Frostweaver

Not sure ity's going to happen unless they give it a stalker-over. Rage is too powerful for a scrapper set.

I guess. I have fun fire farming 🙂

No worries. Umm... consider making a fire farmer?

Bah, launch abort. I get it though, bad weather.

I know it's not CoH, but it's amazing!

back in the day, Ill/rad was absolutely the way to go. In today's IO set environment, though, Ill/Traps is far faster at Killing GM's and Bosses, and can provide real DPS to a team. Trip mines and, like Coyote said, hole-fillers for illusion like web grenade, caltrops, and seeker drones to add more control effects to your hold/fear. Plus, of course, a shield drone that provides excellent defense PLUS mez protection. Rad was better when there were few ways to cap recharge, but with LOTG procs and set bonuses, perma-PA is easy for just about anyone... Now you have Dark, Plants, Poison, and sonic able to solo GM's as well... not as fast, not as efficiently, but they provide lots of alternative to a team that rad does not (although rad definitely has it's team benefits). But traps with illusion is just a top notch overperformer. a few days ago one of my trip mines (I got lucky with containment, procs, and was damage capped with reds and incarnate stuff) blew over a quarter of Black Swan's HP off in 1 shot (as a +4 AV!) and arresting her was an absolute breeze. Even soloing the ITF is a breeze because you tend to have lots of very tough, additional targets for things to beat on instead of YOU. Trip mines and poison mines help stop ambushes, and actually KILL stuff rather than just controlling it for a while.

Okay, assuming that I had some kind of weird impulse to cripple myself, Generic IO's and procs alone are actually very easy Reaction time: Power transfer chance to heal self (you will need the healing) and preventive medicine chance for absorb (The absorption will help you survive stray hits). 2 generic endmod, 2 generic heal, all boosted to +4, or SO's at +3 (much cheaper) An extra slot in health to hold numina's proc Inner will: You take away 2 slots from this in order to add one to reaction time and one to health (as mentioned above) You slot 2 IO recharge +4's, and 2 IO heal +4's SO's- 3 recharge +3, 1 heal SO. You still want it on auto to help with mez as often as possible, but it's not going to help as much with healing. Or, like coyote says, skip the heal. I wouldn't because most mezzes are attached to a small-medium damage component and I like to stay topped off, but that's just my playstyle... I have been within a few % of faceplant many times though, especially from things like the clock king, and it's been the difference. If I were running a no-set build, though, I would reconsider suppressive fire, storm kick, and throw sand because they would provide some much-needed mitigation. Or I'd play a sentinel instead, as they are far more survivable in 'old school' builds. I have an old school DP/Ninja sentinel if you'd like to see it.

I really don't like how low your resistances are. I don't run a WaM!/shield Brute (although I have 3 wm brutes at high levels) But I do have a build for WaM!/shield scrapper, which is functionally identical (albeit considerably higher damage on average) at level 50. And yes, he, too uses physical perfection 🙂 feel free to plagiarize or take ideas from this or ignore it altogether.

Generally, we'd just use SO's in a normal slotting setup until we can afford the IO sets. General IO's are a little too expensive for disposables that will be replaced as soon as you get sets.

To be fair, while Controllers have been getting bad press in the post-50 game, I have never been asked to leave a group, or refused entry into a group, when I was playing a controller. (unlike masterminds) I mean, they DO get containment damage and an entire buff/debuff set, and with all the damned brutes running around SOMEONE has to deal with all that unfocussed aggro running around. The Brutes sure aren't.

I kinda had to readjust a little bit of stuff, but I rarely catch any aggro at all. Last week I soloed Lusca, which was fun if time-consuming. Yesterday, though, I managed to get an 1800 point hit on black swan with a trip mine... I was not sure how it happened, but I think the combination of proc, turret, weaken resolve, and reactive core combined with damage cap and containment, as well as all damage procs firing, led to knocking off a quarter of her health as a +4 AV! Not sure if I have ever even seen a blaster hit that hard 🙂

This I agree with. On my defenders and controllers I'd never even consider running without maximum -recharge. As many LOTG's as I could leverage into the build, 5 sets of purples (or 3 if the ATO's come with 10% recharge), perma-hasten, ageless if I can, agility if I can, etc. That 3 minute recharge ability with a 60 second buff being perma... Is worth it. But on a melee, it's like what... you are sacrificing a power, two slots, and your auto to make your cone come back in 6.5 second instead of 7? Oh, your clickie mez protection can be...tripled? what the heck? It's very hard to make people understand that Hasten is a Hammer... and on something like a Rad/Rad brute, what you need are screwdrivers.

