Hjarki

There are only three places to put the ATO for single target tanking: Precise Strike, Serpent's Reach and Skysplitter. Serpent's Reach has both the worst performance for the ATO and the Apocalypse proc (which you have no other place to slot). So it's clearly not in the cards. Precise Strike has a 32.2% chance to proc Hecatomb twice in 7.658s, for an average of 9.00 dps. Skysplitter has an 80.5% chance to proc once in 7.658s, for an average of 11.26 dps. Note that this 2 dps difference is un-enhanceable so it's just.. 2 dps. In theory, you could slot either of these attacks with a conventional 3.5 ppm proc instead of taking 6% Toxic/Psi and you'd get a bigger dps boost. But it is, after all, a Tanker. So I thought more Toxic/Psi resist would be worthwhile. Precise Strike has a 41.3% chance to proc the ATO twice in 7.658s, for an average of 1.08 stacks over time. Skysplitter has a 90% chance to proc the ATO (capped) once in 7.658s, for an average of 1.18 stacks over time. So it's really a question of whether you want more average stacks of the ATO or 2 more dps - presuming you can otherwise compensate for the -10% recharge Hecatomb has compared to the ATO set in Skysplitter. In terms of "4th attack", I would have thought that was implied by the rotation I listed. Also, you may be overestimating the importance of the ATO proc. If you're a Radiation Tanker, that ATO proc can potentially halve your incoming damage. But for Super Reflexes, all it's doing is slightly nudging the equilibrium point where your total effective health starts to rise due to the scaling resists. So you don't need to have it up with the first attack you throw. Indeed, with any Staff build, you'll be missing a large chunk of resists since you won't have the Perfection of Body bonus until after you've run a complete rotation.

Corruptor is often considered the obvious choice. However, the higher damage cap is normally only relevant on large crowds - and the window between "I overkill everything" and "I barely make a dent" as you adjust the difficulty slider is sufficiently narrow that I don't find optimizing for this all that useful. The advantage with Defenders is that you buff/debuff AV/GM better (although you'll still do less damage overall due to Scourge) and your defenses are significantly easier to manage. For power sets, I think Dual Pistols tends to hit the sweet spot. You've got -resist debuffing, a low recharge ultimate and you can operate effectively at any range.

There's a post over on the Tanker forums for SR/Staff Tanker. The same general approach should be helpful for a Brute version. The only additional comment I'd make on your specific build is that those Force Feedback procs aren't doing much of anything for you. You can't depend on them to accelerate your ST rotation and you don't really have any other powers you're improving when they do proc.

Some notes: Miracle +recovery only works when you activate the power. So there’s little point in putting it into Spirit Ward (which you’ll rarely, if ever, activate). You don’t need all that endurance/health slotting in Health/Stamina. Either you have a party member who can help you out or you simply use Perfection of Soul. Your resists seem a bit low. In general, you want 30% - 40% before scaling resists to hard-cap under dire circumstances. For Super Reflexes, the biggest problem is normally E/N. Slotting 4-set Shield Wall in your SR defense toggles can help here. F/C should come almost naturally from purple sets while Toughness should cover S/L. Ditch the procs from your attacks. A standard 3.5 ppm proc in 0% internal recharge Mercurial Blow will yield an average of 16.74 damage. A basic +5 Damage IO would yield 23.52 damage. This is generally true for Tankers across their variety of attacks - damage slotting is better than proc slotting and you should generally restrict yourself to ‘opportunistic’ procs where you’ve already got the set bonuses you want. So Hecatomb 5-set plus another proc is good. Frankenslotting and ending up with only 23% damage in a power is not. Your ST rotation is sketchy. Mercurial Blow is a terrible attack. A rotation of Precise Strike(x2), Serpent’s Reach, Skysplitter will do more damage. While Gloom is better than Serpent’s Reach, you can’t build in enough recharge to make a rotation with it work and trying to randomly toss it into the rotation doesn’t move the needle enough to bother (especially given the lack of a second high quality ranged set). You don’t need Eye of the Storm. Since you have the increased Tanker arc/targets and Staff is a long range set, you can simply Hover above the fray and your high damage Cones work pretty much like normal PBAoE while dealing more damage than Eye of the Storm. My forum export isn't working for some reason, but I'd probably go with something like: Focused Fighting, Focused Senses, Evasion: 4-set Shield Wall (D, DE, DER, ER or unique) Agile, Dodge, Lucky, Maneuvers: 2-set Luck of the Gambler (D, proc) Practiced Brawler: Recharge IO Quickness: Flight Speed IO Precise Strike: 6-set Hecatomb Guarded Spin: 5-set Armageddon (all but D), Luck of the Gambler (proc) Serpent's Reach: 5-set Apocalypse (all but D), Explosive Strike (proc) Sky Splitter: 6-set Superior Might of the Tanker Innocuous Strikes: 6-set Superior Gauntleted Fist Hover, Fly, Evasive Maneuvers: 2-set Hypersonic (emphasis on EndRed, the proc goes somewhere) Tough: 3-set Unbreakable Guard (proc, R, RE), Gladiator's Armor (proc), Steadfast Protection (proc), Impervious Skin (proc) Weave: 6-set Reactive Defenses Combat Jumping: 2 set Winter's Gift (proc, Speed/Endurance) Char: 6-set Unbreakable Constraint Ring of Fire: 6-set Gravitational Anchor Stamina: Performance Shifter (proc), Power Transfer (proc) Health: Panacea (proc), Numina's Convalescence (proc), Miracle (proc), Regenerative Tissue (proc), Preventative Medicine (proc) Swift: Flight Speed IO This would give you incarnate level defenses against everything without using Guarded Spin. It would give you ~45% S/L/FC, 35% E/N and 30% T/P resists before scaling and the ATO proc.

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.