Gulbasaur

Welcome to the wet side! A word of warning: don't start slotting for mega recharge until you've also got the endurance procs to keep it up. Storm/water, ironically, is a thirsty beast. I took Storm Lantern our for a spin the other day with a storm corruptor and we had a lot of fun. We were either incredibly safe or face down. Silver Mantis, as tradition dictates, did us dirty.

Preach, sister. While I fully admit I've min-maxed my main to within a millimetre, builds that totally collapse the second they have to exemplar and all their set bonuses switch off annoy me. End-game only builds feel silly in a game where your level shifts around constantly if you want to do anything other than grind the same few missions again and again.

They must have had a fair amount of Asia-located lore they basically abandoned when the Korean launch died a horrible death (it was cancelled during the beta). I remember the Korean trailer coming out and thinking how cool it was to see superheroes from other traditions than the American ones (and later derivatives and interpretations). I think one or two of them made it into the game as bit-parts

Yeah. I'm torn between being able to just jump in where I left off and things being a bit easy. Having pretty much all all trials soloable took something away from the experience.

Tanker and stalker play very differently, especially with the IOs. Stalkers kind of have special moves with the predictable crit mechanic, whereas Tankers are all about the flow. Scrappers and brutes, though - potayto potahto.

I think the chance for build up recharge is global so it doesn't matter where it goes. I can't remember though and proc maths eludes me a bit so I don't know if it makes a difference. But yeah @Vulpoid I'd put the chance for hide proc in Assassin's Strike definitely because that usually lets you chain two crits in a row. In Build Up itself, put the Chance for Build Up proc from... the Gaussian set? and leave it otherwise minimally slotted - the Build Up recharge proc cancels the recharge so the proc rate is really high and you can almost always give yourself five seconds of double Build Up that way, which is helpful for hitting things really, really hard. It's really fun but quite clicky as build up resets pretty much every 20 seconds or so.

I think people are put off by the costume editor, really. It's not obvious that your uniform costume slot isn't your only costume slot. There's also the roleplay aspect of not wanting to be constrained by a backstory - my way of explaining it is that they're like the Bat Family or Lantern Corps in that while they all use a similar set of skills, they're all defined as their own characters. The VEAT story has you explicitly proving that you're not just another Arachnos lackey. The top five archetypes are all quite clear in what they do, as well. What really gets me from that chart is how damaged stalkers are by their reputation from the early game - they're absurdly good now. I'm also surprised to see Dominators so low as they're basically Lockdown Blasters. The top four on the list are all archetypes that I think are too boring to play, funnily enough, so clearly I just like making my life more complicated.

I do it in bits and pieces - I usually slot in the +stealth IO as soon as I am able, and a few of the procs and flat bonuses (the +3% def and +5% res ones etc) as soon as is practical. For example, the stalker ATOs add so much value that you'd be making a mistake in not slotting them at 10 if you can afford them. Generally I aim to be more or less slotting for sets in the mid-20s, but I've got a bed of inf to rest on and I quite often rob sets off alts I no longer use.

I use confuse a lot as it's one of the best status effects in the game, but I am mindful of which enemies to confuse. It genuinely changes the dynamics of certain fights and a lot of the above-named enemies are on my "confuse them first" list. Tsoo sorcerers. Ritki Guardians and Menders are all very good to confuse as you end up with some decent buffs and some decent healing. Several Longbow Wardens summon pets and confuse is automatically passed onto pets - it's entertaining (and useful) watching phantom army or the singularity flip around and attack their summoner. My only real foil are those Rularuu buggers. Half of them are basically mezz-resistant and debuff defence quite hard. And Nemesis, just generally. They've got enough mezz resistance to be annoying and the fart explosions when robots go down tends to catch me out.

