Coyote

Sorry, I thought you were talking about PBAoEs, which was how they were flagged before, and which would make it a candidate for a mini-nuke. As Targeted AoE, Flash Freeze isn't as good a nuke option as with PBAoEs, so I misread it because I was thinking of it as a nuke with the PBAoE sets.

That was a great idea, right up until today's patch notes hit 😉 Flash Freeze now accepts Targeted AoE sets rather than PBAoE.

I thought it would be obvious: Hurricane-propelled Forklifts. If you haven't maxed out your Smashing resistance, they'll take your head right off. 😛

Another option is to get Stunned out of the sky by a Rikti Drone that saw through your Invisibility, fall the entire length of the shaft while missing every catwalk, and land on the Hydra's head with 1 HP left from the fall. And survive to get up and run to a safe place, since you were lucky enough to have Group Invisibility up and not a toggle. True story... my first Sewer Trial, and the Charmed badge by going "thump!" on top of the Hydra's head. It's probably used to hero and Rikti bodies falling on it from the sky, though.

Damage procs in the single-target Hold. Energy Font ATO in the AoE Immob (and good End Reduction in it so you can spam it). You can also put a lot of Damage procs in Choking Cloud and turn it into a mild PBAoE damage aura, but it is pretty expensive in terms of End cost... running that with Arctic Air will mean that you have to be very careful with End management and slot heavily for End reduction.

With Gravity, Time's lower damage is a bit less noticeable. But if you're running a lower-damage primary, such as Earth or Ice, you would do a lot better with Storm than with Time. But on teams, personal damage out of you is less important, and Time's greater team defense is more valuable. Soloing, Time is also closer to Storm when the primary's damage is higher, such as from Plant, Fire, Gravity, Dark, etc. In this case, you look at the primary to see if it really benefits from Time's great +Recharge ability... Fire doesn't really, since Fire Imps and Hot Feet are a major source of damage and don't benefit. But Dark does since you get Haunts and Heart of Darkness up faster, and Time's stronger defenses allow you to slot up HoD as a nuke rather than as a control power. So it greatly depends on the primary that you want to use.

Brilliant. I used to do the same thing, and found that I preferred to play masterminds when doing it, since it was easier to control pets than constantly swap targets for controlling. I also added ankle weights... heh, let me tell you, doing the old Positron TF on the treadmill LITERALLY is a contest of endurance 😉 I do suggest that you add another clip or something to clip the shelf onto the other clips or the treadmill... I found that in more intense fights, I might lean one way or hte other and risk tipping the shelf I made, until I attached it more securely.

I do like the balance of a control set that is very strong defensively, to cover Kinetics' lack of personal defense. Also, Kinetics wants good Accuracy, and you can slot Theft of Insight in both Fearsome Stare and Living Shadows.

Great job testing, Sir Myshkin. Also, I'll save some time testing on this, although it's coming from my memory and I'm not going to look in the Wayback Machine for a post with exact details, but here it is: Carrion Creepers is a drop power that drops a MOBILE, INVISIBLE pet. Kind of like Fulcrum Shift dropping a pet that then uses an AoE power around it, except that the CC pet remains for 120 seconds, AND TRAVELS with the character. This pet then pulses out an AoE aura that regularly summons the actual visible pets. Because you usually will summon it near enemies, the initial cast will summon it, it will immediately pulse, and the visible roots/tentacles start to appear, so it looks as if you're summoning the visible pets instead of what I call a "point pet". But, because you're summoning a point pet that lasts for 120 seconds and travels with you, after a while in a new spawn, it will pulse again and bring up the visible CC entities at the new spawn.

Whoops, sorry, my bad. It's LeftDoubleClick, not DClick: LeftDoubleClick "powexec_name Spring Attack$$powexec_name Translocation"

I'm not actually sure that it would proc well at all, since it's a drop power and they sometimes use the 10 second time for toggles rather than the long recharge of the power. However, the sad truth is that even if it uses the power recharge, which would give the proc a 90% activation chance even if you max out the Recharge... it's still probably not worth it. 4 procs would get you to 256 damage, but only available like once a minute. The same type of slotting on a REAL nuke would probably get you to about 500 damage with half the recharge time. Meanwhile, AoEs are up every 10 seconds or better, and probably do in the neighborhood of 150 damage. Given this return, it's not really worth trying to slot it up as a damage/mez nuke. Heart of Darkness works much better even though Shadowfield can also take a lot of procs, because HoD does the same damage per proc IO... but starts off with a Recharge of 90 seconds rather than 240. Shadow Field is a lot worse than HoD, so the only reason to use it is if you have a build that really just has free slots that you're not sure where to put. If that's the case, adding another mini-nuke to the build wouldn't hurt... but that's rarely the case.

