Hjarki

They can add it with the "no, really, please stop 'helping'" command you can give to friendly NPCs.

Personally, I think these powers would be better if the Stealth component were removed. Or, at the very least, made personal to the player. I can't recall any instance outside of a fire farm where giving someone else Stealth was particularly helpful. But, as noted above, it can cause hassles Indeed, this goes beyond just support sets. On my */Ninja Blaster, I have to turn off my damage-augmenting/defense-granting Shinobi any time I end up escorting someone. If Shinobi didn't provide Stealth at all and I was forced to take the Concealment pool, I'd be perfectly happy. So perhaps the solution is just to give escorts hyper-perception so they can see through Stealth. Until then, bitching about someone taking one of the central powers of a set because it causes some degree of inconvenience every now and then isn't particularly sensible.

While Shatter's DPA is slightly better than Encase, Encase generates Seismic Power and the -recharge bonus more quickly. While I can't completely simulate it right now, I believe Encase/Tombstone/Encase/Stalagmite out-performs Shatter/Tombstone/Stalagmite for overall DPS.

From Temporal Manipulation, you definitely want Chronos (you don’t have Aim, remember), Temporal Healing and Time Lord. You may want Future Pain. Dual Pistols is notoriously low dps, so augmenting it with a decent melee attack can be helpful - especially given you have a Hold in primary to make it a bit safer. The rest are primarily either “I’m force to take this crap” or “I suppose I can slot a decent set here” powers. From Dual Pistols, you’ll need Pistols, Swap Ammo, Bullet Rain, Suppressive Fire, Executioner’s Shot and Hail of Bullets. You may want Piercing Rounds for its debuff potential. Not only does it provide -resist itself, but it can slot Annihilation at a very high proc rate.

Upthrust is not Fireball. It has a base dpa of ~22. Contrast with ~30, ~33 and ~34 for Encase, Shatter and Entomb. As a result, it has no real place in your single target rotation. Note that un-boosted Stalagmite also has a base dpa ~22. Moreover, the set mechanics feed off using as many powers as you can. Because each power not only increases the chance you'll have the Seismic proc but also reduces the recharge of every other power in the set by 1.0, you want to fire off as many powers as possible in as short a span of time as possible. In most cases, this means you want to run Encase -> Tombstone -> Encase -> Stalagmite. You have a 52% chance for the Stalagmite to be a strong version (and 100% chance the next time around). This yields ~47 dps (before proc/enhancements/etc.), which is fairly good for a Defender. For comparison, this would be ~92 dps on a Blaster where 100 dpa is really the benchmark for Scrapper/Stalker/Blapper single target dps. Moreover, it reduces recharge by 0.739s per sec. So let's say your Meteor has a total recharge reduction of 200% (between internal and external). This would mean it ordinarily recharges every 57 sec or so. Not bad, but hardly every spawn. However, because you're a */Seismic Defender, time essentially runs faster for you. Every second spent in that single target rotation consume 1.739s of Meteor's recharge - meaning your Meteor is coming around every 31.6 sec. When you add in the fact that you'll almost always be Seismic Force'ing before Meteor, that yields ~17.6 sec recharge. Now, you're not going to get performance nearly this good and I've hand waved away some of the details, but it should express just how important using a lot of nukes is to the set.

