Hjarki

If you look at all the possible primary/secondary conditions, most of them will involve making serious compromises if you don't operate in melee range at least some of the time. Likewise, if you're looking for the highest possible single target dps Blaster build, it will come as a result of combining ranged attacks in primary with melee attacks in secondary. Those ranged primary attacks are the high dps part of a purely ranged rotation while the melee attacks replace the low dps part of your rotation. For example, Fire Blast is ~46 dpa while Charged Brawl is ~103 dpa. If you can get away with not using Fire Blast because you can use Charged Brawl instead, your dps rotation is going to deliver a lot more damage. Using melee attacks also permits you to use Hecatomb for its 10% recharge bonus and exceptional damage proc. Moreover, many of the critical abilities in secondary require melee range. Soul Drain is a potentially awesome ability - but requires you jump into a pile of enemies to use properly. Unfortunately, Blasters don't really get much to help them survive in melee range. With full IO set builds and Scorpion Shield, they can S/L/E/R soft-cap and not immediately flop over dead in most content. But there are few good ways to get status protection and you're not going to see Blasters solo'ing +4 AV without a whole lot of temporary powers and other widgets. As a result, 'Blappers' tend to exemplar poorly and don't scale well into difficult content unless they've got someone with support abilities to keep them operational. You can build them for specialized content (such as fire farms) or for intermittent bouts of trouble (such as with Rune of Protection), but you can't really make the dps-for-all-seasons type of build you could with, say, a Scrapper. This tends to lead to the "why not Scrapper?" question. After all, Scrappers can use ranged attacks just like Blasters can use melee attacks. This survivability issue also means that almost everyone starts out with a 'Hover Blaster' - a character designed to operate purely at range and blow stuff up before they can be blown up through their very narrowly focused ranged defense. However, certain Assault sets tend to open the possibility for 'Blaster Controllers' - Blasters who can operate in safety not just because they're (primarily) at range but also because they have the ability to neutralize spawns in some way. Not having to take Mace or Cold Mastery also opens up significant control options in Epic/Patron pools. This sort of approach trades off single target dps for often better AE possibilities and better scaleability across the range of all possible content.

The damage is reported per target. It's fairly difficult to get a good model of how much increased area/larger target caps impact actual dps, but it can be fairly significant. Just from eyeballing it, my guess is that Spine Burst is usually hitting about 8 targets while Burn is usually hitting about 3. Indeed, while I'd recommend Rad/Fire or Spines/Fire for a playing just starting out - largely due to how quickly they ramp up and can self-farm themselves to 50 and beyond - I think for a long-term 'farm' character, you're often better off with a Tanker due to the increased target caps/radius coupled with the fact that your 'farm' character can also be an actual playable character in game.

The damage I listed includes the ongoing DoT. Also, I think you're imagining that you kill a spawn in its entirety before moving onto a completely fresh spawn. You shouldn't be doing that. You should kill the minions/lieutenants and then either summon or move to that fresh spawn. If you do it that way, the only time you ever get to the situation you're describing - fighting a small number of bosses - is at the very end of the entire farm. In multi-farmer situations this is especially important because multiple farmers can hold truly massive spawns - you should never be in a situation (except, again, at the very end) where you don't have more than enough targets even for a 16 target AE. The reason you don't put Burn on autofire is because you've got better choices - those 10 target AE in your primary.

Burn does 80.5374 damage to 5 targets every 25 sec. For comparison, Atom Smasher does 64.649 damage to 10 targets every ~25 sec. Spine Burst does 49.4569 damage to 10 targets every ~20 sec. Both have larger radii as well. For afk farming, it's tough to be completely afk since even farms like the moon don't necessarily path into you. Using something like Fold Space can mean you press a button only every few minutes. Also, if you're afk, you're not getting value from Burn so you might find Electric a better option since you get a slightly weaker damage aura but a recharge bonus. For follow farming, I'd recommend at Bio/* Tanker. Not only do multiple players hold large spawns better, but the -resist affects you as well as the player you're following. Tankers are also better than Brutes as long as you're fighting large packs due to the 16 target cap - but that also means sets like Claws or Martial Arts that have good click PBAoE (since Irradiated Ground and Quills don't get a target cap upgrade). Shield is also a decent choice for 'Tanker farmer' since it gives a significant damage boost if you're surrounded by enemies. That being said, part of the reason that Rad/Fiery and Spines/Fiery are so popular is that they're cheap and easy. You don't need to layer in purple sets for recharge bonuses and you can start farming early on in the leveling process due to how quickly Fiery Aura caps Fire Resist.

