Carnifax

I have a Grav/Trick Arrow too, but I'm much preferring the Defender version. The debuffs are so nice. I've uploaded all those weird builds to https://www.cohbuildshare.com/builds?user=Carnifax ( @Procat's underused and excellent Build Sharing website).

I'll suggest my Ice/Traps/Sorcery/Stone controller with Fold Space so. It's not my strongest character by any means but it is interesting, especially in smaller groups with friends (who know what shenanigans to expect). Theme-wise he's a "junkbot" so Ice & Sorcery have been recoloured / headcanoned into oils and smogs. Since you mentioned Elec Control I'll also say "Elec/Poison/Stone" controller. I went through a period of weird controllers last year and "Malwire, the living virus" was the 2nd. Recoloured the Stone Armour to a kind of neon-green crystal gives it a kinda of "filled in vector graphics a la Battlezone" feel. I'm also very much enjoying my Trick Arrow / Elec defender. Feels proper "Offender"-y.

My favourite build is my DP/Kin, which I freely admit I robbed initially off Frostweaver and Darkir and then refined / tried 3 or 4 variants of. It's not even that expensive really, 5 Winters and 1 Purple.

It's the same as any other stealth. After a few seconds the flags clear and your Stealth and Def go back up. Always has been afaik, I've always used Group over Superior since i4 or i5.

Not sure I should reply here, since we already discussed in the Controller forums, but since I did what @Onlyasandwich suggested, on Beta I can give you some numbers. So to summarize the CombatParser cannot deal with parsing Achilles Heels directly, because the Log entry is a generic "You reduced the resistence" type message with no indication of which power did it. But @Onlyasandwich pointed out that the PPM for Lady Greys proc is the same as Achilles, and since both FR and Tornado are pseudopets the Lady G hits are logged and parsed under their "parent" power. So I hopped onto Beta, swapped in some Lady Greys and did some runs. 1st was a Hover Farm. So a very heavily populated Astroid Farm. So they're actually quite close to each other; Freezing Rain has the slight edge. I will also say that either 41 or 35 Achilles Hits on such a vastly crowded map really isn't a great return on investment. 2nd I did a +4x8 Council radio. Where tornado comes out on top by a few. So really it's pretty close with the edge to Tornado this time. We have one more data point here. Because I'm Plant/Storm and Fly Trap has both Achilles and TOLG slotted So between all it comes out about even. One more data point for you. I also did a quick run on my Time/Sonic who has Slowed Response procced with all 3 DefDebuff or AccDefBuff procs. In terms of "procs per activation" Slowed Response is MUCH better for triggering procs compared to pseudopets. ProcsPer Activations (on x8 maps, cos Farming is an edge case) Tornado : 1.21 = 21/19 Freezing Rain : 1.26 = 19/15 Slowed Response : 4.3 = ((24+19)/2) / 5 because we've two 3.5 procs in there so we can average them out. Acid Arrow : 0.842 = (16/19) : This seems worse but Acid has a much shorter recharge than Slowed and I tend to spam it, treating it as a proccy AoE with some debuff. This was on a random log for my TA/Elec. TL:DR : It's about the same between Freezing Rain and Tornado but it's probably not really worthwhile on either. Not only does it not proc much but you don't have a lot of control on when it goes off. In Slowed Response I know it'll be the 5 seconds after Slowed and thus it's easy to follow up with something nasty to take advantage (a bit like the "Chance to Build up in Aim or Tactics" debate.

DP/Kin/Dark is wonderful. One of my favourite characters to play and I think the favourite build I managed to steal/make/refine. Kin/Elec or Elec/Kin would also be interesting but a word of caution, the Shocked mechanic and the Tesla Cage chaining are meh at best.

Til they get to Sharkshead 🤣 (I still remember the system shock I got on Live bringing my up-til-then immortal Necro/Dark to Sharks and seeing my poor Zombies getting AOE melted). Stalkers nowadays must be up there too. Can be easily tanky enough in a straight fight and have the ability to ghost annoying missions and "cheat" in fights by deleting the nastiest thing in a spawn before the fight even properly starts. Of course its pretty set dependent but you can fine tune the diff settings to best suit the primary.

According to my last parse it's about the same as roughly a 35-40% damage enhancement added to the Lightning Storm, so yes pretty good. Here's mine, which has an Explosive Strike (because I'm cheap 🙂 ). But I only have LS slotted by 63% for damage on this (for some reason) making the proc pretty pointless. My slotting on LS could use improving really, which may explain why I've been thinking it underperforms. (currently 1 forced feedback, 1 sudden acc kb2kd and 3 Thunderstrike) Silly Carni!! I think 3 Apocs & a cheap proc or 4 Apocs including the proc, along with the two "special" IOs would be better. Or 3 Winters + procs & specials.