Find a kinetic to team with.

ahh, I was thinking about it from a Tanker's point of view, 3 seconds for 600+ damage +it's long recharge that almost guarantees a proc or two firing seemed like...numbers a tanker cannot afford to skip

what do you mean by 'numbers wise the T9 is not meant to be used'?

I tried to follow the guidelines of what you LIKE to play, and squeezed in stealth at the expense of flash arrow... flash arrow is not needed when you have full stealth, as such, and the only decent set you can slot in there has a damage proc attached that wrecks it completely. You should be able to stealth missions easily enough from the very lowest exemplar level, and even have stealth as a 'defense' if you do something like a DFB or the Hollows. This lets you solo things like mirror or sister psyche quickly and easily for scads of merits. That is why you have MORE ST attacks than is usual from a level 50 blaster... so you can exemplar down and earn big merit rewards solo or in a team, and badges while still being able to shred through end bosses and kill-alls. Your 'new' attack chain will usually be glue arrow than rain of arrows, because Glue is fast and debuffs the spawn brutally, and Rain of arrows is... rain of arrows. They also both are available every FIFTEEN FRIGGIN SECONDS. You generally will not have much time to putter around with explosive or fistfull of arrows as you whack bosses with your single target chain of ranged shot-aimed shot-blazing arrow-aimed shot-repeat. I would reccommend popping Aim OR upshot on each spawn so you have one ready for each repetition, since both take about 25 seconds to recharge and hopefully your team has some damage buffs. Upshot-glue-Rain or aim-glue-rain means that you will have rain falling within the first 3 seconds of hitting a spawn... very little wasted damage and that fire blaster will only be hitting HIS nuke every third spawn or so, and your team will HUGELY appreciate how horribly debuffed the remaining boss or two is at between 15% and 35% recharge reduction. I figure that is what archery is about... forcing your enemies to fight in the shade as often as physically possible 🙂 Esd arrow is your control, and is amazing with coupled with Aim for reducing enemy mechs to spare parts in seconds... both recharge in 25 seconds, and are how you keep from being infuriated by how much resist machines have against lethal... Because they will NOT resist this! Unlike the poster above, I think that a good blaster can do insane Damage AND make the battlefield his bitch, without having to choose between the two options. And you do not. You are capped at ranged defense, can KEEP your enemies at range with ease, even in those maddening purple tunnels where you cannot hoverblast them. glue can floor most enemies movement even against resistant enemies like EB's, although it (of course) has no effect on -speed immune enemies like war wolves, other than screwing their recharge up. I skipped flash arrow because even though it's cool, that -5% defense disappears as you go up in levels... and against +4 enemies, luts are only losing like 1% and bosses and above are losing maybe a fraction of a % of to-hit from it. And you have stealth. And absolutely sick recovery. And brute-level regen. and fairly decent s/l resistance. You can even fly through a mission hoverblasting at full speed, and you are STILL over the ranged softcap! The best part is, the whole build is CHEAP. Hasten is 'almost' perma at 124, there are no purples, no winter sets, and your recovery is absolutely SICK so when you look at alphas, Musculature is the FIRST thing you are going to look at rather than the last. And if you look closely, the build is a LEVELLING build... you should have quite decent functionality and killing ability at any point along the build's. If you WANT to slot in a purple set, you can replace Positron's blast set in explosive arrow with ragnarok, which is functionally identical, but all it would really do is shave maybe 1/2 second off hasten recharge and add like 3 dps and a tiny bit more fire/cold resistance... It's really not worth it, especially since you will VERY soon have incarnates that will blow away the slight boost. The most expensive part of the build is the boosters in certain enhancements. And you might not even need those if you get to incarnates and grab something with a hint of recharge on it, like ageless.

Yeah, for TW that doesn't...quite work. Stuff like +chance for end and +heal in stamina (in ADDITION to endmod capped stamina! Not instead of it) as well as a few other lower-level procs like +recharge and if you can, a few sets, make a MONSTROUS difference when you are running from 35-50. You don't click your 'click to not die' buttons often, so you have to make sure that you can run without them. That's why I prefer rad armor to willpower on TW... because it's just a whole lot tougher, and when you DO need to click your emergency buttons you have the leeway to do it when you aren't going to screw up your attack chain or die while waiting for an animation to finish.