The hardest hitting part of the ST rotation isn't available until level 20. Admittedly, most Tanker secondaries are a bit dysfunctional since the first power for the bulk of the melee sets is trash, but you've still got a big gap to fill even if other sets have a similar gap.

Claws is a fairly late-developing set, so it doesn't exemplar very well. However, it has an array of different attacks so it's easily slottable - target AE, melee AE, melee and ranged are all powers you're going to take. It also has an attack you use in both single target and multi-target attack cycles (Follow Up). Lastly, while it's forced to take a bad attack at level 1, this is less of a hindrance because neither of the first two attacks are all that great anyway (so you're not envious of those Brutes/Scrappers/Stalkers who don't have to waste a power pick). My thoughts: Bio. This is a generally strong armor set from an offensive standpoint. The combination of hard-cappable S/L resist and relatively high regen makes it a good choice for Tankers. However, dealing with the S/L Defense issue and a lack of DDR can be problematic. It also has only one defense toggle and there are only 3 obvious defense toggles for Tankers (Combat Jumping, Maneuvers, Weave) so you often have a mule a 5th one. Dark. Dark is almost purely a resist set, but it has a massive Energy hole that's hard to address. Electric. The most pure resist-based approach, it has zero Defensive toggles and a Toxic hole. It's not a bad choice since it amplifies your damage via recharge, but there's no particularly strong synergy. Fiery Aura. Fiery is a lot stronger than many give it credit for. While it's tough to make work (outside a Fire farm) on non-Tankers, you can cap most relevant resists as a Tanker and be in a situation similar to Electric above. However, it again has no real synergy. Radiation. This is the probably the best pure Tanker set there is with it's broad, comprehensive resists and regen. If you want to build a Tanker's Tanker, this is probably the set to use. But Claws wouldn't be the set you pair with it. For Claws, some others to consider: Invulnerability. This has the defense toggles you need and a nice set of overall defenses, albeit with a Psi hole that makes Rikti and Shadow Shard problematic. Super Reflexes. I don't actually like Super Reflexes much because of how narrow it is. But it's very, very good at what it does. Very few enemies can bypass the combination of massive positional defenses and scaling resists - but those enemies slice through you in a heartbeat. Willpower. This is a less offensive, more defensive version of Bio - and it shares the problem of defense debuffs due to the weak S/L defense. That being said, Bio/Claws is arguably one of the best farming specs around. Between the F/C resist on purples and the easily capped F/C defenses, you can easily survive fire farms. Spin does so much damage that you can simply put it on auto-fire and slice apart spawns. If you're actively fighting, you can add Follow Up and the other AE. As long as you have enough targets to feed your high target caps, you can easily out-perform a conventional Brute fire farm build.

While various sets have AE, there are good and bad AE. 'Good' AE has high damage per recharge, hits 10 targets and has a large radius. Ideally, it has knockback so you can slot Force Feedback. The sets with the best AE: Spines. A 15' yard PBAoE coupled with a ranged AE Cone that can blanket an entire spawn from a short distance. The fact that it also has the best melee Cone available to Stalkers is merely a bonus. Ice. A ranged AE and a 10' PBAoE. Psi. Only one true AE, but it's a 10' KB PBAoE. Staff. Again, only one true AE, but a 10' KB PBAoE.

Powers need to hit for procs to activate. As far as I know, there are no auto-hit powers that take Tanker ATOs. Gaussian's will proc about once per minute as you've got it slotted. It's probably not worthing bothering with. Fusion will proc Gaussian's almost automatically. However, it only lasts a brief period of time. In any case, from your description you may be barking up the wrong tree (or, rather, the wrong AT). Most of your problems are likely best solved with control rather than tanking.