Almost certainly Achilles in FR. Tornados radius is so small that a "once every 10 seconds" check will lose out a lot. Gut feeling because the parser doesn't log Achilles debuffs yet. My favourite tornado slotting is 4 expedients, an overwheming and a forced feedback so I get some recharge every time I drop one. Edit : I will say that I've just searched my raw log file from the Plant/Storm farm I took my Tornado & Lightning Storm figures from and I can't see Achilles mentioned AT ALL despite it being slotted (didn't have my Flytrap out, which also has it slotted). That's deeply suspicious as I was spamming FR every time it was up. Hmmmm..... Edit2 : Okay so looks like trying to parse out Achilles' in the logs is pretty much impossible. Just brought my TA/Elec onto a dummy AE arc with Power Analyser and I can see Acid apply Achilles but the logs don't mention the proc by name : 2022-04-07 15:07:08 You hit Dummy Boss with your Acid Arrow for 0.41 points of Toxic damage over time. 2022-04-07 15:07:08 You hit Dummy Boss with your Acid Arrow for 0.49 points of Toxic damage over time. 2022-04-07 15:07:08 Robo N Hood heals you with their Panacea: Chance for +Hit Points/Endurance for 82.86 health points. 2022-04-07 15:07:08 You heal Robo N Hood with Panacea: Chance for +Hit Points/Endurance for 82.86 health points. 2022-04-07 15:07:09 HIT Dummy Boss! Your Acid Arrow power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 46.11. 2022-04-07 15:07:09 HIT Dummy Boss! Your Acid Arrow power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 84.51. 2022-04-07 15:07:09 HIT Dummy Boss! Your Acid Arrow power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 51.35. 2022-04-07 15:07:09 HIT Dummy Boss! Your Acid Arrow power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 76.20. 2022-04-07 15:07:09 HIT Dummy Boss! Your Acid Arrow power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 11.92. 2022-04-07 15:07:09 You reduce your targets damage resistance temporarily 2022-04-07 15:07:09 You reduce your targets damage resistance temporarily

Just on these. In all my parses in different scenarios (+4x8 Council to an Asteroid Hover Farm) Tornado outperforms Lightning Storm on my Plant/Storm, even with both fully slotted up. I was surprised on the Farm because I thought that "most of the fight happens in the middle" would favour Lightning Storm more. I guess the mini-AOE of Tornado compensates. Here's the damage parsed on a farming run. On a fast moving team Tornado is even better because it follows you. I mean on a Stormie I'd take both anyway but if slots are precious then Tornado is a better place to spend them. LS kinda underperforms considering the End cost (probably the #1 reason Stormies have the "End use is terrible" reputation). Although obviously given the Average Recharges the end costs between the two probably evens out in the long term. (Note to self, give the Parser some sort of mechanism to show / hide rows of the table so I don't need to do these horrible "slice" screenshots of the tables)

It looks maybe a little light on damage and maybe overslotted for recharge. It's a shame to skip the glory of Power Boosted Farsight, which sticks you up at incarnate caps (along with the team). All that Def and Recharge Time provides can give you scope to go a bit more proccy if you like. This is an extreme example pulled from a hybrid of my Time/Sonic (who has 211% recharge in Mids which is enough for the Fort epic pet to be a couple of seconds off perma) and my Water/Temporal Blaster. I skipped Fighting & didn't take Sorcery (be aware that Rune will only be up 1/3rd of the time anyway because it has a fixed recharge). You could switch my Hover, Fly & Time Crawl to Sorcery to get Rune back. I've also found that Hydro blast is skippable. Aqua + Dehydrate is "good enough" to keep the Tidal stacks flowing for double-tap Water Jet. Not saying "this is better", but you might look at one or two powers and go "Hey, I'll proc that up to shore up my single target damage". Water Jet is a good place for procs since you can use its "double tap" when the orange circle is up.

It's fine. Procs are better than slotting it for damage but not by a huge amount, it doesn't do Containment (if it did dam + procs would be the way to go). I use it on my Ice/Traps since Jack will get into combat. Quite good in a long fight for some extra damage (lob it on an AV). Worked well in the Summer Blockbuster for me for example. On a low damage character with a pet / pets (Controller & MM) procced version is nice. On a Domi with their decent damage mods just plain old slotting for damage should be better (you can add procs on top of that of course). Arcane is also nice on a low damage set like a Controller. Especially if you can Contain them and wait for the orange circle.

