Hjarki

I normally play support AT, so I decided to give a try at a Stalker. It's worked out pretty well, so I thought I'd list it for advice/discussion. Design Goals I want to make a high damage, high control build with strong defenses. I landed on Ice/Bio as a reasonable compromise. For Defenses, I wanted to soft-cap S/L/F/C/E/N and hard-cap S/L. Soft-capping Psionic seemed impossible and Bio just doesn't have enough support for non-S/L resists. For Control, I've got a single target Hold, two multi-target Sleep (which are admittedly not all that useful) and I took a Knockdown/Disorient attack from pools. For offense, I've got three high damage ST attacks, perhaps one of the best melee AEs around (Frost) and a decent PBAoE. Single Target Rotation There really isn’t a ‘rotation’ per se. Due to variable recharge rates, crit opportunities, etc., it’s more akin to a ‘priority list’. Ice Sword is the lowest priority. Cross Punch is needed to set up insta-Moonbeam. Freezing Touch and Assassin’s Ice Sword are thrown into the mix. In any case, there’s enough to keep me busy. Most of the time Build Up takes the place of Ice Sword. AE Rotation The build has three AE attacks: Frost, Frozen Aura and Cross Punch. The first two are 10-target AEs while the last one is a 5-target cone that I don’t believe I’ve ever seen hit a second target. Adaptation I built around the notion of using all three adaptations: Defensive. I use this when I need to soft-cap defenses and cap S/L resist. Since I’ve also got Shadow Meld, this isn’t too often. Efficiency. This transforms the build from endurance-negative when fighting into endurance-positive so it can be used cyclically as ‘endurance recovery’. Offensive. This is what I use 99% of the time and it’s necessary for insta-snipe. Slotting Notes Ice Sword. Most of my attacks are slotted for S/L defense since Bio only gets S/L in Defensive Adaptation. That means either Kinetic Combat or Stalker’s Guile, so I’ve got two slots left over that I just use to round out the necessary stats and toss a proc on top. Frost. This is technically a target AE. However, it can’t slot range and HO range doesn’t work on it, so I just scavenged all the Damage/Range enhancements from various IO sets instead. Freezing Touch. The proc chance of Superior Blistering Cold is ~82%, so it’s effectively a MAG 5 Hold. I slot chance for knockdown solely to limit the amount of recharge in the power. Genetic Corruption. I have no idea if the Placate does anything here. I’m really just trying to grab the set bonuses. Moonbeam. There are a host of ways to slot this for greater effect. However, straight-slotting for F/C/N/E defense works well enough. Incarnates Intuition. Musculature could also make sense here, but the minor loss in damage in exchange for slow/hold seems reasonable. Range does not seem to affect Frost. Ageless Radial Epiphany. This is the only offensive Destiny and I prefer the version that protects me against defense/hit debuffs since I can always drop into Efficiency if endurance becomes an issue. Assault Radial. I’ve got 3 of the hardest-hitting single target attacks around, so it seems to make more sense than simply getting another Build Up. Lore/Judgement/Interface. These's are all dealer's choice - none of them have any synergy or dissonance with the build. Build Note that Pine's doesn't add in the S/L Def or Resist for some reason in Defensive Adaptation. Total cost is likely around a quarter billion influence.

