Thug / rad or / storm

[lokiie1984]

Curious about these two sets. 

 

I have a character theme I've been working on for the last couple days and I've tried a number of archetypes but so far, while they fit the theme I just can't get into the character. 

 

Im not really a role player, but I do like to build themes and at least think of a backstory. 

 

My goals are to be able to solo well with little fear of death at decent difficulty settings. But also be able to group and do good damage/ be helpful. 

 

Farming would be nice but I'm more interested in steamrolling normal missions. I intend to do all content but pvp so I expect to be exemplared alot. Using oro to hit missions I missed out on as well as older task/strike forces. 

 

For those curious, my theme isn't fleshed out completely yet. But my character is a praetorian clockwork that through random events has gained sentience and escaped. And some how (haven't figured out yet) has become a space pirate captain. 

 

Thugs seems to fit that well. If storm is the way to go, she uses a magic cloak. 

 

Eventually once I nail down the character I plan to do an AE mission to help bring the backstory to life.

 

 

 

 

[Radiaria]

Thugs/Storm is one of the highest if not the absolute King of single target damage. If you build this right, and use procs, this becomes a beast. It will streamroll in most difficulty settings (be careful of ambushes) you definitely want KB -> KD for tornado, and you want to take the AOE immob to not have everything spray everywhere, but you will waste spawns with incredible ease. You will get the majority of kills on a team, and they aren't just "pity" kills like ROF, they are legitimate extremely damaging combinations. You will have absolutely no problems downing enemies. This is chaos to an unstable degree, the sheer amount of damage types you're spraying out, smashing, lethal, fire, cold, energy, is in such volume that not many enemies will heavily resist it all.

**if you have a tanker friend to keep your thuggies from dying and crowd up for you, it S-T-R-E-A-M-R-O-L-L-S. This can have the equivalent damage of full team of 8 people. At your full power mode with Burnout, you can unleash hell upon CoH with Double Gang War, and 4x Tornados, Double Freezing Rain, and 4x Lightning Storms with Lore Pets, and a team of the hardest hitting MM minions in game. That is BEYOND anything you can imagine.

 

Thugs/Rad is safer and a much slower choice that isn't going to be so damaging to the degree storm is but is going to make +4 AV soloing easier on you. You will debuff heavily and in general be well-liked for it. I personally haven't tried this combination but I'm sure it performs decently.

 

Edited October 7, 2019 by 3333053222

[lokiie1984]

5 hours ago, 3333053222 said:

Thugs/Storm is one of the highest if not the absolute King of single target damage. If you build this right, and use procs, this becomes a beast. It will streamroll in most difficulty settings (be careful of ambushes) you definitely want KB -> KD for tornado, and you want to take the AOE immob to not have everything spray everywhere, but you will waste spawns with incredible ease. You will get the majority of kills on a team, and they aren't just "pity" kills like ROF, they are legitimate extremely damaging combinations. You will have absolutely no problems downing enemies. This is chaos to an unstable degree, the sheer amount of damage types you're spraying out, smashing, lethal, fire, cold, energy, is in such volume that not many enemies will heavily resist it all.

**if you have a tanker friend to keep your thuggies from dying and crowd up for you, it S-T-R-E-A-M-R-O-L-L-S. This can have the equivalent damage of full team of 8 people. At your full power mode with Burnout, you can unleash hell upon CoH with Double Gang War, and 4x Tornados, Double Freezing Rain, and 4x Lightning Storms with Lore Pets, and a team of the hardest hitting MM minions in game. That is BEYOND anything you can imagine.

 

Thugs/Rad is safer and a much slower choice that isn't going to be so damaging to the degree storm is but is going to make +4 AV soloing easier on you. You will debuff heavily and in general be well-liked for it. I personally haven't tried this combination but I'm sure it performs decently.

 

Would it be wise to slot KB to KD into the storm powers? In groups i always worry about the knock back being annoying for melee. I hate it too. I wonder what hurricane would be like if it had knock down, assuming it can take the enhancement.

[SmalltalkJava]

All fun. @3333053222 said ,  also read this thread 

 

 

[You]

Thug or Ninja with Storm do crazy damage.  But may be a little too crazy in the sense that the pets die so easily without having the benefit of some more defensive secondary powers.  Taking one step towards to the safer end of the balance, Demons and Zombies (proc-heavy) may be more palatable.  

 

Also, historically Bots and Storm are also a thing.  In the Pylons thread of this forum, someone use Merc with Storm to great effect too. 

 

In my view, steamrolling also implies not dying so frequently - or at least needing to heal regularly - which means more time and endurance for dealing damage. 

 

After all, Storm is a very offensive set to the point where the margin of using different pets is almost academic.  Alternatively, I have heard Dark and Illusion controller pair with Storm very well too.

[Riverdusk]

13 hours ago, You said:

Thug or Ninja with Storm do crazy damage.  But may be a little too crazy in the sense that the pets die so easily without having the benefit of some more defensive secondary powers.  Taking one step towards to the safer end of the balance, Demons and Zombies (proc-heavy) may be more palatable.  

 

 

With Ninja maybe....?  Never tried ninja/storm myself.   Not sure why you'd think thugs die easily with /storm.  Lvl 45 now on that one and not quite there yet, but my thugs/storm pets will soon enough have soft capped defenses (46% to melee and ranged, 61% to aoe by my calculations) and that is without any incarnate extras (I did have to sacrifice some proc slotting in enforcers so I could slot defense there, pre-incarnate at least). 