Ki Push is weird in that it knocks things back quite a lot AND it repels them (and it does damage so an Overwhelming would work). So in it the Overwhelming changes the Knockback bit from 8.3 to < 0.67 (which is the kb / kd threshold) so they'd fall over rather than be knocked back. But it also has the repel effect too, so that's why you see a much smaller flight speed, all the knockback has been transformed into kd but the repel bit is still there to push them away (man this is confusing). But like @Onlyasandwich said to stop Singy sending things flying only a Sudden Acceleration will work. Your screenshot is a little misleading. Gravitional Pull is the new thing added a while back that is actually negative repel (or sorta) so it sucks things in towards Singy. "Repel" is its "knock things away power". https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=pets.singularity.repel&at=minion_pets <-- Needs Sudden Acceleration https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=pets.singularity.gravitational_pull&at=minion_pets <-- The "pull you in towards Singy" power Coupled together that means with Sudden Acceleration slotted Singy will gradually pull things into towards it and when they get close they'll start falling over and you'll hear that god-awful noise.

This is the correct answer. Overwhelming Force is a damage set and the Repel power Singy has which does knockback (like Kinetics > Repel, yes it IS badly named) doesn't have a damage component. Essentially if you stick Overwhelming into Singy all his damaging attacks would gain a chance to do knockdown (and nothing else because none of his damaging attacks do knockback). So you want a Sudden Impact instead to covert Repels KB into KD. This is always the case slotting IOs into pets. To give you another example I like sticking an Achilles Heel into Fly Trap. Fly Trap has 4 attacks, Entangle (no -Def), Fling Thorns (does -Def), Thorny Darts (-Def) and Bite (-Def). So for 3 of their 4 attacks the Achilles has a chance of going off, but it will never go off from Entangle. I like a Touch of Lady Grey there too, for the same reasons. Idiot Shrub will set it off a decent number of times off 3 of 4 attacks. This is also why Cloud Senses proc is good in a Dark Servant. 4 of DS's attacks have some -ToHit so the Cloud Senses will try and proc off those. But it will never proc off Petrifying Gaze (their hold) because it doesn't do -ToHit.

Masterminds for sure. Purple patch just destroys them. Ice Control needs help, both for Controllers and Domis. It's hard to quantify what Arctic Air is doing but Shiver certainly needs changing and Ice Domis need something to make the set work better in Domination. Poison needs a wee tweak, nothing huge (maybe make the cone thingy a bit better, could also give it some -regen). Empathy needs something too. My thought was that the targeted team buffs also have a lesser version of the same effect on the caster.

Thanks Luminara. I wasn't entirely mad and there was the i6 Confuse Jihad. So now can we hijack this into a "Fear should cause Containment" thread?

Where weirdly the expected path (at least in a lot of them) is you solo most of the time (WoW for example). Some have something like "one off" missions you randomly join, do and then never see folk again, like STO and their Task Force Operations. Others like Guild Wars 2 have map events you can stumble across and join in on but I've never played one like CoH where teaming tends to be more the norm even on "normal" story content.

Pretty sure the main reason is that the XP lost isn't based on just the damage they did vs the team doing. It's heavily weighted towards the players. In other words if you do 50% damage to an enemy and a confused mob does 50% you still end up with most of the XP. (vague rememberings say 80% but that could just be echos) I mean my Plant/Stormie happily floors their Def using Freezing Rain and Tornado. But that XP mechanic means I'm not penalizing myself because of it. Edit : In other words I agree with Confuse not needing a buff (Fear does though for Controllers) but not exactly with your reasoning because there's already some XP/Inf weighting mechasnism which was added ages ago (issue 6 or 7 or something when "Your confuse is robbing our XP" was indeed a thing). Edit 2 : I always thought it was interesting how they only have one "Confuse" effect and really it's more of a "I've dominated you" rather than true confusion. I mean Arctic Air specifically is basically "You're in a thick fog and can't tell friend from foe". If I was doing "confuse" nowadays I'd make it "you attack whomever regardless of if they're a player or not" and give it to Seeds, Synapic Overload and Arctic Air to better fit their description (Synaptic & Arctic would need some other buffs mind) and leave the single target "confuses" as they work now (with a new name for the mez effect like Dominated or Mind Controlled) along with Mass Confusion (again rename it to something less, erm, confusing).

The Circle of Thorns need a bank they can trust too.

