Maelwys

I'm going to highlight something in particular here. This is the build for "Ampere Avenger"; your Elec/Elec Defender: Defenders have a low damage scalar and their Blast sets have minimal CC. The best way to get milage out of their Offensive powersets is to Procbomb them. By not aiming for maximum damage output from your Defenders' blasts, you're unfairly favouring the Plant/Elec Controller even before the Top-Tier performance of Plant is considered; because Controller CC effects do not rely on specific slotting and neither does their additional damage from Containment (whilst your Controller's Carrion Creepers and Fly Trap would both really benefit from being Procced out - neither will *drastically* affect their Survivability or Clear Times unless they're soloing). Your Elec Blast Defender's attacks are currently dealing damage like this (Assault + Interface active, but no Vigilance or Hybrid): Charged Bolts: 84.79 Lightning Bolt: 132.7 Zapp (Quick): 185.2 Tesla Cage: 47.86 Ball Lightning: 84.71 Short Circuit: 75.14 Thunderous Blast: 316.3 Compare that to another Elec Blast Defender build like this one Defender - Sonic_Elec (Energize+TCage).mbd (again, Assault + Interface active, but no Vigilance or Hybrid and ignoring the effects of the Primary) Charged Bolts: 99.76 Lightning Bolt: 239.4 Zapp (Quick): 304 Tesla Cage: 316.9 (more than 6 times higher!!) Ball Lightning: 178.5 (more than 2 times higher and applies a -res proc) Short Circuit: 134.5 (also applies a -res proc) Thunderous Blast: 496.9 (They also have sufficient recharge levels that their single target attack chain is seamless, and the Nuke is up every ~51s rather than every ~116s) That second toon's Elec Blast attacks can also drain the endurance of whole mobs in a few seconds and keep them at zero indefinitely if needed, but they will be contributing far more damage than the first toon as well as applying a rather decent chunk of -res. Even Tesla Cage (a power which is traditionally viewed as skippable for many top-tier Elec Blast builds!) will be doing far more for the team as long as you can keep your 'Static' stacks up. I'm not trying to say that all the builds in your testing ought to be min-maxed and purpled out. But I wanted to highlight that the performance of the same Defender Blast set can very WILDLY whenever the character is built by two different people with two different goals; even if you completely discount any differences from things like Secondary and Pool Powers and Team composition etc. So at best you're going to be observing what the performance of one particular predefined character is, not what a powerset - let along a combination of powersets - on each AT is actually capable of.

Whilst I agree that the influence of Random Team Composition and Mission Variability could in theory be drastically reduced to the point of negligiblility by running a sufficiently high number of trials... I think that you're missing a major issue here with Slotting and Powerset Variability. You seem to be intentionally matching Support Powersets between the Defender and Controller ATs. Aside from a few outliers such as Dark Miasma and Dark Affinity, this is an achievable goal. However if you're also trying to factor in the effects of the Offensive powersets and Pool powers then in order to make it a fair test you would have to consider the effects of ALL POSSIBLE offensive Powersets - and ideally in combination with each Support set. Otherwise you can and will end up in a scenario where the Offensive Powerset that you arbitrarily pick for one AT will drastically outperform the Offensive Powerset that you arbitrarily pick for the other AT. And to a lesser extent the same is going to be true for pool powers. As an example: Plant Control and Arsenal Control are both consistently top of the charts for Controllers. They have highly Procable AOE attacks, Short-Recharge AOE Confuses, a variety of CC and useful pets. Plant can even function as a Ghetto Healer with a Panacea Proc in Spirit Tree (and Arsenal's pet gets hardcapped resistances and Taunt). The performance ceiling of those sets is drastically higher than the likes of Ice or Symphony Control. However most Controller Primaries (with the notable exception of Illusion before Perma Phantom Army) can lockdown at least two full enemy spawn groups indefinitely. Conversely, Dark Blast is about the only Defender set that can drastically improve team survivability, and when procced up it can also deal reasonable levels of Single Target damage (whilst Elec Blast can theoretically floor mob Endurance and Recovery, unfortunately only the toughest of targets will have their Blue Bars bottom out before their Red Bars eg. EBs and AVs - and these days those foes can still attack with zero endurance anyway!). All of the other Defender sets have at best a few middling low-Mag ST CC abilities, but bring wildly different levels of additional damage to the table (Ice Blast is good due to probability, Beam Rifle and Dual Pistols and Sonic Blast are good due to -res stacking, etc). Likewise, Defenders getting higher base scalars for debuffs/buffs means taking specific pool powers such as Weaken Resolve and Spirit Ward grants more benefit to them. Aside from different raw base scalar numbers on pool powers; there is going to be a big difference in how specific pool powers mesh with different powersets. A Kinetics that can Combat Teleport into melee range for a split second to drop Fulcrum Shift and then immediately reappear at safe distance is going to be bags more survivable than one that relies on Sprint and Combat Jumping. And the same goes for any Defender with a PBAoE attack, especially a Nuke. In short, unfortunately I really think there are too many variables here for you to "average out" unless you run an unfeasibly large number of tests (e.g. MANY THOUSANDS)... so as things stand I very much suspect that the only way you're going to be able to draw any useful unbiased conclusions here is if the variables are drastically reduced by standardising as much of the build (and the missions and level range and team composition) as possible. However I appreciate doing that would not make for as much fun when playing your way through all these toons, and I'm sure the eventual writeup will at least be entertaining even if it won't be possible to draw many unbiased conclusions from the data set. So by all means continue to have at it.

