Doomguide2005

Yeah while there's certainly room for changes and tweaks to some things on some sets overall Defenders are in a very good spot. Nature and Electric Affinity are a couple of newer sets with very solid reputations especially for teaming. Sonic Attack as mentioned did NOT get nerfed. Rather the resistance debuff changed in duration primarily. It's probably easier now to maintain a lower but still quite potent debuff on a target while still using your primary without neglect even on a busy primary. And as mentioned a couple powers got individually quite buffed in damage. Screech being the notable one going from a mag 3 stun that tickled, to a mag 3 stun that hurts (much more in line with, as an example, Cosmic Burst). Force Fields and Trick Arrow have both been updated. Force Field now has a power that provides DDR (one of only two sets that can provide a DDR buff to another character). My personal favorite debuffer is Cold/Ice, buffer would be Empathy/Any, and I'd love to try Nature and Trick Arrow (and about a billion other pairings for that matter).

Welcome back to the City! Bit sleepy for a proper overview but I'll be back.

You can (unless I missed something during my enforced hiatus) cap both the damage and endmod aspects in Short Circuit. And Power Boost or PBU on Short Circuit on a high recharge can do some scary vales to both end drain and recovery debuff. But solo it's rough to be an equal to just outright damage.

I'd agree the top two are the pets from Illusion and Earth. Illusion has both PA and Phantasm. PA is immune to almost all damage as noted by @SeraphimKensai. Phantasm can be buffed and damaged. It does not Taunt. The Decoy Phantasm created by Phantasm cannot be damaged and also Taunts. So it works best solo when used with a strong debuffing set. Animate Stone while not immune to most damage, like Illusion's pets, is very tough at base, can be buffed (and enhanced by set bonuses) to the point where it essentially becomes immune. It also Taunts. He's very single-target compared to Illusion's pets. So if you're looking for a pet to buff and works well for solo work the only real drawback is Rocky's single-target nature (which hits very hard). Edit: I'd add mention of Ill/Traps to @Sir Myshkin's excellent summation. You can't really buff things but Traps will keep you busy using your traps at a speed and style unique in many ways to the set that often doesn't gel well with teams. Using Superior Invisibility you can remain unseen while your traps make your foes squishy for your pets to squash.

No. Do not want to transition an existing server and disrupt players there. There are SG's and other ways to roll back the clock. Little trickier with some things than others. Skipping p2w and travel powers until 14 straightforward. Working around inherent Fitness less so. I like IOs. Maybe no Redside, or Gold side or possible the ability to switch. Some ATs go bye bye. Same TF/SF, no ITF for instance. No cooperative zones or at least no meaning to such. All the above points to how to decide where, how and what to include or exclude in this option. Guessing there's a whole range of things if folks picked "a la carte" CoX. It's not like this truly boils down to one set of options everyone wants or even a few.

There's even a thread on HC about someone stumbling across this and then using it as a challenge. They found out just how much the Purple Patch destroys your damage.

Well pretty much every attack in Energy Blast can take Knockback sets so that's 8 and then yes 4 from Storm. Normally I wouldn't use one in Hurricane but if you were trying to eliminate all sources of kb yes Hurricane does kb. So a grand total of 12 if you took all the powers from Storm/Energy Blast that have kb. Then you'd have to look at pool and epic choices to see if the add any to the totals

Elude is pretty much this way (-100% end and -10000% recovery). Pre-IO days I dealt with it by using Eye of Magus followed by Geas of the Kind Ones and using one blue to jump start things.

As Nihilii said. Ah the memories from way way back on Live.

Unfortunately that's not how defense works. The game looks at all your defenses, positional and typed and takes the best one. The only time adding typed defenses to Elude is likely to help is if there is no position to the attack. Some Psi attacks for example (see Mind Control) fall into this category. What I don't know is if some of the recent changes altered how many attacks now lack a position to the attack that didn't previously. It was relatively rare to not have both.

Well it's not a set bonus so the Rule of Five doesn't apply. The IO itself is not a unique (Sudden Acceleration) so no limit there. Each IO within a set may only be used once in any given power so it seems the limit is how many powers you can slot the IO in.

Almost certain there was a duo that did this on Live ... but it was 10+ years ago and memory sometimes disappoints.