I think it's a very good combination. Martial has 2 melee-range AoEs with knockdown, and also 1 other good ranged AoE, but that can be used in melee. So it can fight multiple foes well in melee. Electric does well at draining multiple foes next to it, so it helps protect the character from nearby enemies. And it adds more knockdown. The combination of knockdown, AoE damage, and End drain should work very well. I'm running Electric/Earth, and it has pretty much the same function: Melee AoEs, constant knockdowns. It seems to work very well.

Sure, bind a key to "powexec_name Fire Imps". You could also bind it to DCLICK, so that double clicking a spot summons them. But be careful with that :p... other options like ALT+LCLICK may be safer since they're less likely to be activated by mistake.

Dark Control is a great set, but Poison is... not. But can we do something unusually effective with the pairing? Well, let's consider this gem from the combination of Frosticus and Sir Myshkin: "Anyway, the whole thing I was getting to is the fact that with the damage sets available to Poison's version of the trap, that thing has a hypothetical damage output greater than Blackstar (on Defenders), on a 20-25/s potential recharge (purely just looking at global, and that's half the cooldown of the reduced Blackstar cooldown) for just the initial cast alone, never mind the fact that it just sits there for a while, still going off. Now, that's not enough to make me role a Poison set, but that's very scary." Well, let's see if we can persuade you a bit more, by looking at a couple of other powers from Dark Control. Fearsome Stare does about 52 damage per proc, and is your fight opener. It takes two procs, so you start with 100 damage and Fear the spawn. Now, let's look at Heart of Darkness... this is a PBAoE Stun power. Like other Controller AoE Stuns, it does AoE damage... but being a PB set, this opens it up to taking the PBAoE damage procs. This lets us put 4 damage procs in it (leaving 2 slots for Acc/Stun/Rech since it has a low base accuracy), for 256 damage (we're not going to use the Purple damage proc here). So, we start off the fight with 100 from Fearsome Stare, then go into the mobs and put down Poison Trap. I think the damage from this is about 320 or so, since you're using the purple procs elsewhere. Now, add in Heart of Darkness for 256, and we open the fight with mobs Feared, -22% ToHit Debuff, Stunned (with more ToHit Debuff), and Held. And almost 700 damage. Nice, but not quite where we want to be. Now, add in Sproing Attack. 45 base damage, slotted to 90 (this will get 5 Purple slots since it's the longest Recharge so we want to bring its Recharge down to the other powers, and also it does the most base damage)... 180 with Containment. 1 Purple proc and 1 normal do about 160 damage, so this adds in 340 or so. Now, we're up to a bit over 1000 damage as our AoE opener on every spawn. Plus frankly overkill levels of debuffing and mezzing. Add in Fissure just for amusement (and for FF procs, actually). Dark Control is a very strong defensive set. It's known as being solid single-target damage, also. Now look at this combination's AoE damage and tell me, is this enough to make YOU roll a character who uses the Poison set? 😛 Oh, and for single-target damage, Paralytic Poison slots up to over 300 damage, Dark Grasp and Arcane Bolt are at about 240. The single-target Immob lags as usual, but a single-target chain of DG-AB-PP, DG-AB-immob will average over 100 DPS before any -Resist debuffs are put in. And Haunts add more single-target damage. So... single-target damage looks good. AoE damage looks good. Control looks good. Debuffing looks good. Buffing looks... well, who doesn't want to make their teammates puke? 😛 Run, don't walk, to your nearest Hero Depot and grab one of these bad puppies (and they are kinda bad puppies, there's no way to housebreak them, and there are unnameable liquids ALL over the house once you bring one in, not to mention that you can't teach the Umbra Beast to leave the cats alone) while they're still on the shelves.

One FF proc in Hurricane, with one mob in the area, will average a 4.3% Recharge bonus. It won't help out of combat since it only procs if targets are in the area, but you generally have less need for +Recharge when out of combat. For one slot to get you 4.3%, I think that's probably worth it... but the trick is that this is for ONE mob. More mobs means higher chances to proc. If you could keep 16 mobs in Hurricane's area at all times, the max bonus would be about 38% Recharge bonus. So, if you run around most of the combat and tag mobs with Hurricane, it's totally worth it. If you're going hang at range like a Controller and Immobilize mobs and Hurricane is only a "keep away from us" power, it's not going to be worth all that much. In the end, it's just one slot and probably worth it, but how much benefit you get out of it will be dependent upon how much time you have it hitting mobs.

The Mythical Man-Month: adding developers to a late software project often makes it EVEN LATER. The reality is that adding any member to any development team will automatically slow down that development team for a while as they introduce the new person to the environment, the tools, the job, and the team. Then, you gain back performance later as the person becomes productive. If the person works long enough and well enough, after a while you break even, and then you pull ahead. The more complicated and messy the environment, the longer it takes to get someone to become productive. Given what I read about CoX's messy code and databases, I think that bringing someone onboard to do work is a relatively big step. Leaving aside the legalities. Given the situation, I actually think that instead of looking for coders and visual artists, they should FIRST be looking for experienced project managers, who can be taught the overall situation more quickly without having to learn the exact details, and then let those managers bring people onboard and do basic training with them so that the experienced developers don't have to spend time doing training more than once for the head manager.