Oh, good god no, carry on. I prefer actual crowd control tanking to "brute decides to press W". The "immobilisation problem" can usually be resolved very easily by asking then to wait until they're grouped up before firing it off - it's what I do and 95% of players listen to it. I genuinely think brutes are one of the worst planned archetypes in the game as their inherent power benefits from and rewards antisocial player practices (damage bonus for keeping up momentum, even if it means leaving players behind). Who thought "Oh, the kids love scrapperlock, let's make it rewarding"? Who signed off on that? Who said "oh, and let's make them nearly as tough as tankers and give them access to taunts but also reward them if they move into a new group of enemies with more opportunities for Fury generation" in a game with a hard aggro cap? The amount of times I've seen sidekicked-up corruptors or defenders left to deal with two +4 bosses after the "tank" has pressed W and moved onto the next group, causing the aggro cap to kick in and overflow it onto the debuff archetypes is ridiculous. Yes, you do get brutes who tank well and are considerate players, but most brutes I see are tanking by default rather than because the wanted to role a tank. I'm not saying corner tanking is the solution to all life's problems, but some acceptance in some players that roles change depending on the group and depending on the mission would be amazing.

The whole "you need 45% defence or you won't even make it outside Atlas park" thing that seems to be prevalent in build advice really bothers me. A lot of the advice is totally out of context. It seems to assume that damage resistance has no value, mezzes do not exist, absorb doesn't exist, healing is illegal, debuffs don't do anything, teammates are just door sitters and the only goal of a build should be to just keep upright. If you're tanking or mostly play solo, then yes, having 45% defence will benefit you and I'm not questioning that. Having any defence will benefit you. 45% isn't some magic number at which point your character suddenly becomes playable at end-game. Half the time past level 35 you're rocking about +30 to defence from teammates anyway and when you hit the incarnates it spends half its time at the cap. It's almost always at the cost of attacks, so +recharge becomes much more important to close gaps in rotations, which causes an extra endurance drain, so you start removing slots from attack powers to give you more endurance... making fights longer and slower. I think it's fire-farmer wisdom that has leaked into the core game builds. Now, my main is fairly min-maxed and I'm not pretending it's not, however I min-maxed it around the idea that I'll be mostly playing with other people so I can give it a bit of breathing space. I ended up trading out some extra defence for a taunt. Better to be useful to a team than be the last man standing atop a pile of your allies (although one or two casualties helps with TT: Vengeance).

Debuffs have a high threat modifier, which is why debuff support sets grab aggro so well and Ice Tankers are so good at keeping it.

Across all games, across all worlds, across time and space, the LFG is something that you get more out of if you put more in. If you write something generic, you don't stand out. If you write "L42 Blaster looking for blueside missions team, any level", the display of the most minimal effort shows what sort of team you're looking for, which means that people running similar content are much more likely to pick you up. "Gather for RA" the defender calls, halfway across the map, unmoving. "RA in 20 seconds". "Gather for buffs". "RA in 10 seconds". Just run into battle, fire it off and pull out again. If you're running radiation, chances are you've got most of the aggro anyway.

I know it can be, I just choose not to be. Beside the heal, it grants endurance drain resistance, which is quite a rare buff and one that can save an encounter if a tank is getting sapped. It is a power people often undervalue. I get a lot of value out of dehydrate, though, for the endurance proc and as a filler attack. The rotation is, as you say, fairly dense and after the fairly long set-up if you're going all-in, but for single-target damage with some sustain I think Dehydrate is good value. I love water blast, partly for the visuals (it's just pretty) but also it is a near-guaranteed proc for +recharge. My whole idea for this character was "let's see how much I can abuse recharge procs to break Storm" and the answer is "quite a lot". There's no right or wrong way to play it and I'm not pretending my way is the best way at all - that's one of the reasons why we all like this game, after all. I've semi-retired the character for now... got it to 50 and the novelty wore off as I'd achieved my goals. It was a fun ride.

Widows are good too. Honestly, my fortunata is so good I started removing defence powers and bonuses just to add some challenge back into the game (I replaced Combat Jumping with Provoke because I'm a tank now). If you don't like pets but do like literally everything else, fortunatas are the build that you didn't know you needed. Slightly less tanky than spiders, they're still somewhere alongside the average scrapper but can mezz elite bosses indefinitely and have ranged attacks that are pretty near blaster values. I've tanked iTrial AVs with my fortunata. They're bananas. The VEATs are like Greatest Hits compilations of about five different power sets each.