Melt Armor and Slowed Response are the best of the AE -resist debuffs since they can slot near-auto proc Achilles' Heel to instantly deliver -50% resist. However, Melt Armor is inferior to Slowed Response due to the longer recharge and higher recharge:duration ratio. Click -resist debuffs are also functionally the best sort for delivering AE -resist debuffing because you can debuff the entire spawn without scattering it (or worrying about it scattering later). Heat Exhaustion and Lingering Radiation are the best -regen debuffs since they have a 3:1 recharge:duration ratio (and thus higher uptime) while alternatives like Benumb have a 4:1 (or worse) recharge:duration ratio. So Thermal's debuffs are actually quite strong. Radiation's toggle debuffs are useful early on, but fairly weak in the late game. The only real value they have is Enervating Field's -resist component - and Enervating Field is one of the weakest AE -resist debuffs because it can neither benefit from stacking or gain much advantage from procs. The hit/defense/damage components simply get resisted too much or are superfluous (you're hitting enemies 95% of the time when they're not MoG'd anyway). Cold's Sleet is an inferior version of Storm's Freezing Rain. Both are problematic due to the scatter/running problem. If you can solve that in some fashion, Freezing Rain is one of the strongest debuffs in the game since it can be stacked up to 2.5 times and has the largest single AE -resist debuff. Contrary to what the character builder says, the debuff components of Howling Twilight only last 30 secs (the control components only last 15 sec, but can be extended with enhancements). This gives it a 6:1 recharge:duration ratio and it's impossible to make 100% uptime. This means that Dark is roughly on par with a set like Time Manipulation for -regen debuffing. Tar Patch can be made permanent but isn't as good as the -resist rains or the click debuffs (for reasons discussed above). Sonic has a single target -resist debuff and an ally field debuff. The ally field debuff is one of the most convenient mechanisms - if you've got the tank to throw it on - but it has the same problem that Radiation's -resist debuff (no useful procs, no self-stacking). In any case, Sonic is middle-of-the-road at AE debuffing and probably 4th or 5th on single target -resist debuffing. Poison has two stacking -resist debuffs than can yield -65% resist on a single target (or a very tightly packed group of enemies). However, it requires the player be in close range to use the second (smaller) debuff. Pain Domination has a slightly worse version of Melt Armor that's also PBAoE. Overall, I'd say: Thermal does what Pain and Poison do, but better. Storm does what Cold does, but better Time does what Radiation does, but better Dark and Sonic are two ends of the same stick. Dark isn't particularly good at anything it does, but it does so much that the aggregate makes up for the individual weakness of the powers. In contrast, Sonic isn't particularly good at anything it does - but it does so little that it's rarely worth playing the set. Traps is extremely hard to make effective in a group setting, so it's customarily left out of these discussions. Trick Arrow tends to be numerically weaker than it should be, so it also gets omitted.

I'd go with Storm (x4), Time (x2), Thermal (x2) for your team. It covers all the key points: status protection, soft-capped defenses, hard-capped resists, healing, -resist debuffing, recharge buffing, endurance management. Storm is there because it brings both the best control and the best damage. You'd want as many as possible. Time has solid -resist debuffing and provides the best recharge buff. Thermal is there because it's the best option that covers full status protection and its resist buffs complement Time's defense buffs.

I generally make an assumption of +150% for all the various static features of a build. It's probably a wee bit high, but it's a nice round number. Aim + Gaussian's is +130% on that, which puts you 20% away from the cap. On somewhat related note, I think Soul Drain is an over-rated power because players tend not to think about the fungibility of build attributes. Basically, Soul Drain is just a way to replace +damage inspirations in the same way that Conserve Power is a way to replace +endurance inspirations or Weave is a way to replace +defense inspirations. So the question really becomes which replacement is most effective for your build? I'd argue that inspirations are almost always better than Soul Drain for a Defender for three reasons: Inspirations are no-risk. Soul Drain is high risk. Soul Drain requires a three-power investment that precludes many other potentially critical choices and shackles you to one of the weaker resist toggles (negative/toxic are not common damage types). Inspirations don't care what epic/patron pool you picked. Soul Drain is useless when you most need damage boosts: the AV/GM fight. Mass AE tends to be very granular in the sense that your ultimate is going to annihilate all of the minions/lieutenants it catches while leaving all of the bosses alive. Raising yourself to the damage cap will not change this - you'll still be left with the bosses, the minions/lieutenants will still be dead. In contrast, AV/GM fights do reward incremental improvements in damage since the longer the fight goes on the more you need to deal with the AV/GM's attack and the more it regenerates.

My point was that you could accomplish the same thing with IOs or various purple sets and use fewer slots. Tossing in recharge/damage from different random sets doesn't really get you anywhere.

