drbuzzard

I took a elec/enaergy stalker for a drive and tried out a few things. The build was level 50+3/ thoroughly decked out as one might expect. I went to PI and started up the old radio. First selection of missions was arachnos-carnies-carnies. This was a bit annoying since I wanted to try the new Council and CoT. However I said no big deal, I'm trying electric melee with Thuderstrike update, so why not? I fought my way through the carnies at +2x8 and it wasn't over the top. Fought my way through without any real 'oh shit!' moments. Eventually the radio gave me a CoT. Mission. In a cruel twist of fate it was blue cave (gag). I went in and engaged my way through fighting everything. OK, now that is night and day. Normally people do CoT happily on steamroll PI radio missions where a bunch of your team is lowbies fresh out of AP. That will simply not work anymore. There were quite a few touch and go moments, and ultimately I ran into a group with a magma mage and I ate cave floor. After a short hospital stay where they re-inserted my spleen, I went back the (ugh) cave and went back after that spawn, but this time used barrier. I did clear the mission, but it was hairy. There will not be people carrying lowbies around anymore.

I'm willing to be happy with the small sop they are tossing us with the liquefy change for the moment (I'd prefer 120 second recharge though). The set needs more love than that, but I get the impression that there's some innate fear or caution hammered into the power guys heads about resistance and -resistance being way overpowered. In general the players chase defense because it's easier and dodges payloads of debuffs on attacks, but resistance is the one that's harder to chase.

Made up a thermal/fire defender on test to try the melt armor changes. Ran it at low level a little bit first to test all the new player stuff, and that seemed to work fine. Did a DFB with some people and killed a zombie on purpose. MUAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, ahem. Back to the testing report. Freebied my way up to 50 and decked it all out with shiny fancy IOs and stuff (118 global recharge before perma hasten). Then I took them to Cimerora to see if I could get an ITF going since test was pretty full. Silly me. Off once more to solo defenderland. I did the same thing as on the sonic- the repeat mission contact initial mission at +1/x4. Owing to the fact that melt armor was up all the time ( recharge was 24 seconds iirc) my defenderly pace was a bit better than on the sonic/sonic. I was not as safe as having liquefy up most of the time, and I did have to pop hibernate once to save my butt from a second spawn getting aggroed. Warmth being fast recharging was my saving grace. I finished the mission easy enough. Would have preferred a team test but getting a team on test is rather rare. The odd thing is that heat exhaustion now recharges more slowly than melt armor. I think I would prefer them to be identical because it would synch up.

OK, then trim my last post down to 'the liquefy recharge should be 120 seconds so you can perma it by yourself. '.

Odd, I even went back and re-read my post. I suggested nothing actually. I merely criticized the current state of sonic resonance and said the liquefy changes were not enough to fix it. You didn't actually rebut a single thing I said, but I am somehow wrong anyway. Sonic is not in the top half of sets. I've played them all fairly extensively, and I can assure you other sets do a better job of amping up a team. Fixing liquefy will help. It will not be sufficient. Making siphon into a siphon could potentially help depending on how it is done (if it buffs the whole team, then yes). However the set will still lack in variety of tools. It would still be mostly + or - resistance. If I had to make suggestions we'll go down the powers: 1: Sonic Barrier- I suppose keep as is or perhaps add a rather esoteric defbuff resistance like regeneration. 2. Sonic Siphon - you could go with the siphon and transfer resistance to the team. I've contemplated either -damage (probably not good since it stacks with the resistance being handed out) or -regen. 3. Sonic Haven- again add some esoteric debuff resistance perhaps endurance drain resistance. 4. Sonic Cage- nuke this from orbit. Yes, It has limited uses, but even those are frustrating (wall off a sapper or surgeon, but someone will want to kill them and waste their time trying). Maybe put in an endurance boosting power. There's a lot of heals which are pulses in a toggle. How about an endurance boosting pulse toggle? 5. Disruption field- fine as is 6. Sonic Dispersion- This already does a fair amount, so fine as is. 7. Sonic Repulsion- it requires an IO to be useful. How about we just make it a knockdown toggle the way it ends up, and cut to the chase? Also fix the noise. 8. Clarity - since it's fairly redundant, people often skip it or let it gather dust in the tray. How about we throw in half a forge on top of the redundant status protection (+12.5 to hit and +25 damage) ? Keep the short recharge so it can be handed out easily for a change. In a world with lots of team damage buffs that just go to the whole team, a fast recharging single target one is no crime. 9. Liquefy- I'd rather see the recharge go to 120 instead of 150 so you can actually get it permanent without outside help. The gap is small on rest right now, but why not bite the bullet and make sonic catch up in damage mitigation? OK, now you can complain about suggestions since I've actually made some.

Been a while since I did goldside, but it had more enemy debuffs iirc. That could get rough. Personally I dislike the low levels so I DFB to Posi 1+2 and after those I'm in the 20s where I actually like things.

