drbuzzard

Ok, built up a Dark/Sonic blaster last night and gave it a spin. I will admit I wasn't as thorough as I might have been as I skipped Strident Echo, Echo Chamber, and Sound Cannon. However I just followed my normal approach to making a build as I would were it live and then give that optimized build a run through some simple enough content. My approach was to load up on attacks, skip mezzes, and go for a resistance build based on Sound Barrier. I added tough from the fighting pool, and Charged armor from the EPPs. Only after I had things together did I notice that Sound Barrier only does smashing resistance, not lethal and smashing resistance. I found that to be rather odd, and perhaps the only place I've see that other than increase density from kinetics. After I tossed in a defense buff to avoid mezzes, my smashing was capped while energy and lethal were pretty high. I had alpha slot set up with resilient radial to optimize the resistance (and absorb). I did a test run in Cimerora. I started by clearing the city walls for a few rounds. This proved to be easy enough. The absorb shield coupled with the resistance was enough to make the wall parties of romans into no real threat. I suppose if I just stood there, I might have died, but as it was I had plenty of time to kill them all off, even with dark not being one of the strongest blaster sets (and I wasn't catering to its strength with a defensive build). I went on to try out some of the repeatable cimeroran missions on +0x8. This went well enough if I was careful and didn't aggro more than one spawn at a time. If I got two on me, I would die consistently. So impressions of the powers: Sonic Thrust: Dayum, that thing really flings a target. I was pitching surgeons off the city walls for distance and humor. Sound Booster: I only really used it as build up, so didn't notice other properties. Deafening Wave: Good area on the PBAOE, damage was OK. I would generally lay it down after blackstar in case the t9 missed. I suppose I should have upped the target levels to see how stacking the two on tough targets went. It would be a nice follow up to the t9 PBAOE nukes when fighting +4s. As I was solo, I didn't really want to do +4s. Sound Barrier: I was a bit dubious on this looking at the raw stats, but the absorb shield proved to be pretty damned good since it cycled so fast. Couple it with a decent resistance build, and you get a reasonably durable blaster. Of course I had no endurance issues. I had it slotted with 2 each of 50+3 resistance, heal/absorb and EndMod. Disruption Aura: I'm really just not a blapper at heart (All of my played blasters are range only builds), so this really only helped much when going in for Blackstar and Deafening Wave. Those who do blap will get more mileage out of this. Of course I'm not one to complain about adding 14% damage to my nuke. Earsplitter: This hits like a mac truck. This would be a power that would tempt me to blap a bit. I didn't really notice the hold effect since targets weren't around long enough to see if they were held or not. Overall Impression: Most of my blasters are /dev since as mentioned, I dislike blapping. For a ranged only blaster, this wouldn't really be a good choice, though for a blapper, it has some nice tools though it does lack a depth of melee attacks to make a chain. Granted I skipped three of the powers, but that was based on reading the stats. Neither Strident Echo nor Echo Chamber do good DPAS (damage per activation second), so I wouldn't take them under any circumstances on live (ok, maybe Echo Chamber on an Ice blaster to help stack up the holds). If your goal is to make a good blapping build, you need attacks with solid DPAS or you lose damage going into melee where it's dangerous. The single target attacks of dark blast, which are not even close to kings of DPAS in blasters were better than most of the single target attacks in this secondary (except earsplitter). Then you have sound cannon. A stun/cone knockback could be an OK 'oh shit' button, but it is counter productive to everything else the set is doing. If I'm taking this set to blap, and debuff resistance, blasting them away from me and making them stumble around is exactly what I don't want. I get the impression that you don't want another hold on Sound Cannon, but disorient is a bad idea there, and it probably would be better as a PBAOE. At least then you can throw in a KB>KD and keep them in one place for a little bit.

I found that if you just accept not doing AS from hide, you can get a hell of a damage chain going. Start from hide with TF, then ET, BS, (also EP depending on recharge) then a critting AS from visible. Wash rinse and repeat.

This was on a solo ITF.

My interface slot was cognitive to get some psi damage to beat down the EBs during their unstoppable use, so no. I had no envenomed daggers either. Build had hecatomb in ET (full), superior stalker ATOs in AS and TF (Stalker's guile in AS), and Armageddon in Power Crash. Honestly I'm not sure why anyone would be shocked by beating down Rommy (and Requiem) in mission 3. He's not all that tough. I've done the TF solo on live with a psi/SD stalker before without a whole lot of trouble.