 

I couldn't actually find a way to even get close to soft capping on a necro/storm when I tried to build one.  Necro do get extra tohit debufing,  but that isn't always as reliable/easy as just soft capping them.  That debuffing doesn't always hit the right targets and then against AV's is severely reduced in effectiveness.  I feel like necro is actually a step down in defense and with them would rather go with something safer like necro/dark or necro/time.  I actually want to try a necro/dark sometime.

 

I'm still not the best MM player so sometimes things get spread out and pets do die (especially that darn arsonist), but that's kind of a danger for almost any MM.  Yes even more so for storm as it has so many powers that cause enemies to run (which is why I definitely am not a fan of illusion/storm which has zero access to immobilizes).  But as long as I can keep things fairly tightly packed my thugs already feel almost indestructible.  

 

 

[Riverdusk]

On 10/7/2019 at 2:48 PM, lokiie1984 said:

Would it be wise to slot KB to KD into the storm powers? In groups i always worry about the knock back being annoying for melee. I hate it too. I wonder what hurricane would be like if it had knock down, assuming it can take the enhancement.

I definitely suggest some of those procs, especially if you aren't a fan of knockback.  Best early level mitigation I had was spamming gale, which was probably my most used power early on (and I still use it a lot now, even more than hurricane).   That proc in gale means you can freely spam it even in the open and in groups. 

 

Hurricane does take that proc as well, but it only mitigates the knockback, the repel is still there, so you still push them back as well as knocking them down.  I'm still undecided on even putting one there as often I'll only use hurricane now as more of an "emergency" button, not something I use all the time.  Using it with the knockback can be useful as it more often ragdolls things which can sometimes lead to them being taken out of the fight for a long time.  That one is a preference thing.

 

That proc in tornado is a must imho.

 

In lightning storm it is nice, but not quite as mandatory since its knockback isn't as high of a mag, so if you are fighting +3's say, it'll probably just do knockdown even without the proc.  I haven't calculated the exact numbers though.  I went ahead and put one in so I can team without worrying about it.

 

 

[Radiaria]

On 10/7/2019 at 5:48 PM, lokiie1984 said:

Would it be wise to slot KB to KD into the storm powers? In groups i always worry about the knock back being annoying for melee. I hate it too. I wonder what hurricane would be like if it had knock down, assuming it can take the enhancement.

This is controversial, but I skipped Hurricane altogether, there's more than enough mitigation with the knockdowns that tornado + lightning storm and your thuggies will do constantly. Only with GMs do I have an issue where they're actually running away from me.

[lokiie1984]

I have gotten to 33 now and finally realized what knock back to knock down enhancement people are using. I always thought it was the overwhelming force one. So with that in mind, does it matter what level i use? Looks like they are all the same price anyway but wanna make sure. Sounds like i will need at least two, gale and tornado. When it comes to a build beyond that i have no idea, doubt i could afford it right now anyway though.

[SmalltalkJava]

For procs.  Either use the lowest level available or attuned.   

[lokiie1984]

I've gotten this Mastermind to 40 and it's alot of fun. The knock downs are great. But I have a massive issue when fighting avs. I don't feel like I can add much to any fight with an av or gm. 

 

Is there anything I can take to help with those? Be it patron powers or incarnates. 

 

So far my only example has been summer bb where every av fight has been a huge mess. And then an itf where the group gave up. We couldn't even put a dent in the last fight. Which I know wasn't 100 percent my fault but I felt like I could have helped more. 

[Dr Causality]

On 10/13/2019 at 3:14 AM, lokiie1984 said:

I've gotten this Mastermind to 40 and it's alot of fun. The knock downs are great. But I have a massive issue when fighting avs. I don't feel like I can add much to any fight with an av or gm. 

 

Is there anything I can take to help with those? Be it patron powers or incarnates. 

 

So far my only example has been summer bb where every av fight has been a huge mess. And then an itf where the group gave up. We couldn't even put a dent in the last fight. Which I know wasn't 100 percent my fault but I felt like I could have helped more. 

What level was the ITF set to?  Was it +4 levels or something?       This seems rough and quite odd that a whole team couldn't do enough damage, because for instance several of my MM builds have been able to solo it a +2/+8 and a Blaster posted about doing to it +4/+8.... So a whole team definitely shoulda been able to do it.   But admittedly that last AV fight is the difficult one due to the Healing Nictus.     Lately, alot of teams have so much aoe that they've been able to kill one of the Nictus before Romulus.    Also, if there's every an chance of having trouble with the final AV fight, definitely take your time to safeguard and bring Imperious along with you.    He's a spazzy pain in the ass that will run off aggroing anything in sight getting himself killed, but he also can do a lot of damage to the AV...

 

You already rolled a /Storm and it should be great.  But I wanted to add that /Radiation would probably be better at low levels because they get their core set defining powers early by say level 20,  whereas /Storm has most of their best powers after level 20.  

[Shoulung]

Also, don’t think /storm is considered all that strong against AVs; not enough debuffing.

[Dr Causality]

2 hours ago, Shoulung said:

Also, don’t think /storm is considered all that strong against AVs; not enough debuffing.

 

It's missing -Regen and has survivability issues due to single target heal, not have capped def or res for pets, etc..  But once you get it proced out it has very respectable -Res and the highest 2ndary Dmg of all MM sets.  Fully IO-ed as long as it doesn't die it should be the clear DPS king.   The challenges are keeping yourself and pets alive long enough to deliver that damage...  And that even AVs will run from your /Storm powers, so you need a way to hold them in place for /Storm power to deliver its damage. 

Edited October 16, 2019 by Dr Causality