Hjarki

Here's the thing: in many cases, I'm not happy to see this. On almost any melee character, that Stun/Immobilize is going to severely hamper what I want to do while not affording me meaningful protection - after all, I probably already took the alpha strike. Certainly, you can speculate about all-squishie groups that want to lock everything down. But even then, the Control sets are generally less important than the support sets.

Yes, it's a major flaw. It's not just the lack of DDR but the lack of DDR coupled with the lack of S/L resist. Yes, you can barely stagger across the soft-cap for S/L with proper slotting - but that just means you have a 1-in-20 chance of the cascading defense failure occurring. Contrast with builds that go for 59% S/L defense coupled with DDR and can confidently charging into such spawns. I think */Bio is more of an 'adequate' defensive set than one I would consider for a 'tough as nails' build.

The issue I have here is that 'City of AoEs' isn't some sort of endgame for many builds, but starts early on in the leveling process. By the teens/20s, you've hit the point where a significant number of melee builds and even some Blaster builds are focused on this playstyle. Then you need to consider that you're likely to find teammates who are exemplared down and designed to function in that environment. In contrast, the 'City of Statues' model arises much, much later. Perma-Dom really requires set bonuses you're not going to see until long after you have */Fire Brutes running around trying to AE everything. Likewise, you simply don't have the recharge necessary for every-spawn hard controls until you're at the point where you see a lot of endgame-style builds. Even then, I'd argue that the sort of control-centric game you prefer doesn't favor what you're arguing for. If you're in a leveling up process, Dark is definitely better than Mind. Dark's -hit is far more useful than Mind's ability to - once every half dozen spawns - throw a lockdown ability that doesn't affect bosses (because you don't have perma-Dom yet) and doesn't last long enough (since you're in a group that isn't built for mass AE). Likewise, if you want to play a control-centric game leveling up, it's hard to imagine a better ability than Static Field with its low recharge and self-stacking. Indeed, talking about a Dominator in most of the situations you're outlining doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me because Dominators tend to be awful in them. Dominator is a very late-developing AT that really demands its epic pools and set bonuses before it starts to really 'work'.

The sort of proc mentality you're trying to use isn't really all that appropriate for Blasters. Consider Freeze Ray. This power deals 125.1 damage. Thus, a standard damage IO would yield 0.42 * 125.1 = 52.5 damage. In contrast, a standard 3.5 proc would deal 71.75 * (10 + 1) * 3.5 / 60 = 46.0 damage. So you definitely want to slot damage in those powers before you start piling on the procs. Blasters don't have the support mechanisms Defenders do. Blasters can't get +50% or so recharge from their non-Blast set. A basic Defender build starts somewhere in the mid-20s for universal defense while a Blaster would be somewhere in the mid-teens. Defenders get massive -resist debuffs; Blasters do not. From memory, the standard Ice rains do poorly with procs but Glue Arrow performs excellently with them.

I don't think the primary actually matters much. -hit debuffs are an unreliable form of defense - especially for melee. The various +def attacks might seem good on paper, but they're rarely of much use. They tend to give bonuses like Lethal/Melee. However, every other form of Lethal Defense also has Smashing Defense, so you either up with a 'Smashing Hole' or you completely overkill Lethal Defense. On the Melee Defense end, it's possible to build for positionals - except that virtually every Stalker build that goes for positionals is doing so via a positional defense set. Which means that your +Melee Def set is probably just going to give you way more defense than you need. The control options for Stalkers are likewise not all that great. Most of them either have low Mag, have unreliable conditions attached them or pose slotting problems. For the secondary, I think it's hard to beat Ice Armor. Ice Armor's Defense "hole" is Fire/Cold - which is easily patched with Winter sets and Aegis. Couple this with a crash-less tier 9 power that can hard-cap most resists about 50% of the time, and you can build a nearly indestructible Stalker pretty easily. While Ice Armor has no psi defense, this is an almost universal problem for Stalkers. Even sets with Psi defense tend to have so little of it that it's nearly impossible to reach soft-cap.

I tossed together a build that doesn't hit its desired performance without Incarnates, but has nearly perma-Hasten (likely perma-Hasten with Force Feedback) and soft-cap typed defenses: That being said, I don't think this is a particularly strong combo. Electric Control is very control-heavy, so pairing it with Martial doesn't necessary work all that well.