That's true enough and I fully recommend the Reactive Defences proc that gives you between 3 and 13% global damage resistance, dependent on health. Another one gives you a 5% global res boost and the +absorb proc in Preventative Medicine is really helpful for those rare occasions where enemies get two good hits in in quick succession. Those three are very good value enhancements in terms of their impact-per-slot. I'd say a couple of those is much more likely to add value than reworking an entire build for half a percentage point of defence. Several sets (the Widow secondaries and Super Reflexes) also have a scaling damage resistance boost, which mean the more damage you've taken the more damage you can take. They don't show up in the Hero Planner so people often don't realise they're there, somewhat underselling the powersets. I'm a "fast, loose and chaotic" player and I absolutely don't look at my health bar until I see the words Preventative Medicine appear on my screen, because above about 40% defence I don't feel I really have to. Two of the uniques you have in there give you significantly more survivability than having an extra half a percent of typed defence. Defence is only part of the equation. Don't bite off your nose to spite your face.

While this is factually correct, it also obscures the truth a bit (as is often the case with statistics). I used to teach mathematics and statistics is something that confuses people so I just want this to be super clear: That's 10% of a 5% chance - 10% of 5% is 0.5%. It's 0.5% on top of 5%. That's still less than one in nineteen hits attempted hits making contact. It's 11 hits in every 200 as opposed to 10 in every 200. Not in any practical sense - you'll be hit, on average, once more for every two hundred attempts. If your build can't survive that, it has bigger problems. Also, everyone and their cow runs Maneuvers, if not force fields/mind link/link minds/farsight etc. Past level about thirty, the second you step into a team you'll be well over the soft cap. A single inspiration will see you through those two-hundred-and-one hits easily enough and usually bounce you up enough that if you get defence debuffed it doesn't mean certain death. FWIW I used to solo AVs on 35% defence with my widow before I got bored of soloing AVs. People who say anything lower than 45% defence is worthless (and I'm not saying anyone in this thread is) just aren't paying attention to how percentages of percentages work.

In London, there's literally the City, which is the City of London which is a different city than the city named London, which it's in. London, which is the capital city, doesn't have official city status, but the much smaller City of London is a city with official city status. London, the city that isn't officially a city, is much bigger than the City of London.

I need to play characters who do more than one thing. Pure DPS has never done it for me.

As in how you actually play - not just "support" or "melee". I spend most of my time either exemplared down or with lowbies sidekicked up. Mid-sized teams are more fun than teams of eight for me. I like the added challenge of maintaining aggro and keeping everyone alive while not on a tanker, brute or scrapper (my fortunata can out-aggro a brute but struggles with tankers). Blending up enemies in teams of 8 on +4x8 offers no real enjoyment - blending up enemies in a team of four on +3x8 with three people under level 20 on my team? Yes please. (It puts TT: Vengeance to work, if nothing else.) So, how do you like to play?

Yup. With the exception of Titan Weapons, Stalkers come out on top for single target DPS. They're very tanky (not quite at scrapper levels, but let's not pretend you're relying on the last 10% of your health all the time, but also Stalkers have a small AoE fear proc going on so you end up with mezzed enemies anyway) and their ATOs add a huge amount to gameplay. Being able to choose when you crit, having Build Up as a spammable power thanks to the ATO and the Hide proc often letting you crit twice in a row is very, very fun. At L50, I was able to predictably open with a 1k crit, which is very good for boss-destroying, and then get a few more in before the fight is over.

I once tried to walk from somewhere to somewhere using only roads and crossing and Skyway City's roads just don't connect in any logical way. I think it's actually impossible to get from one side to the other without running through traffic. Crey's is such an underused zone. That shanty town had serious story potential, but it's somewhere that you skip through briefly one one or two task forces and never think about again.

