Carnifax

War Mace is fun. Mace/Rad is chonky.

If Mez is really bothering you go down the Sorcery route for Rune of Protection. Never felt the need personally on any Blaster but you may. If you can't live without Mez prot Sentinels and Forts both cover "Mez prot with ranged". As do Dominators to some extent too. There are tradeoffs (to avoid Tankmaging) but all 3 ATs give some combination of ranged (and some melee if you want) and Mez prot.

I think they mean that Elecs ranged single target damage isn't great and since you're a hover blaster shoring it up with melees from the secondary isn't an option.

What Hyperstrike says is totally true as well. Not only is building Resists building to your strengths but also as you approach 90% each point of extra resist becomes more valuable. For example my Rad was at 80% smashing/lethal resists. I respecced them and used Bombardment sets and doctored wounds and preventitive med pairs to eke out 10% more. So where before if someone hit me for 1000 damage I'd take 200. Now I take 100. In other words I doubled how much smashing / lethal damage I can take, all by slotting 2 pairs of doctored wounds and 2 pairs of preventative and replacing my Positrons Blasts with Bombardments. Def works the same, as you approach 45% a 1% increase becomes very valuable. The difference is of course that one Ring Mistress can strip that right back down on you, or a lucky gun shot can do the same, because you've no DDR. One shot can fall you back from being hit 1 time in 10 or 20 to being hit half the time. Since high resistance always gives you high resist debuff resistance the same thing won't happen on a high Res build.

6. You want either 3 or 6 Artillery / Thunderstrikes for the Ranged Def bonuses. The bonus at 6 is more than at 3, so 1 power 6 slotted is better than 2 3 slotted.

This is why I always also rename some random placeholder character after I've transferred the original. Keeps the name "safe" for you while you're out visiting other shards.

No, thank you. Now respeccing my lingering Brute to this new build 🙂

I revamped my Mace / Rad build (so thank you for that. got me +10% s/l resists to the cap) and then palette swapped Mace to Stone to give this. Not sure you actually want Hurl Boulder 6 slotted like that but adjust as you see fit. Obviously if you wanted to go "full bore" slotting some Winters in would give you better s/l defense, better Fire/Cold resists and (probably more importantly) decent -Recharge resistence.

Elec/Poison/Stone is surprisingly fun as well. Lots of layers of soft-ish control and likes being in close debuffing and draining stuff while you drop Poison Traps and smack them with Seismic / Fissure. (Plant/Storm is immense fun. My favourite controller)

Honestly I've never been good with "Purpled out mega builds". It's just not in my wheelhouse to do them. I'm sure there must be proper "there was no budget" builds for Water out there but I tend to always build things way more modestly. I mean the PvP IO Heal set in Temporal Healing gives you a tiny % extra while costing LOTS more than Doctored Wounds. And you could purple out Water Jet. I would like to squeeze Forced Feedbacks in there as they can be very effective in improving recharge in bursts (my DP/Kin and Plant/Stormie both do this).

My hover-blaster is a Water / Temporal / Cold (head canoned as "Time Blast / Temporal" as water has a 'wibby-wobbly-timey-wimey' feel to it). Reasonably cheap too with 1 purple, no Winters and 3 PvP IOs (two are procs which actually looking at it again could be replaced by Shield Breaker or Impeded Swiftness procs for much less Inf). Capped ranged def, decent s/l def and the combo of Temporal Healings + Dehydrate + Hoarfrost makes you reasonably tough. Could do with more recharge but like I said I made them on the cheap(ish).

Yup, they do indeed. I'm just selfish 🙂

2 of them, you want to max the recharge out on this for the stacking DDR. Grant Covers DDR isn't enhancable so I go with 1 LOTG.

