Sirrocco

...and for the people this guide is for? That really, really doesn't matter. With the exception of the freebies off the START vendor, Procs are very specific enhancements that they almost certainly won't be able to afford soon, often requiring levels that they're going to take a while to reach, and an understanding of one of the more complicated corners of the game engine to know what to slot them in. That's the whole point of this guide. There are lots of guides out there that will tell you "This is how you fast-forward to endgame ASAP, and then the optimal choices to make for endgame". That's not what this is. This is a guide that's trying to offer some helpful advice on taking those first few stumbling steps for those who *don't* want to skip past the learning experience.

Why would it miss the buff on your own team? You tide pool, you whitecap into the tide pool, the enemy focuses on you for a (hopefully brief) moment, and then the rest of the melee comes in and starts getting tide pool buffs. Is that not how it works? Or if you don't like taking alpha strikes, you tide pool, you let the other poor schmuck run in and get all the attention (thus getting tide pool buffs), *then* you whitecap in and etc etc etc. So, that's all useful stuff for the "how do I play my character" question. The question I'm trying to ask is "how do I get the information that will help me figure out how to play my character for myself". I feel like for everything by the support trees, I can mostly get it by feel. Some pools are more complicated than others, but I can manage it for basically all of them. For the support pools, though, especially the heavy debuff parts, I can't.

I'm trying to run the Marine pool, and with a lot of it being debuffs that have a particular duration, i'm having real trouble understanding which bits to prioritize, which bits are useful at which times, and so forth. I like to get an understanding of my powers in play. For damage-dealing, this is really easy. I take swings, I can see how much end it eats and how much damage it does, how often it hits and when it refreshes. Some of the secondary effects get a little wobbly but it's pretty straightforward. DoTs aren't much harder. Heals and HoTs are very similar. Endurance management abilities (in both directions) are also pretty straightforward. Resists are manageable, defense is a little iffy but I can work with it if I pay enough attention. temporary buffs on myself require a degree of attention, but I can work with them as well as I need to to get a gist of what's going on. CC is actually pretty easy because it's nice and obvious, and I can see how it reduces the enemy's ability to function and what other effects it has. -Recharge is a bit harder to track on properly, but I can at least see how I'd come to understand it. Always-on buffs and debuff auras I can look at, say "yet, this is probably worthwhile on general principles", slot endurance management appropriately and mostly just have them on full-time. All of this stuff I can work with. Then we get to duration-based debuffs, and my ability to understand what I'm doing and which ones are more important and what to slot for and what to open with and all of that stuff just falls apart. I can basically figure that the stuff that I'm doing is generally useful, and I should do it, but I'm having real difficulty getting that gut understanding on things like "How long is this effect lasting?", "Who did I actually manage to stick that to anyway?", "Were they or were they not in my cone, and what would I have to do to fix that?", and "How significant *was* that effect?" That, in turn, means that my ability to figure out useful rotations, figure out reasonable slotting, know what things I should be using to burn through minion packs versus prioritizing against single individual threats... it's all pretty much a mess. I want to learn, because it seems like it's an interesting game to play, but it's a game based on deeper understanding that I straight-up don't have, and in-the-moment information that I have real trouble keeping track of. I figure that for Defender mains, this is all bread-and-butter stuff. You have to have solutions for this already... so I'm asking for some clue. I'm currently most directly concerned with Marine, but I'm sure that the same basic skillset of "how do I make sense of this stuff anyway" applies to Trick Arrow and Poison and probably Kinetics and almost certainly a few others as well. So suggestions of specific advice for specific powers aren't unwelcome or anything, but mostly what I'm interested in is knowing how to put together the tools for figuring this all out for myself. I mean, *is* there a way for coming to understand it intuitively? Is it just all spreadsheet madness, all the way down? I sure hope not, but if it is, then I do what to know that. Thank you for whatever time or attention you see fit to offer.

Followup on the last - mostly this ahs just been an annoyance, but there is one particular thing that it prevents. Mistress Eva's intervention prevents me from switching missions. I'd need to click on the mission I want, click on the select mission button, and then click on the "yes, I want to abandon progress" button all before I get another "actually, you're obsessed with a contact that you can't see" tick. So... no resetting the mission, no being able to quickly swap around difficulty and re-try, nothing like that. It is still possible to abandon the current mission at the contact, but there's no guarantee that you'll be able to get the same mission again quickly.

Bah. Well, it is what it is. Presumably it's at least no worse for these situations than standard power pool stealth.