Hold shit so it doesn't move, and THEN blow shit up 😛 Compared to Controllers, it has similar plan to Control, but instead of having the ability to add buffs to a team or self, or debuff mobs, it blasts them. Compared to Blasters, it blasts them at range and in melee (like Blasters), but where a few Blasters have some controls (mostly single-target), Dominators have AoE controls and much longer-lasting single-target controls. But Blasters do more damage and especially more up-front damage at the beginning of a fight. Blasters also have more HPs and better regeneration so while they don't stop as much incoming damage, they're better equipped to survive taking some damage.

You mean a professional studio? Or a team of unpaid volunteers? Adding Wind Control with hacked-together visuals that look decent on their own, even if they repeat animations, IS a fine visual. I mean, heck, we have TONS of powers in the game that use the same cast animations and very similar particle effects with each other.

Not sure about the Soulbound. Force Feedback procs on YOU when you drop the power, using the Recharge of the power, so it should have a 90% chance to proc. It's possible that after that, it procs on the Tornado as a standard toggle proc, but we wouldn't know it because it won't have any effects on the Tornado. Edit: To add, Force Feedback in Lightning Storm has the same effect: procs on you with a 90% chance on the drop, and afterwards it may or may not affect the cloud but since it's not affected by Recharge buffs we won't know it.

Another combination of a poor set (Ice) and a decent but situational set (Rad) turns out surprisingly solid defensively. It still has a massive AoE damage hole, though. Ice Control is rightly villified as doing very little on the Control end, as it provides relatively weak Control with a debuff that is not all that useful, and little damage. But there is a way to make it relatively strong in damage mitigation, although it still has some lack of alpha-strike mitigation. The -Recharge from Ice and the knockdowns from Ice Slick both work to reduce the rate of incoming damage, although they don't do much to mitigate the spawn's alpha strike. However, if you open up with the much-maligned Flash Freeze (heh, I know, LOL), you stop most of the spawn from acting for a short while. Arctic Air converts about 50% of incoming damage from Lts/Minions to be redirected at the enemies, BUT it takes about 4 seconds for it to get to this level of protection. But when you Flash Freeze the mobs, jump into their middle (NOT with Spring Attack :p), and start the Rad toggles, that gives AA time to start affecting mobs. So, if you do this and throw the usual 3 Rad powers (RI, EF, LR) at a spawn, then open the actual festivities fight with Ice Slick, you end up with mobs that will hit less often, and then won't get to shoot again for a while... and will attack their side half the time... and will do less damage if they hit you... and will be attacking less often and at staggered rates due to the knockdowns. So incoming damage will be greatly lessened, and you have an AoE heal. The concept basically is a turn-around from the usual idea of Control, which is to stop mobs from acting upon the team... and says "Go ahead and act, but it will be at slow rates, inaccurate, and weak.). This becomes more of a debuffer than a mezzer. What is interesting is that because you're not looking for much Recharge (other than Flash Freeze and Ice Slick), you can make a cheaper build and chase +Recovery (which you WILL need). Speaking of Recovery, you can add to the damage mitigation with Choking Cloud... but I'm not sure if the End drain is manageable with both AA and CC running. Side note: other than Rad, Time and Dark can do the same thing... Time is also a good choice since Distortion Field can take Procs and provide at least a bit of AoE damage.

Another combination that is considered really weak is Mind Control/Trick Arrow. Unlike the Earth/Cold I wrote another post about, this is actually a combination of two sets that really are considered weak separately. Now, what can we make of this? Well, Mind Control is said to be weak in AoE control, largely because its every-spawn controls (Sleep and Fear) are not really... controlling. And unlike Fearsome Stare, Terrify doesn't put out a -ToHit debuff, so it really doesn't do much in a situation where your team is constantly attacking the mobs. It does have TWO AoE shutdown mez options (Mass Confusion and Total Domination), but it's a rare build that can have one up for every spawn. So you end up with a nasty gap in your control in every 3rd spawn... when soloing this is less of an issue, but on a team it's hard to ask them to slow down because your two controls aren't ready. Trick Arrow is generally weak, but it does provide AoE damage (Acid Arrow, slotted with damage procs, and Oil Slick Arrow)... and one good AoE mez, EMP Arrow. Taken by itself, this one AoE mez has a long enough recharge that it's relegated to emergency purposes. But add it to Mind Control's 2 AoEs and the character now has 3 AoE shutdown mezzes, and can cycle them from spawn to spawn even on most fast-moving teams. And if teams are moving so fast that you can't rotate them, then odds are that the team doesn't care about mezzing. Mind Control always solos well, due to a lot of good single-target mezzing options, but its single-target damage is not all that high (lack of pet at high levels, and it's a bit harder to get Containment in some cases). Ice Arrow adds in single-target damage if procced up (about 340 damage with 5 damage procs), and the rest of TA adds in -Resist and some AoE damage, exactly what Mind needs. It's hard to make a really good character out of these sets, but when you slot up Dominate with some Damage procs (see the Earth/Cold post for how Fossilize is slotted) and add in Ice Arrow, you can make a pretty good single-target attack chain. With some AoE available from Trick Arrow, the character becomes able to solo tolerably well. On teams, it goes from pretty weak control since Mind has an AoE control gap, to pretty good control since it can now build for and cycle two AoE Holds and one Confuse. This is one of the few ways that I'd run Mind as a Controller, and it's also one of the better uses of Trick Arrow as a Controller secondary.

