Blastroller / semi-tank Fortunata build - First attempt, can surely be better

[EnjoyTheJourney]

As a first effort, this is virtually certain to leave quite a bit of room for improvement. But, hopefully the core goals and intended function of the build holds up fairly well, even as is.

 

The basic function would be to serve as a kind of "blastroller", doing good damage mostly from range and also being able to (hopefully and mostly safely) divert attention from teammates when needed. With good support serving as the group's tank or off-tank will hopefully be possible. 

 

Beginning with weaknesses, key weaknesses of the build are that debuffs to recovery or recharge can quickly hamstring the build's effectiveness and cascading defense failure can lead to a quick defeat. Resistances are not very high, which means that hits which get through will tend to hurt quite a bit. Plus, there is no healing in any of the powers chosen other than the "rebirth" destiny incarnate (which is on a 2 minute timer). 

 

The rapidity with which these weaknesses can lead to defeats and the number of them increases the attractiveness of being able to keep mobs mostly at range and to interfere with their ability to do damage with various hard and soft controls. Thus, the basic idea is to do good damage while mostly at range, with just a single melee attack (lunge) that offers very good single target DPA when melee is unavoidable (or desirable). All three single target ranged attacks have a status effect associated with them (knockdown, mag 3 hold, mag 3 immobilize), to help keep mobs off balance. All four AOE attacks also have a status effect associated with them (2 have knockdown, 1 has a mag 3 disorient and a very large recharge debuff, and 1 has a mag 3 immobilize). 

 

Basic overall attributes of the build are as follows, for those who don't have the build loaded up into their character planner:

 

Recharge (force feedback +recharge proc effects from casting psionic tornado are not added to numbers given below)

global recharge is 172.5%

mind link is perma (recharges in slightly less than 83 seconds, uptime is 90 seconds)

hasten is 2.1 seconds from being perma after both lvl 50 recharge IOs are boosted 5 times

 

Defenses (mind link considered active and no mask presence buffs counted)

positional defenses are as follows: 69.7% / 59.8% / 64.9% for melee / ranged / AOE

psi resist is maxed, smash / lethal / fire / cold resists are in the high 30s, toxic is mid-20s, and energy / neg nrg are 8%

 

Damage (alpha and interface engaged, hybrid slot switched off, possible mask presence bonuses not included)

best DPA single target attack: lunge, with a cast time of 0.83 seconds, doing an average of 591 points of damage, and a 3.5 second cooldown  

psychic wail does an average of 678 hit points of damage and recharges after 39 seconds

good ranged ST chain would be dominate (5 damage procs, including 2 purples), telekinetic blast, subdue, telekinetic blast, ... repeat

 

As always, if somebody finds something helpful here, then that would be a welcome outcome. If somebody can help to improve the build then such feedback would be welcome and appreciated. 

 

Thank you in advance!

 

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[Gulbasaur]

Welcome to Arachnos.

 

Is this a build you're planning or a build you're using? Just interested

8 hours ago, EnjoyTheJourney said:

also being able to (hopefully and mostly safely) divert attention from teammates when needed. With good support serving as the group's tank or off-tank will hopefully be possible. 

I see you've taken Provoke - I get a lot of mileage out of it. I used it to pull aggro in BAF yesterday to pull both the AVs and fortunatas can tank very well, although you might want to lean a bit more into a tanktroller playstyle than a tanker/brute one.

8 hours ago, EnjoyTheJourney said:

Beginning with weaknesses, key weaknesses of the build are that debuffs to recovery or recharge can quickly hamstring the build's effectiveness and cascading defense failure can lead to a quick defeat. Resistances are not very high, which means that hits which get through will tend to hurt quite a bit. Plus, there is no healing in any of the powers chosen other than the "rebirth" destiny incarnate (which is on a 2 minute timer). 

Your high defence mostly covers you for the debuffs so it's actually less of a problem in practice than on paper. Cascading defence failure is something I rarely see in practice but when it does hit it hits hard but you've also got scaling damage resistances from the Reactive Defence IO, CT: Defensive and Foresight (both all but tox and psi), which isn't really visible in the build planner. At 50% health, your resists are actually about 30% higher than they look. I'd also maybe think about the +Absorb proc from Preventative Medicine if you've got a slot for it. It's basically a "you need to start paying attention" warning system.

 

For a blastroller, you're quite low on the control aspect and I think that's a mistake - what you lack in damage resistance you can make up for by just not letting enemies attack you in the first place. Immobilising enemies isn't as useful on a fortunata - your ranged defence is your lowest of the positionals and you don't have a lot of AoE.

 

Out of interest, I turned Weave off and you still have defence over 50% with Mind Link up - I'd drop the fighting pool entirely if I were you. You're investing a lot for a very large defence debuff buffer and 23% S/L resists at the expense of both of the Confuse powers. They offer an absurd amount of damage mitigation to all but AVs and the occasional control-resistant mob. If you go Rogue, you get an AoE confuse power which you can use to stack magnitudes up quite decently.

 

As you're almost entirely ranged, I'd also consider dropping Lunge in exchange for psychic scream. Swap the Dominion of Arachnos ATO set from Subdue and it'll start proccing Fear and -DMG at a high-enough rate to be worthwhile, even with the lower cone proc rates. It basically slows down attack rate to one attack per five second interval - that's pretty decent.

 

You're also missing the global toxic proc ATO - this literally adds a toxic proc to all your attacks (not just the one you slot it in) and missing it out is, to put it mildly, very silly indeed.

 

Hope some of that helps - feel free to ignore any of my advice (apart from the global toxic ATO - make room for that one).

