Frostweaver

@Darkir- good build for a fire farmer, if a bit too...specialized for my tastes, I like corrupter builds that can run ALL content. How does it compare to brute speeds?

To be fair, I don't actually LIKE BR on a blaster... it's damage single target is high enough that spreading disintegrate feels like a waste of time, and it just doesn't feel like it has the AOE a blaster set needs... although it is PERFECT for sentinel target caps, and if your blaster wants to stomp all over scrapper and stalker toes by being a premier single-target murderer, it's pretty much the best for getting the job done. AR/devices is a natural synergy that the developers have actually artificially added synergy to. AR goes from being a low-end set to being a middle-of-the-road set when paired with either devices or Trick Arrow. Dual Pistols has a weird synergy with devices because of the pbaoe nuke and trip mine... It turns Devices from a set specializing in ranged attacks to a hell of a Blapper. The defense buff from Hail gives you all the time you need to drop a trip mine without getting hurt, and because devices does NOT have any auras to attract aggro, you can stand right in the middle of a spawn, take your sweet time to drop a time bomb or trip mine, and then unleash hail to break the alpha. I do not necessarily agree with others about the uselessness of time bomb... it's damage buff is like having a build-up in a combo like dp/devices that doesn't HAVE a build up, and when you drop it and follow up with (smoke grenade!) hail, rain, a trip mine, caltrops, back up a little for empty clips, and another rain, it goes off right after the rain does... leading to about 3500 damage inside 15 seconds and bouncing, debuffed, slowed, proc monstered, running in fear, whiffing enemies... if any survive. Mu mastery for charged armor (big resists against the three most common damage types in the game) and electrifying fences to keep a spawn on your trops and finish your aoe attack chain, and your 'low damage' pistols are doing darned near what a fire/fire blaster can do with TONS more mitigation. And, of course, your ranged and steamroll damage is NOTHING to sneer at either. Piercing rounds with an achilles in it makes AV's squishy. And, of course, since most of DP's attacks can slot KB sets EVEN when you have incindiary ammo equipped, just using a couple of slots almost always gives you an extra +100 recharge... which cranks the heck out of your DPS (usually +30% with an incarnate build) and lower damage with faster recharge (but still slow recharge) also means more damage procs going off in the same period of time. Frankenslotting Hail is VERY profitable.

This is my Water/Atomic blaster, Squallout. She is more than capable of soloing hard content, and has very high recharge without hasten. She is built to stealth exemplared content and smash bosses with relative ease, and also to farm at +2/x8 s/l in fair safety (or +4/8 without bosses) as well as handle herself well on ITF's, Itrials, MSR's, and Dark Astoria. Because Atomic performs so well in Melee, I have loaded her for melee-range brutality as well as enough ranged stuff to help slow down mezzes which only hold on for a few seconds anyway. The 47 slot is open. I used it for acrobatics for a while, then hasten, then eventually I just dumped posi fist in there for polishing off bosses. Her place is directly in the middle of a fight, but NOT behind the tanker, usually on the other side of the spawn, because all those cones and aoe's centered on the melees will mess her up hard. About every 30-40 seconds, you can hold most of a spawn, pop your BU's , and then proceed to dump almost 3000 aoe damage on everything in it in about 15seconds, with an extra thousand for irritating bosses and such. Absolutely priceless on steamroll teams, post-musculature your aoe DPS is about 2-300 (depending on buildups and stuff) and your ST dps hovers around 250 DPS. (these numbers are important for knowing if you can solo a tower, GM, or AV. Once you get support core, of course, that cranks it up another 15% plus added survivability. Musculature ALSO helps with the -def and immobilizes, which is quite nice (although not as important as it may be to other blasters) as you can keep that debuffed boss from running like a chicken, and minimize his tier 9, after you whack him a couple of times. To me, being able to solo farm a few vet levels in AE is VERY Important.... not being able to do it means you aren't really a blaster 🙂

OR, you remember that you are a blaster and not a defender, 2 slot nictus for the healing, proc, and hp, and 4 slot the rest as an actual damage power. With Recharge. The procs do not fire as often, but the base damage becomes 250+ and a worthwhile addition to your attack chain even if you do not blow your combo points on it. And, radiation already has a darned fine sustain. Blasters do extreme damage as an AT, and unless you are in an environment where you are externally capped (fulcrum shift) damage enhancements will always outperform procs on a decent-damage power. If you are always planning on teaming up with kinetics or chain-munching reds (farming) then by all means, sacrifice damage for procs... Otherwise, it's a poor strategy to waste Water's highest st damage attack by turning it into a proc mule.

