Hjarki

With 'flipped' archetypes (such as Brute/Tanker, Corruptor/Defender, Stalker/Scrapper), you really have to focus on the unique mechanics involved. Certain combinations work well in one form or the other. In terms of Stalkers/Scrappers, the two key differences: Stalkers don't get damage auras, Scrappers do. This makes any set with a damage aura unusually weak for a Stalker. Stalkers get a 'free' single target attack, Scrappers don't. This creates the seemingly paradoxical situation that sets with strong AE tend to be better on Stalkers than Scrappers - because Stalkers can fill the hole in an otherwise weak single target attack chain. For example, the latest Stalker I'm playing is Electrical/Energy/Mu. Electrical ordinarily doesn't have particularly good single target - but the Assassinate ability fills that hole. On the other hand, it has amazing AE - which is a common problem with Stalkers. On the armor side, Energy is virtually identical between the two right down to the Hide. So by playing it as a Stalker the power I lose to accommodate Hide is... a Hide. If you flip this to Scrapper, then you lose a lot of single target damage, you lose the near-constant build up from the archetype IO in Chain Induction and you gain nothing. It's a 'Stalker build'. Contrast this with the classic Titan Weapons/Bio Scrapper. Titan Weapons isn't even available to Stalkers. With Bio Armor, you lose both the damage aura and the -resist aura. So this would be a 'Scrapper Build'.

As I said, the numbers may be inaccurate in some place. However, two other powers I didn't think about compared to a 25 sec duration on Shock: Lightning Storm 90 * 4 * 10 / 2.244 = 1604 Heat Exhaustion 200 * 40 / 2.244 = 3565 (unenhanceable) Shock 75 * 25 / 2.244 = 836 You can check the Gremlins attacks with in-game info (I noted it above). What I discovered is that taking Ninjas from 'tissue paper' to 'slightly more durable tissue paper' didn't help much - especially as the melee-centric ninjas tend to run out of the bubble. Demons seems like a better overall choice. Additional Note: I got back to the Beta server to test a new sapper build:; This isn't a horrible general build, but it was primarily aimed at trying to sap as effectively as possible. I put no real effort in defenses, so it's relatively Against standard spawns, it shuts them down in fairly short order. They lose all their endurance and can't do anything else while I kill them (which doesn't take all that long). It's not going to win any awards for AE fire farming (especially given that it's based around some long recharges without which life gets considerably more dangerous), but I suspect a slog through an +4/x8 wouldn't be impossible. Against a pylon or Lusca, I could zero the end bar and pile on some massive -recovery very quickly. However, even with all that -recovery, there were still attacks coming through (I'm not sure of the significance, but it appears Lusca stopped using 'Ink' and was just using a basic melee attack every 10 secs). At this point, I think it's safe to eliminate any fragile pet-based sapping (such as from Gremlins or Galvanic Sentinel) from consideration because they just die too quickly (this was true even with Faraday Cage). There are probably ways to tweak this to be better or other builds that are comparable. But I'd consider this pretty close to the limit of what can be done with the concept of sapping. Power Boosted Heat Exhaustion might be even better, but I'm not sure if Power Boost affects Heat Exhaustion.