Frost breath on cast. Ice Storm is a patch power, so once every 10 seconds starting at 0. However because it is a patch the calculated proc rate would be poor (patches use "10 seconds" both for the check time and the recharge time for figuring out the proc % chance)

Earth is fab for "I like to be close up" controllers. So there's some synergy there between Earths attacks and Natures PBAOE toggles. Nature HATES being mezzed so Psi is another option. Edit : Here's proc-heavy Plant / Nature / Stone version. Getting a Forced Feedback into Fissure will make Nature happy too 🙂 Scorp would be too except for the stupid redraw on the attacks. If you can handle that it's not a bad option (Disruptor blast needs a KB2KD but can also take Forced Feedback).

I do "macros row 1, actual power above it in row 2" for this, it's the best I can manage. It does mean twice the icons (or thrice in the case of my Ice/Fire blaster because Row 1 uses "powexeclocation self" to turn things into PBAOEs and "powexeclocation target" in Row 3 for "I is scared of that spawn and want to soften them with Blizzard before jumping in")

You want Creepers frankenslotted. 2-3 IOs which boost Recharge, Damage and Acc and 3-4 damage procs. 3 of those procs should be from Ranged AOE Damage (Targeted AoE Damage). 4th should be the Immob one if you're using it. Nature likes recharge generally, so Haste is very good for it. Getting Overgrowth perma is difficult. Still nothing wrong with getting up as much as possible. Epic is up to you. I like Ice as it's vaguely thematic, has Def armour and Ice Storm will do some containment damage. Hibernate is nice as "combat rest" / panic button. Here's my Plant/Storm reworked to Nature instead. Rebirth, Entangling Aura, Spore Cloud and Lifegiving Spores are potentially optional (in that order, Rebirth is well skippable. Entangling & Spore Cloud really depends on how often you find yourself in close. Lifegiving is very useful in prolonged fights).

It's not just the extra damage Fire does, it's the quick animations. Ice is similarly quick but doesn't get the DoTs and is lacking Fireball and a snipe. Fire Melee also does extra DoT damage but the animations aren't quicker than other sets, so Fire Melee isn't generally counted as "top tier" as Fire blast is.

I'm half-plotting an Earth/Fire. Gotta be better than Dark/MA

I've never gutted an alt either but I'm conscious how much a pair of underwhelming domis cost to Io out and am considering it. Strongly.

Totally agree with this. It's like half an aoe confuse. Elec is basically lots of weird layered light-ish controls. But Trick arrow should help with that.

I've an Elec/Poison and a Grav/TA and you've hit on some interesting synergies between Elec & TA which seem fun. Both Jolting and Acid Arrow are good proc candidates. Epic-wise Mu makes most sense overall, but Elec does like being in close for Conductive Aura draining so Earth or Frozen might work too (for the S/L shield). Frozen Armour will also take both Def and Resist sets so a good choice for a defensive armour where you can also slot the Resist uniques (so you can skip fighting). I've cobbled together a build by merging my two but trying to squeeze everything in is hard (I can do it if I go Mu though). You can always replace Leadership with Fighting if you prefer. Synaptic almost forces you into the purple set for the 5% range def. Normally Malaises Illusion is a good sub but if the Proc goes off it alerts them. It'll be a very clickie combo though. *Edit : Also at the moment EMP Arrow is bugged and does No Hold At All (got me killed one day). Known issue apparently.

I think it's a combo of that and how the Auction House works now. IOs going into the AH "with no level" makes a big difference. Also Converters being an easy thing to earn make a huge difference. "Crap" Def set IOs can be turned into good ones very easily, so the supply of "good ones" is easier to sustain. It WAS broken in live but part of that was the AH supply was utterly fragmented whereas now its much more streamlined.

The last two Loot updates were pretty good. That was Artillery + Bombardment first, two cone-friendly sets with useful bonuses. Then the End Mod sets which again widened the use cases for them (some were more damaging). I think Slows, Stuns and debuff IOs could have a few extra sets added in the same way with saner or more interesting enhancement values and options. I can also totally understand why we haven't seen more purple sets, for fear of power creep. Edit. I have been slightly disappointed by the lack of new Cossie pieces but again I understand the time constraints involved make it harder. Asynchronous shoulder, boot and glove options are fab.

The Stalker / Scrapper version is my favourite "no slots required" power. Makes corner-herding-if-things-get-tough so effective.