Dual Blades (1.6) 66.05 ['Nimble Slash', 'Sweeping Strike', 'Ablating Strike', 'Nimble Slash', 'Assassins Blades', 'Ablating Strike'] Dual Blades (1.9) 66.95 ['Ablating Strike', 'Assassins Blades', 'Sweeping Strike', 'Moonbeam', 'Ablating Strike', 'One Thousand Cuts'] Dual Blades (2.05) 68.57 ['Power Slice', 'Ablating Strike', 'Moonbeam', 'Power Slice', 'Ablating Strike', 'Sweeping Strike', 'Assassins Blades'] Dual Blades (2.2) 69.60 ['Nimble Slash', 'Ablating Strike', 'Sweeping Strike', 'Moonbeam', 'Power Slice', 'Ablating Strike', 'Assassins Blades'] Dual Blades (2.35) 70.72 ['Nimble Slash', 'Assassins Blades', 'Ablating Strike', 'Sweeping Strike', 'Nimble Slash', 'Moonbeam', 'Ablating Strike'] Dual Blades (2.65) 74.14 ['Power Slice', 'Ablating Strike', 'Sweeping Strike', 'Moonbeam', 'Ablating Strike', 'Assassins Blades'] Dual Blades (3) 75.68 ['Nimble Slash', 'Ablating Strike', 'Assassins Blades', 'Moonbeam', 'Ablating Strike', 'Sweeping Strike'] Dual Blades (3.5) 76.32 ['Power Slice', 'Moonbeam', 'Assassins Blades', 'Sweeping Strike', 'Ablating Strike'] Dual Blades (4) 82.50 ['Ablating Strike', 'Assassins Blades', 'Sweeping Strike', 'Ablating Strike', 'Moonbeam'] The numbers in parentheses are the total haste for the attack (including internal recharge), so 2.75 would reflect perma-Hasten levels of recharge. In practice, hitting that 2.05 should be possible on a non-Hasten build while most of the higher numbers would likely include Hasten. With that in mind, I'm not a particularly big fan of the 'pylon test' notion of single target rotations because it's so rarely of any relevance in actual game play. I'd also second the "ignore combo" notion. In theory, Sweep would work well on a Stalker since it involves just 'good' attacks in a sensible sequence, but it's buggy enough that I can never get it to work reliably. For secondary, Ninjitsu just makes your build so much easier to manage. Because Dual Blades has only melee and PBAoE attacks, you need to find other sorts of attacks elsewhere to get access to the set bonuses you want - Ninjitsu's ranged AE and Confuse both give you great options there. Ninjitsu is also an unusually 'high impact' set in that it packs most of its value into single powers rather than spreading them across many. You can easily get over-capped defenses in a build with plenty of utility, use Caltrops to provide a lot of mitigation and just heal up the damage that gets through. Consider the following:

Stone can simply rotate Fault and Tremor. Both can slot Force Feedback and you can slot Fault for Disorient otherwise. The result is that enemies spend virtually all of their time disoriented or flopping - I'm not sure Oppressive Gloom is even particularly helpful for such a strategy. You could potentially get a similar benefit with the Triumphant Insult proc. Electric and Super Strength are less effective versions of this approach (longer recharges, knockback that needs suppression). The end cost is also... considerable. Note: Radiation can do something similar with the Disorient from Atom Smasher and Overwhelming Force + Avalanche + Superior Avalanche procs in Irradiated Ground. However, Atom Smasher doesn't knockback (so no Force Feedback) and doing this sort of thing would probably impact your dps in a very negative way. In terms of the primary, it sounds like what you're doing involves some very different content. From your list of characters, it seems safe to assume there's little to no Psi damage, so you can ignore that problem. However, you've got a lot of unusual attacks and defenses, so you probably want a set that's at least partially defense-focused. So I'm thinking Bio/Stone. But any Tanker will be relatively slow unless you're chewing down reds.