You should be able to double or even triple it if you slot Triage for recharge, as last I checked you can have multiple Triage Beacons out (Disclaimer: I haven't played around much on a Bot/Traps since the i27p5 changes, but I regularly use a Panacea Proc in Spirit Ward on my /Cold and /FF toons as well as in Spirit Tree on my Plant Dominator!) but yeah it's one of those weird edge cases where the actual activation rate of the proc is considerably higher than the radius of the power suggests on paper. Pseudopet shenanigans!

95% Hit Rate vs regular unbuffed +3 enemies is the first goal to shoot for, as that covers you for the vast majority of PVE content. You can also set enemy level difference in Mids and eyeball it before building - you'll almost always be fighting things that are +3 to you or lower (Lv50+1 PC against Lv54 NPCs). Having an on-demand ToHit buff and/or ToHit Debuff resistance can help too in order to counter specific enemy abilities- that's the main reason Focused Accuracy is still beneficial to take for many melee toons. But the Geas of the Kind Ones accolade can fill in in a pinch.

A quick eyeball shows Mu Elec Fences with a >30% and >20% chance for the two aforementioned stun procs to kick in, so that may be worth testing too providing you can put up with the S/L/E res armor!

Drones are pretty self sustainable, but the Protector Bots and AssBot both guzzle endurance like it's going out of fashion. Triage Beacon can help here if you stick a Panacea Proc in it, especially whenever you have multiple copies of it out. With procced Triage Beacon plus softcapped bots the maintenance drone can comfortably handle top up healing without you needing to dip into the medicine pool. Don't bother slotting Upgrade Robot, just stick a Preventive Medicine unique in its default slot... but *do* slot Equip Robot for +Res. Drones really need ED capped Accuracy to reliability hit +3 enemies (since these are +5 to the drones) even with Supremacy and slotted Tactics. The Acid Mortar can help make up for this vs a tough Single Target but not vs hordes of mooks. To figure out what your henchmens' hit rate will be in Mids you'll need to unslot any Accuracy Set Bonuses (and Kismet if applicable) then raise your enemy level slider to +5 (Drones) and +4 (Protector Bots) instead of the usual +3 baseline. Regarding KB>KD, yes, you'll want to stick a convertor in the AssBot otherwise its Swarm Missiles become very annoying as it punts stuff out of its own Burn Patches let alone /Traps other placeables... however thankfully none of the other pets require one any more. The Explosive Strike Damage proc adds a fair bit to the Drones' ST damage and the AssBot's AOE damage. The Soulbound Allegiance Proc can go in either, although personally I prefer the Drones. ...but I have to ask: why Dark Pit over Thunder Strike or Oppressive Gloom? It's not as if being in melee range is going to be much of an issue with softcapped defense and BG mode, and you'll already likely be toebombing TripMine and Poison Trap... and picking Mu Mastery would also let you slot Electrifying Fences with both the Energy Manipulator and Debilitative Action procs.