The comparisons are apples to watermelons most of the time anyway. If you have two different Scrapper builds that clock in at 250 dps and 300 dps, it's reasonable to say that one is 20% more dps than the other because both builds likely scale the same (very well). After all, being able to solo Rikti Pylons isn't why people optimize their dps. They just want to measure how well they'll do against enemies they actually care about. But consider that 300 dps Scrapper against a 600 dps Storm Summoning Mastermind. While the Mastermind does twice the damage against a Rikti Pylon, that does not translate into twice the dps against anything you care about. Consider: When someone Fulcrum Shifts, virtually all of a Scrapper's damage is improved (and to a higher cap) while a significant portion of the Mastermind's probably isn't. Pets that perform fine at +0 don't necessarily work at +4. Not only do they die in an eyeblink, but their damage is minimized because they're lower level than the summoner. Storm Summoning requires long, static fights (such as against Rikti Pylons). If the fight goes mobile or doesn't last long enough, the value of Storm Summoning's damage tools diminishes rapidly. I'd term Scrapper/Stalker dps as "flexible and scalable". It can be turned on and off almost instantly - it doesn't require prep time or long ramp-up periods. It scales with buffs, debuffs and levels almost perfectly. Comparing that dps against dps that is optimized (whether or not that was the intent) to fight +0 immobile objects doesn't yield very sensible results.

Some thoughts: Ageless Destiny is not only the best damage-amplifying Destiny but completely solves all your endurance woes. In contrast, Cardiac Alpha comes at the expense of Intuition (or Musculature). I think it's hard to justify Cardic on anything except a tank. Procs in Tornado/Lightning Storm. I'm not a particularly big fan of placing damage procs in these powers since they both have a (small) AF penalty that isn't justified by the rate at which they actually inflict AE damage (they tend to be almost exclusively single target damage). With Lightning Storm you also have the issue that it's a special purpose power rather than a core part of every encounter - you're only really using it on relatively long, static fights. Given that, I'd rather invest the proc slot elsewhere or use Lightning Storm as a mule (since you have to mule something, might as well mule those powers you use less frequently). Steamy Mist. I think a better approach is to franken-slot it for both Defense and Resistance. This will get you ED-limited defense, ED-limited Resistance and the endurance discount you need. The way you have it slotted right now provides relatively weak set bonuses and wastes most of the enhancement value. Fly Trap. This has two defense debuff attacks, so it makes sense to slot defense debuff-related procs. Slotting Soulbound Allegiance for the Build Up may or may not be a wise idea. However, you should give serious consideration to taking a patron pool so you can mule all 4 def/res bonuses for pets to keep your Fly Trap alive. That being said, the only patron pool I really like is Mace Mastery - and that would require re-orienting the build towards S/L/E defense and likely Poisonous Ray rather than Arcane Bolt (which wouldn't make for a repeatable single target rotation but would significantly amplify pet/pseudo-pet damage on a single target). Carrion Creepers. I don't understand this slotting at all. You've got three different sets that don't combine to actually grant set bonuses. You probably want to slot this with a purple set for the superior enhancement (even if you can't grab useful set bonuses). That being said, I don't find powers with this long of a recharge particularly useful in most cases. Sure, they do dramatic things when they're available - but they're so rarely available that the overall impact isn't great. With single target powers it can be somewhat justified for rare AV/GM fights. But AE powers tend to only be useful when they're massive burst damage (often with control attached, like Blast set ultimates) or high dps when viewed over time. Carrion Creepers is neither. O2 Boost. I tend to view avoiding the heal as problematic. Considering it also doubles as status effect protection, it seems like taking it and slotting one of the several very strong heal set options makes sense. Enflame. I've heard good things about this power for static fights and if you place procs in it. As a baseline power, I was thoroughly unimpressed. Freezing Rain. This isn't really a damage power, so adding more than some slots for recharge and maybe slow is only justified if you get some really strong set bonuses. Panacea +end/healing. This is a great unique you can slot in Health.

Control effects are in general not very useful in the 50+ IO set world. The control effects you do see being used tend to be "...and also controls" effects like Tornado or Bonfire that are primarily sources of damage. You also have to consider that many control effects are actively counterproductive because they interfere with melee AE. Unlike ranged dps, your melee need those mobs packed tight. If you're not very careful how you're using your AE control effects, you end up creating a situation where you turn an easy AE fight into a long, drawn-out single target one.