Exactly this. In the 'farm fresh builds' thread, there are a bunch of binds that automagically combine all your inspirations into reds, automagically EAT the reds, and then fire off your attack powers based on the numbers keys. That way YOU do not have to pay any attention to your inspiration bar whatsoever. This is HOW we get those 4 min clear times. Without them, we are lucky to pull 6 minutes, and often clear as slowly as a tanker. They literally double your clear speeds, and are the 'secret trick' for farming brutes, farming blasters, Farming Tankers, and even the 'weird' farmers tend to use them (except kinetics... kinetics self-cap damage so they tend to use binds that combine for oranges and purples instead, since kinetics doesn't slot well to cap defense/resistance) But if you want to be special and different and not use the inspirations that fall like blood droplets in a John Woo movie, go for it.... but where I come from, 'special' and 'different' are often Euphemisms for 'slow', and Slow is what your Brute's gonna be. But, if you like, here's the thread with the keybinds that will MAKE your brute the same kind of killing machine we are used to: Bear in mind that the 'Farm' chosen and the 'turn off exp' thing are all old, and no longer valid, news since the devs nerfed the crap out of it. Some of us have been building new farms to encourage Tickets and the new paradigm of super-fast all-boss or all-lut farms, as well as farms for alternative farmers like blasters to excel at now that the old model is broken, but those are still being tweaked.

Water/Traps. Easy softcapped positional defenses, crunchy -resist, 1000% -regen, and GIGANTIC AOE damage to compliment the already-outstanding AOE potential in Water. Plus proc-trops, and proc-drones for even more aoe goodness that you spawn between fights and automatically hone in on targets. Plus, the always-fun water/kin... slip into a spawn of +4, Fulcrum shift, and blow everything but the bosses to kingdom come with your nuke and burst, and they are flopping around uselessly while you set up another show. Plus everyone else in the fight loves you.

@Mercurias: could you throw up a build with a datalink? I'd like to poke around with it in Mids and see if there's a trick or two to steal 🙂

a thing to remembver, and the thing that makes the combo amazing for a team though, is that AV's debuff resistance is often based directly on it's damage resistance. drop it's DR and stuff like -defense, -to-hit, and -recharge suddenly work a lot better.

Running recharge enhancement sets is kinda the way to go. putting as many LOTG -recharge procs as you can (up to 5) is also the way to go. That's why a lot of us builders pick stupid stuff as mules, like stealth (two mules, conceal and invis) or leadership (maneuvers and vengeance) so that we can use them as 1 slot LOTG mules for an extra 7.5% global recharge. 5 is the cutoff for set bonuses, but three is not technically the diminishing returns cutoff. things like defenses and resistance have a cutoff of 57% bonus, most things like recharge, accuracy, and damage have a cutoff of 97%, and a very few things have a higher cutoff... it's called a 'schedule' and I friggin hate it. And just to make things even more fun, incarnates come along and intentionally break diminishing returns... so when you have something like musculature, where 2/3rds of the bonus violates diminishing returns, you might have +133 damage bonus reported. It's overly complex. but it's what we are stuck with. Rad armor has several clickies but those clickies are not generally mandatory for survival, even though, as a TW, you will be clicking the crap out of radiation therapy just for the end... try to do it just before you pop build momentum, although I am pretty sure you already figured that out 🙂 At 27, There's just not a whole lot you can do other than run a levelling build. Most levelling builds are built pretty much the same, lots of SO's, some generic IO's, and the occasional 'lucky find' like a lower-level set or damage proc. It's cool for right now, just remember that at 50 you will respec to a vastly better build... sure, you will probably slot in a lot of the same junk you had before while you are acquiring the 'stuff' for the new build, but in the end it will be an entirely different experience.

ahh, fpr seedster theme I went savage melee.... I know that the clawing things are not quite right, but the attacks (and teleport attack!) feel faster than just about anything else.

I like the thread title 🙂 To be fair, though, Traps can pretty much screw resistance 6 ways without sonic's help. That being said, though, it certainly has potential. The thing is... FFG gives you a crapton of defense, seriously. Mace mastery is kind of...primitive. Having a bit more resistance, in my experience, tends to improve survivability... and because FFG offers a ton of positional, positional is generally the way to go. Especially since, as a defender, FFG, combat jump, and maneuvers alone will get you to nearly 40% positional... slotting options make that extra 5% almost inevitable, and for incarnate content, agility will crank that up to almost 60%, incarnate cap. (and some protection from defense debuffs) I personally despise triage beacon. Maybe you will use it as a mule.

