Hjarki

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.

You'd lose that bet - my conclusions on Sonic are the result of extensively playing the set. I pulled the info from Mid's because it's far more convenient than loading up the game and looking at the numbers there. However, the 'corrections' aren't actually more accurate - for example, Bopper used two completely different metrics for evaluating Sonic vs. Beam Rifle/Dual Pistols. What people are saying just doesn't match how the game is played. They're talking about idealized situations that never happen - infinite length battles with uninterrupted chains of attacks in battles which somehow speed-to-kill still matters. What I'm trying to stress is that the single big -resist debuff is far more important than the rest of the chain - to the point where the rest of the chain barely matters at all. So crippling your performance in every other aspect of the game so you can do slightly better on an AV/GM where it probably doesn't matter isn't a good tradeoff. Sonic is a set like Force Field or Empathy. It's fairly good at low levels when you're still in 'team mode' and you've got people wandering around in groups of 8 carefully engaging spawns. But as you start to reach higher levels and your 'team' is 5 - 8 different solos/duos spread across the map, the notion of 'support' being a 'force multiplier' vanishes. The only time the team comes together is for that big AV/GM battle. But in that battle, it's almost never about dps - it's about control and mitigation.

Actually, I think I'm the only who is using metrics that have bearing on the game while everyone else is trying to argue from some sort of sandbox that doesn't mimic game play. Against trash, Sonic is horrible. -Resist has to be applied before attacks, not after. Saying "ooh... I can stack -100% resist!" isn't really meaningful against enemies that are dead long before those stacks occur. In terms of single target nuking power, Sonic doesn't come remotely close to what other sets deliver even with the -resist debuffs - those other sets have attacks that are literally 3-4x the dpa of what Sonic brings once you slot them up. So you're left with AV/GM fights. But not solo AV/GM fights (where Sonic's abysmally low personal dps overwhelms the value of its -resist debuffs). Team AV/GM fights. But you need team AV/GM fights that are going to last a reasonable amount of time, where you've got enough dps to overwhelm your personal dps shortfall, where the kill time matters and where you don't have so many debuffs that your -resist debuffing isn't watered down. That's a pretty precise target to hit. I think the problem is that people are imagining the value of Sonic rather than observing it. It's a set like Empathy - you can speculate on all sorts of "other players will love me!" notions, but eventually you realize that other players just don't care - and, if they do care, their primary concern is that you're a burden on the team because you're ineffectual when you don't have someone helping you. Note: Another analogy would be relationships like Force FIeld vs. Time or Cold. Technically, Force Field can buff defense to greater values. But this comes at such a cost that's almost never worth it. The same could be said for Sonic. The cost is simply too high for the marginal benefits it provides.

I just pulled the numbers from Mid's, so they may differ a slight amount from the in-game values. However, the relative value should be similar to what I posted. The problem that occurs with the fast recharging attacks is the same that occurs with procs: powers you use whenever they recharge gain far more benefit than powers which recharge 'too fast' in your rotation. In terms of the stacking issue, these powers 'self-stack'. So if a better power (longer duration) is available, you always prefer that power. What's effectively happening is that Dual Pistols/Beam Rifle get their version of the best power in the set - the power that constitutes about half of your debuffing - while being able to exploit that debuffing with far more effective attacks.

Note that DP/Kin can also be done with typed defenses easily:

The various attacks all self-stack. A good metric for judging how good they'll be is debuff * duration / activation: Screech = 20 * 14.9 / 1.716 = 174 Shout = 20 * 10 / 2.904 = 69 Scream = 20 * 6 / 1.848 = 65 Shriek = 20 * 3 / 1.188 = 51 Piercing Rounds = 20 * 8 / 2.64 = 61 Piercing Beam = 20 * 10 / 2.508 = 80 What this means in practice is that virtually all of the advantage Sonic has over Beam Rifle or Dual Pistols rests with Screech - which does so little damage it's more like a pure debuffing attack. Moreover, the Dual Pistols/Beam Rifle attacks can slot Annihilation with nearly 100% uptime. While Annihilation procs from different players will not stack, this normally isn't a concern because no one except Dual Pistols/Beam Rifle users can usefully slot Annihilation for use on a single target (the AFs on the proc chance kills it unless the underlying attack has such a huge recharge that you can't maintain reasonable uptime). So your stacking concerns are limited with Annihilation. Unless you're playing with an 'all one power set' group, chances are you're the only person using Annihilation. You're certainly the only one using Annihilation on the target if you're solo or attacking the mob by yourself (which is virtually all single target attacks except AV/GM). To compound this difficulty, Sonic Attack is a lot worse than it initially looks because of the inability to slot procs into its powers. Attacks like Penetrating Ray deal about 4x the damage of any Sonic Attack single target power once you've accounted for those procs - Beam Rifle can literally beat Sonic Attack's entire attack chain with that one power. Even in a team setting, this massive shortfall in personal dps is difficult to overcome. The benefits of Sonic Attack are almost exclusively on AV/GM (targets tough enough to stack multiple -resist) in a team setting, while its damage is painfully inadequate anywhere else. However, in a team setting you often have so many debuffs on the target that the slight marginal advantage it provides in -resist debuffing often isn't enough. Sonic Attack really ends up being a 'pure support' Blast set. It's terrible as a Blast set and it's only value lies in the fact that you might potentially be helping the rest of the team. But the situations for this help to be meaningful are narrow enough that you're almost always better off going with a Blast set that can actually Blast. Even after you've laid in your -resist (a process that takes long enough that non-AV/GM targets would probably already be dead under normal circumstances), you're still under-performing traditional Blast sets.