Tried this on a stalker (EM/EA). As long as you always remember to do the TF-ET as a combo, it has a lot of the classic feel of EM or perhaps even better since TF isn't so slow anymore. Power crash is nice, but I almost get the feeling it crits more than expected even out of hide. This has not been quantitatively measured, but I almost always seemed to be a critting at least some of the targets in hide or not. Test was running an ITF solo. Made it to the last rommy, but bailed after one of the add spawns piled on and killed me. I had rommy down half before that. The new EM is likely to be single target king the way I was able to beat down AVs well past their regeneration.

Didn't notice the changes to teleport, but I suppose I didn't really try. Still has the 'can't reall move' version of hover which is annoying. Combat teleport is very cool, but I don't get enough use out of it yet. Only bug I noticed was where it wouldn't teleport up some stairs to a target. It left me at the base of the stairs.

Speed ITFs are usually under 15 minutes in my experience. If someone advertised a speed run and changed it after launch, I'd probably bail. I'm not at all a fan of bait and switch.

As I mentioned, there's some sets which have a nice gimmick, which includes follow up. Stalkers lose those tricks because they always have build up instead, which is a bit of a waste (an artifact of their initial design which was periodic burst damage from hide, which really isn't valid anymore). However if you're looking to beat down a single target, they are hard to beat (or unbeatable, I'm not up on current pylon times). You are also correct about them being awful in aggro management. I have stalkers durable enough to tank most things, but they shed aggro like water off a duck's back. If I want melee AOE I will concede scrappers clearly, but I use tanks or brutes for that. As for costs in the secondaries, I only really do defense sets on stalkers, so I can't really speak to WP or regen (or many other sets). Heck, I'm generally of the opinion that non defense sets on anything but tankers or brutes (or sentinels since they have range), it not tough enough for me to like it. Of course YMMV.

I've got a goodly number of stalkers on HC, and they are really a great AT now. They simply tear things up. I tried to make scrappers to give the AT a shot, and honestly the AT simply doesn't measure up, even with the ATOs. Yes, there are some cases where the stalker does give up too much from a primary, generally AOE potential (or a nice gimmick like soul drain), but it's easy enough to pick a primary that works well and proceed to dish out amazing damage with crits you actually <gasp> control.

Then you should have gone with a decent primary. <runs for cover>

OK, the ones I have on HC. Amp Up: fairly meh to me. I've got it on my EA defender, but I'm not the biggest fan of a T9 being a single target buff even if it is a pretty big one. The buff is rather powerful and does a wide variety of stuff, but picking a target, and rotating the target is honestly more bother than I like. It's a YMMV situation, so some might like it even if don't. This could be called a matter of play style preference more than anything. Power is probably fine as is. Fulcrum Shift: Easily this is the best of the T9s, and honestly might be deemed the point to match for current balance. Of course it would require buffs of many others for this to be the case. A well run kinetics buffer on a team has a huge effect. Liquefy: The power is fairly good in terms of effect but the duration to recharge ratio is rather meh. Even on a perma hastened build it's not really up enough to be deemed more than an 'oh shit' power. Thing is, it's not so great that it will save your bacon in a lot of 'oh shit' moments. I have it on my sonic defender, and I do use it, but I've got trouble thinking of an instance where it really turned a battle. Chrono Shift this is a solid power. While it's not a hell of a lot better than speed boost (now that speed boost hits everyone at once), it does hit the user which is nice and adds in healing. One might be able to make a case that it's a touch underpowered, but given how good Time Manipulation is otherwise, and that it works on the user, I'd say it is fine as is. Time Bomb: Only good thing I can say about this dumpster fire is that I know what power I can skip to use on pools or EPPs. EM Pulse: This power is an immediate 'skip' for me. It's not the dumpster fire that time bomb is, but I still wouldn't bother with it in any build I can imagine. I have a ill/rad and I sure didn't bother with it there.

I'll second the good word for ice melee. It's got 2 very solid AOEs and cold is not very resisted. Couple that with freezing touch, which is one of the best single target attacks in the game, the whole set is very under-appreciated. The main weakness is the lower number of attacks and the fact that the tier 1 is complete garbage. You basically have to add something from out of the set to have a good single target chain.

I use the LFG system all the time... to teleport around. It's great for that. For actually getting teams, you use the channel.

I don't believe anyone mentioned the Toad. He would be one of the first super jumpers, and it was his only power initially. Oh, and since someone mentioned the LSH, Bouncing Boy.

SR wasn't a tanker primary because there was little crossover of defensive sets between tankers and scrappers initially. The only one was invulnerability, and back at launch invincibility had a bug which double stacked it, unyielding was unyielding stance so you couldn't move, and unstoppable could be perma-ed. Also the resistance cap was 90 for everyone, so scrappers just had to get to 40 or so and they capped out defense and resistance and had to just avoid dying during the unstoppable crashes. Back then when tankers had a damage scalar of .7 (iirc), if you could get an invulnerability scrapper to high enough, you made moot tankers easy enough. Let's just not worry too much about the notion of balance in the game as initially released (or really at any time, but certainly not when released).