Okay. I thank you all for your input. I actually went Illusion/Thermal. Thermal... it's like cold, but the shields are resist shield rather than Def shields. I'm thinking that'll help the kid hit his resist caps that much easier, because I'm not really thinking he'll get there from there without them - not with the kind of slotting we're likely to see during expected playtime. It also comes with two early heals, and, if I make it to 16, an ally rez. It's nothing all that involved, but I feel like a lot of the stuff its' giving me is stuff that I want. Admittedly, my res hole in toxic lines up with his res hole in toxic, but that just means that we need to stay away from Vahzilock. The res weakness to cold... well, there just isn't all that much cold damage in the game in the first place, honestly. We're planning on mostly running storylines, for those sweet, sweet Merit points. All advice that's talking about things like proc-bombs is imagining much higher budgets for enhancements than we're actually working with. there's a decent chance that we won't ever slot anything more complicated than a common IO. It's possible that we'll buy a class ATO or two with merit points, if we get that far. I do intend to slot for endurance, and talk the kidn through it. One of my mains is a Dark/Rad tanker. I know about slotting for endurance. I grabbed illusion because looking at it, it looked like one of the major illusion drawbacks was the tendency for illusory damage to heal itself over time. Well, if I have a Brute tearing out their liver, then that'll help drop them before that gets to be a problem, right? So far it's sort-of working. We'll see how it plays out. I'm looking forward to having superior Invisibility to play with once we hit level 8. It says it doesn't break on attack. If it also doesn't break on glowy interaction, it's going to enable *so much* ninja-running of missions. It also seems like the sort of thing that's useful for keeping the attention on the big guy. For those confused about my initial logic train, it went sort of like this: - My kid and I decide that we want to play this game together. - I explain the options to the kid, and he decides he likes the idea of a Brute. A bit more discussion of what he wants and a bit of research on my side, and we settle on Savage/Fire... which, as I understand it, is a pretty popular Brute build, and not just for farming. - I'm trying to figure out what to play to work alongside that. It occurs to me that I was avoiding Controllers because I'd heard of their difficulties while soloing, and this was an opportunity to try them out while *not* soloing. Sounds good.

Eh... the real thing is that I want to try to play with the control power sets a bit. Like, I do a *lot* of solo, and I've done a lot of digging into the support power pools of various sorts to feed my mastermind habit, and Defender is basically just... that but better at it. The Control power pools are something that I have zero experience with, and I'd kind of like to change that. Well, their main issue (as I understand it) is that they're real bad at solo, because they can't keep up with the necessary damage pressure... and I have a brute buddy who can ensure that plenty of damage gets done. If the real answer is "This is a bad choice. Controllers are bad at low levels." or "This is a bad choice. Controllers need more than one ally." or "This is a bad choice. Controllers are inevitably complicated to play." then... well, okay. I can adjust based on that if I need to... but the way I'm seeing it, this might be my best opportunity to get some experience over on that side of things, and I'd like to try to work with that.

So, I'm setting up to paly paired characters alongside a Savage/Fire Brute as a bit of father/son bonding time. Savage/Fire is a pretty classic Brute package that's resist-based, a little light on the protection, heavy on the damage, and even more interested in blitzing from one fight to the next than normal Brutes are. I've largely been playing solo up until now, and the whole "controllers are terrible at solo" thing has kept me from really even looking into the archetype in a meaningful way... but if this is a paired character, then that might actually work out pretty well. So... I could use some advice. I know that I want at least some healing in my secondary, ideally early on, but I'm thinking that the "single-target not you" heals might actually be better for my purposes than the "area heal yourself and everyone else" ones, as long as I can keep from stealing aggro too badly. I don't want to depend *too* hard on my kid's aggro management skills. He's very nearly brand new to the game. I know I care more about the early game, even the very early game, than the late game. I play a lot of alts, and not one of them has gotten past 25, and I honestly don't expect this pairing to get even that far. If it's a setup with a very solid early game that just kind of whimpers out at the higher levels, I'm prepared to be happy with that. "But it has a really cool capstone" isn't a huge draw. I'm somewhat worried about complexity. I have an expectation that playing a controller is kind of complicated, and... well, one or my favorite archetypes is Mastermind, and there are mastermind secondaries I don't play (like, say, Marine and Trick Arrow) because they just take way more attention and control than I'm prepared to deal out even when my minions are mostly taking care of themselves. So *that's* a thing. I'm quite fond of toggles and autopowers, but I understand that there's not but so many of those in controller space. At the same time, I *do* want a character who's doing *something*. In particular, I want to be doing something interesting in the fight that goes beyond just "keep the shields up, stay in aura range" or whatever the equivalent is. We are not interested in full builds. We will not be twinking anything. We'll be figuring stuff out as we go and paying our own way, and probably not even using all that much from the P2W vendor. I expect we'll be playing blueside, and I do know the available missions in the appropriate level ranges pretty well. Suggestions about "this build is great at fighting X but not Y" are cool. (Example from the Tanker side: Electric armor is fantastic against standard clockwork. It's really not great against Vahzilock.) So yeah. I have a fairly solid grasp of the support pools. I got *nothing* on the control pools, and I also don't know even the bare minimum about the basic stuff you need to know to play a controller well. Mostly, I'm hoping for suggestions about primary, secondary, combos of the two (if that even matters) and any random bits of advice on playing a controller properly in this environment. Explanations of why this or that option is good or quick explanations of the differences are even better than just "I suggest you play X". Thank you for your time.