If you're building only for fire farming, you're normally looking to slot Winter sets (Melee, Hold, Target AE, PBAoE, Ranged, Travel) and Aegis. Since Flame Mastery gives you a resist toggle for Fire, a Hold and a Melee Attack, it's near perfect. The 5 standard Winter sets will give you +27.5% Fire/Cold Defense and +30% Fire/Cold Resist. Each 2-slot Travel set will give you another +3.75% Fire/Cold Resist (Speed Boost and Inertial Reduction are both travel powers). Each 3-slot Aegis will give you +3.13% Fire/Cold Defense. Fire Shield itself will give you ~40% Fire Resist once slotted. You get +6% universal defense from the two Resist uniques (Steadfast Protection, Gladiator's Armor). The 5 standard Winter sets can slot into Greater Fire Sword, Char, Atomic Blast, Neutron Bomb and Neutrino Bolt. Since Weave will give us ~7% universal Defense and Maneuvers will give us ~5% once slotted, that's 7 + 5 + 27.5 + 3.13 + 3.13 = 45.76% Fire/Cold Defense if we put Aegis into two of Tough, Increase Density and Fire Shield. We've got 30% Fire/Cold from Winter Sets, another 40% from Fire Shield. Slot Speed Boost and Inertial Reduction for for Winter's Gift's and you're at the Resist hard cap for Fire. Transfusion will be able to heal whatever dribbles get through your soft-capped Defense/hard-capped Resist.

While exploiting the floor on proc chances is interesting, the practical value isn't very high. WIth the Aimed/Snap sequence, your expectation is that you'll get a proc once every 39 secs or so. If you just put the proc in a standard 10 sec attack with perma-Hasten levels of global recharge (+175%), you'd expect to see the proc once every 25 secs or so. And, of course, the Aimed/Snap sequence is doing terrible dps even when the proc is active, much less when it isn't. The sequence being illustrated is also backwards from how most fights go. You open with AE rather than single target because once you've aggro'd the spawn, you're normally either gathering them around yourself (rarely desirable with a purely ranged set like Archery) or they're being scattered. To make this scheme really work, you need some sort of 'perfect spawn' that is prepared to receive your AE damage precisely when you get a lucky proc.

Proc chance is normalized into ppm based on the inherent cycle time (recharge / slotted recharge + activation) of the power. However, any forms of global recharge don't affect proc chance. This means the way you optimize recharge is to take slow recharge powers, slot no inherent recharge and just run them off global recharge. Snap Shot is one of the worst powers in the game to slot procs due to its low basic recharge. Aimed Shot is a strictly better attack on Corruptors and Defenders. Aimed Shot is usually better on a Blaster. However, neither are really attacks you use much - they're mainly used as mules. Both sniper attacks have a damage of 162.7 in sniper mode, 99.8 in fast mode. In fast mode, this would result in a dpa of 75.0. Both will hit at exactly the same rate because they're higher accuracy than your other attacks which have the same global accuracy applied. Gloom is 48.2 dpa with an 8 sec recharge (for those procs, as I noted above). Aimed Shot is 31.4 dpa with a 4 sec recharge. Blazing Arrow is 47.2 dpa on a 10 sec recharge. However, what you're missing is that every single Dark attack can slot an additional +71.75% damage proc. On Gloom, that would be an additional +29.6 dpa (not affected by +damage) over what you could do with a comparable Archery attack. My comments about Blackstar vs. Rain of Arrows were specific to Blasters. With Defenders/Corruptors, you'd normally want a ranged ultimate because you're not anticipating killing the entire spawn and the way you slot your powers means you don't need a PBAoE. With Blasters, you really want a PBAoE for slotting opportunities in most builds and you're normally 'straight slotting' the powers. Moreover, your damage scale is so high that you can realistically expect to annihilate entire spawns with your ultimates. As a result, having a massive burst of damage is better than having a slightly-better-than-Fireball AE. On a Defender, Rain of Arrows is somewhat limited due to its lack of proc opportunities. On a Corruptor, Rains of Arrows is fairly decent due to how rains and Scourge interact. Trick Arrow does not provide global recharge, global accuracy/hi or defense buffs. Those are the key elements for a Defender power set to support the blast set. They're what enable you to slot powers for pure offense rather than needing to straight-slot them for set bonuses. -recharge is a useless debuff. On non-AV/GM, enemies rarely get a chance to cycle their debuffs. On an AV/GM, it gets resisted too heavily to mean anything. -defense is also a useless debuff since building for the hit cap is the norm. 'Difficult to slot' = no good set options. In general, if you're going to 5- or 6- slot something, you want to be using a purple set, an Archetype IO set or a Winter set. Almost anything else is going to give you sub-standard results. On some types of powers, there are better or worse slotting options at lower levels of investment. Slow and Sleep are amongst the worst of the options. While Sleep has a purple set, it's not a particularly impressive one - it's very common to see Sleeps slotted for Archetype IOs instead (at least on Controllers/Dominators - most other ATs don't even bother to take them in the first place). Slow has a single damage proc option but is otherwise really unimpressive. Not only do you get mediocre set bonuses, but the distribution of Accuracy/Damage/Slow/Endurance/Recharge/etc. tends to be terrible. Defense Debuff actually tends to be pretty good from the standpoint of procs, but you don't have the purple/Archetype/Winter options. I think we may be talking about different stages of the game. If you're playing at lower levels or with basic IOs, you're not going to see the disparities I'm talking about. Once you're looking at the 50 game where you've got IO sets and Incarnates, the disparities can get pretty big.

