Parabola

Yesterday I had the very humbling experience of trying to solo sarah moore (sp?) on my main at 4/8. He's a fully kitted out ss/ea brute and I had considered him to be basically immortal as long as I manage the rage crashes. I now know better... I was going ok until I hit the first rularuu mission. Those big eyeballs are just plain cheating. I have nearly icap typed defences to everything but psi and around 50% res to everything including psi but excluding toxic. And barrier as a back up. May as well not have bothered with any of it. Monitoring the combat log they were hitting me with 95% accuracy right from the word go. The resistances seemed meaningless and once I hit a room that made it impossible to pull effectively it was all over. I'm now going to spend a bit of time on the test server trying to find a combo that can handle rularuu at 4/8!

I dunno I quite like that. It has a certain lyrical quality. I also like the idea of a superhero who chooses a complicated name to confuse the bad guys. If they are busy trying to work out what the name means they are less focused on the fight!

Well of course you do you, rad is a great set (although the cast time on the toggles is a bit of a drag these days). I think the thing that I have been trying to address is that several of the powers you earlier wrote off as useless are far from being so and for the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with the set it's worth talking about the utility of those powers. Trick arrow could do with a bit of a buff up, I think we are all in agreement about that, but leaving half its tools on the bench isn't the way to get a balanced view of it.

5 actually. The purple one, the pvp one, both psionic hold procs and impeded swiftness. I like to use the last slot for either an acc/end piece or if my global acc+tohit is high enough the end/hold from the purple set.

That rules out every single target hold in the game unless you are under domination. Seems an unnecessarily high standard to set. As mentioned ice arrow takes procs really well. I view all single target holds these days as blasts that happen to hold and ice arrow is great for this purpose. Flash arrow is a useful little utility power. It doesn't notify so you can fire it prior to engaging with a spawn, making its activation time practically free. The perception debuff can be useful in situations when two spawns are close together and you only want to engage one of them. And the tohit debuff is flagged as unresistable so it may not be a huge number but it is very reliable. All that and it works perfectly well with only the base slot.

I'd love trick arrow to get a little polish up. As others have said it does lack a little mitigation and sometimes it takes several arrows to achieve effects that other sets have in a single power. However I do have a soft spot for trick arrow in it's guise as a fantastic vehicle for procs. Ice arrow and acid arrow in particular turn into great attacks. Also it has oil slick arrow which is basically a nuke if you can get it lit. This means that trick arrow does have a place as an agressive support set but it does need to be paired with something that can shore up its survivability. This makes archery sadly one of the worst options. I've had a lot of fun with a ta/dark offender and also rate trick arrow as a controller secondary. I also think the comparisons with tactical arrow are a little unfair as it stands. Cap P has already said that he overtuned tactical arrow and some correction is on the way. I'm just hoping esd arrow takes most of the flak and the rest of the set survives more or less unscathed. Of course the comparisons between the immobilize and the slow patch are unflattering for trick arrow but tactical arrow has nothing like acid or oil slick arrows. I'm certainly not saying trick arrow couldn't do with some love but it should be judged on its own merits rather than comparing with a different kind of set that is in something of a beta state.

There are a few different things to look at here. Firstly in general it is much easier to add significant defence than resistance to a build. Set bonuses give more defence and there are way more pool powers that give defence than resistance. The easiest thing to build up is ranged defence on a blaster. Thunderstrike, artillery and even mako's bite make it fairly cheap to do so. The ato's both provide ranged def and if you're throwing any kind of money at the build you are likely to have those. As you say you are likely to be blapping on this build but ranged defence is still going to be very useful. Blappers don't have all enemies making melee attacks against them. You have no taunt effect to draw them in and anything stood right next to you is likely being incinerated in short order. The danger is really in the enemies standing around the edges shooting you with ranged attacks. This is made doubly true by the fact that the majority of mez is attached to ranged attacks and you really want to be avoiding these wherever you are standing. Having said which I tend to try to build for s/l defence as well on blappers. The coverage between s/l and ranged seems pretty good overall and results in a tough blaster. Doing this does really mean going for either the ice or mace epic pool though for the shield. Mace having the advantage of bringing energy defence along for the ride. But of course concept>any other factor so if I were building a fire/fire/fire I think I'd go for the ranged softcap, pick up the odd bit of s/l res and see if that in combination with bonfire and the afraid/slow effects were enough.

I'm not convinced there is anything particularly wrong with superstrength on brutes either. No more than there is on tanks at any rate. The damage bonus from rage may be less pronounced but the more the merrier and it's not like fury+rage is any danger of capping you out. And the wonderful tohit bonus it gives you works just fine on either AT. Taking it on a brute allows you drop the truely dreadful tier one too.

Dark marital arts? Now we're talking.

Another often missed aspect of combat jumping is what it brings to a flier. It removes the inertia from flight and mystic flight making them much more user friendly imo. I find it so useful that I struggle to build a flier without it. One of the powers in tac arrow does the same thing (probably gymnastics?).

Had a stab at this below. Not sure how it would actually play out but might have a chance of surviving...

There is certainly significant pbaoe synergy between these sets. I tried the combo back on live, pre blaster buffs. It turned into something of an experiment into how quickly I could accumulate debt which amused me at the time. These days it could be made safer but it would still be spending much of its career in melee range without much in the way of mitigation. One thing to mention though is that blasters don't have a huge amount to gain from the proc monster concept. They have high damage modifiers and need to build using sets to build up defence. Proc monster builds work best on AT's with low damage modifiers and high defences like defenders. I'll have a play in mids to see if I can come up with a build that might stand a chance of working.

