Doc Spectre

I hope it’s just bye for now and not forever. Maybe have a break and play something else for a while. This place won’t be the same without a snarky vampire lurking about in the shadows.

Cool, not sure when that change happened, that's great.

I think you should try a Trick Arrow defender and do great debuffing and some control from range, pair with electrical blast for ignighting oil slick arrow or maybe assault rifle or fire blast. A corrupter would also work. You could pair trick arrow with archery but will need some fire and energy damage proc Invention origin enhancements to set your oil slicks on fire. That way you can stay entirely at range, possibly in hover, laying down debuff, control and damage.

I think a Widow and a Soldier of Arachnos would do well together.

Here is my Super Strength / Regen brute. I built for S/L resistance and resistance to recharge slow. As a dirty Mac user I don't have Mids so here are some screen shots. I completely ignored def, all I have is from base combat jump 1.88Def. The recharge bonus is without hasten or Force Feedback proc and the Hit Points are without Dull Pain, Regen without instant healing, resists without MoG. As you can see with a deep wallet you can get some decent Resist numbers if you are prepared to make some sacrifices. I figured that chasing Defence was pointless with no innate DDR and the Rage debuff. Between Handclap, Stalagmites and Footstomp I find I that I have enough control that I hardly need to touch my Regen panic buttons or inspiration tray. I can comfortably solo a Heather arc on +4x8 or tank a 54 ITF for a team if that is the sort of thing that floats your boat. For Alpha I took Spiritual and for Hybrid I use Melee.

Maybe the much maligned Kinetic Melee, has ranged attacks anyway.

I read all that expecting some sort of amusing punchline 😞

If you like SO enhancements then once you can slot level 35s you should check for Common IOs on the auction house. Players make a bunch of the for the crafting badges so you can often get them really cheap on auction (often cheaper than the equivalent vendor price SO). They will have higher bonuses than an SO at 35+ and won’t expire.

Seems like cloaking device gets half suppressed in combat

Good point from testing combat attributes in game my 52 def suppressed to 46 when I attacked someone

I got to 70 smash resistance pretty easily, Bane armour gives 11 to all, shield wall another 5 to all, tough gets about 23.5 to s/l, Wolf armour 4.5 s/l and 18.75 s/l from 5 x 3.75 set bonuses for 5 parts LotG x3, 5 part call to arms and 5 part touch of death, 2.25 x2 from 3 parts of Bombardment. Positional defences are at 53 and above. Can brain dead mode +4x8 most of the time.

My first thought was also Shield, I think one of the martial arts kicks also buffs defence so maybe Shield/Martial Arts. lf you wanted to have more AoE then Shield/War Mace is pretty good.

As others gave said a Huntsman is a player term for a Bane that focuses on gun attacks and team support over wack bonking with a mace. I guess the play style is similar to an AR/traps corrupter but you don’t need to place stuff on the ground all the time. Between venom grenade, heavy burst and frag grenade you have an entirely AoE attack chain, throw in wide area web grenade for control. Single target is not the greatest but you could easily do a second build as a bane. A stalker will only ever be a stalker.

Btw if you haven’t done an all Arachnos team you should try it sometime. The week that VEATs dropped was probably the most adrenaline rush experience I ever had on CoH. Just don’t skip Team Training (special leadership toggles)

If you build a huntsman you will have quite a lot of AoE