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Frosticus

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Everything posted by Frosticus

  1. Frosticus
    Traps, Rad, Cold, Thermal, Dark, Poison, TA, Storm They can all do it with varying degrees of ease. Add lore/temps and the options expand considerably. All the primaries are viable (though mind would be a challenge), with illusion having the strongest suite of tools available for it. There were fire/rads taking down AVs back before IOs so it can certainly do it.
  2. Frosticus
    Disruption arrow doesn't self stack, that was changed with the recent TA overhaul. I mean for a split second it will I guess. A TA troller can reliably put out 45% -res to a single target. Acid can take 2 -res procs, but it is far from reliable and not a great damage power so I'd be surprised if someone spammed it given the duration of the debuffs that it packs vs the animation time and low damage. There is no theory about self stacking sleet. You don't need immobs or taunts to keep things in a sleet patch for long enough to do its magic. It is up to a 45 second -res debuff. triple stacked is more common than not when fighting anything with staying power. I reliably triple stack it on my cold/fire defender too. Infrig rolls achilies at 90% proc rate, while also taking 3 damage procs. So not only does it replicate what you are getting from entangling arrow, it also hits pretty hard in the process. HL is a buff first and foremost. But it is pretty nice to help spike up -res at the start of the fight before multi sleet kicks in. The 50% unresistable debuffs of TA (-dam is probably what you are comparing to with benumb) is both a positive and a negative. It is a positive if your target has appreciable damage resistance because it will still lower their damage output without being resisted. It is a negative because it means that -res doesn't amplify it as much. Cpt Powerhouse did that specifically to avoid some of the insane -damage debuffing potential seen in poison, cold and dark when they amplify it with their -res (especially stacking -res). It lowers the ceiling, but raises the floor for TA. Against most targets /cold will floor their damage output quite rapidly. Unresistable or resistable, both cold and TA are still impacted by the purple patch, so 54's reduce the effectiveness of everything by ~35%
  3. Frosticus
    I'd definitely recommend one build for solo and one for teaming for any character that someone spends considerable time playing. If you enjoy low level content I'd even do a third build focused on exemplaring down. Ease of access to IOs, acquiring multiple t3 level incarnates and being able to switch builds away from a trainer make that a fairly easy recommendation. I'm not sure I'd recommend two dedicated solo builds like I have going unless you are specifically challenging some limitation of the game. For instance, nearly any situation that I flip to my "survival build" could have been covered by just using some inspirations and doing it much faster with my "damage build".
  4. Frosticus
    Shields are just for lotg or when I team. I don't spend time tending to phantasm. I'm nearly done an ill/cold guide, just digging in to the nitty gritty aspects of some key mechanics to help others understand why this combo sings so well. I hope to have it up over the weekend. That will have all the builds that I use and several interesting options to consider. I'll also talk about some other cool illusion pairings for those that are adverse to cold temperatures 🙂. I want to keep this thread mostly just to the things I knock off (or others if they want to post). PM me if you want me to have a gander at your build in the mean time.
  5. Frosticus
    @DocMidknight I was in the same boat. I kept stalling out on the way to 50 in favour of other characters even though ill/cold was able to solo missions set with AV's from back in the mid 30's, well before I had a high recharge build in place. I think the issue (for me) is that illusion is so strong vs a few enemies, but pretty anemic against large spawns. An illusion build geared toward range and survival makes the game pretty boring either through ease (few enemies), or inefficient arresting (large spawns). What revitalized the build for me was to go all in on offense. The output that this combo is capable of is astounding. In addition to that I basically asked myself what this combo can do as a standalone? no aids such as temps/insp/lore/amplifiers because it has so many tools at its disposal. All of which are quite sharp! Some builds respond exceptionally well to inspirations and such, but I don't feel illusion/cold does because so much of the damage comes from summons and procs. So now I'm in there like a dirty shirt side by side with my PA (and phantasm cause he loves melee too!). Rolling up and stomping down an AV in under a minute feels great. Scrolling back through the combat log and seeing seismic smash producing ~1500 damage is pretty satisfying.
  6. Frosticus
