Hjarki

If your opponents are throwing Melt Armor, the purple patch is no longer an advantage in the buff vs. debuff debate since your buffs are getting shredded at a purple patch-increased rate.

Poison has no innate resist or defense, so it's a bit like saying that your */Energy Blaster has no issues in melee even against an AV. Sure... if you're not talking about particularly challenging enemies. But once you're dealing with content where you have massive hit/defense shifts towards the hard cap, what you can do with just pool powers gets overwhelmed. Poison also gets a lot of its durability from a toggle debuff aura without having any status protection. If even one lucky control effect sneaks through, that debuff aura shuts down - and you go down very, very quickly. With that in mind, most such discussions involve implicit and subjective assumptions that aren't really justified. Ultimately, a full team of Fire/Energy Blasters with properly timed Barrier Incarnates can probably do anything these 'most potent' support sets can do with regards to survival.

I haven't had a chance to test it out completely on Beta, but the core mechanic of the set seems problematic. If your pet is simply throwing a copy of your control effect on the same target a few second later, that works just fine for the basic attacks. If it's throwing the copy on a different target, you might as well not even bother (a 2 Mag effect might as well be a 0 Mag effect). If your pet is throwing Cones 15 sec later, that's a complete nightmare. Cones require precise positioning to take advantage of - precise positioning which won't exist 2 seconds later much less 15 seconds into the future. Even if they were standard AE attacks, it's unlikely you'll need that same effect 15 secs from now. As noted elsewhere, this is especially true with Sleep where you pet would be actively interfering by replacing your somewhat decent Sleep with its crappy one.

As I'm reading it, this isn't quite the case. You've got a single common debuff (Vibrations #1) that's -12% for 8 sec. Then you've got 5 different debuffs for -8% (of varying durations). So in theory you can stack up to -52% resistance (although not consistently since one of those debuffs only comes from the long recharge ultimate). More realistically, you're probably not going to use Howl or the ultimate in your single target rotation, so you'll be stacking 12% + 8% * 3 = -36% on a Defender.

Except they're applying that level of game and build knowledge to a task that isn't the normal play of the game. LeBron James is a fantastic basketball player. Despite his athleticism, I doubt he would do particularly well against a professional boxer. Not because he couldn't have applied himself to that task but because he didn't.

Which is why you wouldn't slot like that for a pylon test but you would slot like that for general play where you're expecting to be surrounded by a team.

Pie Assault would work better with my clown concept character.

The build up proc has a chance for each Tactics target, so it becomes a near-constant buff when you're in a team setting.

My notes: AV/GM resists do not affect PGA. The Purple Patch cuts both ways. You're talking about content with significant enemy debuffs, all of which are amplified in the same fashion our debuffs are diminished. So +resist has no inherent advantage over -damage due to the purple patch. PGA is auto-hit In my personal opinion, churning through large groups is a lot easier with fire-and-forget buffs and short recharge powers. However, there's a reason people use sets like Radiation or Trick Arrow when they're trying to beat the absolute toughest opponents in the game - the impact of those debuffs on a single hard target is far greater than the impact of the buffs on the team.

EMP Arrow has a 300s recharge. The bubble portion has a 240s duration and is easily perma-able (presuming you don't move much). The debuff portions are 45s long and would require +567% recharge to perma (which isn't possible).