I'd argue that Sonic is actually one of the worst Blast sets in current play. The value of a -resist debuff is based not just on its existence but also its duration and activation time. In practice, about half the value of the entire Sonic Blast -resist debuffing comes from a single power: Screech. Moreover, nothing in Sonic Blast permits you to slot Achilles' Heel, Annihilation or Fury of the Gladiator procs. This leads to a result where both Dual Pistols and Beam Rifle are roughly equivalent to Sonic Blast in terms of debuffing potential. They may only have one -resist debuff, but it's capable of slotting an additional -resist proc (and one that will rarely be on a single target except from users of those sets) and it's better than anything Sonic Blast has to offer (by a large margin) except for Screech. The advantage Sonic Blast has over Dual Pistols/Beam Rifle is minor, but the penalties it pays are massive in terms of the damage it deals. Moreover, Sonic Blast is a poor choice for any 'active' support set because the more time you spend with your support set, the less time you spend with Sonic's debuffing. Overall, I look at the following features of Blast sets (in no particular order): Knockback, especially on AE. A little bit of knockback (or, even better, knockdown) is a good thing since it lets you slot Force Feedback. However, you don't want enemies flying all over the place with every attack. Low activation times. The amount of damage you can realistically do is limited by the activation time of your powers. As a result, sets with relatively high activation times do a lot less damage than those with low activation times. High recharge. Due to how the proc math works, you really want higher recharges (up to a point) on your powers. Low recharge powers are ones that will inevitably deliver worse performances with procs. Proc-friendly secondary effects. For a Defender, you're going to get a lot of your damage from piling procs into your attacks, so you want secondary effects which permit this. Slow, -hit and KB all have an additional proc while -def has 2-3 additional procs. Sniper attacks. Due to the sniper changes, Sniper attacks are now high damage, fast-activating attacks. Rain effects. These are abnormally strong for Corruptors, but they come at the cost of not being useable against Flying targets. For Defenders, they're normally a negative. Ultimates. You're normally better off with lower recharge on ultimates and ranged > PBAoE in most cases. Aim. This can end up being active about half the time on a high recharge build. Holds. Holds have the best slotting opportunities of any powers. Cones. Cones are, in general, bad. However, extremely narrow arc cones that are effectively single target attacks tend to be good as well as extremely long range Cones. That being said, Cones have an inherently issue with poor close-range performance, so they need to be paired with sets that operate at long range. Multiple single target attacks. While all sets have multiple single target attacks, I'm really talking about multiple good single target attacks. Pairings like Gloom/Moonbeam, Blaze/Blazing Bolt, Freezing Ray/Bitter Ice Blast, or Psionic Lance/Telekinetic Blast stand out. However, most of these sets actually work better for Corruptors.

Both Time and Water are relatively well-explored sets. I've done up a basic build below:

As noted above, ally buffing isn't all that useful in endgame. However, the larger issue is that virtually any Force Field build you could come up would work better with another set. There's not much of anything in the set that isn't done as well elsewhere - and generally done in conjunction with far more useful supplemental features.

This is my basic Fire/Kin build: The main variations would be the choice of Epic/Patron pool. The above has an Energy/Neg hole, but better offense. The Ice version would have the same Energy/Neg hole, but be better for fire farming. The Mace version closes the Energy hole, but comes at the expense of having to mule sub-standard attacks. The basic premise is that Kinetics permits you to avoid efficient slotting and just pursue set bonuses (in this case, all those Winter sets for typed defenses). Because it provides you with large amounts of +damage and +recharge, you don't need to worry about things like wasting your single target Hold on Entomb. In the above build, Sorcery is used for status protection/resist (intermittently). The basic resists aren't great, but aren't terrible.