Let's look at how you're likely to build each. Ice Manipulation Chilblain is a waste of a power pick no matter how you cut it. Nor is Frozen Fists any better. Pick your poison. Neither can be slotted with particularly strong sets (that you wouldn't be using elsewhere). Ice Sword is a mediocre melee attack. It's a bit better than Flares (69 base dpa vs. 53 base dpa) and Fireball (63 base dpa), although the long activation time can be helpful in meeting recharge demands. Frigid Protection is a standard Regen/Recovery power with a large slow/-damage field attached. The slow field isn't really all that helpful unless you're fighting trivial content and you're probably not going to slot it for slow sets anyway. Build Up is what it is. It's better than Aim but it's normally a bit superfluous to take them both. Ice Patch can't be slotted, so it's a dead power pick. It's one of those powers that seems a lot more useful than it is. Shiver is junk. Frozen Aura is nice enough, I suppose. But you rarely want to be milling around in a crowd lightly wounding them - especially when the control effect is a Sleep that will likely be broken almost instantly. That leaves us with the shining star of the set: Freezing Touch. Freezing Touch has top notch damage (98 dpa), it's a Hold (can slot Unbreakable Constraint and protect yourself from whatever you're fighting) and it's on a 10 sec recharge (almost any other melee attack this deep in the tree is on a 16+ sec cooldown and doesn't fit well in most rotations). So you'd generally take Frigid Protection, Build Up (it is better than Aim, after all) and Freezing Touch. This allows us to just use Fireball, Freezing Touch, Blaze and Blazing Bolt if we're in melee and the Hold on Freezing Touch means we're probably protected from reprisal by a non-AV/GM enemy. Fire Manipulation Ring of Fire is the only Immobilize Blasters ever really want to take. It's not exceptional damage (73 dpa), but it's a lot higher than standard T1/T2 blasts (including Flares). The 6 second cooldown means you can (in theory) run a rotation of Ring of Fire, Blaze, Fireball, Ring of Fire, Blazing Bolt. Fire Sword is on the low end of melee damage (78 dpa), but it's a -defense melee attack. Build Up is what it is. Cauterizing Aura gives you a damage aura on top of your Regen/Recovery. It's nice enough, but don't expect it to do much damage since the radius is melee range. The rest of the set is PBAoE, PBAoE and more PBAoE. Since you already dumped the one good PBAoE set into Inferno, this isn't much of an advantage unless you're doing something extremely specialized like a Blaster Fire Farm build. Perhaps the best use for Fire Manipulation (outside of that fire farm build) would be a pure Hover blaster due to Ring of Fire. For epic pools, Fire is a solid choice. Char is one of the best Holds around and can take Basilisk's Gaze. Fire Shield can mule the uniques. Rise of the Phoenix is a handy tool to have in your toolkit and can take Stupefy without having to worry too much about the knockback proc.

Blizzard does 417 damage. Rain of Arrows does 150.

The 'fast cast' Water Jet is 103 dpa. Which is... decent. Blaze is 140 dpa. Bitter Ice Blast/Freeze Ray and TK Blast are about the same as fast cast Water Jet. A standard 1.584 speed Snipe is a bit more at 109 dpa (if you have max +hit). The problem is that all the ways to set up Water Jet are abysmal. Indeed, the best performance you can eek out of it is to simply never cast any single target Water attack except Water Jet. This gives you 1-in-4 as a fast cast (for an average of 84 dpa). I guess you could do something like Ice Sword/Freezing Touch/Water Jet as your rotation. This would give you about 85 dps (before enhancements/procs). A reasonable standard for a mixed melee/ranged Blaster dps (pre-enhancement/proc) would be about 100 dps. Water makes a lot more sense for a Defender, where the base damage isn't nearly as important and you can more realistically play games like quad-proc'ing Water Jet with no internal recharge.

It's actually not a particularly good attack in terms of dpa (about 80). For comparison, Smite and Taser are both about 92 dpa and Charged Brawl is 103 dpa. It's also interesting to note that, technically, a rotation like HM/Blaze/Blazing Bolt requires +333% recharge (about 60% recharge above perma-Hasten). However, arcanatime seems insufficient to properly model how long rotations actually take - in-game rotations tend to take much longer than theoretical calculations would predict. Also, the lack of Seismic Smash in those rotations raises a concern. Every single one of them would be better if SS was used on recharge - it's not just considerably higher dpa than Heavy Mallet but most of the other attacks on that list. While the long recharge precludes using it in a tight 3-move rotation, a rotation of Blaze/Blazing Bolt/Heavy Mallet/Blaze/Blazing Bolt/Seismic Smash is stronger than the Heavy Mallet-only rotation listed - especially when you consider the Unbreakable Constraint proc. Lastly, I'm not sure how useful melee-inclusive single target rotations really are. Yes, they're nice against pylons. But in actual play, you can't depend on 100% melee - especially as the difficulty slider moves up. Blasters simply don't have the kind of defenses that allow them to safely close with many potential foes so you need a fully ranged rotation to fall back on.