Kinetics/Sonic is one of those 'obvious' pairings I don't think works all that well. Sonic Blast is by far the weakest of the Blast sets. It makes up for this with -resist debuffs. But for those -resist debuffs to bridge the gap between Sonic and other Blast sets, you need to be almost constantly blasting. Kinetics is an incredibly busy set that consumes large chunks of your activation time, so you can't realistically maintain the rotation for maximum -resist debuffing. So while an unencumbered Sonic Blast Defender might muster -100% resist on a single target, you're probably only going to get half of that with Kinetics. The 'busy-ness' of Kinetics also strongly favors sets that pack a lot of impact into their high damage powers since the low damage powers will be mostly replaced by various Kinetics powers in the rotation. A pairing like Kinetics/Dual Pistols or Kinetics/Beam Rifle will generate almost as much -resist as Kinetics/Sonic once you take into account the time spent on Kinetics, but they'll also have powers that can better benefit from the buffs/debuffs. In terms of defense, the notion of teaming you have tends to fade very quickly as you level up. A Kinetics Defender who can't survive is one who is of little use to anyone because even the best Tankers will have trouble ensuring that every mob is focused on them. About the only characters I've seen who can legitimately justify not taking the Fighting pool would be Invulnerability Tankers (who easily cap S/L Resist without Toughness) - but even they're very tempted to throw away two powers to grab Weave. You also need both resist and defense toggles to slot uniques. While Kinetics can slot both +defense uniques in Increase Density, normally want you 5 defense powers for Luck of the Gambler. Mustering those 5 defense powers with the Fighting pool is hard enough. Doing it without the Fighting pool normally means just grabbing powers like Vengeance solely for their ability to hold LotG. In terms of Experimentation, Corrosive Vial is a 8 yard radius that deals a total of 50.6058 damage over 14 sec to up to 5 targets. This isn't bad, but it's not game-changing either. The fact that you need to take two powers that are probably of no use is a strong argument against it.

I haven't seen a comprehensive list of the correct rotations for various power sets, so I wrote a quick tool to generate them (in Python). Note that the tool handles everything in a generalized fashion, so it doesn't recognize the value of specialized maneuvers very well. Some notes: Psionic Melee assumes 50% uptime on Insight. Energy Melee assumes you never have Focus. Titan Weapons assumes you always have Momentum Dual Blades does not use any of its special features +damage abilities such as Claws' Follow Up are ignored Staff Mastery assumes you're always at three stacks Savage Melee assumes you're always at maximum stacks Street Justice assumes Combo Level 3 Cross Punch assumes you have both Kick and Boxing Sequences longer than 7 are ignored If two attacks have an identical activation, cooldown and damage, the lower level power will be chosen in preference to the higher level power. These factors are all encoded into the damage values in the .csv. However, the goal here isn't to make a dps comparison, but to examine how rotations change at varying Haste levels. The .csv contains all the power set data, so changing the information there would allow the same tool to generate similar information for any AT's offensive power sets. A sample line: Spines (1.75) 51.97 ['Barb Swipe', 'Ripper', 'Gloom', 'Cross Punch'] This indicates that if you have a total of +175% haste (from both internal recharge slotting and external recharge bonuses; +275% haste is perma-Hasten), you have sufficient haste to run the listed rotation and it will deal 51.97 dps without any damage slotting. Given the constraints above, this should be the best rotation you can run at that haste level. Note that this is not the minimum necessary, merely a sufficient amount - I only test about 10 different haste values. For most sets, these should be an optimal rotation at a given haste level. However, bear in mind the limitations above and check if using a set's special abilities might change your choices. coh_tanker_rotations.csv coh_tanker_rotations.py

I'd argue that Elec/Psi would be the king of AV solo'ing for Dominators. The reasoning here is that all you really need to do to solo an AV/GM is shut it down and then beat its regen. If you can do those two things, nothing else really matters. Electric is probably the premiere "shut it down" set between its ability to floor endurance and its Sleep Field. The fact that it also has a decently useful Confuse is just a bonus. Psi provides the -regen. Now, I'm not going to claim this is the highest dps build - or even close to it - but you'll eventually beat almost anything.

I'd argue Staff/Radiation is unmatched. Radiation has more Toxic than Psi resist (having both) with enough armor toggles to slot Impervium all over the place. Radiation doesn't have a true 'hole', but it's weak against two of the least-used damage types (Negative and Cold). Radiation has one of the few useable ultimates since it doesn't deliver a full crash. Radiation has End Drain resist so you can't get de-toggled. It provides decent regen and recovery. Because it has no innate defenses, that frees you to build for positionals rather than typed. Because it's strong across-the-board on resists, you can essentially ignore AoE Defense. Staff has a LotG mule that also allows you to pump your Melee Defense to ridiculous heights to prevent cascading Defense failure. It also has a maneuver that boosts your resists by 10% across-the-board. It has Knockdown AE that both accelerates the rest of your build and keeps enemies from attacking. Staff is also the longest range set, so there's a definite quality-of-life element there when you're faced with hordes of ranged attackers who refuse to cluster.