Yeah, I vote this. Personally, I'd answer "neither, grab a support set with heavy debuffs and transcend" but that's because I enjoy hybrid builds... I do need to roll a tanktroller again... I think something /time but I don't know what the something is yet. The reality is, as you say, you can proc or bonus your way to glory with either. I've never found blasters' damage worth the fuss, but the same is true of sentinels and scrappers. Tankers are rather relaxing to play and stalkers have the constant crit-stealth minigame going on which means you can hit for 1k damage and choose when you do it. I'm still trying to find something as awesome as my fortunata. I'd love to see blasters get a damage buff as they have the same issue that many of the Hero ATs have that they're balanced around a game with a different meta and their inherent powers are generally a bit wetter. If damage is their whole shtick, they shouldn't be in the middle for damage numbers in actual play as they lose their "ranged advantage" in group play as so many heals and buffs are AoE focused. I'd like to see Defiance scale in in a similar way to Fury, which is the closest mechanically with increasing damage buffs with increasing activity... only Defiance rarely gets you more than about 30% extra base damage whereas Brutes can sit at +100% without trying.

I rank Blasters quite low on the "ATs I think are well designed" list. Like Peacebringers (IOs largely took away what made them unique and they can't self-buff to the same level that Warshades can) and Scrappers (Stalkers are basically Scrapper 2.0), I find it quite hard to justify playing them in a post-IO, post-Going Rogue game.* I've always felt that Blasters just don't do enough extra damage to counteract the squishiness and lack of team utility (although sets like time, devices and tactical arrow do add some), particularly as team play is mostly a melee/mid-range affair. Yes, you can one-shot someone from across a room, but how useful is that more than once per fight if your team is playing with a pre-CoV mentality where the Blaster pulls and the Tanker grabs aggro and it's not just a Brute running from mob to mob like a hyperactive spaniel. They're not the highest for single target or AoE damage. They're barely even the highest at range. They only do 12.5% higher damage than the VEATs, only they don't get the AoE debuffs that SoAs get and they don't get the control that Widows get (or the tankiness or the passive team buffs, including a 15% base damage buff although this does diminish in usefulness in among enhancements). Dominators aren't really that far behind blasters in terms of ranged damage, but they can also lock down elite bosses like 'twere nothing. I mean, Controllers get criticals which can put them at a pretty reasonable damage scale when they get going... Corruptors get Scourge, plus a lot of them have -res... You could argue that they have a higher damage cap than the other ranged AT's but to get to that cap you'll have to be playing in melee range because of how Fulcrum Shift works so the point is, as they say, moo. Yes, Blasters get Defiance, but lets not pretend Defiance is winning Inherent of the Year. The give up a hell of a lot for a modest damage buff and they're still not even the best at damage. Considering they're meant to be glass cannons, they're just not canon-y enough. Grab a sentinel (or a VEAT or a Kheldian if you're feeling spicy), slap on a couple of procs and you'll barely notice the difference in damage. * I mean, unless you just think they're fun, in which case blast on, you crazy diamond. This isn't exactly the hardest game in the world and "I just think it's fun" is a 100% valid reason to play the way you play and don't let anyone tell you differently. I'm not anti-blaster and will happily team with you, I just think they pay a high utility/survivability cost for relatively meagre gains.

I ran it on a defender and it's lots of fun. I'd actually recommend using the defender version, though. Storm has poor synergy with Scourge and Lightning Storm does more damage on a Defender. It also has much better low level synergy as you'll have Freezing Rain much earlier and it pairs very well with Whirlpool. You've got strong AoE damage and debuff and both sets use knockup/down mechanics (Tornado is basically a knockup and Lightning Storm is basically a knockdown - you don't need to slot for KB>KD). Storm has a number of powers that are, frankly, very skippable, so you can indulge in the power pools a bit. Gale, O2 Boost, Snow Storm, Hurricane and Thunderclap are all "take it or leave it" powers, in my opinion. Obviously, you need to pick up one of the first two, but my only heal is Vengeance and I don't have to use it very often. Use lots of Force Feedback recharge procs and put +endurance procs into anything that will take them or you'll burn out extremely quickly. Water Blast has an attack that can heal you, which you can also use to recharge endurance with the proc.