Archery's 'low damage'. You're comparing two terrible attacks that no one ever wants to use - and the fact that Defenders are forced to use them is a strong argument for not taking these sets as a Defender. The attacks you should be comparing are the high damage attacks, not the filler attacks that you rarely use. Defenders in particular place a strong emphasize on how 'proc friendly' attacks are - being able to slot more procs is important damage-wise. The accuracy bonus tends to be fairly trivial (I believe it's 5%, not 15%). The particular problem Archery faces is that it has one strong attack (Ranged Shot) and nothing to really back it up. Contrast with sets like Fire, Ice, Psi or (yes) Dark that have two strong single target attacks. This is especially important for Defenders/Corruptors, whose 'rotation' often ends up being more of a priority list in between support set activations. Trick's Arrow versatility. Unfortunately, having one or two really strong powers tends to be better than having a lot of weak ones. Because Trick Arrow has no recharge, accuracy or defense, slotting also becomes a major concern. So while I'll take Tactical Arrow's Glue Arrow (a legitimate AE blast) routinely, Trick Arrow's Glue Arrow rarely makes the cut. Indeed, the same can be said for the bulk of the low end of Trick Arrow. It's a lot of effects you probably don't need, don't want to waste time using or are difficult to slot. Even when you get to the top end, you're talking about debuffs that aren't quite as good as what other sets bring. I think Trick Arrow works with Illusion because its ability to set Containment is tremendous. I think Tactical Arrow works for Blasters because it makes a lot of those mediocre powers into effective damage powers while providing little tweaks like lowering the recharge on EMP Arrow from 500 to 90 seconds. So while I think it's useful to examine how to make a set you're going to play anyway more effective, I think it's also important to put those sets in context. The reason Trick Arrow is 'under-rated' isn't so much because people don't understand it but because it's rarely the first choice of power set from the standpoint of effective mechanics.

I tend not to approach Dominators (or Controllers) in this fashion because this can lead to a lot of problems. In my mind, it's far better to layer your controls with actual defenses so you can manage all the situations where the Controls can fail (target caps, 5% miss chance, etc.). So my personal favorites: Electric Control. This is the improved version of Mind Control. It's got the best Sleep in the game with Static Field. It's also got the lowest recharge AE Confuse power with Synaptic Overload. However, unlike Mind, it also has an AE Immobilize. Lastly, it can end drain anything, so if you want to go that route you really only need to maintain control briefly. Fire Control. This is the superior version of Earth Control. Pretty much every power I bother to take in Earth Control has a better version in Fire Control (faster activating, does damage, etc.), plus Hot Feet can add a lot of damage and Smoke can be situationally useful. Dark Control. This is a bit of an oddball. It has a fairly conventional ST Hold, AE Immobilize, AE Disorient setup that most sets do. However, it applies -hit to everything to shore up weak defenses and it does massive amounts of pet damage. It also has a single target no-aggro Confuse if you want to go that route. Gravity Control occupies a mid-way position in my mind. Wormhole is so incredibly potent that it can justify taking an otherwise mediocre set. A huge part of the game is condensing spawns, and Wormhole is one of the best powers around for doing precisely that. The sets I don't much like: Earth Control. As stated above, there are two kinds of powers in Earth. The kind that Fire does better and the kind that aren't really all that great. Ice Control. I want to like Arctic Air, but it just has too much packed onto it. If it was just PBAoE Confuse aura, then it might be worthwhile. Once you start adding in Fear and -recharge, it negates much of the value of Confuse. The rest of the set is largely just standard controls you can get better versions of elsewhere. Mind Control. As noted above, I think Electric just does what Mind does better while bringing key components that Mind doesn't. Plant Control. Plant's main selling point is that it does more AE damage than most Control sets. However, it doesn't really match Fire for this purpose - and even Fire just barely justifies its AE damage compared to Dominator secondaries. Seeds of Confusion is nice, but the fact that it causes aggro can create difficulties for many of the edge cases where you actually want a Confuse.

