Doc Spectre

There is no way in hell I would trade in what we have now to go back to the pre-ED CoH.

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

So I took Fire/Thermal to 50. I mostly did it through Task Forces including the ones required for Task Force Commander and the ITF, Moonfire ect. so the usual ones. I found that I really didn't need to do much healing at all (practically zero). I guess maybe keeping Forge on damage dealers could be viewed as a chore (it doesn't bother me at all). Applying the 2 thermal shields is a piece of cake now that it does a whole team in one go. I have plenty of time for actual controlling. I can also solo x8 if I want to, though frankly I have alts that do it better. Once I'm IOed out to the gills and T3 I expect +3x8 should be reasonably smooth sailing if maybe slightly on the slower side.

Useful to know, though I’m level 42 and I don’t feel like I need Fire Cages so far.

I agree that Fire/TA is probably better than Fire/Thermal. Fire/Thermal is far from unplayable though. I'm up to level 40 in my experiment now and I hardly have to heal at all. I put the Overwhelming Force chance for Knockdown proc in Fire Imps and between that and the Knockback to Knockdown in Bonfire most enemies are on their derierre a significant portion of the time. I actually skipped Fire Cages (crazy idea) and have put a slow movement set in Hot Feet. The enemies I don't care that much about (that are not on their backsides and can still move) try to move away from me very slowly and hardy attack at all. If I immobilised them all I think I would be getting shot at a whole lot more. Im using a combo of Char, Ring of Fire and Arcane Bolt (big hit) to bust down tough targets. It may not be the peak of efficiency but it's going well enough to push my team size up to the mid range when solo.

Out of curiosity I made a Fire Control/Thermal and took it to level 29 this evening. I joined a Frostfire team, did the 2 positron TFs and a Yin TF. It was totally fine, applying the shields was a piece of cake and i wasn’t just healing the whole time. Btw Bonfire with the knockdown Proc is mint!

I suggest that you make an Earth/Thermal controller and team all the way to level 50. Then report back on your experience.

To be fair some tanks don’t seem to know that there is an aggro cap either.

Now that I think about it I did take an Electric blast/Stone armour sentinel to 50 and that combo is very tanky and blasty. The character theme was being made of magnetic rock. If you want to do Storm/Stone I think you should go for it. Brimstone armour should buff Lightning Strike and your other single target attacks which is the stuff that really matters. The AoE attacks don’t have to have optimal damage to get the job done. It’s sounds like you would be a rarity ‘a high-powered mutant of some kind, never considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die’ 😉

I have taken a Storm blast/Dark armour sent and a Storm blast/Martial blaster to fifty and I found I preferred playing the sentinel. I think storm blast is quite suited to being up ‘in the thick of it’. That is my impression anyway. I don’t see why Storm/Stone would not work, should be sturdy enough to hang around the fringes of melee. If you wanted some other suggestions I might consider SR, Electric armour or any other set that has a recharge enhancing passive for faster recharging zapping.

Well Redside is a lot quieter than Blue. So I think you probably want to look at more solo capable archetypes like brutes, scrappers, masterminds. Though since you said there is no budget limit you can’t probably make do with just about anything just some will be faster than others. Be prepared for ambushes and some rather nasty Elite Bosses in later level story arcs. Having some debuff and/or very decent damage will help a lot. A Dark melee/invulnerability brute is an extremely tough nut to crack. Necromancy/Dark miasma and Robot/Traps masterminds are some other good options to consider.