I don't know that talking about specific content as 'difficult' is a particularly good way to approach the question. I think it's better to break it down according to the limits on game mechanics. Durability tends to fall into three rough categories: Health/Regen. This is normally the weakest of the categories in terms of scaling because it's purely additive. It very rapidly goes from "I'm impervious to all harm!" to paste-on-the-floor for this reason. Defense. This is by far the easiest to build for due to the existence of a relatively low 'soft cap' and the plethora of abilities that boost it. However, when you're talking about extreme difficulty you run afoul of the incredibly high 'hard cap' that's virtually impossible to reach without massive external buffs. Since it's matched up against some of the most common debuffs (-defense) and buffs (+hit), it's also the most common way we see of boosting the difficulty of content. So any build that relies on Defense is normally going to falter in more difficult content. Resist. At low levels, resist isn't very effective because it's awfully hard to reach the hard cap without a lot of slotting and only two AT (Tanker, Brute) have a hard cap that's comparable to what defense can deliver. Resist-based builds also have to worry quite a bit about status effects and debuffs since even armor sets don't do a particularly good job of reducing those. However, resists can't easily be debuffed or overcome with +damage, making them the most reliable form of mitigation as you ramp up the difficulty. You've also got the debuff vs. buff issue. Any debuff that requires a hit roll will be less reliable than a buff. Debuffs which can be scaled down by level shifts need to be accounted for. And, of course, debuffs that are perfectly reasonable against normal enemies often fail against AV/GM due to the AV/GM resists. You also have to recognize that defensive debuffs require striking first against all potential targets while buffs are simply there against all those targets. So while stacking 27 different buffs on a player is easy, stacking more than one debuff is often tough because the first debuff aggros everything. So let's look at this in the context of Trick Arrow: Entangling Arrow. This is primarily just a single target -resist debuff. It's nice enough, but it won't help you survive. Flash Arrow. This is your best mitigation debuff for normal play. Against AV/GM, the -hit component will be largely meaningless (about equal to Weave) due to AV/GM resists. Against non-AV/GM enemies, it will still be a substantial debuff but not quite as much effective defense as you'd get from a 'bubbler'. However, it is an auto-hit power and can be used to completely bypass spawns. Glue Arrow. This is mostly useless against any form of content and would just be heavily resisted in difficult content. Ice Arrow. This is hyper-specialized in its applicability, mostly against AV/GM with fairly niche abilities to shut them down. However, it's not going to be very helpful most of the time. Poison Gas Arrow. This will normally be better than +resist buffs in terms of overall damage mitigation unless you're fighting enemies with extreme amounts of +damage. It's auto-hit and half of it bypasses resistance. It also helps your Tanker a lot more than +resist buffs do since it stacks on top of them - a Tanker with standard 90% S/L and PGA can almost ignore Defense entirely (for the purposes of raw damage). Acid/Disruption/Oil Slick Arrow. These are all offensive amplification effects, so not terribly relevant. EMP Arrow. This is the same basic effect as Faraday Cage, albeit with longer recharge/duration. So it's less effective if you're rapidly moving from spawn-to-spawn but generally more effective if you're engaged in long static fights. The offensive portion of EMP Arrow can't be made perma- and requires a hit roll, but it almost completely obliterates the capacity of any spawn - even those in very difficult content - to fight back.

Due to the diversity of primaries, Defenders tend to pick from a wider array of epic/patron pools than other AT. There's no one 'best' pool. Consider: Storm Summoning. A pool like Electric with its fast-recharging Immobilize can be invaluable for controlling the chaos delivered by Tornado. Couple this with a S/L/E toggle that lets you become highly resistant to the three primary forms of damage. Time Manipulation. Both Power and Soul give you a 'power boost' ability that effectively doubles the impact of your +defense power. Since the non-detoggling nature of this power is an essential defense, being able to remain at cap even while stunned/held/etc. makes these pools often a better choice than more conventional pools. Kinetics. This power set delivers no defense bonuses and tends to encourage close-in play. Unlike most traditional Defender builds, you're more likely to pursue a S/L/R defense scheme built around Mace Mastery's Scorpion Shield. Flame/Psychic Mastery. These two pools are commonly taken to round out rotations with their fast-activating high proc'able holds. About the only epic/patron that I would classify as an "only for theme" pool would be Leviathan Mastery.

Arctic Fog and Hot Feet are very similar powers. Arctic Fog has a minions-only Confuse with only about a 50% uptime while Hot Feet has a better slow, Fear and a damage aura.