Surely your mastery is without parallel and your understanding beyond reproach. Perhaps you should write your own guide.

Bah. Ugh. I'm new at reading City of Data, and I keep getting it wrong. Fine. One more edit.

Ah? I was misinformed, then. Good to know before I started slotting those enhancements. I go in and try to modify accordingly. ...and now I can see where on City of Data it indicated that. It was a very small icon in a place I wouldn't have any thought of havign looked, nor necessarily understood if I'd found it. Still... good to know that sort of thing for the future. I'm not sure where you're getting Fissure from on a tanker. If you meant Fault, then that's only Mag 1. In order to perma Mag 4, you'd have to do something like double the recharge and also double the effect time, plus whatever you need to do to punch through the level difference and any specific resist to stun they might have. If you're managing *that*, then you have a much better enhancement game than I do. On electric melee, for Thunder Strike, you're looking at a 50% chance of mag 2 for 5-6 seconds, with a base 20 second recharge... so you basically need to fit another doubling in there somehow. Hand Clap is running a 100% chance of an 8 second mag 2 on a recharge of 30, but it almost doesn't need Dark Armor, because it also has another 50% chance of mag 2 on top of that, so half the time it's hitting 4s all by itself. I can see why SS tankers are so fond of it. Devastating Blow from radiation is doing better than Fault on a single target, though you can't really make it as reliable. It beats Thunder Strike handily, but Hand Clap is in a zone of its own. Atom Smasher isn't at all reliable, but it is still nice to have.

Currently playing as a pure Praetorian (resistance). I finished out the First Ward storylines, looked around for available contacts on the "find contacts" list, and noticed that Mistress Eva (Talos Island) was on the list. I thought that it might be interesting to see what she had to say, so I hit the "teleport to contact" button. It teleported me to the contact, the map server complained (probably because I wasn't a hero), and it immediately teleported me back to where I was. Well, okay. Fine. The problem is that now, whenever I try to select *any other* contact, it de-selects that contact and selects Mistress Eva almost immediately afterwards. This is not preventing me from playing. I'm still able to get missions, to complete missions, and so forth. I suspect that I can solve this little problem by just converting over to being a hero and actually going to visit Mistress Eva... but, honestly, I'd like to work my way through the Night Ward mission set before I do that. Replicating this problem should be pretty easy as long as you have a praetorian of the correct level. It's possible that they may have to be rebel - I don't know who Mistress Eva shows up as a contact for. My character with this problem is Dark Core over on Everlasting. I hope you find this helpful.