I kind of get this but I still think more options are better than less. If they could have produced enough powersets that each AT could have it's own suite of powersets then that might have been ok but given how much work that would have been I think we are better off where we are. Besides I find it interesting how the same set plays differently on different AT's.

I would agree that bruce lee probably was a scrapper but bruce lee does not represent the entirety of martial arts concepts. That larger bloke in enter the dragon (the bad guys champion) could be described as a brute simply on size alone. It's not for any of us to say what concepts are correct or not for anyone else. More options > less options.

Rad is very good and can be built to have decent s/l/m def numbers quite easily. It also responds well to a pure res build achieving impressive numbers across the board. Fire is always going to lag behind in toughness but you do get more offensive tools. Procs can give rad two mini nukes though which can help out an aoe light primary.

You get to 50 before you get distracted by something new?! That's amazing dedication as far as I'm concerned. I've created characters in mids (I always do a build first), spun them up in game spending considerable time on the costume, loaded into atlas and then immediately left them and started something else... Even if I do spend a good bit of time with a character many of them fizzle out in the 30's because I just can't maintain focus. It's the forums fault of course. Reading all your posts about the interesting, cool or just plain powerful characters you've created. How is anyone supposed to stay faithful with this much temptation around?

Just checked the spreadsheet and the panacea proc is just worth more recovery than a second lv50+5 end io in a blaster sustain. The first lv50+5 end io is worth more recovery than any other option and the second is only beaten by the panacea proc (which will usually be going in the base slot of health anyway).

Unless I'm really chasing recharge or ranged defence (slotting prev medicine or numinas respectively) I always like to slot 2 basic end mods in any blaster sustain. They give so much recovery you can completely forget about end issues. Each end mod in a sustain is worth far more than any other recovery slot regardless of what you put in it (possible exception being the panacea proc?). This allows you to save slots in health and stamina for more interesting things.

I don't entirely disagree but doorsitting in someone else's farm is stretching it a little. Mind you people can get their kicks where they like; it's the lfg spam looking for farms to doorsit in that annoys me.

Oh sure, I'm not saying tanks can't split groups up due to survivability concerns (hence the corner pull reference). However I've seen tanks on more than one occasion stand away from a group they could handle perfectly well and taunt them. The group just spreads out as some open fire and some run in, some others may have been missed altogether and are free to attack whoever. Jump in the middle then taunt the outliers has to be the best basic strategy in 95% of cases. The same argument about dfb spam could be made for any tf though. People are logging on all the time and wouldn't have seen earlier messages. People recruiting other trials and tfs don't seem to see the need to spam lfg relentlessly like they do for dfb. It strikes me as odd, and annoying. I get the gather thing and way back in the mists of time I did it myself. But these days it's just unnecessary. Hold the buff until the next spawn, once engaged position yourself halfway between the melees and the ranged guys and fire it off. Anyone it misses likely doesn't need it anyway and has wandered off to find their own challenge, and good luck to them. I know people calling for buffs generally mean well and I don't mean to imply otherwise, but it can slow things down considerably.

Mine is the endless spam in the lfg channel by people looking to tag along on fire farms. I know it shouldn't but it really annoys me. Play the game people. Speaking of endless lfg spam, what is it about recruiting for a dfb that seems to require 5x the number of messages than any other tf/trial? We know you're at 6/8. We heard you the first 5 times... Actually I have so many of these. Worried I might not be the most tolerant person in the world... Buffers who call people to gather. That's a relic of a very different game. Drop the buff when it's available, try to hit as many people as you can and don't hold up play. If someone misses it they miss it. It'll be up again in a while. Tankers who don't just dive in. Corner pulling can be useful in some circumstances but standing in full view of a group and taunting so they spread out never is. Anybody who uses bright, opaque power fx. If you only solo then sure, go nuts. But on a team it just makes it impossible to see what's going on. This is particularly a problem with certain shields (cold and thermal) and ranged powers where the user never has to experience what it's like to be stood in the middle of what they are vomiting onto the battlefield.

This is where some aoe from the armour set will go a very long way. As mentioned before I've played rad/stone as a tank and am very tempted to try a stone/fire brute. Stone melee on a tank actually has tremor moved earlier too. It's also possible to put a couple of procs into fault which gives it a touch of damage, it'll never be a fully fledged aoe but it's fantastic control and a reliable source of ff+rech. My biggest complaint about fault is the rubbish accuracy.

If you haven't tried it already make yourself a macro for this: "/macro QS powexec_location target Quicksand". This will place the power under whatever you have targetted.

Yeah snap shot and stunning shot are both skippable. Depending on build I'll sometimes skip aim as well and just use upshot. Pretty much everything in tactical arrow is good in it's current form. I say that because we know 'adjustment' is coming at some point. In particular I wouldn't get too attached to esd arrow as it is. I like flash arrow though and wouldn't skip it. It is unresistable and can be fired prior to engagement which essentially makes it free in terms of activation. The -perception can be useful too. Ice arrow procs out into a very useful attack that happens to hold and all the buff powers are great.

4 slot cloud senses including the proc seems ideal to me. Recharge bonus and enhancing tohit debuff which is kind of the point of fluffy.