A good metric for these sorts of powers could be (recovery duration) * (recovery debuff) / (activation time). A small sample: Thunderous Blast 20 * 100 / 3.96 = 505 Chain Fences 6 * 100 / 1.32 = 455 Shock = 12 * 75 / 2.244 = 401 Jolting Chain 8 * 100 / 2.244 = 357 Ball Lightning 4 * 100 / 1.32 = 303 Short Circuit 10 * 100 / 3.3 = 303 Zapp 4 * 100 / 1.33 = 301 Lightning Bolt 4 * 100 / 1.848 = 216 Charged Bolts 2 * 100 / 1.188 = 168 Tesla Cage 4 * 100 / 2.378 = 168 Electric Fence 2 * 100 / 1.848 = 108 I don't have exact numbers on Galvanic Sentinel, but since it's supposed to be weaker than Mastermind's discharge, that strongly implies it's actually very weak. The Voltaic Sentinel does not have -recovery. Imps have 4 sec -100% recovery on a 4 sec recharge. If you can keep them alive, that would be a steady -200% recovery on top of everything else. So I'm not sure that Electric Affinity is actually all that useful for this approach. Most of your -recovery is going to come from Electric Control and the Chain Fences/Jolting Chain rotation provides so little room that you'll have little time to slip in Shocks. Examining again, I'm actually leaning towards Electric/Nature as a 'sapper'. You've got three key powers (Corrosive Enzymes, Wild Growth and Overgrowth) all on relatively long recharges (i.e. not taking up sapping time). You're getting some +damage and -resist out of the bargain to compensate for your investment in sapping. Your 'healing' is largely covered by large amounts of regen, so you're spending a lot less time throwing actual heals. The biggest problem I see is that your 'sapping rotation' is - with the exception of Jolting Chain - also an extremely low damage rotation.

You may find your results disappointing. One of the key problems with Sonic is that the -resist debuff is strongly dependent on how much time to contribute to it. The moment you throw a power that isn't a -resist debuff, your average starts to drop. This makes Sonic Blast antagonistic with 'busy' Support sets - you really want a fire-and-forget Support set that doesn't have any short recharge powers to make best use of it. Most -recovery debuffs are short duration. Electric Fence, Tesla Cage and Jolting Chain are 2, 4, 8 secs respectively. So you run into a problem akin to the Sonic issue above where any time you're doing something that isn't -recovery, your -recovery starts to suffer dramatically. Shock is dramatically better than any of those powers at -recovery. But if you were at the recharge cap, you could still only eek -400% recovery out of it (before resistances). You're more than welcome to give end drain'ing these sorts of targets a try. I did a variety of tests, but I wouldn't call them perfectly optimal. What I did find is that while I could certainly sap the endurance, keeping it sapped in a meaningful fashion proved impossible. Note: I think people get enthusiastic because end drain is so devastating to players. However, the primary impact against players isn't delaying their attacks - it's dropping their toggles. Malta sappers kill players by shutting down all of their defenses more than making it harder to throw an attack. Since PvE enemies don't have toggles, they're effectively immune to the most important consequence of end drain.

The problem I find with Sentinel is that's just not very useful except for being a target you can bounce your effects off... but it dies very easily. It would have been far more sensible to make it immune to damage - especially considering the mediocrity of effects it provides. Short Circuit can, with Incarnate, slotting and Power Boost, zero out an entire spawn. However, that's a lot of effort to momentarily pause a spawn (the -recovery buff is fairly short and once the -recovery wears off, enemies start attacking again). Energizing Circuit isn't particularly useful on other players (who have already solved their endurance/recharge issues). However, it's incredibly useful on the EA player who can use it to deal with those problems. However, the nature of the +recharge buff means that you're mainly using it for long recharge powers.

The rule of thumb here is: if you can't drain endurance faster than health, you might as well not bother. End drain is all-or-nothing. You need to floor both the target's endurance and their recovery before end drain does any good. At that point, you've effectively got a disorient. Against minions/lieutenants, endurance drain will almost always be useless. You kill them so fast that it makes no sense to End Drain them. Against bosses, endurance drain can make some sense. However, there are relatively few one-button end drain methods that can sap a boss to nothing (especially @ +4), so you very rapidly get into "I'll just throw my Hold twice" territory. Against AV/GM, endurance drain could potentially make a lot of sense. The fastest pylon times are usually in the 1 - 2 minute range. You can sap a pylon in 20 seconds. This becomes especially relevant when you consider all of those long recharge defense clicks that let you be effectively invulnerable for more than enough time to sap the AV/GM to zero. So the theory goes: click your "I can't be hurt" power, sap the AV/GM to nothing, spend the rest of the fight in complete safety. Unfortunately, there are two wrinkles to this scheme: Recovery can't be floored. Maybe you could do it with 3-4 Electric Affinity players. But not with a single player. Recovery debuffing is just resisted too much. If Recovery isn't floored, you wasted a lot of time draining endurance because it has no impact on the fight. AV/GM (probably) can act anyway. There are almost certainly abilities particularly to a given AV/GM that cost 0 endurance and can be used anyway. So instead of crippling the AV/GM, you're probably mildly inconveniencing it. Maybe you can come up with a build that can do something useful (PvE-wise) with End Drain. But I was unable to find any build - even dedicated sapper builds that sacrificed any hope of dealing meaningful damage - that were of any use against pylons or Lusca (testing against actual AV/GM in missions requires a bit of effort to reach them).