I just today learned about a kind of awesome thing hidden in the Dark Armor/Radiation Melee combo, and I wanted to share, because it's awesome. For those of you who already know how this magnitude vs protection thing works, you already know most of this,.. but I only just found this out today, and I've been actually working on understanding how this game works for a while, so I figure that's not all of you. So, first of all, there's the very straightforward "I get to have two damage auras" thing. Dark armor is one of the armor types with a damage aura. Dark, Elec, and Fire all get it at level 1, then Stone at 6, Ice at 12, and Bio at 22. Meanwhile, the only two melee sets that get damage auras are radiation at 24 and spines at 18. Irradiated ground is 8 ft radius. Dual damage auras is kind of fun, and having one from the very beginning is great. This is the reason I built the character in the first place, and I've been quite happy with him. Admittedly, I *have* had to put a fair bit of thought and attention into endurance management, but that's the game you sign up for when you take Dark Armor, and I've been enjoying it. It turns out that there's another more hidden synergy. Dark Armor has a disorient aura. Radiation melee has some high-level attacks that disorient. This is actually important. First of all, for those of you who've not had the pleasure, disorient is awesome. A disoriented enemy takes no actions. They stop whatever they were doing, stand up, and wander sort of aimlessly and slowly around, until they stop being disoriented. Damaging them does not break the effect. The only real downside is that we're inflicting this via aura, and it's possible for the enemy to (eventually) wander out of said aura. That's it. So... disorient is a crowd control effect, which means that it has something called a magnitude. It also has a duration. In the case of Oppressive Gloom, the magnitude is 2, and the duration is (AFAICT) exactly as long as the repeat cycle on the aura, which means that anything that sits in the aura is going to be under a magnitude 2 effect at all times. Enemies have a stat called protection with respect to these effects. In order for them to actually do anything, the total magnitude of effects of that type applied to the enemy must be greater than or equal to their protection. Protection is tied very directly to tier. Magnitude 2, for example, means that it'll stick on all minions, and all underlings/small, and no one else. Now, there are ways to fix this. The obvious thing to do is to try to use enhancers. Disorient enhancers will increase duration (thus enabling overlaps) and recharge enhancers (and other methods of improving recharge) will let you use your powers more frequently. Unfortunately, neither one will help with Oppressive Gloom. It only allows for one stack at a time per caster, and recharge boosters aren't any more meaningful on toggles than they are on auto effects. If you have a friend who also has Oppressive Gloom, the two auras will stack just fine, but there's no other way to push OG itself. It does the thing it does very reliably, and is not interested in doing anything else. This is where the other synergy between Radiation Melee and Dark Armor comes in. Radiation Melee has two attacks that also disorient. Devastating Blow is a single-target attack that hands out a magnitude 3 disorient for roughly 10-12 seconds (depending on level) at a 60% chance with a 17 second recharge time, and Atom Smasher is a PBAoE attack that hands out a magnitude 2 disorient for roughly 6-7 seconds at a 25% chance with a 22 second recharge time. There's nothing you can do about those percent chances, but you can add disorient duration enhancements and probably *should* be adding recharge enhancements, to cram on more time under the effects, and (if you're quite lucky) possibly get situations where they stack on themselves or each other, cranking it further. It is worth noting at this point that level differentials ("the purple patch") have a direct effect on mez duration (the thing we're talking about here). So if you're trying the overlap trick on yellow and orange enemies, know that you're going to need to add on more of those duration boosts to get it done. Some of them are likely to have resistance as well, which *also* directly reduces the duration. As far as I can tell, OG itself doesn't care much about any of this, because the duration it's throwing around is significantly longer than the frequency with which it fires, but whatever powers you get off of your secondary sure will. Essentially, then, if you don't have Dark Armor, then Radiation Melee's two most powerful attacks have a chance of shutting down minions and maybe lieutenants for a little while. It's cool, but not that big a deal. If you *do* have dark armor, those same attacks can shut down bosses, and if you get everything lined up just right and get lucky with it, even elite bosses. It won't last all that long, but every moment an elite boss is staggering around being ineffectual is a good moment, right? Now, if you don't care about doubling up on damage auras? If you think that the idea of a tanker specialized in disorient is awesome, and you want to build for that? Well, honestly, it's not hard to find. Fully 11 of the 22 Tanker secondaries come with some form of Disorient baked in, with some of them fielding significantly more disorient than Radiation does. Three powers in particular that I'm personally aware of (now) are Stone Melee (Fault), Super Strength (Hand Clap) and Electric Melee (Electric Clap). Each of those powers is clearly designed as a heavy mez power - dealing a solid 2 disorient 100% of the time, and a 50% to disorient further, and I suspect that with enough boosts to recharge and disorient duration, you could get every one of them to 100% uptime... which means that every boss and below you fight could be permanently under the effects of disorient, and every archvillain/hero/monster could be disoriented a third of the time. Getting your magnitude up to 7 for the Elite Bosses could be a trick, but that kind of thing is what friends are for. Of the Primary power pools, though, the only one that offers any disorient at all is Fiery Aura, and that's only as a side-effect on its self-rez power. So practically speaking, if you want to enjoy the benefits of disorient stacking, it's Dark Armor or nothing. /************************/ Credit goes out to Psi and Terminal over on the City of Roleplay discord for being willing to take the time to explain to me how this all worked. Much appreciated. Further credit to @Psyonico for catching some errors and misunderstandings I'd had along the way and pointing out the Electric, Stone, and Super Strength versions of the combo.

I played thugs/traps for a while. It was okay. I suspect it would be better in high level play with the right enhancements, but I'm still kind of a newb. I've started a new character with thugs/time, and it's been working very well. I'm about to hit 20, and the Time powerset has been very satisfying. Now, if only the arsonist would quit picking fights and dying in them... and maybe develop a better fashion sense?

Thugs/empathy. You're a massive fanboy/simp, just following the bug guy around and cheering him on.