+ Lv53 Acc/Dmg HO + Lv50+5 Dmg IO + Lv53 Acc/EndMod DSync + Lv50+5 EndMod IO + 2x Lv50+5 Heal IO If you really need more Recovery, then swap the Lv50+5 Dmg IO for a Theft of Essence Proc. If you don't want to shell out for HOs and don't care about enhancing the damage you could go with: + 2x Lv50+5 Efficacy Adaptor Set IOs (Acc/EndMod, EndMod) + 2x Lv50+5 Touch of the Nictus Set IOs (Acc/Heal, Heal) + Theft of Essence Proc + Power Transfer Proc Proc activation chance every 10 seconds per enemy in range are: 26.32% for the Power Transfer 30.70% for the Theft of Essence

Its raw effects are still pretty weak, mainly due to Purple Patch and Archvillain Resistance negating a large portion of Debuff effects. IMO the AoE -res debuffs are the best part... although unlike Tar Patch from Dark (for example) they don't stack with themselves. Lots of its powers take a fair number of useful procs though.

No worries. If you do use that bind setup then one thing I'd recommend is making a 3rd text file which periodically "resets" things (just in case the Button5 binds get out of synch and start trying to trigger Eclipse before the teleport!). Append loading it to your regular movement or travel power activation keys etc. and it'll keep things running smoothly. I use a Joypad most of the time, and some of my characters have pretty crazy bind setups. However by far the worst is my Fire/Ice/Fire Blaster - they simply have too many useful clicky powers to comfortably spread across a single set of joypad + mouse buttons... so I created a series of overwriting keybind files which make one of the joypad's shoulder buttons act as a "modifier key" + whilst you hold that button down all the other joypad buttons trigger different powers than normal. The real trick was getting it set up so that if that shoulder button is released without pressing any of the other joypad buttons then it toggles on and off the character's main Travel Power + does slightly different things depending on whether or not they currently have "Hover" enabled. In total I think it's 9 different rotating multiline bind text files for a single button...

It's possible to have a bind that activates twice with a single button push (once on button PRESS, and then again on button RELEASE) but in order to get it to do two different things you'll need to swap the bind's content midway through the button push (via loading a new bind text file!) e.g: [c:\coh\binds\file1.txt] BUTTON5 "+down$$-down$$powexec_location target Starless Step$$bind_load_file_silent c:\coh\binds\file2.txt" [c:\coh\binds\file2.txt] BUTTON5 "+down$$-down$$powexec_name Eclipse$$bind_load_file_silent c:\coh\binds\file1.txt"

Also, don't be surprised if sometimes whenever you throw out a Siren's Song; it seems like the sleep doesn't work. Whilst the damage built into Siren's Song doesn't override its own sleep effect... unfortunately additional damage from other sources such as your Interface Incarnate slot will still wake 'em up. So if you ever find yourself soloing on higher difficulty levels it can make sense to slot a NON DAMAGING interface slot like Diamagnetic instead of Degenerative/Reactive. Personally I'd still lean towards a different secondary; but sometimes thematics trump performance 🙂

After the rework Sonic Blast really only needs a few Single Target powers alternating each other in order to cap out the -res debuffs. Realistically you can get by with just Scream and Shriek and Dreadful Wail; plus Siren's Song and/or Aim. (And perhaps a procbombed Weaken Resolve...) Shockwave and Siren's Song and Aim don't inflict any -res; but the rest all inflict Sonic Vibrations #1 (-12% res for 12s; doesn't stack) plus one other type: Scream and Shriek and Shout and Screech all inflict Sonic Vibrations #2 (-8% res for 12s; stacks up to 4 times) Howl inflicts Sonic Vibrations Wide (-8% res for 12s; doesn't stack) Dreadful Wail inflicts Sonic Vibrations Extensive (-8% res for 20s; doesn't stack) Siren's Song also deals decent damage now, on top of inflicting a Mag3 sleep. As for Sonic Resonance? Skip Sonic Cage and Sonic Repulsion and maybe Clarity (personally I take it, as IMO being able to preemptively stack enough mez protection on your allies to let them ignore the likes of Ghost Widow's Mag100 hold is worth the power pick). Slot the rest. Even Liquefy is worth taking now ever since its recharge time was drastically reduced - it wants ED-capped recharge and -ToHit. My closest relevant toon is a Sonic/Elec/Mu: Defender - Sonic_Elec (Energize+TCage).mbd zDefender - Sonic_Elec (AidOther+NoSJ).mbd (I flick between ArcaneWard+Energize and AidOther+AidSelf; but the former is probably a smidge better performing)

Assuming you're always running premades alternating Barrier/Clarion? Sure. Often the TauntBot on those teams won't even have to turn their armor toggles on. However a Soloist (or PUGer) with a more traditional view of a Tanker may well want as much cushioning between them and oral carpetburns as possible. Since the OP specifically requested "super sturdy, Offensive mode bio tanks", I suspect in this case it's More Defense > More Dakka + let the 2nd build handle the 4-star stuff...