One of the things you have to remember is that you want to keep your extraneous clicks to a minimum. That means slotting tons of recharge is better than having hasten on auto. Making sure your armor set can protect you WITHOUT extra clicks is good too. That being said, Ageless is god.

pool attacks tend to cost you momentum.

My husband is really loving his staff/elec

*crunch* and what doesn't die in front of you is trying to get up on broken legs. Excuse me 'arrested'

You gave me the idea. Once I tested it (on test) I was stunned at how much mitigation it really provides, even in a brutal farming environment. And on a Kin your end fluctuates but you replenish it constantly. Gotta get a couple of accolades to make it work better, though 🙂

Ice armor is admittedly ugly, but it is, as @Colder said, vastly underrated. Mostly because some old farts remember when it really sucked, back in... umm...I2. Some people just cannot cope with change. It has a psi hole, yes (energy hole exists only if you don't know how to build) but as long as you remain in melee, chilling embrace STILL slows the crap and reduces the damage from incoming sources. Most people who hate ice do so because of either it's graphics or because they cannot figure out how to keep stuff in melee range. My Ice/fire tanker is just peachy as MT in Itrials, and my fire/ice brute is a farmer second only to rad/fire while still being more than capable of dominating in standard content. Rules to remember- you need Hoarfrost on auto. It is not a heal, it is a gigantic friggin 850 boost to your HP Slot power transfer: chance to heal into energy absorption. healing back half your HP every 20 seconds is actually a pretty huge deal. I wonder if they designed that set specifically for ice armor. chilling embrace is awesome. It has HUGE taunt (Ice tankers/brutes get all the aggro. all of it) it offers -15% damage, and -32% recharge to all enemies in it's radius, and it sticks for around 15 seconds. Two slot it with pacing of the turtle's proc. Amd, lastly, Hibernate does NOT suck. It's a fantastic set mule, can be set to have a recharge of less than 30 seconds, has a QUARTER second animation, and can drag you back to 100% in only seconds. It has no crash, and the only downside is that you lose aggro while it's turned on... and believe me, when you turn it off, that aggro is still there, they just couldn't do anything about it while you are glaciated. Compared to a lot of Tier 9 defense set powers it is a dream, and it's how you do master solo +4/x8 TF's without insp. Normal content Fire/Ice Brute: Fire/Ice Brute for people who hate weird combat tricks (hibernate, BoF positioning) Both of these builds are on my 'main' Frostweaver. I also have a third build, a 'farmer' build, but the build is absolutely useless outside of the frozen farm custom map. I also have an ice/fire tanker version of her on another server Where she has a farmer build (she duos with a kinetic), a general content build, and a 'classic' build which is just SO's and Hami-os. Let me know if you want to see the builds.

Extreme damage is generally higher Damage per attack, but superior is often better DPS (lower recharge times) War Mace/EA is strong and Pretty, Battle Axe is not. Seriously, though, war mace has more weapon graphics, (Bat, Carnie hammer, sledge, a lot of nice ones) and smashing damage, while resisted as often as lethal, seems to be resisted a lot less completely.... War robots are just miserable for most lethal sets. The big differences though are clobber, which does sick damage versus battleaxe swoop, and crowd control, which does almost as much damage as pendulum but has a much better recharge. Other than that, though, they actually perform fairly similarly. But with Clobber, War Mace proves that it is what Titan Weapons wants to grow up to be 🙂 Mostly because WM can use shield, and TW cannot. Broadsword is also very similar, but gives up it's tier 5 'big damage single target' for parry.... which, while an amazing power, still slows down dps significantly versus hard targets, and replaces it's tier 9 melee cone with the big damage that should have been in tier 5, costing it some aoe in the long run. (Katana does the same thing but cannot be used with shield, which makes it inferior unless 'sick damage' is not your goal)

Yeah, I hate to agree, but Sonic/dark, while amazing on teams, is not that strong a soloist... Making it a dark/sonic defender, well, defenders just get better numbers on all the buff/debuffs, and even the damage winds up being roughly the same because of defender's better -resists. And for some weird reason, Defenders get better 'controllery' stuff from Dark... no idea why. Make it a 'Dark Defender' like Dexter Morgan 🙂

Thrown together build for DP/Kin: Thrown together build for DP/Traps Both work by running into a fight, popping off your damage buff (fulcrum shift/soul drain) and then unleashing hell with hail and something else, based on which set you are using. In steamroll teams, the kinetic is much more desireable, while soloing or hard targets (Romulus, Freedom Phalanx) really allows traps to shine.