Some recent discussion about weak control sets made me consider putting up some combinations that are considered in some way ineffective, and explaining how it may be possible to build solid characters despite the deficiencies. First on the list is Earth/Cold... actually, both of these sets are considered good, but only for teaming. Earth puts out a lot of AoE control, and so is useful on teams at all levels (though of course at high level, actual control is not all that useful). Cold puts out a lot of defense, which is very useful at low levels, and at high levels it remains useful with high -Resist (and good -Regen, though this is less relevant). But... the usual complaint is that Earth is too low damage to solo well. However, I have a build that I've started, which looks as if it will be able to solo well enough... it lacks AoE, and it is hard to add much of that to an Earth build. But single-target damage is surprisingly good, when built properly. The keys to the build are: 1: Fossilize with 3+ Damage procs. There are two good versions, both start with a single Acc/Dam/End (which could be changed to Acc/Dam if preferred). Because both Earth and Cold put out a lot of -Def, more Accuracy is not needed. With 3 Procs (1 Purple) at level 50, Fossilize does about 230 damage with Containment (still 200 without), putting it at over 100 DPA. This base, before any -Resist effects. I have 3 Damage procs to leave room for 2 Chance to Hold procs in order to have about an 80% chance to 1-shot Hold a Boss (because /Cold doesn't have much personal defense boosts), but there is an option to add another two Damage procs and improve the damage by about 82. 2: Arcane Bolt with 3 Damage procs (1 Purple, which is why Fossilize only has 1). This does about 274 damage, putting it about 120 DPA. It also has a Force Feedback for more Recharge, leaving 2 slots for Acc, Dam, and End. 3: Infrigidate (yes, I'm serious) with 3 Damage procs and Achilles Heel. The power goes from 0 DPA to about 160 DPA (190 damage with 1.188 Activation Time). And it procs Achilles 90% of the time, for an average -18 Res. And with good Global Recharge, it's up often enough to refresh AH before it drops. We round out the single-target attack chain with the weak Stone Prison, which brings up the rear at about 60 DPA. The overall chain, repeating each power once, does right about 100 DPS before -Res effects. And, unlike the usual problem with single-target attacks from Controllers, the great majority of the damage is immediate, so no need to wait 6 seconds for that minion to slowly get crushed to death. It could also be improved, as noted above, by swapping Chance to Hold procs out for Damage procs. So, overall, a known solid team combination and terrible soloer... is not all that bad at soloing. I wouldn't put it near the top of Controller builds for soloing, but it's not that bad, and especially at lower levels, all of the -Def really makes up for the lack of Accuracy from set bonuses that you don't yet have room to slot. It can certainly solo most AVs since Stoney can take 2 Resist and 2 Defense IOs, making him extremely tough with the Ice shields up and he'll hold aggro, it can solo at +2 starting early and up to +4 before Incarnate level (just don't go above x2 or a kill-all mission will be painful), and while it doesn't have much for personal defenses its Controls should be enough against most foes.

Yes, that is a nice feature, but most mobs don't use toggles, which is why the ability to shut them off isn't a big deal. I want to make a higher % of a mob's resistances and defenses be based on toggle effects rather than on automatic powers. Although, I wonder if the original reason for making them automatic might not have been due to processing and memory... it takes a lot less calculation to have an automatic power with 20% resist to Smashing damage, than to run a toggle and have regular End loss and recovery from every mob in a mission. Maybe only do it for the "tank"-type mobs?

I think it would be a great improvement if more mobs got defensive toggles, especially at high levels. Then, End Drain and Stuns/Holds would actually be useful, if you could get an effective 20 or 30% damage increase by shutting off the toggles of mobs. We'd have more use for End Drain, and Controllers would be less marginalized in steamrolling teams.

I think that Illusion is by far the best.