I probably should have mentioned this because I suspect loading the build I linked wouldn't work on a standard version of Mid's.

If you're fighting a level 50 AV/GM, it should have 85% resist. That means -40% resist would debuff it to an effective 79% resist. Applying -110% damage would thus reduce it's overall damage by -23.1%. About half of that is the almost-certain-to-be-killed Dark Servant so you're looking at -12% or so in practice.

As an example of the sort of things I've been playing with: The above isn't really a 'power build'. It's very durable (at least vs. S/L) and has decent damage for a non-Storm Defender. However, it is nonetheless a 'Classic' Defender in the sense that it's far more effective as an aid to a team than solo. It can function solo, but you'll discover that keeping your Galvanic Sentinel alive (without which most of your primary becomes useless) can be tricky. As usual with Electric sets, I ignore the end drain component and just focus on the abilities themselves. Psi Blast meshes well because it has two solid single target attacks, a KB AE and a PBAoE ultimate. I don't really need more than those two single target attacks (Mental Blast can be used, but it's basically a mule for set bonuses) because the Primary is so busy. You'll need to be activating Energizing Circuit on recharge and then healing as necessary. Empowering Circuit only needs to be refresh once every minute.

The Cage creates a pseudo-pet that refreshes the buff on a fairly short duration. So you have to stay inside the cage. If you activate the power again, the previous Cage disappears - you can only have one at a time.

The key features of Electric Affinity are the recharge/endurance and the bubble/self-heals. As long as you've got an active pet, you can take an enormous beating - I didn't try solo'ing Liberty or anything with it, but it's very hard to kill. But neither Electric Affinity nor Electric Blast/Control make endurance drain practical. I do think that a good place to start looking for synergies is with relatively long recharge PBAoE since the combination of recharge + bubble makes them more practical. I did do an Elec/Elec/Soul build to exploit Soul Drain + Power Boost (Power Boost allows both Thunderous Blast and Short Circuit to zero end bars). However, while the bubble is very good, it's unlikely you'll be hard-capping resists except S/L and it does nothing for defenses. Rectified Recticle isn't really worthwhile outside of PvP, unless you want the S/L def bonuses. Gaussian's appears to act in a manner similar to Tactics - the chance to proc is increased by the number of targets. However, from my admitted brief testing, I believe you have to be in the Empowering Circuit yourself to get the buff (if you're only buffing others, it doesn't seem to proc). Also, because Empowering Circuit can only usefully be activated once per minute, you're almost certainly going to get performance directly inferior to Tactics.

"How little of slotting" is often a bug, not a feature. There are no defensive powers (no LotG mules), no damaging powers (lots of opportunities there), no Holds/Confuses (great sets overall), etc. The new Preemptive Optimization offers 3.75% Ranged + 3.75% Recharge at 6-slot, but that more 'better than Performance Shifter' than actually good. The two heals can take Numina's (Ranged Def), Preventive (recharge) or Panacea (recharge), which are all reasonably good options. In terms of the set overall, I think the core features are Energizing Circuit and Faraday Cage. I tried a lot of builds and the notion of 'sapping' never really worked out - spending a minute to drain the endurance of targets you could kill in 45 sec just isn't useful. Amp Up and Defibrillate are the two powers I can't really see taking in almost any build. Galvanic Sentinel is a power I'd only take as a potential target for my Chain spells when I don't have another pet to use. Shock just doesn't do anything useful - either it's pointless (on standard minion/lt/boss) or it's resisted into nothing (AV/GM). Empowering Circuit doesn't really need any slotting at all since it doesn't stack and the duration is four times the recharge. Maybe some +hit slotting if you really want. The two heals are nice and there are some decent heal sets. However, back to those core features (Energizing Circuit and Faraday Cage). The key features of both don't meaningfully vary between primary and secondary, so the only reason to play as a Defender is if you really hate the idea of wasting a power on Shock or you need the superior values from pools. Probably the best build I threw together was Ill/Electric/Mace, but this is less an optimal build than a more team-friendly version of the always popular Illusion. I do think Electric is generally one of the best of the 'pure support' sets with its excellent heals and bubble.