I don't think Archery/TA is utterly dysfunctional. I just think it tends to be inferior to other approaches. Consider Dark/TA vs. Archery/TA. They've got a very similar structure. However, Dark permits you to: Replace the low damage basic attack from Archery with the high damage Gloom Replace the low damage/fast recharge Rain of Arrows with the high damage/slow recharge Blackstar (this also gives you certain advantages in slotting) Replace the low damage Ice Arrow with the higher damage Abyssal Gaze. Also debuffs the target(s) with -hit. The rest of the core functionality is pretty much the same. Moonbeam and Ranged Shot are both equivalent Sniper attacks. Aim is Aim. Umbral Torrent and Explosive Arrow are fast-activating 80 range target AE.

Psionic Tornado is a fairly conventional target AE attack. It's a decent enough attack. Tornado is one of the highest damage-per-activation attacks in the game and provides a significant amount of soft control. So it's not really one-or-the-other. They do very different things.

There are two power sets involved here. The first is Trick/Tactical Arrow. Now, there are some good uses for Trick Arrow. But the lack of recharge or defense-boosting abilities tends to make those uses very limited. With the right pairing, Trick Arrow can work - but it really needs that right pairing. Tactical Arrow tends to be a more generally strong set. It's probably the best Blaster secondary for a purely ranged Blaster build. The second is the various forms of Archery. Of the forms, the Corruptor set - with its 1.188s tier two attack - is probably the best. However, the set as a whole tends to emphasize slotting more like a Blaster than a Defender. It is not a 'proc monster' set and you'll generally use Explosive Arrow as part of your single target rotation (which means you're emphasizing its basic damage rather than procs in it). Ultimately, I don't think Archery/Archery is a particularly strong choice for any of the AT. I probably wouldn't play either Archery set as a Defender. If I played it as a Corruptor, I'd pair Archery with something other than Trick Arrow. If I played it as a Blaster, I'd pair Tactical Arrow with something other than Archery.

It depends on your build. For most melee, you tend to make what I like to term purple + Winter builds - you straight-slot very rare sets into your attack powers to take advantage of the enormous amounts of defense and recharge they afford. Such builds inevitably have far more accuracy in their attacks than they need. For a build structured around exploiting procs, you normally don't have any accuracy in your attacks at all. Moreover, because you're using your attack powers for proc offense, you don't have those piles of +15% accuracy bonuses. This means you need a lot of +hit to compensate for the lack of internal/global recharge. Also, remember that sniper attacks still benefit from +hit. If you're running +0 hit, you do a lot less damage with your sniper attack than if you're running +22.5% hit. Lastly, almost any build without an Aim/Build Up will run Tactics for Gaussian's.