The Forced Feedback is wasted in Hurricane pretty much. Move it to Tornado and every time you drop a tornado you get 5 seconds of +100% recharge. Put one in Tornado AND Lightning storm and any time you drop those you get 5 seconds (won't stack, will replace). So you can do tornado -> *other stuff for a few seconds* -> Lightning Storm and get 10 seconds of lovely lovely recharge. Why the Winters set in Lightning? If you're looking for pure ranged Def 6 Thunderstrike is the way to go. Or split the difference, 3 Thunderstrike, 1 random Acc/Dam/End IO and a Forced Feedback. For your End woes you really want Pancea : Chance for HP / End. It's twice as effective as the Performance Shifter in Stamina (I've parsed out the logs). So I'd drop both the Preventative in Health and replace with a Miracle and a Pancea. Freezing Rain only really needs 2 +5 Recharge IOs to max it out and maybe an Achilles Heel Chance for -Resist. Personally I strongly dislike slotting your Single target hold for damage itself. 4 Basilisks (7.5% recharge. You want LOTS of recharge to get PAs as close to perma as possible), 1 random Acc/Hold and a purple hold proc is usually how I slot it. Of course you could also go 5 Purple hold IOs or the full Will of the Controller set. Spectral Terror is a mez which is actually a better -ToHit debuff. So you can move the Will of the Controller to Blind and then go 4 Dark Watchers Despair. It does a LOT of -ToHit. 2 Invises is a bit odd, normally people go one or the other. People prefer Superior but I like Group + Steamy as it's basically full invis anyway and Superior is a bit of an End hog. Not much point taking Psi Tornado that underslotted. It doesn't need KB2KD, it does Knockup so it won't be sending things flying. Personally I like Ice on a Stormie. Frozen Armour is both a decent s/l def shield and will take both Resist and Def IOs, so good for uniques (although you have them elsewhere anyway). Ice Storm is a bit chaotic but is reasonably good and Hibernate is great on a Stormie as a "combat heal" : Ice up and recover your End while the Phanties, Lightning Storm, Tornados and Freezing Rain work away for you. That said if you want Psi for the mez protection and another "tornado" go Psi (Psi Tornado isn't really a tornado. It's just a Damage over Time AOE blast like Fireball with a swirly graphic. Good for Yet Another Forced Feedback mind).

Well that's a rather bizarre design choice. Who thought that was a good idea?

I started a Trick Arrow / Elec Defender, does that count? (I say started but the Mapserver event ended up power levelling me a tad yesterday, what's going on there? Swear I levelled faster than on a Fire farm). Reunion tends towards the quieter and I've been guilty of not being around for 5-6 months much, the last Page or whatever it was called didn't really appeal to me. But there's still teams going etc. Certainly a lot of our "daily" Discorders aren't around at the mo. But it's both healthy and rational to take a few months every now and then.

Weirdly this is exactly the combo @Handmixer suggested / used when we were looking this and running them through the parser. It comfortably bet the Plant/Stormie doing about 16.7k Inf/sec compared to my 11.8k Inf/Sec. (I then got angry because I realised that Blaster Oil Slick might have a smaller radius, but it also has half the recharge. Bloody blasters)

Plant/Storm/Ice for me worked surprisingly well. Even parsed out reasonably well but a well built Fire/Fire blaster still happily outpaced me. I suspect once wrung through and actually parsed Plant/TA/Fire or Plant/TA/Mu built with a lot of recharge and a lot of procs could be the king of controller hover farming. Map I tried it on though the enemies were not Fire enemies and had Ice Patch. So they didn't play well with Seeds. The rewards get affected then. I think that's why the map I tried they used Ice Patch, because it counted as a ranged attack (so no reward penalty) and it's one that can't hit you. But it's not Seeds friendly. Of course the metric is Inf per second really so even if you're taking a Rewards penalty it still might be better overall having 0 ranged attacks. Edit : So I did a quick run on Gotters hover asteroid where the enemies have Mace attacks. Note that I don't have smart things like macros which do your convert to red and eat them set up at all (that'd help a lot). I also spammed seeds a lot since getting them to help me murder them is always useful. https://www.carnifax.org/?uuid=bbdc2373-17e7-4fbe-acdd-4a8d0645c8f2 10901 Inf per second gives you about 39 million Inf an hour. I think a decent Fire / Spines does 2 to 3 times that. Interestingly Roots outpaced Lightning Storm and almost matched Tornado in terms of overall damage. Ice Storm is also VERY good, I guess because it does some containment damage and it's not "wasteful", once things die the damage just starts hitting other things instead. So Plant/Trick Arrow/Ice might be an excellent combo (Oil Slick isn't wasteful either although you'd want to have its recharge maxed out and figure out some way to light it reliably)

I remixed my old chars when I restarted Homecoming (I still had the original install folder in my documents, so my cossies were saved). So my main, Ill/Storm became Ill/Dark and my Plant/Emp became Plant/Storm. So a remix of Rad plus a newer or changed blast set might be the way to go, just to balance nostalgia with some New and Shiny. Also Welcome Home!!