I never skip Spore Burst. If you're just churning through +0 content with a team, Spore Burst is indeed useless. The sleep will get broken in an eyeblink as your group unloads on everything. Even if you're solo'ing at that level, your own Carrion Creepers will break it. As you move the difficulty slider up, Spore Burst becomes essential. If you're planning a Relentless run, you absolutely want it because it's the one reliable way to shut down an entire room. The combination of ignoring AV special protection and auto-hit means that you can reduce every fight to a single mob fight with near-certainty - and that single mob fight can occur precisely the way you want it to occur.

I mistakenly left the DoT in for the critical on Vicious. It should be 83.43/144.37 dpa. Vicious Slash deals 112.6107 damage, plus another 20.2699 per tick up to 4 times (cancelable) @ 75% chance in 1.848 arcanatime. That would be (112.6107 + 20.2699*(0.75+0.75^2+0.75^3+0.75^4))/1.848 = 83.4306 dpa.

The single target attacks (for Scrappers, non-critical/critical values): Maiming 75.29/130.27 dpa Savage 61.67/106.70 dpa Vicious 83.43/166.86 dpa Hemo (4 stack) 73.90/146.39 dpa Hemo (5 stack) 90.04/162.53 dpa

I don't know that anyone has rigorously clocked the rate of Fury gain, but most of the time a Brute reaches near-cap in short order and them remains there indefinitely just from their own attacks. I certainly wouldn't be concerned about the fact that certain armor sets minimize the number of times Brutes get hit from the standpoint of Fury generation.

City of Heroes is a bit different because the game runs completely off the rails at the high end. The sheer power of stacking buffs/debuffs means that even a full team is often far more powerful than anything the game can bring to bear against them - and a full league focused on a target is slammed up against every cap there is. Incarnate powers, temporary powers and inspirations can all utterly trivialize the hardest challenges in the game. So before anyone can really answer the question you're asking, they first need to know what arbitrary restrictions you'll be putting on your play.

Telekinetic Blow is 100.0984 damage plus a 95% chance at a 33% chance for an additional 153.4842 damage when you use your Assassination. This yields 86.37 dpa. Zapp is 127.8785 damage if you're at the hit cap (which you're not), for a dpa of 80.73. Zapp also has an unmanageably long recharge compared to Telekinetic Blow's 9 sec. You can run a basic Psi rotation without Hasten, so Hasten is really only valuable for increasing multi-target dps. Boggle isn't the most useful power in the world - it's rarely ever used in a team setting and mostly for odd solo challenges - but it does have the ability to slot the exceptional Coercive Persuasion (which gives both +10% recharge and +5% Ranged Defense). You might consider switching Superior Avalanche and Armageddon since the latter set offers more recharge. I like Fury of the Gladiator in Shield Charge since it's almost guaranteed to proc and you normally use Shield Charge as an opener.

The point I'm trying to emphasize is that the costs of Sonic Blast normally don't justify the benefits. For example, consider the common Kinetics/Dual Pistols pairing. You've got a fast-recharging that you walk into a mob with, dropping Fury of the Gladiator on them. Then you start in with your Pistols (Achilles Heel) and Piercing Rounds (Annihilation). Your total resist is similar to what you'd get from Sonic but you're doing significantly more damage. Even if you decide to maximize -damage, you're still dramatically out-damaging the Sonic version. The Sonic version only starts to look better if you're running a pure support build where your expectation is that someone else is already bringing those non-stacking procs. And, of course, Dual Pistols could switch to Toxic to really ensure you're flooring the enemies' damage.

Blast sets will almost universally do more damage on Corruptors. However, certain features tend to make them better/worse: Strong reliance on secondary effects (example: Sonic) tends to make for "Defender" sets. Useless Tier One attack tends to make for "Corruptor" sets. Rains that optimize Scourge damage tend to make for "Corruptor" sets. Secondary effects that permit a high degree of proc slotting tend to make for "Defender" sets. Archery hits every one of those points on the 'Corruptor' side of the equation.