Except it's not really much fun to join a group and find that you're totally useless in that group. No one takes their level 5 character into an AE farm with a level 50 Brute because they find watching some guy stand in a puddle of effects for 10 minutes 'fun'. Mostly, they just go afk and come back to their xp. When half or more of the archetypes/powers in the game aren't really of much use because they can't be competitive at high levels, that is a significant problem. Nor is it one that can be solved by introducing really challenging content that even more dramatically showcases the shortcomings of such archetypes/powers. I get the impression you haven't spent a whole lot of time playing around with this 'new content'. Personally, I think it's fairly balanced - by which I mean that much of it isn't going to make an appearance in any 'power build'. Defibrillate is essentially a mass disorient with a longer recharge and shorter range than most mass disorients. While it's neat to completely sap a spawn of endurance, that's only half the story. The other half is the recovery debuff - which has a relatively short, unenhanceable duration. Once their recovery starts ticking, there's no real difference between being at 1% endurance and 100% endurance. So really you end up with an effect that might be considered an interesting variation on a tactic that few players use in the first place. Remember, we can already do what Defibrillate does with Thunderous Blast. But no one does. Likewise, your argument about Amp Up fails to recognize how rarely boosting those powers on others is of any meaningful value. Bear in mind that we're currently playing a game where people slot their mezzes for damage, the only debuff that really matters is the unenhanceable -resist (or the equally unenhanceable -regen) and players build their characters around having enough +hit so they don't need your help. When a power like Amp Up affects the player - who can specifically build around the certainty of its presence - it makes sense. When it buffs others (whose builds were created independent of that buff), it almost never provides them with anything they can use. Or consider the new IO sets. Bombardment has a new proc which will probably see some use. The pure end mod set has some nice set bonuses that existing end mod sets don't have so you're likely to see it in powers like Transference. But the others? Why would you need a hybrid End Mod/Damage set in the first place? If you wanted to increase both End Mod and Damage in the same power, you can already do that by mixing End Mod and Damage sets - and normally far more effectively. But, of course, no one does that because endurance drain is only useful if you're draining endurance faster than you're draining health - and the powers we have in game don't do that. Once the first blush of "ooh... shiny" wears off, I think you'll discover that this new content is relatively balanced... by which I mean it's not something most players will use. Electric Affinity is nice, but it's basically Kinetics with a bubble rather than Fulcrum Shift - a trade most people would be unwilling to make. From my perspective, that's a big problem. It's not "play what you want, have fun doing it". It's "play what you want, but you'll probably be gimped". Adding new content that no one wants to use is no different than adding no content at all. The complexity of CoH builds tends to mean that most of them aren't very good, so I'm not sure how valuable such a survey really is. If you compare between strong builds, I suspect you'll find a lot less diversity in choices - and much of the diversity you do find is simply due to the fact that some abilities synergize better than others. What I'm pointing out is that CoH's primary problem isn't "there's nothing to do" or "there's no difficult content". The problem is game balance. You briefly mentioned that you rarely see Empathy. That's a problem. Empathy isn't a bad power set - it just doesn't provide much that's useful when you're playing slammed up against the limits of the game. If you're a player who thinks its fun to play that sort of pure support character, you're eventually forced to confront the reality that few others can benefit from the support you provide - and that you're not much use to the team. Being useless is not 'fun'.