    Something most people don't look deeply in to is the t9's. Probably because most are skippable. But you can set up some stalkers to be incredibly survivable on the sets with soft crash t9's. I recently did a respec on my sav/shield (cause hemo nerf took the wind out of my sails for single target damage) that cycles: rune, one w/ shield, rune, melee hybrid - repeat. Minimal slotting investment needed on rune/owts. No downtime, always running very good resistance on top of softcapped def and capped ddr (ageless radial plus 2x active defense). ice, rad, willpower can all do similar setups that let you comfortably run just about all content confidently.
  7. Frosticus
    Kronos Class Titan (GM) This GM has a surprising amount of offense. It is much less hardy that the Council Goliath Warwalker though and went down in less than half the time.
  8. Frosticus
    Fire/rad is a good choice too. I think rad functions best at range. Like someone mentioned earlier you don't even need the last 3 powers in rad. Ice is all ranged too. Rad gives you some +rech which means you can more easily sneak some procs into your attacks (ie 4-5 procs in freezeray, 3-4 in BIB) without as much worry about set bonuses. It's a good pairing with a lot of utility.
  9. Frosticus
    Fire/Cold is pretty beastly. I've done it to 50 three times now. (Live as a corr, corr here and defender here). Competent solo'er, but imo one of the best team builds you can show up with. Ice/rad is great too. It matures very early.
  10. Frosticus
    Council Goliath War Walker I've heard some people say this guy couldn't be solo'd. I don't think that is the case because I just did it no insp/temp/lore/amps, so I'm sure other builds could succeed. My first go at this GM was super fast (like 15 min), but I didn't have a timer going or lock my insp/temps etc. So I ran him again later. It took way longer this time. Not sure why. I sort of gave up hitting him with HL. His model is too big, so I hop away and buff off the greys nearby every second HL cycle. Otherwise I'd shut nearly everything off and try to run off just the 1 buff. This run took me about 23 min. At any rate, I think he has like 70% resistance to all damage. He his pretty hard and stuns often. I had to use my survival tools pretty often, though was never in real danger. Edit: 15 mins is repeatable
  11. Frosticus
    I don't want to sound like a debbie downer, but the only doms that can reliably handle AV's are mind and dark by stacking enough confuse and then engaging. Everyone else is just playing the luck game and hoping they don't get 2 shot. If your strategy is confuse I'd probably go dark so you at least have some supplemental pet damage you can call on once they are confused. Earth has stoney, which will taunt the AV off of you, but without a support set to buff/debuff he'll still go down quickly. That said, by the time you've stacked enough confuse to engage most AV's, a more accredited AV killer would already be done with them. *using confuse on the LRSF is certainly handy. Penny can rip through her allies with ease. But the thing is she does so much damage that even a psi melee scrapper using boggle could accomplish this strategy by having her kill her friends while the triangles are down. /fire certainly has the dps to kill most. /nrg does as well. /psi has a nice -500% regen debuff, but otherwise doesn't do great damage and -regen doesn't matter "that" much vs most AV's, though it is helpful. dark/fire was my original dominator pick that I had hopes for, but ultimately I wouldn't rate it as a very capable AV killer. GM's even less so.
  12. Frosticus
    I don't think interuptable AS matters. Most people don't use hidden AS very often because it is slow as molasses. Stalkers are generally best served by playing a lot more like scrappers these days. Albeit with more controlled crits at the cost of some upper level freakish performance. There is nothing wrong with resistance based sets on stalkers either. Not on an AT that has access to shadow meld. Radiation armor can be set up to greatly improve a stalker's aoe damage (large area too), while easily being "tough enough" for most content. I also find more teams offer +def buffs than +res buffs. The former tends to benefit a resistance based set more than someone already running on a softcapped def set.
  13. Frosticus
    it doesn't provide a +100% damage buff to fire for 20 seconds. It flags a fire proc to most damaging powers for 20 seconds. Like I said above it is largely agnostic when it comes to your damage dealing primary (secondary for tanker). FE has no special interaction with fire melee in pve. Stalker fire armor is not great, but if more people understood FE they'd feel a bit better about scrapper fire armor. It is perfectly hardy with a few team buffs and does WAY more damage than other secondaries in such scenarios.
  14. Frosticus
    You can stick with it, but that isn't what FE does.
  15. Frosticus
    Fiery Embrace was changed some time back. It is fairly primary agnostic now and provides a 20 second fire proc to most damaging powers. I don't believe that fire melee has any special interaction with it anymore (pve). An em/fa scrapper is bonkers from a burst damage perspective.
  16. Frosticus
    I'm a fan of shield. I think defense works best on stalkers, but shield still offers some decent resists and +hp on top of that. The set doesn't have much in the way of holes you need to plug. Shield charge offers a bit of aoe to an AT that is often sorely lacking in that department.
  17. Frosticus