TBF if the OP's goal wasn't "super sturdy" but "high damage", I'd recommend Bio/BA in a heartbeat. BattleAxe's primary drawback is the exceedingly high endurance consumption; but Bio tankers tend to sit at the Recovery Hardcap. (e.g. Just build for decent levels of uptime on DNA Siphon + Parasitic Aura and Procbomb everything. Maps melt...)

For showing some numbers I'll link this: as well as this for an up-to-date build: ...but to answer your question: this will really depend on exactly what "sturdy enough" means for you and what secondary powersets you're willing to use. It's rather easy for BIO to cap S/L resistance and softcap F/C/E/N Defence; even in Offensive mode. Plus lots of Regeneration, Recovery and Absorb. However it's much trickier to cap the other resistances (with the possible exception of Toxic) and S/L or Melee Defense. If you choose an offensive powerset with a +Defense move like Broadsword, Staff, Titan Weapons or Martial Arts then it gives you far more wiggle room. However many people either hate the animations/visuals/etc on some of those; or don't want them due to character concept.

Also FWIW I've been playing around with a Water/ Corr a bit recently. It's hitting a very nice sweet spot for me somewhere between the AoE capability of Fire Blast, the Procability of Ice Blast and the sustainability of Dark Blast. Mix of ST and AoE, a Ranged Nuke, a Scourge-friendly "Rain" power in Whirlpool (despite the animation being ground-centric!), a Self-Heal, access to "Aim" (AKA 'Tidal Forces'), a useful secondary effect and opportunities to slot Achilles' Heel procs in multiple places. It's a little lacking in terms of raw high-DPA Single Target damage compared to the likes of Fire Blast; but its powers take 2-4 additional damage procs (slow and -def) and it makes up for it practically everywhere else.

Fire = More Damage by way of Bigger Red Numbers. It boasts high raw Single Target and AoE damage plus access to Aim. And Scourge loves "Rain of Fire". Downsides: Nuke needs you to be in Melee and has a long animation time. Powers have no secondary effect (so limited damage proc opportunities in the ST Blasts) Dark = More Damage by way of Not Faceplanting as Quickly. It has decent Single Target damage, plus "Life Drain" and lots of -ToHit debuffs. It gets to slot an extra Damage Proc (from the Cloud Senses set) in each attack. Downside: Poor AoE damage output other than the nuke (which also needs you to be in Melee and has a long animation time... although at least it inflicts -50% ToHit!)

Yep. The "Pets" tab at the top of the group window is there by default now - Issue 27 Page 7 - 'The "Show Pet Window Option" setting has been removed and is always enabled.' If you can't find it for some reason, try typing "/window_show pet"

The "Quick Start" manual is what my old CoH Deluxe box came with. I've a copy of CoV with the redside manual that's slightly bigger.

BR, obviously. Waving TWO sonic screwdrivers at your enemies would look EXTRA ridiculous...

Expand the posts, right-click the build link and pick "Save as". It'll save it down as a *.mxd file (which is an older filetype but Mids Reborn is still able to open). You may need to tell your browser it's safe to download and/or to "keep". Alternatively, just open these (I did the above and resaved the two posted builds as *.mbd files): mids_build (Brute).mbd mids_build (Tank).mbd Worth pointing out that neither of these builds are defense-softcapped with one foe in range of Invincibility; nor do they have perma Dull Pain. Both of which for me are essential on an INV. Compare those numbers to an all-rounder INV/SS Tanker I have in my character stable (add another 6.7%-13.4% res to all via SMoT Procs): zTanker - INV_SS (CrossPunch).mbd Incarnate clickies can make things silly. Melee Core Embodiment will cap them to all but Toxic and bring their regeneration to a hair under 100HP/Sec.