Riverdusk

The stealth ability also gives a huge boost to your crit chance on your alpha strike (when it is most important and least likely to be wasted on overkill). I found it a surprising boost to my damage.

Nature has a resist buff as well.

Always liked time's sounds okay as well, but I can understand. For me it is beam rifle, ice melee, and some others. I know there is the work around, but would be nice to have an option for minimal sound fx right on the power, like we have minimal fx for graphics for a lot of them.

Thermal would be on the obvious list I'd think, but you didn't mention it. Good match anyway. Most non obvious, (but still good), maybe nature?

Illusion sure seems to have gotten more than its share of bugs for this patch. Put mine on the shelf for now.

Good to hear it'll soon be fixed. Almost got me killed when I suddenly couldn't confuse or hold a boss I was fighting on my new low level illusion controller. Figured a bug crept in.

I'd probably stick with scrapper for BS over brute. Biggest advantage it has over katana is its big hits. The one time it is faster than katana is when you can one shot something that katana takes two hits to take out. More likely to do that as a scrapper than a brute.

Just to respond to this point, have you tried using the bind/macro to do this? Try /macro Caltrops powexeclocation self "caltrops" and that should do exactly what you describe. Just click the macro button instead of the caltrops button. Should work for all of those. There are even tricks to change the macro button to an image of your choice to make it look better, but that I haven't gotten into. You can also replace 'self' with 'target' to cast at your current target (I use that for phantom army myself). That would then solve that issue for you and still leave the option for those that like to be able to target it.

Wanted to let you know Bopper, that you and your build inspired me to try a Time/DP. Been testing it a little on beta server, will probably start it tonight for real. I was surprised that things seem to proc regardless of ammo type used (so force feedbacks proc even if you aren't using lethal ammo). That is amazing and gives DP more proc opportunities than I realized.

Nice analysis. Honestly though you could probably throw dice to randomly pick defender powersets, throw 8 of them together, and buzzsaw anything.

Stone Melee would like a word with you. But yeah, WM has a solid feel to it no doubt.

Yep, I always consider that as long as you hit at least 2, which isn't hard, it is worth using.

Don't believe so. Those all seemed to be listed as [all damage]. Soul drain is the only special one I've found so far that lists out all the damage types that it buffs separate and then leaves off toxic.

At level 50 GenCon does 9.38 base damage every 2 seconds. At max soul drain adds +150% damage (10 targets is (50%) +10% x 10)). 9.38 x 1.5 = 14. 14 extra damage in gencon x 10 targets = 140 x 15 tics during that 30 seconds = 2,100 potential damage lost every 30 seconds. Soul drain in top builds can be close to perma. Best case scenario of course, but I'd say that is a concern to me. YMMV. Still doesn't answer my question regardless. It just seems like a strange oversight. Probably because there was no toxic damage available in a secondary when soul drain was created, so they didn't even think about it.

So, looking at this combo and it was looking good until I happened to notice Soul Drain buffs literally every damage type EXCEPT toxic for some reason. Bio's damage aura happens to be...toxic damage. I double checked it on the beta server to make sure it wasn't just a text oversight and confirmed Soul Drain had no effect on the damage of genetic contamination. That is a major drag as of course giving dark melee some AoE damage it otherwise lacks is pretty nice. Should this be reported as an oversight/bug? Or do people think this was done on purpose for some reason? The text of soul drain certainly doesn't say anything about excluding toxic.

An Illusion/rad would be better off speeding Ouro missions and/or TF's to rack up merits to sell I'd think. To me that's a more enjoyable playstyle anyway, but to each their own of course.

Just curious why you have acrobatics? I've taken it on some just for the bit of hold protection, but not really needed in this case since you have force field gen. Clarion seems a bit redundant for same reason. If going for a support build maybe throw in group invisibility instead? It does stack with superior.

If you already have a brute click on powers, combat attributes, base, rt click on damage bonus. You'll be able to monitor it for yourself and get an idea.

Yep, traps is one of the best solo sets going. Both illusion and gravity I'd consider especially strong to go with traps. If you still want the force field type theme, traps is also a good substitute for it since it also has a force field. Have a 50 illusion/traps myself and it is a solo machine.

That and more for stone melee. Stone melee is such a fun smashy feeling set, to me it signifies how a brute should "feel" more than any other melee set. However, it's one and only real AoE power (tremor) is absolute garbage with the now old 3.3 sec activation time and whopping 12.64 base DPA because of it. Added insult that tremor is the tier 9 power that you'd think would feel extra good. Tremor even being lowered to "only" 2.5 seconds activation would make it at least a little more decent. Love seeing the boost for the dom version though!

So, a mind controller? 😀

One tip I read a long time ago back on live forums that can help cut down on that is to set up a macro to put them into an emote stance whenever you are not fighting, something like holdtorch or atease. That stops their yelling which they do when they are idle.

Also doubles its psi resistance. Ninjitsu as a set can get amazing psi resistance because of this.

Minor thing I know, and I know some people love them of course, but I find animated gifs annoying and distracting (like the dancing/flashing avatars people choose). It is why to this day I don't have them enabled in Twitch chats. Any way to disable them here? To be clear, it'd just be an option for those that choose not to see them, I don't mean globally.

Still say there is no need for the 15% to hit penalty aoe holds have at this point, which is worse since it is basically a tohit penalty, not accuracy. It is just insult on top of injury. And I'm not counting on a bunch of IO accuracy set bonuses just to make my pathetic aoe hold hit at a rate that all other powers hit at a baseline. Looking it up on paragonwiki against +4 enemies a normal attack with base 75% tohit gets reduced to 39. The aoe holds have a base of 60% tohit, which I would think means it'd be down to 24%. Not sure where you are getting 43% from? Unless that info is out of date or I'm not understanding it.