Did anyone mention 'nerf regen"?

This is a rather moot point since tankers don't get regeneration. However the great thing about this technique is that it is easily tuned. Basically an amount of instant healing (at a high level) is a set amount well lower than the total level of health. Basically it defines a set level of damage mitigation. You can essentially ignore X damage per time, but big hits make it rather less impressive. Say you're fighting Bobcat in a Tin Mage TF, the big hits will blow right through this and you better have other things going for you or you will dead immediately. It doesn't have an ability to scale against the incoming damage like resistance or defense. Both of those are scaling. An 8k hit from Bobcat does 0 or 8k with defense, but only 5% of the time. An 8k hit from Bobcat against 90% resistance is scaled down to 800. Against this flavor of absorb shield 8k is 8k (well say it's a 600 HP shield, it's 7400). but is will be proportionally better against lesser attacks IMO, which would be interesting and unlike the rest of the defensive sets. Playing a regeneration sentinel is rather interesting in that you learn your threshold of incoming damage which you can basically ignore, and you avoid stepping past it because it means you die very quickly.

For those who have not tried sentinel regeneration, the reason it is well liked it because it doesn't have click Instant Heal. It replaces it with an early accessible power (tier 4) called instant regeneration. It's an absorb shield which replenishes rapidly enough that you can fully ignore a few even level minions beating on you. However it's not like the IH of the old days where you had the whole health bar as a rubber band, where if something didn't like you in one burst, you'd never die. Personally I think it was a brilliant solution for bringing back the old feel of regeneration without making it overpowered (gloriously I might add) as it once was.

Sentinel regeneration is pretty damned good. It's the only version of regeneration I've played on Homecoming, and it will remain that way unless regeneration gets drastic revision. As said by others, the set on melee ATs is a strange mix of self heals, a bit of constant regeneration, burst regeneration, and a very short 'oh shit' power. It's clearly more 'clicky' than anything I would ever be interested in. I guess some people enjoy it, but I can't imagine it's a popular choice overall.

Nah, I build all my sents for recharge, so it's agility radial for recharge and more defense. I like my nuke up as often as possible. Do have degen though iirc and assault core. .

That's the single target chain I use on my BR/Bio.

Yes, you are wrong. Beam Rifle is a good bit of fun, but it really doesn't have a really good high DPAS power. Lancer shot is the best of the bunch at around 75 DPAS (part is DoT which is variable) with disintegrate up. Without it on the target, you only get 55. Fire, ice, and electricity all have 100+ DPAS powers. A big problem with BR is that the in game data is off because it gets distorted by the disintegration mechanic. For example, single shot is listed at 85 DPAS at level 50, but that's completely wrong since it includes the damage of disintegration spread, which doesn't affect the target you just shot. Actual value (without Arcanatime so numbers are comparable) is 51. Charged shot is more honest since in that case disintegrate actually does boost damage, as is Lancer shot. I have a beam/bio sentinel and I used to consider it to be the bee's knees, but after making an elec/bio for direct comparison, I don't play it very much. Disintegrate is an entertaining mechanic, and watching the spread is cool, but it kind of distracts you from how plebeian the set really is (especially if disintegrate is not yet up). I suppose in a sense it is a bit like titan weapons in that with disintegrate up vs. disintegrate down on the target there is a large difference in performance, but the high end performance just isn't that high like in TW.

This is actually quite true internally on the AT unlike a lot of the rest of the ATs in the game. I guess being able to basically do it all from scratch let them actually make things fairly balanced without pissing off people with vested interested. This is not to say all primaries and secondaries are balanced (I'm looking at you ice armor), but by and large the primaries mostly stack up pretty close, and the secondaries are usually the best versions in the game (making allowance for the scalar). Balanced compared to other ATs is a bit more questionable as you say due to power creep.

For someone new to tanking, I'd suggest keeping it simple. This means a click and forget primary- willpower which is very durable and about as simple as can be. Put on the toggles and go beat things. Then take war mace for the secondary. It's a very good mix of single target and AOE attacks, with no gimmicks.

Certainly beats having nothing like a bunch of the brute sets (without taking a certain EPP). I'm not against Doms getting a pool like that, but I certainly cannot agree that melee ATs lack endurance concerns (or have the least). It very much varies by powerset, which is also the case for defenders, corrupters, MMs, and controllers.