DP/kin is popular because it is a very late-blooming set that synergizes extremely well in melee range. It is solid in low to medium-level, but late-game, because of the fact that nearly every attack can slot the force feedback: chance for -recharge, and hail of bullets provides +12.5 defense to all positions, it thrives in the middle of a pack of enemies where kinetics does best as well. Add in the fact that the tier 9, hail of bullets also has a low recharge that is still long enough to trigger almost any proc several times (like armageddon: chance for fire damage) and that you can slot an ENORMOUS amount of Global recharge bonuses and procs instead of pushing for set bonuses and damage (with fulcrum shift) it becomes a tank-mage with few equals. The problem is that that strength is extremely expensive and very late game. And it involves weird tricks like splitting up your ATO sets, AND it's pure ranged damage suffers from the lack of build-up or a sniper attack (although with fulcrum shift no one cares) making it very powerful late-game both solo and on a team. It requires patience, however. DP/Time is also a very powerful combo, although not as synergistic as DP/Kin. Both /time and /traps are extraordinarily useful, traps has slightly better synergies in melee since FF drone, Hail of bullets, and weave practically cap all of your defenses without help, and hail, bullet rain, and toe-boming with a trip mine are incredibly powerful and can wipe out even +4 spawns in relative safety. I highly recommend both kinetics and traps for Dual Pistol. I think Time works well, with everything, but it synergizes better with other primaries because it doesn't benefit as much from DP's short range strength and mitigation. Traps matures and stays strong earlier than kinetics, and is better against single hard targets, but kinetics has more potential on teams and in steamroll environments and trials. If you decide to stick with kinetics, or go with traps, I strongly suggest asking people for build help... There are tons of tricks that can make you godlike, but many of them have been hammered out over the last year by builders and may not be immediately apparent to newer builders. You don't have to use someone else's build, but feel free to steal every trick you can find and use it in your own 🙂 . That's what we are here for.

Okay, I did it early. By level 40 you should have already done several SBB's, and finished banging out your ATO's... you know you will pull them out and rearrange in your 50's build, but splitting up scourging blast is EXTREMELY attractive for a corrupter... Getting and installing some cheap sets can get you to a solid, workmanlike 20% ranged defense, and 15% to most other stuff. It's nothing to write home about, but you can afford to start slotting a few things that will help you through your 40's. By 37, you should definitely have enough IO's to replace the old SO's you had at 25, and your power will be much greater. Some cheap(er) sets, some of the procs that will last you for the rest of the game, and keep your health and endurance up reasonably well... although you are NOT a kinetic, you can actually kill stuff faster and a single purple should keep you happy if you have to engage groups. Plus, you have 50% recharge already without having to waste precious (at this level) powers or slots on a hasten that will only be up around half the time. Plus, you can do your patron arc, and at 41 you get school of sharks... Your glue->slick->ignite is already something that will make you forget you even wanted a tier 9 attack, but school of sharks ALSO makes three quarters of the spawn just stand there and take it while still bouncing. Start saving up merits or cash for ragnaroks and frozen blast: chance to immobilize. those will make ignite far more brutal. You still want to team though, tankers make decent doorstops.

You never told me if you'd like it. And you never told me what you were eventually planing on slotting for 🙂 I'll try to get to it tomorrow morning. Tonight is Mutants and Masterminds night, and I am running.

Thanks for your feedback. I boosted the price of the build a bit by replacing one of the thunderstrikes with a set of 5 slotted superior winter's bite, which offers more range def. I went ahead and put in hasten, ditched the flight and stealth pool, and went with SS stealth slotted so I could still stealth exemplared content... If I need to do other exemp content I can dual-box, join a team, or play with my husband. I lost a little global, but hasten more than picked up the slack. I realized that Not taking a team buff that offers almost 40% resistance to s/e was stupid and selfish. Also gave me another place to slot some s/l/m defense, so increase density is in. I managed to boost up end to 109%. and recovery post incarnates is truly sick. enough to (as your build did) run repel as an ice patch and FF -rech mule. I still like the melee hybrid, because it gives outstanding status resistance and incarnate-level defense boosts, and in the middle of a big melee it makes you almost untouchable. I also still like dark embrace, and as a defender power boost affects a crap ton of my powers. It is also up half the time, and even if there's little around to fuel melee hybrid, it still greatly boosts my defenses. I am not that impressed with the assault radial because it doesn't carry over procs and uses defender base damage, which is like... the lowest in the game. It would probably work better on a Corrupter with decent rain attacks. FS and most of my powers now are able to 95% most +4 content.

o tankers do not either. It is a mid's artifact