We really have only two 'tests' - pylon tests and AE farm clear times - and they're both limited in terms of what they can predict (and, in the case of AE farm clear times, we don't have a very comprehensive set of examples from Controllers). So it's disingenuous to claim your opinion isn't an opinion. For single target damage, it's primarily about the pet(s). Most of the core features of single target controller damage are pets, procs, support sets and pools. The only factors uniquely tied to the Control sets are the pets. So it tends to boil down to (a) how much pet damage there is and (b) whether you can keep those pets alive. Because Illusion absolutely wins on (b), a reasonable ranking for single target damage would be: Illusion > Dark, Plant > everything else. Illusion has the invulnerable pets and another pet summons. Dark has the best actual pet and augments it with additional pets. Plant has the most proc-friendly of the pets. However, Phantom Army's invulnerability cannot be understated. In most tough single target fights, your pets are simply going to get crunched without some fairly extraordinary efforts - and thus not contribute dps. Since no Controller has remotely competitive single target non-pet dps from their Control set, it becomes a bit like a tallest Oompa Loompa contest at this point. In terms of AE, it's largely about layering powers and procs (in a practical fashion). This gives us: Electric, Fire, Plant > Earth > Dark, Ice > everything else. Jolting Chain and Carrion Creepers have incredible proc performance on top of the standard Immobilize and an AE Confuse. Fire has four different AE effects to layer those procs. As you move down the list, your options become slimmer and slimmer.

I think we're talking about different problems. The problem you're talking about - content that doesn't challenge people - isn't really a problem in my mind. If you want to experience catastrophic defense failures or psi control effects knocking down your toggles, that's available. People just don't do it much because there's no real advantage to doing it when you can just rip through far easier content. Certainly, it would be nice to have more content. Even better, it would be nice to have better content systems where players could usefully create missions other players would actually play (beyond simple farm missions). The problem I'm talking about - the dramatic imbalance between 'haves' and 'have nots' - is a problem that simply adding more difficult content doesn't address and potentially exacerbates. There's a vast array of abilities in the game that simply aren't very useful - such as almost every secondary effect on blast and melee sets. A large part of the game's appeal is its customization. But if you want to build your concept character, there's a good chance you'll be gimped because your concept doesn't happen to hit the right power sets/archetypes. When you look at the power pools players take, they're almost formulaic (the reason we no longer have Fitness pool) rather than being ways to expand your concept. To me, that's the real problem. When someone comes on these boards and says "I have a neat concept for a character", the response shouldn't be "well, you can build it, but it will suck compared to X" - which is what the response often is right now.

I tossed together a fairly basic build. The leveling order probably isn't ideal, though. I also did it as a Corruptor for two reasons. First, Psychic Blast has a better second than first power. Second, Kinetics tends to work better as a Corruptor due to the higher +damage cap. The basic goal was to reach 45 S/L Def while preserving a decent offensive; Rune of Protection can hopefully cover some of the gaps. Most of the powers are slotted in ways that, if not ideal, should give you an idea of what you might want to explore.

It really depends on what you're fighting. However, I find typed defenses generally easier on a melee character. For ranged characters, you can eliminate virtually all attacks by simply taking Ranged Defense and staying at range. For a melee character, you'd really need to take all 3 positional defenses to get the same sort of coverage. Positional defenses also defend against any attack that has any of those attack types attached. So if someone fires an Icebolt at you, you can defend against with either Smashing or Cold. Also, you need to remember that Stalkers have massive AoE defense... when they're hidden. When they're not hidden, that massive boost from Hide goes away. So you might not actually be soft-capped to AoE.

For pure farming, the consensus builds are Spines/Fire and Rad/Fire Brutes. The Tanker changes earlier this year probably mean that there are Tanker builds that equal/exceed the performance of these sorts of Brute builds. The controller builds are a bit of a step back from the Brutes/Tankers and tend to require a bit more interaction - you can literally go afk with your Brute/Tanker and come back to a pile of influence/xp. FIre/Kin remains perhaps the most popular build in the game. It's a fairly flexible build that also works well in team settings. However, a build like Plant/Storm is likely to beat it for sheer mass carnage.

I agree that Energizing Circuit is one of the core powers of the set. About the only test character where I found Amp Up useful was Necromancy/Electric.