Random thought, did they ever change Mind Link so it can't take Membrane HOs as that's how I used to do it on Live?

Welcome to the game. As High Beam said your join date (Dec 2, 2022) doesn't tell us if you're brand new to CoX or newly returned.. Either way poke @Yomo Kimyata and they can drop some coin on you. It can be done as others have said in a variety of ways so unless you've got a self imposed restriction (no farms/farming, gifts, no marketing etc.) you should be able to earn sufficient inf. Early on it can be more difficult but again that's mostly when you impose restrictions on how you do it. And once you have your first 50 it gets even easier. Endurance usage is one of those things that depending on your AT, sets and build can be easy to a bit rough especially if Inf is an issue and doubly so if low level. But again it's a learning curve on the many tools available to make them go away.

This one of those places where no Mids, no computer hurts me but I wonder how it numerically compares with grabbing something like an Acc/Dam + Acc/Dam/Endred Thunderstrikes vs the HOs (gaining 2-piece set bonuses) or perhaps other IO combos since in many cases you'll already have 1 of the set already (as a proc).

It is a very strong combo. Shouldn't disappoint, the defender mirror was my go to debuffer on Pinnacle for endgame content.

Post your build perhaps. Liable to get more feedback that way and definitely more specific.

Probably Fire Blaster. But it depends on a huge number of variables. Player skill, vs which foes, AoE vs Single Target, build (and the skill of the builder), level of character, exemplar or not, slotting choices, or even what's meant by overpowered.

Yeah it is definitely a sustain and a pretty strong one at that I just missed it in the first read through as it's existed for long time prior to when they gave all blasters some sort of sustain and my brain didn't draw the connection at first. Mine was a Sonic/MM blaster on Virtue a long time ago. I'd try to use the Sleep then move in to use Drain Psyche. And that was many Issues before Sunset. I'd never seen or heard of a "sustain" prior to HC. It made thinking about tackling higher level AVs solo on a Blaster a much more doable thing as there was about zero ways on a Blaster to get a triple digit regen debuff. Unless endurance is an issue I'd probably favor buffing my regeneration. Hell I'm greedy I'd be looking to hit ED territory on both regeneration and recovery.

Is this the IO'd version of the character mentioned in the thread about an SO only weekly group?

Do you have both Psychic Shockwave and Drain Psyche (hint I would strongly recommend both)? Despite the descriptive text (Close AoE) Psychic Shockwave is a PBAoE attack. (Re)Reading I'm inclined to say yes the sustain you mention is Drain Psyche despite the fact it predates Blasters getting sustains as a whole. In any case it's a very powerful Regeneration and Recovery buff and debuff. For a non-support AT it is a very potent regeneration debuff and not to shabby even on a support character. Combined with an Epic resist Shield you'll be very hard to defeat while it's buffing you. Add in the presence of a Tanker and the Kin drawing aggro as well should make survival even against higher notoriety setting very solid. I'd be trying to follow the Tanker in (side by side with the Kin). Tanker gets aggro, Kin uses FS while you Drain Psyche then unleash. If you have or plan to get Unleash Potential I'd be trying to cycle between the two. The rough part will be when they're both on cooldown which unfortunately on SO only build will be a significant period as both have relatively long cool downs. That's when I'd be using those cones when the other two are on cool down.

It's a testament to this game, it's fans and the folks keeping the servers going, that when I last looked, between Rebirth and Homecoming they account for over 1000 votes out of a total of 1200 some.

@TheZagAbsolutely nothing wrong with having a skippable t9 or any other tier for that matter if that's in reference to my comments. But if I were to buff something related to SR that's the power that currently has the least downside to skipping and hence easiest to make the choice to skip or not matter.

No one here is saying SR doesn't have some warts just nothings so off it requires changes the OP is proposing. At least that's my understanding of the thread. Me I'd like to see Elude tweaked but if it never happens that would be fine too. SR as a whole works very well across all levels and builds.

And that's the rub. Seems like basically you want to change things up because your idea of what Super Reflexes means isn't matched by the original designers ideas, they clash. Not sure why you think using reflexes Super or otherwise wouldn't use energy though. Just because I innately react 10 or 100 or a million times as quickly as a normal human why I'd use any less energy doing so. I'm still moving out of the way.