and sloppy, soft backends. Maybe it will be better when it gets colder (hi's still in the upper 60s to mid 70s here) and the stuff gels up a little, but right now it just migrates all over the place. All it does is take every other problem and shortcoming with any other kind of oil and magnifies it. Burns faster than Fire, carries down worse than Ice, plus new problems! I can't believe this stuff got through R&D. They've spent 2 1/2 months adjusting the shot here to try to accommodate all its issues and oddities, but the problems we already have with 1-7 being super dry and the backends in the track being soft have just been magnified, now it's MORE over/under.
HOWEVER, on the left side of the lane? Completely different experience. The traffic on the left side is slow enough that it allows it to do what its supposed to do. Volume holds up, carrydown is minimal, actually don't mind it on the left side. I still prefer Ice to anything else, but I have zero problems with it on the left side.
There have still been a fair amount of high scores, however, but I attribute that more to the volume bump than anything else. Both of these houses have always been on the drier side, so now that the ball can get down the lane and transition to the backend better, carry has improved somewhat and people are able to throw more relaxed shots. Overall though, I still find Ice to be my favorite, and several other oils to be vastly superior to Defy. This also isn't just my opinion, even the average joe is making the same complaints and noticing the same issues.