The absolute limit of Gaussian's up-time should be 55% because the proc only lasts 5.5 sec and can only trigger once every 10 secs. With just your 6 pets out, you've got ~33% chance to proc each tick so you should be experiencing ~20% uptime if the math all checks out. In terms of Storm, the Build Up proc isn't particularly useful. Storm has 4 damage dealing powers: Gale. This is rarely used for damage (except via procs) and it doesn't deal meaningful damage. Freezing Rain. Again, the damage is too low to bother buffing. Tornado. This is unaffected by Build Up in any way. Lightning Storm. If you summon a Lightning Storm while the proc is active, you will get a damage bonus for as long as the proc is active. However, after it fades, you no longer get the damage bonus and you do not get a damage bonus on previously summoned Lightning Storms if you get a proc while one is out. There's no reason not to put the Gaussian's proc in Tactics. However, I don't believe it's going to yield the results you're expecting. If you were forced to choose between Tactics + Gaussian's and Assault, Assault would very likely be a better choice. Likewise, if you were able to choose between Aim and Tactics to slot Gaussian's, the former would usually be a better choice.

Notes: Electrical Blast. While it does have a PBAoE (Short Circuit), it's not one you're ever likely to take. It does terrible damage and it can't fully end drain a target without Alpha (at which point you're simply going to Thunderous Blast them instead). Dark Blast. This relies on cones, which means you need to be at a precise range - and that range is never 'close' and frequently not 'far'. Time, Radiation, and Dark all have AE heals around the player. This means your position is dependent on who needs healing - and that frequently brings you into melee range. Kinetics could reasonably be considered 'long range' on a Defender. The reason a Defender would close to melee range would be to benefit from Fulcrum Shift themselves. However, between Siphon Speed, the player-centric portion of Fulcrum Shift, various enhancements to damage and bonuses like Aim, the Defender normally doesn't need to Fulcrum Shift themselves because they're already at/near the +damage cap. Pain Domination and Poison both have critical PBAoE -resist debuffs. This is part of the reason they're generally considered weaker sets - you can't realistically skip these debuffs as irrelevant the way you could Time's Juncture and they force you into melee range. Dark Miasma. The only cone in Dark Miasma is Fearsome Stare and it's an easily skipped power. Storm Summoning. I'm not sure I'd really put Hurricane in with the other PBAoE powers. When you first get it, it's fantastic and you can play all sorts of "I shove them in the corner" games. At 50, the relatively low magnitude on the Repel and the degree to which to-hit debuffs are resisted make it a situational power that's more defensive in nature (reacting to an enemy reaching melee range) than a proactive one (purposefully entering melee range to use it). Cold Domination. While theoretically you could enter melee range to receive more benefit from Heat Loss, Cold Domination is such a low endurance set that it's unlikely you'd ever need to do so.

Running Tactics constantly with 6 pets, I see ~10% uptime. There might be an issue where Tactics checks each target on activation but the aura itself only checks the individual with Tactics. However, I'm not sure that's particularly helpful since it just means you have a less reliable version of Aim. I'm also not sure it's terribly relevant since the Mastermind's personal damage makes up such a low percentage of their overall dps - and the proc only affects that personal dps.

Yes, they are gimping themselves by not taking Freezing Rain. I'd call Steamy Mist, Freezing Rain, Tornado and Lightning Storm the 'must haves' of the set - if you're not taking them, you really have to question why you're playing the set. Hurricane and O2 Boost are both nice, but optional. Thunder Clap, Snow Storm and Gale are more 'if I have to take this, I will'.

Kinetics doesn't really show off the value of the procs because it doesn't buff their damage. That's why most of the discussion has centered around debuff-centric sets like Dark, Time and Storm. AE is often more useful for driving Force Feedback procs than being damage augmented. Of the four types of AE damage (Cone, Rain, PBAoE, Target AE), two of those (Cones, Rains) work poorly with damage procs (lack of slots due to range requirements, procs not firing in Rains). If you're building specifically for clearing an AE moon, then you'll probably want almost all of those - and the poor performance of procs on two of them will dilute your impact. Any build will benefit by understanding the potency of various procs and their relationship to recharge. However, some builds profit so much from the PPM changes that they end up being dramatically more powerful than 'traditional' builds.

Sonic's main virtue has always been its -resist debuffs. However, you pay a huge price for them in the form of an extremely weak attack chain. In the current game, this huge price normally isn't justified because you can get similar debuffing via procs (Achilles' Heel, Annihilation, Fury of the Gladiator) with only a fraction of your attack cycle and on significantly more damaging attacks.