AV have 85% (at even level) resist vs. regeneration, so the actual -regen is 75%. This can be roughly translated into 75 dps. Tornado will usually deal in the neighborhood of 1000 damage per Tornado, normally useable every 15 sec or so with a duration of 30 sec. This means you're dealing about 133 dps. With 40% resists, this would be reduced to 80 dps - which would then be bumped back up to 128 dps with stacked Freezing Rain. Then, of course, you have the Lightning Storms on top of that. The larger issue is that, all things being equal, where Storm is getting -60% resist debuffing, Cold would be getting -84% resist debuffing. I can't recall where I left my pet dps spreadsheet, but let's assume Phantom Army is dishing out 400 dps. That would be almost 100 dps from Heat Loss that Storm isn't getting (making it more significant than Benumb). Unfortunately, all things are not equal. Storm and Cold are very similar sets, but Force Feedback procs give Storm a massive advantage in recharge. While Cold is desperately trying to scrape together enough recharge from IO sets and even Incarnates, Storm has a fairly easy time hitting perma-PA. Moreover, Storm damage scales with recharge while the damage advantages Cold has do not - if you're running at the recharge cap, you'll be running with 2.5 active Tornados and 3 active Lightning Storms. In contrast, Cold at the recharge cap is still only getting a flat -24% resist debuff advantage and that 75 dps from -regen. It's certainly possible to create a scenario where the player's damage is reduced so far that they're barely able to damage the target at all so slowing down the regen is the only option left. But you're going to have a fairly narrow window between "Cold can do it but Storm cannot" and "Cold can't do it either" because anything that is able to shut down Tornado/Lightning Storm that hard will normally also shut down the rest of Ill/* damage long before the Tornado/Lightning Storm start failing. Even then, you can get Envenomed Dagger for reasonably cheap but replicating Tornado/Lightning Storm damage is difficult to impossible with temporary powers. With that in mind, I think the real problem with this sort of approach to Illusion is that you're depending stacked target AE -resist fields. These are useless against fliers and of limited use against targets who move out of the field. Storm compounds this problem by Tornado actively fearing targets out of the field - and a surprising number of AV are subject to this fear while they wouldn't be subject to conventional status effects. Truthfully, when asked the question "is Ill/Cold or Ill/Storm better?", my answer would be "they're both worse than Ill/TA and Ill/Traps". While the sets are a bit clunky in many respects, they have the critical feature Illusion lacks: an Immobilize. Containment will automatically double your base attack damage, taking it to near- Blaster or Scrapper levels. Being able to knock AV's out of the sky and lock them in place also eliminates all those fights that simply aren't winnable for Ill/Storm or Ill/Cold.

Due to Incarnate shifts, you really only need to aim for +3. The only time you'll see anything above this level would be some AV/GM in Incarnate Trials. However, in those situations, you're virtually guaranteed to be surrounded by a sea of allies. Given that almost anyone with a Sniper power (most Blasters, Defenders, Corruptors, Stalkers, Scrappers and Dominators) is probably taking Tactics, the shortfall in +hit likely isn't an issue.

Ill/Kin is one of those combinations that I don't like much because it takes two sets that are individually very strong in certain combinations... and pastes them together without regard for their complete lack of synergy: the two key abilities (Phantom Army and Fulcrum Shift) don't actually work with one another. With that in mind, the below should be a good starting point:

I'm well aware of this technique. However, there are times where it can't be used and it remains an inferior approach to just standing/moving wherever you like and using a 360 radius power. To justify it, you need a good reason to select a Cone - and that's fairly uncommon. Ice Melee's Frost is about the only example I can think of off-hand. Here's he taking two Cones that are very slow activating and not particularly high damage. He has a host of better options in other pools. So why bother with it?

Notes: Your offensive powers are far too inaccurate. In general, my benchmark is that I want to hit 95%+ of the time against +3 targets (+4 with Incarnate level shift). Your proc slotting is inefficient. Consider Savage Strike. This deals 46.31 damage (per Mid's). A single damage IO would raise this to 65.95, so is worth +19.64 damage. Touch of Death +shadow has a (2.5 + 0.8) * 3.5 / 60 = 19.25% chance to proc 71.75 damage, or +13.81 damage. Since there's no reason to expect you'll be anywhere near your +damage cap most of the time, you really want to be pushing ED before you start slotting procs. You're also not slotting any endurance reduction, so you might find yourself gasping for endurance without any major endurance restoration. Your armor set slotting is inefficient. You get far more bang for your buck straight-slotting offensive powers than you do defensive ones. You want to be looking for opportunities to slot Very Rare (purple), Winter and Incarnate full sets. Not only do offensive powers generally have far more features that need improving, but the Defense/Heal/Resist sets just aren't as good. The overall approach you're using isn't necessarily going to yield great results. Part of the reason the 'proc monster' threads went over like gangbusters on Defenders/Controllers but petered out on Tankers is that Tankers just don't have the kind of recharge/accuracy/-resist etc. that support sets offer. Hitting perma-Hasten on a Storm or Time Defender is relatively easy even without purple sets. Doing it on a Tanker is brutally hard. I find Leviathan Mastery a curious choice. Cone-based attacks are hard enough on a ranged character. On a Tanker - who is likely to be surrounded by enemies - they're likely to be very inefficient. Since the Leviathan Mastery attacks aren't actually all that strong even if you disregard their Cone nature, I find it an unusual choice. You might also consider whether you want to play this combination as a Tanker. I tend to view Tanker/Scrapper/Brute/Stalker as basically one archetype - it's just that you choose which one you want based on the power sets you're using. In general, Defense-oriented armor sets work better with Scrapper/Stalker and Savage Melee is often considered a 'Stalker set'. Normally when you end up with a 'Tanker' build, you want a build that's virtually impervious to harm - not one that merely has decent positional defenses and mid-tier resists. Overall, I think if you threw out the notion of 'proc slotting' and just straight-slotted your offensive powers in a traditional fashion, you'd have a much stronger build. Certainly, tossing a stray Force Feedback here or there can be helpful, but the strategy of layering damage procs like you have is unlikely to match what you could do with a more conventional build.