Slotting +End proc is actually a lot less effective than simply slotting EndMod into the power. Jolting Chain works on a different mechanism of summoning pseudopets. Proc slotting Jolting Chain is advantageous over, say, proc-slotting an Immobilize since the individual proc chances are much higher and they are immune to recharge reductions (beyond the first target). So you can slot three procs into Jolting Chain, drop its recharge down into the 2-3 second range, and generate a lot more procs than you could with a comparable AE power. I wouldn't look to get much from the proc slotting of EA powers. Most of the opportunities involve doing something less effectively than the power you're slotting already does.

In most games I've seen - not just CoH - additional classes/archetypes are almost always a mistake because the original design included a broad swathes of concepts that they don't actually expand on with the additional classes/archetypes. The Sentinel is a perfect example of this. Instead of creating an entirely new archetype, why not just add Blast sets (with an adjusted ranged Damage Scale) to Scrappers? So you could choose Dark Blast/Dark Armor or Dark Melee/Dark Armor as a Scrapper if you so chose.

A good way to think of Electric Affinity is that it's Kinetics with Fulcrum Shift traded out for Sonic Dispersion. So that should give you an idea of why it might not be the most popular set. The major limitation of the set is that you need an ally to gain a personal benefit from most of its powers - and that ally needs to be in close proximity. While you can fire the powers from across the room, they can only bounce to nearby targets. The major benefits of the set are burst +recharge and the bubble. Taken together, I'd argue that Dark Control is probably the best choice. It has the quantity of pets you need to ensure you always have an ally, it can benefit from the recharge and the bubble will help protect them.

When last I checked, Rain effects did generate procs - but they were generated on a 10 sec timing rather than a 60 sec timing, making them nearly useless.

I don't know that I have 'tips' so much as 'cautions'. Electric Control is generally the most 'Controller-ish' of the Control sets. It has two of the best absolute lockdown powers in any Control Set - Static Field and Synaptic Overload - as well as the best sapping of any set and the ability to feed endurance to its other power set. This makes it fantastic for supporting very aggressive secondaries. However, what it does not have is particularly significant amounts of damage. This means a combination of Electric/Radiation is really two sets trying to support something that isn't there - your offensive really needs to come from somewhere else. I'd also argue that Electric is a control set, not a damage set - and trying to re-purpose it as damage doesn't work very well: Chain Fences. AE Immobilizes from Control sets aren't actually very good damage powers. Even Plant's Roots is only barely at the level of Defender 15' nukes, much less 'real' AE nukes. As such, I think they're best used as control effects to provide Containment rather than damage effects in their own right. This is especially true of Chain Fences, which is one of the best sapping powers in the game. I'd actually slot this primarily for EndMod/EndRed/Recharge - and not really bother with procs (the proc chance is extraordinarily low) except perhaps Performance Shifter or Power Transfer (to leverage large numbers of targets). Jolting Chain. This is a bit of an oddball power since it acts differently as a single target power and an AE power in terms of proc rates. For AE damage, you want triple procs (Apoc, Javelin, Explosive Strike). For single target, you might as well slot EndMod/Recharge. I tend to avoid slotting actual damage here and I like a high internal recharge because normally when I use it on a single target I use it for sapping rather than damage. Conductive Aura. Procs generally don't work in this power and it's nearly useless for personal recovery/regen. The only reason to take it is if you're planning on sapping endurance on nearby targets - and the only thing it can usefully slot is EndMod. Two EndMod are normally all that's worthwhile unless you really need to mule it. Static Field. This is a commonly overlooked power but it's a beast. Not only can it readily 5-slot for 10% recharge, but adding EndMod (IO, it can't slot EndMod sets) can create a 'negative cost' power that can fuel the rest of your build. Synpatic Overload. The other major control power, this accepts CP if you're working towards Ranged Def. However, normally I'd 5-slot it instead with either Archetype IO or CP because Contagious Confusion isn't really necessary. Gremlins. I simply assume these will die in any situation where I don't have a total lockdown so I just normally mule Expeditious into them and - maybe if I have space - something like Soulbound Allegiance or Power Transfer. Radiation is well-trod territory - you take the 5 powers (RA, RI, AM, EF, LR) and slot them as customary. Neither primary nor secondary has a particularly major demand for recharge, so your main concern will be amassing defense. For an Epic/Patron, I think this sort of light damage primary/secondary combination really demands the melee structure of Cross Punch/Seismic Smash. That would give you S/L Def as a matter of course and your ability to use SF/SO to shut down spawns long enough to zero out their end bars would suffice for the rest of the protection you'd need. Against AV/GM, it's a bit trickier since Electric Control needs 5 - 10 secs to zero an AV/GM. That being said, Static Field can still help in that situation and you can always eat some inspirations until the battle stabilizes.