    En/Bio

    Frosticus replied to Captain Paragon's topic in Scrapper

    That should give you an indication of how strong the build is.
  18. Frosticus
    Keep in mind that fiery embrace is up more than it is down on a perma dom build and it is a long lasting buff allowing multiple rounds of attacks to get out. It averages out to over +50% damage over time, which is significant for such a low (self) buffing AT. It also helps doms deliver meaningful aoe damage by boosting fireball and rain of fire. /nrg is in a great spot, but I'd still take /fire for single target destruction if for no other reason than not having to be in melee range stuck using a 2.7 second long attack to unlock my damage boost. /fire can hit FE, blaze and have the damage from blazing bolt landing at roughly the same time that /nrg is landing its first TF. Maybe it will catch up, maybe it won't. Both are great sets for dealing out good damage.
  19. Frosticus
    I chose reactive interface for my poison/fire for this specific reason. I do a lot of proc damage and rely heavily on the interaction of -damage debuffing being amplified by -resistance debuffing. At the end of the day, Degen may still be better for taking down big targets, but I like reactive as it fits the build well. Kin is a great addition to poison, just depends what content you like to tackle whether a second poison would be preferable. Multiple poisons become insane for both speed and safety because their debuff aura doesn't take animation time and poison trap proc bomb gets out so fast.
  20. Frosticus
    Indeed. 0x8 is super fun. 4x8 has proven to test my patience too much as I have to lean heavily on confuse. I skip the dwarf ambush up top. Interestingly enough if you confuse the nictus into killing the crystals in mission 2 the ambushes struggle to zero in on you and just sort of run around aimlessly. I've never really examined how to separate romy from his nictus so I ultimately get overwhelmed in the final fight.
  21. Frosticus
    The -res cap is very high. I think it is like -300% or something like that. It is pretty rare to hit it even in teams. The only thing better than 1 poison is 2! You might even consider some of the ally powers in that case.
  22. Frosticus
    I think it is just a culmination of the right tools for this build. -A lot of psi damage, which I switched the build around to accentuate. Unstoppable had a small impact on my dps, whereas it normally flatlines most builds. -Uninterruptable dps. He can't stun PA and I'm out of range of it. The few times he got me, benumb makes the duration pretty short. -Ability to quickly kill off his friends, but also nearly halt his regen while I fight with them. His HP would barely go back up while I'd deal with his generals. Most builds lose a lot of ground during this period, which is frustrating. -Finally, I think it was actually -recharge that did him in. Even through AV resistances I avg about 40%-rech. Slowing down his dullpain cycle may have been the deciding factor. When he was at about 10% hp I "knew" it was in the bag because I would outpace his dullpain cycle. But I was still sweating the thought of an error getting me killed. He didn't get off another dullpain though. This fight is an absolute snooze-fest. 0/10 would not do again.
  23. Frosticus
    My survival build is as the name suggest. Softcapped ranged and psi def, full time mez protection, melee hybrid and barrier as well as respectable resistance to most damage types (toxic/neg hole). It hovers out of the fray and only steps in for the Heat Loss buff. I can handle a fair amount of attention. My damage build doesn't really avoid damage. It dishes it out haha. It only has 38% s/l def, but it does have rune of protection, barrier and perma dull pain. It relies on survival through chaos. Bouncing things with fissure and sleet, spectral terror, PA and sheer offense that rivals anything I've built. That said, there are times you simply have to disengage to regroup. I got into a bad funk on a recent marketcrash causing frequent endurance crashes and had to flee back into the cave 2 times. Or vs the warwalker waves in Apex. I fought them all over that map to keep creating distance. There is nowhere to hide, but you can briefly break line of sight. If they are moving, they aren't attacking. I made them travel through my drop patches and summons which allowed me to layer some confuse on them and then press the advantage. I spend most of my time on my damage build, but if I'm walking into a situation that I know is going to be dangerous, I hit the macro to flip to my survival build. It puts everything in to cooldown, but that is the only drawback.
  24. Frosticus
    54+3 Mot I love caesars, so I thought Mot and I would get along better. He didn't want to share his clamato juice so I took it from him.
  25. Frosticus
    I think if I didn't have an ill/cold I'd roll an ill/ta. Just about everything in TA compliments illusion and the synergy is undeniable in things like: spec terror + flash arrow = huge tohit debuffs that are safely applied before the fight acid arrow+ healback = should block some of the heal back from illusionary damage reliable st and semi reliable aoe containment - two things illusion does not excel at decent aoe damage from oil slick and proc'd acid arrow to round out the stellar st damage of illusion That said, ill/cold is still better at killing AV/GM's, maybe by a large amount. The stacking -res is just extreme on top of benumb. But I could see myself playing an ill/ta at x8 settings and I don't really find that fun on ill/cold.
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