Procs don't scale with Fury, so they're not the kind of pure upside you see with Defenders. I do know that procs are very effective in Dark Regeneration (30 sec cooldown, 20 yard radius). Sadly, Theft of Essence appears to only proc on the activation of the power rather than each time it heals/damages. Damage auras are also a decent place for buff procs since they can be kept active without much attention. But I don't think the sort of wall-to-wall proc'd attacks like you see with Defenders are really all that practical. You really don't have worthwhile 3-set bonuses like Defender ATOs, Thunderstrike or Sting of the Manticore with melee sets. On the other hand, you do have many very solid 5-set bonuses - which tends to encourage taking a 5-set with a proc and then filling it out with another proc. Brutes also don't have the sort of dichotomy between 'proc set' and 'non-proc set'. Every offensive attack they could make can slot +psi (from taunt) and there are piles of melee/PBAoE procs. Perhaps the biggest issue is whether a set has a Force Feedback-friendly AE knockdown/knockback.

Since my first reply, there's been a fair bit of development in terms of how we think about power sets. As of now, I'd actually recommend skipping Hydro Bolt and taking either Flame Mastery or Psychic Mastery as your epic pool so you can get Char or Dominate to round out your single target attack cycle with a fast activation Hold. This allows you to slot an additional purple proc you wouldn't otherwise be able to slot. Tidal Force should absolute have the Gaussian's proc (the rest of it is up to you - depends on build requirements). In terms of pool powers, generally you're looking to soft-cap ranged defense and have 5 different defense powers for LotG. I normally go with both Flight (Hover and Afterburner) and Leadership (Maneuvers and Vengeance). Dark already has a defense toggle. Dark's Hold could also theoretically used for this purpose, but it's relatively slow activation and it doesn't deliver any actual damage itself so it's not nearly as strong.

I play DA/TW and what I've discovered: Procs aren't really that big a deal. The loss from 5-slot bonuses is simply too great to justify an extra proc in most of the powers. While my offensive powers do have procs, they tend to only be Force Feedback and the ones that arise 'organically' (Hecatomb, Armageddon, ATO, etc.) The only power I have "proc'd out" is Dark Regeneration - I think I have 5 procs in it. Dark Armor has a problem with Energy/Toxic. I don't much care about Toxic. However, Energy is one of the most common damage types. Because it comes paired with Negative Energy on all IO sets (and in the toggle), you end up with a 40+ point disparity between your Energy and Negative resistance - trying to bridge that disparity means putting your Negative at some ridiculous number over 90% and I'm not even sure it's possible without committing your entire build to it. I went with S/L and Melee Defense. More to the point, I went with S/L Defense and Melee came along for the ride. The two are paired virtually everywhere. I wasn't concerned with Psi defense because my Psi resist is capped, but I'm still a purple away from Ranged/AoE/Energy. Endurance problems (mostly) disappear with T4 Cardiac. I've still got Energy Mastery as my pool but that's more a matter of not having any slots left over for ancillary/patron pools (so it's a big pointless to take more attacks). I run with Defensive Sweep, Follow Through, Rend Armor, Whirling Smash, Arc of Destruction. I did take Ageless, but I took the debuff resist version (the build natively has no defense debuff resistance and that can be a huge problem - pretty much every time I've died has been to an avalanche of defense debuffs). I take all of the first six Dark powers and none of the last three Dark powers. The fear aura has some nice set bonus opportunities but it's not a terribly useful power. Likewise, the resurrect can slot healing sets (I could just drop Preventative Medicine proc in there and save a slot) but the power itself isn't very useful. The stun is junk. The lack of diversity in TW attacks means it's tough to meet recharge goals. While I get a lot of recharge from Force Feedback, I'm still below perma-Hasten because the only types of attacks I have are melee and PBAoE. I could potentially do a build where I use epic/patron pool attacks but they're so dramatically inferior to the TW attacks that it's hard to justify that decision.

I don't like this solution for two reasons. The first issue is that there are sometimes pathing issues. BAF is notorious for this, where target binds can't find a short enough path to the target (even when you're standing right next to it). The second issue is that you lose a major virtue of location AE: they're not tied to a target. You don't have to worry about the center of your AE suddenly shifting halfway across the room because someone used knockback or the mob decides to start running. You don't have to carefully target the precise mob in the center of the spawn. What I tend to do with Location AE is bind them to shift-lbutton and alt-lbutton. These buttons allow one button clicking in the environment and I in term bind them to extra buttons on my mouse so I don't even have to push the modifier keys - I just click one button.