I can't say I object to this suggestion, but it doesn't address the main issue. Sonic Resonance is a set with a very small bag of tricks. Basically every other set does a wide variety of effects, while sonic has a very, very small toolkit. I agree that the liquefy change improves things to a good degree, but I tested at +1 (given alpha shift, +0). It was completely slotted up so it gave -56.23% to hit debuff. This sounds mighty impressive, and at even level it rather is. What about when you take on the +4s that happen when things are actually tough? Let's slap on that purple patch and see how it drives. 56.23* .48= .27. Ok, now you're enemies go from base .50 to .23 chance to hit (higher for non minions). That's not bad. You can hand out 55% to most things (ignore psi hole for a sec here). So 45% *.23 = 10.35 % damage. Let's look at a bubbler. In set they can hand out 39.25% defense before dipping into leadership. This is with just the base 3 shields of course and comes to about the same level of mitigation as the sonic with 3 shields and a not perma T9. Take leadership on the bubbler and we're at softcap and the damage cuts in half. The bubbler doesn't need to stack a pile of IO bonuses and achieve perma hasten to get this effect. It's a pool power and there you go. Also, since they are defense to everything (but toxic) they don't have that psi hole and all the packaged debuffs miss as well. This is merely showing that debuffs are much weaker with the purple patch than buffs. FF is a buffing set mostly. Liquefy is pure debuff. At even level liquefy+sonic shields is superior, yes. Then again you don't really need a defender for even level now do you? So if the liquefy change were possible to make permanent (which currently requires the recharge cap) you're at bubbler level mitigation kind of. The power also does a defense debuff (so does the T9 FF bubble), - recharge, and knocks people down (except Romans now, who seem to have been given weeble capability). The FF T9 offers a bunch of interesting debuffs as well as some debuff resistance for all the effects which managed to hit your softcapped team. It should also be noted that the FF T9 can be permanent with just 100% recharge slotting in the power. One of the best sonic tricks is rigging sonic repulsion for knockdown, which of course takes an IO for the purpose. This is probably the only interesting effect FF can't achieve (repel being in repulsion field). Of course to mitigate this nice trick, the endurance cost is an expensive toggle plus more cost per target knocked. Sonic then has the shared with FF useless 'get in the corner child' power (sonic cage), and then clarity which is pretty redundant with sonic dispersion. I have tricked out level 50 sonic and FF defenders. I know which one can turn a sorry team around and make it plow through things without much trouble at all. That isn't the sonic defender.

Finally played the sonic defender I made on test to try out the liquefy change. Still could not get a spot on a team, so I just did the cimeroran repeat mission intro solo. Went in with it set at +1 x4. Individual spawns were not an issue. I could lay down liquefy, and proceed to beat them all down at a defenderly pace. After they were down, I waited till liquefy was back up (not very long since I was in perma hasten +spiritual core alpha) and repeated the process. One time I got a bit too ambitious and while in the middle of a spawn tossed ion judgment at the rest of the room. That did not end well for me. I went to the hospital, returned and cleared them out at the measured pace of one x4 spawn at a time and it wasn't an issue. I was running with bosses off which no doubt made it much easier. Sonic is really not a soloing set given how many powers need allies to even be used (5 of 9). The liquefy change is nice, but I think sonic needs more love than this. Other than being the king of handing out resistance to a team (and thus providing less protection than a bubbler), it really shines nowhere else. It's not even king of resistance debuff. Poison, Cold, and trick arrow all debuff a single target just as hard. Poison and trick arrow are also better at the AOE debuffing. I don't know if I need to note this, but the defender is level 50, and fully tricked out with all the free goodies and incarnate powers.

I always play with the sound off. In the beta version I set audio to the off point like in live, but I still get the sound effects, just fairly quiet. This has been for every character I've played with.

Made a elec/energy stalker to try out the thunderstrike change. It is definitely a good thing and puts electric melee into the realm of good sets. Thunderstrike used to be a somewhat marginal power IMO. It is no long marginal, it is good.

I'm respeccing my SoA and it's calling me a tanker when I check the information on powers. Ok, it's weirder than that. The attack data is all off during this respec. When I was looking in a respec earlier, it seemed to be correct, but now values are completely different than when I check in the enhancement screen back out of the respec. Further weirdness, just did /respec again and now it sees me as a SOA and the numbers are correct again. Previously I had been running a 1* LGTF on a tank if that had something to do with it.

Tried the psionic mastery set on a tank (part of it mesmerize and harmonic mind). I chose mesmerize because it is listen as having pretty high damage in the stats. However in the text below it seems to be about 1/2 that. In practice it seems to follow the 1/2 value from the text. Harmonic mind seems to be working OK.

