Mu vs Soul Mastery

[FUBARczar]

Does Moonbeam really do more damage than Zapp?

 

And Dark Blast is slightly faster than Mu Bolts...

 

But Mu Mastery gives a nice AOE in Ball Lightning...

 

And Shadow Meld of course...

 

Which do you prefer?

[Croax]

Zapp and Moonbeam deal the same amount of damage, they have different debuff effects and therefore different sets to slot in. Both have a good hold power and the blast are not that much different. In my opinion it comes down to Ball Lightning vs Shadow Meld. And this can only be answerede by looking at your build as whole. Do you need another Purple Set Mule, another AoE, Emergency Defense, LotG Mule, are you short on slots? These should be the things to take into account.

[tidge]

I agree with everything Croax wrote. I have both a Scrapper and Stalker that chose Soul Mastery. I can try to explain my reasoning, but the choice is personal.

• Each of my builds was only going to take (at most) one more power from the pool. Each build wanted a ranged attack, and Sniper attacks are simply 'too good' to pass up. This meant 'no Patron pet'. With these damage-dealing ATs, I also wasn't going to take any 'control' powers, nor was I looking for another power that I could add 'control' effects on top of.
• Each build already had enough attacks for a good chain; I wouldn't have the extra slots to make a targeted AoE like Ball Lightning do that much for me, without seriously gimping one of my other attacks. Read this as also meaning that I wouldn't have the slots to get 'awesome' set bonuses from any of the other powers in either Mu or Soul.
• Shadow Meld is a perfectly good Mule for LotG Def/Global Recharge with just the initial slot, a second slot of Recharge @ 50+5 (on my high-recharge builds) has it available (but mostly unused) in under 30 seconds on both of my toons.

I'm normally not an advocate of 'panic button' powers, but that is generally what I use Shadow Meld for. I think it's ok to 'panic' before taking the Alpha!

 

Contrasted with how I would use Ball Lightning: It would almost certainly be an attempt to get some -Resistance on groups of (nearby) opponents, possibly as a tool to draw aggro to me... maybe even as a(nother) Knockdown mechanism. Notice I'm not considering it as a source of damage! My bad, perhaps... but both my Stalker and Scrapper had 6 attacks from the primaries already.

[kiramon]

They can flesh out attacks for like, psi for example - which is short one attack IMO— tho I use cross punch there personally. 

[r0y]

Moonbeam if you need a LotG mule (shadowmeld, but don't actually use it, unless your build sucks), Zapp if you must have Ball Lightning.

 

Moonbeam (4) procs better than Zapp (3), so is my choice most all of the time, besides Negative > Energy for one of the least resisted damage types in the game.

[Lockpick]

It might depend on your secondary.  I usually take a defense secondary, so don't really need Shadow Meld.  That being said, I generally take it as a reactive panic button.  However, I am looking at Bio or resistance secondaries and thinking I could soft-cap defenses with Shadow Meld as a proactive defensive power.

[MTeague]

I must be the oddball using Dark Mastery (epic pool, not patron pool) for some Cones with -ToHit debuffs.  Back door defense buff for the team, plus I like the look on the animations.