If you're built for comprehensive resists - include debuff resistance - I'd argue the reverse. The full resist Tanker never has to worry about environmental damage and their health is extremely predictable. More importantly, you'll almost certainly have massive buffs to defense while getting buffs to resistance is rare. A team of 8 is probably giving you around +25% Defense to everything just from Maneuvers. In contrast, unless you're specifically bringing along certain support sets, your resistances are what they are. Even with Barrier, the defensive bonus is far more significant than the resist bonus. The different damage types tend to also have a different emphasis. S/L/E are by far the most common - and hardest-hitting - types of damage. Having both resist and defense is ideal. However, resist is generally better - and a lot better for Lethal unless you also have DDR (Radiation also debuffs defense but not many enemies use Radiation). Beyond this, you tend to want to resist Fire and Toxic while defending against Cold, Negative and Psionic. If you're immune/near-immune to the secondary effects of Cold and Negative (which is relatively easy with set bonuses and Focused Accuracy), you can almost discard them from consideration. This might make sense for a Blaster or Scrapper who is built entirely around damage. For a Tanker, not so much. While doing more damage is nice, it's not really all that much more damage - assuming you took Assault and have no other damage boosts, you're going from 2.15x damage to 2.45x (14% improvement for base damage). But then you have to consider that about half your level 50 team probably has Assault as well. Not to mention that if you bring along a Defender/Corruptor/Controller/Mastermind, there's a good chance they'll boost your damage as well. Moreover, that 14% is 14% of the Tanker's damage - which is a lot lower than the tip-of-the-spear folks. And, of course, you can chew reds like candy while you can't do the same with other features of your build. But supplemental features - healing, control duration, etc. - aren't likely to be boosted in this fashion. Moreover, these features are often ones where you get the full bonus (rather than 1/3rd of it being ED'd into irrelevance) since you don't slot your attacks for it. With that in mind, I generally agree with the notion that taking Cardiac to solve your endurance issues is a poor design choice. If this is your approach, your character will be unplayable in exemplar'd content.

In some sense, support sets are just armor sets you use for the benefits of others. Unfortunately, there are two problems with this model: The player with the armor set is always where they are. The player with the support set may or may not be in position to help the player they're helping. The player with the armor set knows precisely what breakpoints they need to hit and how to hit them. The player with the support set has no idea what - if anything - they can do to help nor how much that help is worth. The result is that you'll find a lot of situations where your Defender/Corruptor is really little more than a weak Blaster - regardless of which support set you choose. So my main criteria for "best support" is answering the question "how can I be useful when my buffs/debuffs aren't?".

From the original post: As such, it seems prudent to caution them about the nature of */Traps on teams.

I'm not talking about what the sets can do, but how they do it. Pet-based builds tend to get left in the dust by non-pet builds in highly mobile fights - which is the bulk of what happens in CoH. So a lot of the time in team play, you'll be left behind following in the wake of the team.

I agree with your analysis with regards to solo play. However, it should be noted that such a build isn't very team-friendly. Almost any pet-dependent build is going to operate at a different speed than the rest of the team and Traps compounds this by making many of its buffs/debuffs pseudo-pet based.

The reason I ask is that Storm Cell/Category V have an entry I've never seen before (https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=corruptor_ranged.storm_blast.storm_cell&at=corruptor) If you look under "create entity" (the power that creates the pseudopet), there's a "Entity has creator's modifiers" flag. This flag does not seem to exist on other similar powers and presumably it does something.

With Storm Blast, does activating +damage boosts while Storm Cell/Category V are already down impact the damage of subsequent damage of the various Lightning Aura effects?

On a non-Tanker/Brute, I generally view the Fighting Pool as a poor choice. It requires investing 3 power picks. One of them is almost purely a waste (Kick/Boxing). Another is minimally useful on an AT that can't reach 90% hard-cap for resists (Toughness) and largely serves as a mule for uniques. The last - Weave - is inarguably useful. But it's still suppressible defense on AT that usually don't have status protection and it's only slightly better than alternatives which don't require three power picks.

The fundamental issue is that the idea of 'support' doesn't really work in CoH. As builds start nearing the limits of the game, what support AT provide becomes increasingly irrelevant to those builds. Few level 50 Incarnated builds really need hit/defense/recharge/recovery, for example. They already built to cover those needs. Even if this were not true, universal benefits like the Leadership pool and Barrier Destiny mean that any reasonably sized group is going to have a ton of certain buffs. Even when builds do have 'holes' in them, there's no way to know which set of holes your particular set of team mates will have. As a result, the best 'support' builds tend to be builds that start from the premise of being independently useful and only then think about team utility. Moreover, when they're thinking primarily about augmenting damage - which is something which tends to have nearly unlimited upside - rather than more conventional aspects of support like 'healing'. Time Manipulation is a good example of where this problem arises. Time Manipulation is a fantastic set from the standpoint of the buffing the user with Farsight and Chrono Shift. But neither of these powers are very impressive for our fully incarnated level 50 team mate who already has the defense/hit/recharge/recovery they need to run their build. Slowed Response is what impresses them... and it's not a particularly impressive example of the type. So our Time/X Defender is running around with abysmal personal damage and with buffs/heals that most of our team doesn't care about. It's not necessarily a bad build - just not a particularly useful one for our team. Basically, if your support set isn't doing anything meaningful for the team, you might as well bring a Blaster. And if you're bringing a Blaster, you might as well just bring a Scrapper.