A re-tinkering, using Cold rather than Dark: The underlying motivation here is that Cold will ramp up your damage (via Sleet) more than Dark will, while also providing overall better defenses. The above sort of approach to building is basically purples + Winter sets. It's almost entirely based around stacking lots of offensive powers across a wide variety of categories so you can get the +50% recharge from purples as well as the massive defensive bonuses from the Winter sets. For control, Flashfires is the only true lockdown power. However, you can use it every spawn under perma-dom and you've got plenty of Immobilize to complete the task. Most everything else is just damage.

They indicate how much debuffing is provided per animation time - which is a critical metric. It tells you how efficiently you're using that animation time. Remember, what I was actually arguing - as opposed to the straw men you've been attacking - is that the bulk of the -resist debuffing occurs with a single power. Even your numbers demonstrate the truth of that statement, even as you try to avoid addressing it. 'Significant targets of interest' are AV/GM. Everything else simply goes down too fast. There isn't a boss in the game that can stand up to even two Scrappers/Stalkers pounding on it for more than a few seconds - by the time you layer on your -resist debuffs, it's already dead. It's only meaningful for another player if it's coordinated with what they're doing. But it almost never is. What I've been stressing is that you can't depend on other players to justify your presence in the team - you bring buffs/debuffs for yourself and if they happen to help someone else, that's nice but not essential. They exist in pretty every pug I'm ever in. You've got a few power builds who effectively do everything - and then non-power builds who don't really contribute much but tag along in their wake. Now, I guess you could try to talk about things few people ever do (Rularuu @ +4/x8) to justify a certain approach. But then you're really just saying you're willing to accept being terrible elsewhere on the off-chance you'll run this niche content. Even then, your specific example is an odd one since */Sonic would be inferior to */Dark against unusual attack categories. As I noted before, I think you (and others) are dreaming about a game that doesn't exist. Playing a pure 'force multiplier' doesn't make sense in a game where the people whose force you're purportedly 'multiplying' don't need it - and certainly aren't going to wait up for you to apply buffs/debuffs that don't make a meaningful impact on their performance. Listen. I get it. You don't want the game to devolve down into a bunch of solo toons at 50/Incarnate. I don't really want that either. But that's how the game works.

I think Fire/TA is a strong combo. I've attached a sample build with fast activating, high damage powers, typed defenses and even a mass Hold:

My argument hasn't changed it all. It's just that people have been nit-picking irrelevancies rather than addressing it. Bear in mind that the corrected numbers say exactly the same thing as my original numbers did: that -resist debuffing primarily rests in a single large debuff, with the remainder providing half or less of the value. That -20% debuff doesn't apply to "all of your teammates" damage. In the vast majority of content, you are not surrounded by 8 teammates. You are next to maybe one or two of them - and if it's two of them, probably one of them is playing a pure support build that doesn't contribute much. The only time you're near a large number of other players is when everything coalesces on the AV/GM fight. But there aren't very many AV/GM team fights where that -resist is actually meaningful. If you've got the mitigation/control to win the fight, you just beat the AV/GM down. Saving a bit of time is meaningless compared to the time it took you to wade through all the trash on the way to AV/GM. You're speculating about how it would work in some other game, not in CoH.

Your team can't benefit from it because they're nowhere near you - they're off fighting somewhere else while you're helplessly flailing around trying to kill a spawn with your anemic damage. If you do decide to tag along after one of your more capable teammates, that -20% you're applying doesn't come close to making up the shortfall in damage you bring to the table.