In terms of Time Manipulation, I'm increasingly not a fan. It's a grab bag of seemingly powerful effects that ultimately don't end up being all that useful. The long recharge buffs to recharge/defense are effectively personal-only buffs not just because it's difficult to get teams to stand still to receive the buffs but also because they probably don't need them in the first place - recharge and defense are the primary problems decent builds try to solve and once they're solved they don't need additional help from you. Moreover, they're issues you can solve yourself without Time Manipulation. So you're left with a set that has mediocre -regen, mediocre -resist and doesn't bring any significant damage to the table. So I'd go with Kinetics. The key realization here is that if you have Siphon Power/Fulcrum Shift, you don't need to slot your powers for damage. So you can chase the set bonuses you need or augment their secondary effects instead. I pulled the below from my old builds file to demonstrate how this can be done - a S/L/E/R soft-capped Ice/Kinetics build:;

In theory it fixes it. In practice, a Mag 3 single target Immobilize is hard to use for Containment and there aren't any good options for AE Containment (at least as I slot the powers). I have multiple stacking ST holds, but I slot them as Holds (and, frankly, don't use them all that much except for debuffing). While Oil Slick is useful as a big boom, my overall attitude is "let the pets kill it". I think I've posted it elsewhere, but my latest build is below.

I'm not entirely sure why you're harassing me over what was an entirely legitimate comparison between the basic performance of two sets. Do you have an actual point to make?

I find my Illusion/Trick Arrow just works a lot better than anything else. While you need to slot a ton of recharge, you've got the powers to do so since everything you do is offensively-oriented. Your debuffs are unmatched for crippling enemies and you've got an 'ultimate' AE you can use.

The "big picture" requires complex assumptions that lack consensus. What that comparison should showcase is that 'top tier' set isn't actually all that far ahead of the 'bottom tier' set. The only place Electrical has a slotting advantage is with Tesla Cage. Everywhere else, Sonic is getting far better return on the procs both can slot.

It's not slotted because it's not designed to be an ideal build, but to give a sense of scale.

A sequence of Scream -> Shout -> Screech -> Mind Probe deals (69.74 + 112 + 120.5 + 110.9) / (1.848 + 2.904 + 1.716 + 1.32) = 53.05 dps with 9.6 * (7+10+12) / (1.848 + 2.904 + 1.716 + 1.32) = 35.75% -resist for 72.01 dps. Contrast this with Charged Bolts -> Zapping Bolt -> Charged Bolts -> Tesla Cage at (52.83*2 + 103.5 + 120.5) / (1.188*3 + 2.376) = 55.50 dps, plus another 8.22 dps from the Sentinel.

I think Aqua Bolt is generally the stronger power. They're about equivalent, but having a fast recharge power helps fill gaps in the rotation. Skipping Tidal Forces isn't really an option since you use it before every Geyser. Steam Spray has high enough dpa that it can be used as part of your single target attack chain (although the long recharge can be problematic). Whirlpool feels mandatory on a Corruptor to me. It's the hardest-hitting non-ultimate Rain, and Corruptors love Rains. That being said, Water is almost purely an AE set. Water Jet isn't all that bad an attack, but it requires fiddling around with the Tidal Power mechanic to reach the level of 'adequate'. None of the other attacks are more than just basic single target damage. On a Blaster, you can replace the ST attack chain with a melee attack chain from secondary and be left with awesome AE coupled with strong (melee) ST. On a Corruptor, you're stuck with anemic ST damage.

10% of the time in +4. Poison also really suffers from lack of status protection. If even one of those holds/sleeps/disorients gets through, you die in a hurry.

While the set has its issues, I found Trick Arrow to be probably the most 'soloable' set available to Defenders. From level 1, you've got Flash Arrow - and that solves 95% of the defensive problems you'll ever experience in game. Long-term, it provides a decent boost to personal damage and a second ultimate. In contrast, another solo-friendly set would be Storm Summoning. But it's only solo friendly on the back end and generally requires IO sets to really work.

Consider: The last few points of defense/resist/whatever you need to meet defensive goals is the most 'expensive' - you need to make the most compromises to reach it. Defensive goals are limits while damage is (effectively) unbounded. You're far more likely to receive external defensive buffs than external damage buffs. You only need those defensive limits against certain content. With that in mind, building against the expectation of Defensive Adaptation makes a lot more sense. Perhaps it makes more sense if you phrase it "build for offense, not for defense". If you're building against the expectation of Defensive Adaptation, you're building for offence. If you're building against the expectation of Offensive Adaptation, you're building for defense.