I'm not sure about 'amazing'. FF recharge only procs when you hit a target, so you need to be standing in the middle of not just a crowd but a tightly packed crowd (9 yard radius) - with no ability to actually pack that crowd (no taunt). Assuming you do so, you'll end up with about 50% up-time at the expense of 1% end/sec (can't be reduced) and 0.78%/sec (can be reduced). Moreover, while it will slow down attacks against you, it won't actually stop them - you still need defenses capable of operating in melee range for prolonged periods of time (without either status protection or defense debuff resistance, you're going to spend quite a bit of time dead). Compared to using AE knockdown in primary for the same (or better) recharge, it cost ridiculous amounts of endurance while putting you in extreme danger. Something to remember is that the guys who thrive pulling aggro in melee don't just have decent resists. They have decent resists, strong defenses, status protection and debuff resistances. It's possible to build a Corruptor/Defender that has some of those elements. Trying to build one with all of those elements? When your support set can't slot IOs that improve your defenses to any meaningful extent? That's not practical. About all you can hope for would be something like a "pure fire farm" build where your defenses are strictly tuned to protect against fire (and only fire) but you're useless anywhere else.

I think people are slowly assimilating the consequences of those i24/i25 changes. The sniper changes were perhaps the first thing people latched onto, but they're beginning to see the impact of the PPM and knockback changes as well. However, unlike the Sniper changes, the PPM/knockback changes both cut across people's long-held understanding of the game and involve a lot of detailed examination of what can and can not be effectively slotted. For example, the Storm Summoning thread on the Defender forums features a long (pages) back-and-forth between myself and a few other players with different builds - and, if you read between the lines, you can see how seemingly trivial distinctions led to significant changes in the final outcome. In terms of Rains, the general answer seems to be that they don't trigger most procs at all. I know they trigger self-buff style procs (mine are slotted with the Defender ATOs and are capped proc chance). Sadly, the proc I most want to slot in a Rain - Force Feedback - doesn't recognize that there's a knockdown involved. This tends to mean that Rains are primarily worthwhile for Corruptors. Because they can't slot procs usefully, you can easily get away with 4-slotting or 3-slotting them. Because they have the benefit of Scourge on later ticks, they remain potent. For Blasters and Defenders, this is not the case - they're going to be considerably weaker vs. click nukes than they were pre-I24/I25. That being said, I find there are two mitigating issues: Larger area. With a decent tank and some herding, 15 yard areas are fine. When you're the tip of the spear, there are just too many places where the spawn is spread all over the place and the 25 yard radius is the difference between "must as well use single target attacks" and "can use mass AE". On my Storm/Water Defender, I eventually dropped Water Burst because there were too few places where it was worth the bother of activating. ATO sets. The ATOs are some of the most powerful enhancement around and you're often stuck trying to figure out places to slot them. Rains are a great place to dump them because you don't care all that much how they're slotted - as long as you've got maximum damage and some recharge, you're fine.