So, here's what I have been trying to piece together about kinetic Melee In general, most of the attacks are like much weaker versions of Energy Melee. But you have a buildup, which at first is more like an aim with no damage. but it lasts 20 seconds. Then you have to build up that aim by firing off weakass single target attacks to get it up to buildup levels. Except that those cannot be ANY attacks, they HAVE to be kinetic attacks... and anything slow wrecks it. And then you get to use your big built-up single target attack, which takes almost as much time as putting down a trip mine. Oh, and stalkers and scrappers cannot crit with it, they just get to restart the whole cycle a little quicker. After that, you can fire off your slow-as hell pbaoe, and then your second aoe which knocks everything out of range for your final attack, which will probably be another weakass single target attack, because that wonderful build up power caps at just barely above an actual build-up damage, and there's no way on EARTH you are getting off a second big hitter attack with it's huge recharge and gigantic cast time. But that's okay, because if you keep flailing away for another minute or so you get to restart the cycle while your team moves 3 spawns down. And anything that caps your damage caps it at the same weakass below-energy melee level. only now, stalkers and scrappers still cannot crit with the big attack, so their crappy build-up is useless. And it's 'special' for all of this weirdness is a pathetically low level of -damage that is resisted by every AV and GM to the point of uselessness, a bit of knockdown, and a minion-level stun that makes things wander stupidly outside of your attack range on a regular basis. Oh, and a slow, low-damage ranged attack that never ever benefits from the weird build-up. Did I get that right? Or am I missing something? Because I am trying to figure out if this was supposed to be a powerset, or a way for the live devs to pretend to play street fighter 2 with the CoH engine. Without a flaming uppercut. or a spin kick.

A LOTG mule is less important than serious defense. So you have 3 instead of 5 lotg's? So what? Which do you prefer, the range game or hoverblasting? /TA doesn't need to hoverblast like other sets because of glue arrow and some other nasty tricks, but if you are used to it, it does help against things like Magmites and War Wolves. What is your preferred attack chain? Do you tend to go solo, be on steamrolls, work with a tanker partner, Trial and TF, or what? Do you plan to exemplar? Would you prefer to kill your way through or stealth exemplared content? Do you happen to like stealth? We can bang out an improved specialist, but it helps to know what your preferred playstyle is.

I didn't even know that there was a water-blast power set for brutes! Huh, I cannot find it. I use a Kin/Water DEFENDER in a fire farm. Just because you cannot see it doesn't mean it doesn't work.

No one is arguing that you cannot make a 7 minute Tanker Farmer. Heck, I have a shield/savage Tanker that can 7 minute farm, no problems, and she's capped positional and 80% to most and solo runs at darned close to damage cap from beginning to end. But yes, if you decide to make a 'non specialist farmer' you are going to do it in twice the time. That means that what takes a 'normal' specialized fire farmer brute 25 minutes to do, it's going to take you almost 40 minutes to do. Farmers don't farm with arcs and radius. They drop massive 360 degree PBAOE's around themselves as well as 2 PBAOE auras packed with procs, into stuff that's packed about 8 feet around them. cones slow you down, no matter how awesome they are. If you actually ever farmed, you'd know darned well that farmers have tried, and discarded, attempts to add ripper, eviscerate, and proton sweep into their attack chains, and only ever do it when there is a big gap to fill... knowing that the target cap makes it barely better than one ST big attack. Unless you increase Tanker aggro and PBAOE target cap to 24+, Tankers are not going to be as good as brutes at farming just because of their 'radius'. Now PLEASE don't start this stupid Gamma conversation about how you 'imagine' a tanker could be a better farmer than a brute over again. It's tiresome.

This thing is the culmination of dozens of rebuilds, and is about the best I can do or have seen. Feel free to critique if you like, I will take such seriously if they are merited.

Actually it comes down to a pair BUILT to duo with fulcrum shift. Meaning that very few powers are slotted with damage on either character, they are slotted with as many damage procs as possible. incarnates are based around -rech to speed up attacks instead of damage. My husband and I were working on it last night, and we are still tweaking the builds to try and break the twenty minute mark. And the fact that 2 brutes are sharing inspiration drops... They are lucky, very lucky, if they can keep their damage bonus above 250. (450 total) I bet sonic/kin and rad/fire tanker would be even faster, due to -res in aoe's. It's not 'playing better', it's "I am sitting right across from him and we have coordinated every part of this from complimentary builds to tactics"

Will you eat crow if a kin/water defender and a fire/staff TANKER cleared it in 25:30ish? The secret is that both characters are proc monsters, and are damage-capped by kin WITHOUT eating a single red... They actually have higher damage than 2 brutes 🙂

After working with it for a while, ill/traps just isn't a good proc monster. I mean, it doesn't really need it, but it's ALL PETS with the pet proc limits, and if you WANT perma PA there's just too many demands on your sets to give you the freedom to proc up.