I think you're threading an awfully fine needle here. This is a power received at 32 or 38. It requires a party member with a fairly specific build and a situation where that would be useful. Consider your example of to-hit debuffs. These are effects no one increases in the first place because they tend to act in a binary fashion. Either your to-hit buffs tend to completely overwhelm the target's hit or they're resisted into irrelevance. If improving hit debuffs was important, then people playing Dark Control or Dark Blast would do that. The fact that they don't even bother strongly suggests that doing it for them is unlikely to yield much benefit. As a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that we: Reduce the recharge to a few seconds Make it affect all allies (just not the user) like a standard bubble-type power Swap it from the 9th slot to something much lower Now, ask yourself - would you take this power? For me, it would fall into the 'maybe' category alongside powers like Increase Density.

As I noted, the damage on Poison Trap isn't remotely close to an ultimate nuke. It's less than conventional nukes like Irradiate or Fireball that have much lower recharges. The hold also isn't very good - it's extremely short duration and the nature of the trap tends to scatter a spawn. In terms of return on investment, it's actually quite low because the proc chance is based on the pseudo-pet (10 sec) rather than on the recharge (60 sec). When I was talking about Irradiate, I was being perfectly serious - Irradiate is a substantially better mechanism for damage because it can exploit the disparity between MRT and actual recharge (which Poison Trap can't do) while also having a large radius and strong damage. If you've already decided to play Poison, then you might as well take it. But it's not a very strong selling point for the set.

Except you're the team's "Defender or Controller". So you need to have another Defender/Controller to receive the buff - and one whose abilities overlap substantially with your own. Moreover, the buff tends to target the kinds of features that builds design around. At low levels, +recharge is a good ally buff - at higher levels, players tend to have enough recharge to run their rotation and additional recharge does little for them. Likewise, they have enough hit to cap, enough duration on their mezzes and End Mod is a hyper-specialized approach. So I'm having trouble seeing how Amp Up would be useful in anything except a static team where you have a teammate designed around the use of Amp Up.

I don't believe there's really any way to 'abuse it' beyond the conventional ones. Jolting Chain should act just like a single target attack. But I think it really boils down to the fact that, no matter what you do with it, it's still just a minor heal. I suppose you could just toss it in Stamina and let it tick away, but normally this sort of 'regen' just isn't very useful. Overall, I haven't found either of the damage/endurance sets to have much use. They don't have any key bonuses that would make 2- or 3- slotting them worthwhile. The bonuses at 5- and 6- are decent but not particularly inspiring. Splitting across end mod alongside more conventional features like recharge, damage and accuracy means they end up being bad at everything. I think there's also the "stop trying to make fetch a thing" factor here. There just aren't many powers that are both good at damage and end mod (Thunderous Blast is the only one I can think of). Indeed, damage and end mod are opposing concepts - if you can just kill something, you have no reason to drain its endurance. Pre-emptive Optimization I have found useful. Non-damaging end drain powers do exist and this is a better set than exists currently.

I tested it on a number of different spawns. It procs a single time - upon detonation. It can potentially proc a second time 10 secs later - if it hasn't scattered the spawn. Its overall damage (with procs) is less than conventional nukes. What you are arguing is that the power works in a dramatically different way than any other similar power and is dramatically different from the way it actually works on the Beta server. If you have some secret trick to making it work the way you claim, I'd love to hear it.

1. 27% is based on a 10 yard radius and a 10 sec activation. It matches the in-game performance. 2. 10 is an approximation. Spawns that you can Fireball in their entirety tend to have the fringes missed by the trap. 4. 7 out of 13 Blast sets have PBAoE ultimates. Only 2 out of 9 Control sets have PBAoE damage abilities, but all Defenders/Controllers/Corruptors have access to PBAoE via Epic/Patron pools. That's not 'rare' - that's "anyone can take one if they want one". Irradiate (from Radiation Blast) is almost directly superior to the trap. Given that there's no great rush to take Radiation for Irradiate, it's hard to agree with the notion that the trap is a key selling point of the Poison set.