Sonic is mediocre for Corruptors since the -resist values are scaled down but the abysmal base damage is not scaled up. You can also get that -resist on other sets via procs like Achilles' and Annihilation. AE dps tends to function with two different types of recharge: Burst dps. This is the classic "nuke the entire spawn" approach. What you're counting on here is that most of the long recharge will be consumed by travel between spawns. So really you're not concerned with the precise value on the recharge numbers but the very granular "number of spawns per use" figure for your nuke. In most cases, this is going to be the same between Blizzard and Inferno. While Inferno will have a lower recharge, it still won't be low enough for every spawn use. You really need powers like Geyser, Overcharge or Hail of Bullets for that (or Archery/Assault Rifle with their 60 sec base recharge). Sustained dps. This is what you're concerned with in something like an AE farm. However, Scourge tends to offset the longer recharge on Blizzard, making the two effects a wash. Also, none of the ultimates are particularly good sustained dps. For use as burst dps, I think Blizzard tends to be much better because it can be used very safely. It's a ranged effect that can benefit from debuffs laid after the fact and paralyzes an entire spawn (bosses included). In contrast, Inferno requires you stand in the middle of a spawn during its very long activation time - an activation time that needs to come after you've already alerted the spawn with your attempts to pump it up - and then leaves the bosses standing, completely uncontrolled and undebuffed, right next to you and able to strike back. It's possible to build a character who can operate in that environment. But it is significantly more difficult than building a character who operates at a distance - and that difficulty translates into having to make compromises that inevitably reduce your damage output. I'm also increasing skeptical of the notion of Kinetics as a 'tier one' set due to the i24/i25 changes. Consider: The gap between current and capped +damage has shrunk due to Gaussian's. Almost anyone who could use Gaussian's has an Aim/Build Up style ability, probably slotted with Gaussian's. Since it's nearly an automatic proc, this means a +130% damage shift right before their big attacks. The amount of additional value added by Fulcrum Shift isn't nearly as great as it was on Live. The increasing prevalence of procs means that less and less of a player's damage is subject to Fulcrum Shift. For an i24/i25 build, you're almost certainly going to be getting between 20% and 40% of your damage from various procs - but that damage can't be buffed in this fashion. It can only be increased by debuffs. This means that Fulcrum Shift'ing someone to cap will often have less impact than simply using an effect like Slowed Response which provides a straight multiplier to all of their damage.

A level 54 lieutenant has 867 health. A fully Fulcrum Shifted Blizzard will deal approximately 1816 damage, leaving nothing but the bosses alive. However, this also tends to mean that the AE portion of the fight is over because the bosses are normally spread out enough that you're going to need to use primarily single target nukes. In a team setting, you'll also have team mates who bring their own Judgements and alpha strike attacks that will compound this. Even when split up, I find that the duration of the AE phase of a fight in a level 50 +4x8 group is 3 - 4 seconds. After that you're just finishing off bosses and picking off stragglers. If you're fighting purely melee enemies with a decent tank, they might be able to keep them clustered but this is a bit of a rarity with high level enemies outside of farms.

Kinetics also works well with Masterminds in the same way: it's a primarily buff set, so it helps to ensure you always have targets to buff. What I was trying to point out is that Kinetics is very difficult to build because the set is nearly useless for slotting set bonuses.

Damage procs. I tend to take a 'might as well' attitude here. It's effectively free damage, albeit not much free damage. Repel. While knockback is experiencing a renaissance, I think you'll be disappointed with Repel. It requires you be in close melee range with enemies - a place where you'll take far more damage than Repel could ever possibly prevent. As a Mastermind, there generally isn't any reason to Fulcrum Shift yourself, so you might as well stay far, far away from melee. Any slotting opportunities offered by Repel are also offered by Kick (which is necessary to get Tough/Weave). Invoke Panic. If this was a first tier power and you didn't have to consume one of your 4 pools to get it, it might be worthwhile. As it stands, you need to take multiple (useless) powers to reach it. At best it could be argued that you could mule some recharge along the way if you've got 7 spare slots for Glimpse and Perfect Zinger. That being said, if you're taking the pool all the way to Invoke Panic you probably should grab Unrelenting as well. I suspect what you'll discover is that Kinetics is a very hard road to walk. Because Kinetics provide so few slotting opportunities, it's incredible difficult to get meaningful defenses. The offensive boost it provides is also far less than you imagine. Melee love Kinetics because they've got high +damage caps, difficulty mustering enough recharge without wall-to-wall purples and atrocious endurance demands.

I'm not sure this is the case. It's hard to tell, but my experience is that 'cone' is a bit a misnomer - it's more like 'triangle'. The same is true of other AE. While they may have spherical graphics, they don't have spherical effects - you don't have to be that far above the ground to fly right through a Tar Patch like it wasn't even there or avoid damage from a Rain. With a conventional AE, you end up with a slightly thick circle of effect parallel with the ground. With a cone what seems to happen is that you end up with a slightly thick triangle of effect. The problem with launching cones in the air is that one of those ends is anchored to you, so the cone inclines up to you. If you're hovering right above your targets, you don't get a circle on the ground so much as a rectangle of effect with a length equal to the expected radius and a width of maybe 5 feet or so.