Corrupter sets are at 75% value of the buffs compared to a defender, so it is a bit harder to softcap (yourself and others). They also get reduced value from the leadership sets. In exchange ther have an appreciably higher damage scaler, and scourge (which doubles damage at low target health). All the data is here: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/index.html

Yes, the big bubble gives you the benefits. You are only short the individual bubbles. You can get to softcap with IOs, manuever, and weave without that much trouble.

Force field only has 2 powers which buff others, so it's actually not a bad choice. With a careful build you can easily softcap all defenses and hand out softcap defense to your team as well. For a novel suggestion, you might consider the Soldier of Arachnos or the Widow. Both have leadership toggles present in their sets which can be stacked with the pool powers. This adds up to some respectable numbers for you and everyone even vaguely near you. For SoA You can hand out about 20% defense and 30% damage to your team. It's a lot of toggles, but it works pretty well.

2 DFB, Posi 1&2, Yin (repeat if needed). If there's PUG teams, that can pad XP as well.

How tough do you expect a tank to be? (your resistances are off BTW), it's higher for non l/s around 78% except psi). Psi has long been a tanker weakness, so one accepts that. On a team, granite is perfectly capable of tanking with minimal support. Heck, SR will softcap with just weave and the powers in the set. With the level of DDR the set provides, it will work just fine tanking most anything as well. You shouldn't make absolute statements is really my point. "I guarantee you no Tank with a common IO build and no Incarnates is tanking +4/x8." Many sets are kinda squishy without IOs yes, but granite never suffered from that. It suffered from self inflicted pain.

Granite could.

Regen, the yo yo set.

Yes, the defense stats, melee, ranged and AOE. Once you get to the softcap (45 as you say), there's not a heck of a lot of a point in more (though incarnate has a higher softcap of 57%, so if you're paranoid enough you can shoot for that). My SR sentinels are built around defense and recharge primarily so I can get the nuke up more often (tier 9 blast set power) as it is your best AOE attack by a large margin in basically every set. Before I had a lot of resources I'd chase the spiritual alpha incarnate set to help getting myself to perma hasten and as much recharge as possible. Then I noticed that you can get both defense and recharge if you use agility, so I did that a lot. If you're not familiar with the alpha incarnate power, it gives more boost to all stats as if you'd slotted for it, beyond the normal limitation of ~100% imposed by enhancement diversification. Agility can cover some defense gaps for you while also getting you more recharge. My own builds end up using musculature (damage boosting alpha) these days simply because I can get to perma hasten without using alpha anymore (it's just more expensive in IO sets). If you'd like some buying suggestions, I can do that. If you're not rich, don't worry about purples (ragnarok for example). They are somewhat nice, but not really worth the influence if you don't have piles. The marginal improvement offered by ragnarok for recharge is only 3.75% (10% vs 6.25% for positron set). Most ranged damage sets are relatively cheap (I say relatively only, 2-3M or so for rare IOs). There are a number of guides on how to amass wealth using the auction house and IO converters. That's probably your best bet for getting you what you want for your builds. If you don't feel like being a trader, play kill most Imperious Task forces in Cimerora. They will net you about 13M per run and are a good bit of fun. They also fill quite fast. The merits gained can also be used to pick up things which are really steep in the market (like the purples if you want them). To pump up defense I pretty much always end up with fighting pool, even though you will have a waste power in boxing. However tough is useful for taking steadfast protection +def and the gladiator's armor +3 resistance uniques. Between those two you get 6% defense to all, which is a fairly big deal when you're chasing it. You won't need to actually run tough for these to work, and it is somewhat of an endurance hog. Slotted up, weave gets you another ~6% so you will run that. Sorry if I don't offer up builds, but I stopped using the planning software a while back. I prefer to just build or respec using experience. I can juggle the numbers I need in my head well enough.

If you're SR, just go for defense, there's just not enough to build on for resistance (yes I know there's the scaling resistance with damage, but you'd have a hell of a time getting that high enough to save you). If you want defense and resistance, make an energy aura or invulnerability sentinel. Energy aura is easy enough to softcap defense with fairly respectable resistance. SR has plenty enough defense for a sentinel job. Contrary to my own delusions at times, sentinels are not tanks, and should not be aggro magnets. You can build pretty durable sentinels, but they don't hold aggro well enough for it to be worth it really.

I was coming in to say this. You get to hit debuff and a heal. What more could you ask for?

Yeah, thrown weapons is a blaster set screaming to be made. There's so many options and so very many comic book examples.

I level something up to 50 and deck it out with IOs and at least T3 alpha before I abandon a character. Then I strip it down of IOs and let it sit. With 1k slots, it doesn't really matter.

Get a bunch of team inspirations (dual large resistance/defense ones are best) and make sure the cats are all herded onto the stairs without charging in. Pop 2 or 3 of the insps, and then let the cats loose. Easy peasy.