From my understanding, -damage debuffs are resisted by the same resist type. So let's say I have 50% Smashing Resist and 0% Psionic Resist. If you hit me with a 40% -damage debuff, I would drop from 100% Psi damage (assuming no +damage) to 60% Psi damage, with a floor of 10%. This would be roughly equivalent to having 40% Psi Resist. However, if it were Smashing damage, then my Smashing Resist would reduce the -damage debuff to 20% and I'd be doing 80% damage - about the equivalent of 20% Smashing Resist. This unfortunately means that -damage isn't a very reliable form of reducing incoming damage (except for Trick Arrow versions). Since -resist can drive resists below zero, this means that you can actually amplify -damage to the point where even relatively minor amounts will floor an enemy's damage. With that being said, using Sonic Attack for this purpose is normally not all that effective. While a Sonic Attack Defender can pile up 100% (or so) -resist, this is dependent on using all of their time on Sonic Blast. When you have a particularly busy primary (such as Kinetics), your ability to do so is severely hindered. Not all Sonic powers are equally effective. You can think of the impact of the debuffs in terms of -resist/sec. For each Sonic power: Shriek = -20% * 5 / 1.188 = -84% Scream = -20% * 7 / 1.848 = -76% Shout = -20% * 10 / 2.904 = -69% Screech = -20% * 12 / 1.716 = -140% So if you were able to chain-cast Screech, you would debuff by -140%. However, consider: Piercing Beam = -20% * 10 / 2.508 = -80% Piercing Rounds = -20% * 10 / 2.64 = -76% Note: To clarify any possible confusion, those numbers are what you'd get if you could chain-activate those powers. Obviously, you're not getting anywhere near those values since you have to deal with recharge. Now, Screech is obviously the big gun here. But Screech does virtually no damage of its own. It can't even be proc'd out like normal attacks. It also has a much longer recharge than any of the attacks I've listed. Indeed, Sonic attacks in general are terrible. Even with the additional debuffing, a Sonic Attack Defender can't keep pace with a Dual Pistols or Beam Rifle Defender (neither of which are particularly high damage themselves) in terms of single target damage. This brings us to Kinetics. At perma-Hasten, using Siphon Speed, Siphon Power and Fulcrum Shift as they recharge will consume 53% of your total activation time (there is some interference between them that I'm ignoring). Our Beam Rifle Defender would be using about 40% of their total activation time on Piercing Beam and our Sonic Attack Defender would be using 25% of their time on Screech. So basically, you end up in a situation where Sonic Attack just doesn't have the time to pile up large amounts of -resist - and no attacks that can exploit that debuffing. So our Kinetics/Sonic is going to end up doing a lot less damage than our Kinetics/Beam while not offering all that much more protection. Our perma-Hasten Kineticist also doesn't necessarily need the help of -resist. They can stack -185% damage on a single target. Most targets - even AV - tend not to have enough resist in their damage-dealing types to raise them much over the floor. Even for those that do, you can often use procs like Achilles' Heel to cover small shortfalls and no amount of Sonic Attack will let you cover massive ones.

For me, the key to Savage is the realization that you never want to hit 5 stacks. As long as you're below 5 stacks, you won't incur the 15 second lockout and you can continue to gain the EndRed/Recharge bonuses. This makes Savage on a non-Stalker problematic. On a Stalker, you've got Build Up (fueled by the ATO) that works well with Savage Leap as a mini-ultimate attack. On a non-Stalker, you have Blood Thirst putting you at 5 stacks (and causing a lockout when you consume them). I'm not sure what's 'broken' about Hemorrhage. It appears to work fine for me.

powexeclocation self Voltaic Sentinel

Regen/maximum health is normally an inefficient way to accomplish this. The issue is the way that Resist/Defense scale. Let's assume that Dull Pain increases your Regen rate by 40%. If you've got 0% Resist and want to increase your survivability by 40%, you'd need about 28.5 Resist. However, if you've already got 86% Resist, those last 4% to reach 90% will give you the same 40% survivability boost. So Dull Pain goes from slightly worse than Temp Invulnerability to being ridiculously bad compared to Temp Invulnerability (as long as you're not exceeding the hard cap).