I believe the way it works is that the pseudopet copies your +damage modifiers when it is created and those +damage modifiers are retained for the life of the psuedopet. If it worked the way you suggest, then you could activate Blizzard and then Build Up/Aim after the Blizzard has started to provide a bonus to Blizzard damage.

The Spines/Fire is more a matter of having it laying around and wanting an AFK farmer. In terms of farming speed, I think Radiation is... ok. However, I usually play Martial Arts. Since I can slot Spinning Kick with Force Feedback, it ends up firing procs a lot faster than Irradiated Ground can while also reducing the recharge on Burn. The knockdown also provides a degree of mitigation.

DoT are generally worse for a Corruptor than a Defender. Scourge only checks when the power effect starts, so having delayed damage means your next attack is less likely to Scourge. Rains are better for Corruptors since the Scourge check occurs on every pulse. In terms of the overall question, Corruptors will almost inevitably deal more damage than Defenders except in some very special circumstances. Corruptors have a 15% advantage in damage and Scourge (over a large enough health total) averages out to +30%. Corruptors also have an additional purple proc. For Trick Arrow, Defenders will deal 1.4x damage from Disruption Arrow vs. 1.3x for a Corruptor, which is about an 8% advantage. Even adding in Entangling Arrow, it isn't enough to counterbalance the advantages above. Moreover, if you're playing at +4 w/Alpha, the value of debuffs is purple patch'd to 65% of its value. There's also a philosophical question of whether you're buffing others or buffing yourself. I'd argue that, in the current game, you should aim to buff yourself (the Offender model) rather than to buff others (the Defender model). The reasoning here is twofold. The first is that you simply don't know what other players need so trying to build a character around fixing the problems of some random player you've never met is folly. The second is that window between solo play (where you only buff yourself) and too-many-buffs/debuffs-to-count play (where losing a small amount on your buffs/debuffs) is very small. So in the majority of content you'll face, any advantage the Defender variant would have will be meaningless. With all that mind, the correct answer is "Trick Arrow/Dual Pistols Defender' because Suppressive Fire on Corruptors is currently bugged.

I would caution you that Poison can die in a big hurry due to the nature of the power set. Eventually, you'll want to be in the thick of things to use your debuff aura. However, you have no status protection. So even with exceptional defenses - which are often tricky to build because you're in melee range - a single bad roll will result in all of your defense toggles and your debuff aura shutting down. Once that happens, you'll generally get smashed. This is potentially a smaller problem on Controllers since you can (with sufficient recharge) get 100% uptime status protection. Dual Pistols is a fairly strong set, but it lacks an Aim. This means it is less effective with the ultimate than most Defender secondaries. While it has its detractors, Poison might be a good pairing with Storm Blast. Due to the nature of Venomous Gas and the position it puts you in, the drawbacks of the Storm Cell are somewhat minimized and the knockdown from the various Storm effects can potentially improve survivability.

Some fire farms have enemies with Fire Sword. Since this also does S/L damage (which fire farm builds are weaker against, especially if they turn off unnecessary toggles and skip the Defense uniques that increase resists, ATO, etc.), it can chew you up fast. You also might be short on Regen. In terms of the overall topic, I tend to run Spines/Fire these days in my "el cheapo" build with only 6 purples (both procs, 5-slot for 10% recharge). Spines works a bit better since I can use 5xIce Mistral's to boost defense/recharge. It does pretty good AFK farming and has a ton of recharge so chomping reds while active farming really ramps up the damage.

According the patch notes (and City of Data), the recharge on Suppressive Fire when using non-lethal ammunition should be 8 sec. On my Corruptor, the recharge is instead 20 secs regardless of what ammo toggle I have active. On Brainstorm, the mechanics seem to work as intended for Defenders and Blasters (8 sec recharge when non-lethal ammo is selected). But for Corruptors, the recharge remains 20 sec regardless of the ammo toggle. Looking at City of Data, it appears the power has a 'container' power which triggers either the lethal or non-lethal versions. On Blasters and Defenders, these triggers are fine. On Corruptors, they're reversed (lethal goes to non-lethal, non-lethal goes to lethal).

While it appears it didn't get modified, the patch notes claim it did. Note that City of Data also lists the power as having two modes - one for fire/toxic/cold (with 8 sec recharge) and one for lethal (with 20 sec recharge).