Edited August 23, 2020 by Gulbasaur

[tidge]

As the other half of the 'Rebo & Zooty' Fortunata whisperers, here are my comments.

 

The core of my build is here:

 

The build I linked to does not use either the Speed or Fighting Pools. In practice, I only found Hasten to be helping with Psychic Wail and Mind Link; there is room for Hasten in the build by dropping Weaken Resolve (at level 47), and stealing a slot from somewhere for extra recharge if you want it 'perma'.  Personally, I very rarely take Hasten so early in a build. At low levels I don't have powers that need to cycle quickly. If you want more 'constant attacks' use the P2W freebies.

 

I love the Presence pool on Fortunatas, and I would recommend leaning into heavily if you actually want a 'controller' feel. Unrelenting should be your third pick as it is (if Recharge is low) it is a good panic button or as a damage boost (if recharge is ok). Unrelenting takes the Preventive Medicine Pool and can be used much more frequently than Tactical Training: Vengence. The build I linked doesn't multi-slot Provoke, but I like end-set bonuses from Mocking Beratement better than Perfect Zinger. Invoke Panic is a great PBAoE control power, as is Aura of Confusion.

 

I think you have over-slotted Mind Link. YMMV, but my experience is that Mind Link really only needs 3 slots, focusing on Recharge.

• Adjusted Targetting: Recharge
• LotG: Defense/Recharge
• LotG: Def/Global Recharge (assuming you use this power to hold one of five LotG Global recharge pieces)

I accept that if you want even more Defense from it, you can add a 4th slot for even more Defense, but I think that puts you past the point of Enhancement Diversification.

 

I would encourage you to look at the effects of your slots in Health.  You may not need the Numina proc. Once you have the accolades which boost Health and Endurance, you may find that extra Regeneration isn't helping you that much (especially for a Defensive build). IIRC the formulae for Health recovery is:

• (Total HP) / 120 = How much HP you recover per 'tick'
• 12 seconds / Regeneration Rate = Time between ticks

A similar calculation can be done for Endurance/Recovery, but since we always spend Endurance I'm less fussy about pouring extras into Endurance Recovery.

 

[Machariel]

My thoughts:

Core of the build looks good.

-Vengeance is way overslotted, and IMO can be comfortably skipped on a Fortunata, since it doubles down on what you're already doing so much of with your Mind Link & Leadership powers.

-Lunge is a great attack but as its your only melee attack, I believe you'll be stuck with the claw redraw every time you use it, which - if I understand it correctly - pretty much cuts the DPA in half (idk how long redraw is but lets call it 0.7 sec), so I'm not sure if you're getting the best use out of it.  So I'd either take more melee attacks or more likely sawp Lunge (good as it is) for... something.  I don't like Psychic Scream though as it's easily the worst of the ranged targeted AoEs and you already have PsiNado, Fences, and Ball Lightning.

I like how you slotted Electrifying Fences and I'd copy that slotting onto Ball Lightning.  (also I'd swap the PVP proc for the Bombardment proc as it's cheaper and a more exotic damage type)

Mind Link you can definitely save a few slots on as the LOTG bonuses aren't great. 

I prefer the Build Up proc in Aim so that you can control when it procs, but opinions vary.

I would pick up a second big control power.  The simplest choice to me would be to swap Vengeance for Aura of Confusion (one of the best control powers available) with 5 or 6 pcs of the Coercive Persuasion set.  With the contagious confusion proc it usually confuses bosses in one hit if used in a decently sized mob, for a few seconds.

If you wanted to get your resistances up you could move a few slots in defensive powers around and find room for a few 4x Shield Wall (in f.ex mind link & TT-maneuvers) which comes with a nice energy/neg energy bonus.  (6pc Reactive Defenses is a clean swap for the 6pc Preventive Medicine also).

[tidge]

17 hours ago, Machariel said:

I like how you slotted Electrifying Fences and I'd copy that slotting onto Ball Lightning.  (also I'd swap the PVP proc for the Bombardment proc as it's cheaper and a more exotic damage type)

If I have the option, I try to mix up damage types (from procs), but don't PVP procs use the same scale as the Purple procs? The damage from a Purple proc is 1.49 greater than a regular %damage proc.

[Machariel]

1 hour ago, tidge said:

If I have the option, I try to mix up damage types (from procs), but don't PVP procs use the same scale as the Purple procs? The damage from a Purple proc is 1.49 greater than a regular %damage proc.

I could be wrong, but I think that the PVP procs do more damage to players than they do to critters.🤔

[EnjoyTheJourney]

Thank you for the feedback! There's quite a bit to digest here. 

 

I'll be tweaking the build, probably to something more along the lines of a blaptroller. The melee attacks have so much better DPA than the ranged attacks for fortunatas, in the end, and it seems better to stick with the suggestion made by others to control through range and fight up close. I'll also definitely make room for aura of confusion, as well. 

[tidge]

Good luck! There are a lot of different options for fun builds.

 

I have both Confuse and Aura of Confusion in one of my builds. Taking potential set bonuses out of the picture: I am not sure that the Coercive Persuasion Contagious Confusion proc in the PBAoE is as important as simply emphasizing Recharge or alternate %Damage procs. You can invest a lot in recharge and not have it affect %Proc chances. Personally, because it is PBAoE I would slot at least one of the Confuse %Damage procs (Malaise's Illusions for Psi or Cacophony for Energy) over Contagious Confusion for two reasons:

1. MOAR AoE Damage!
2. Getting a 'hit' with damage on targets of an PBAoE confuse puts you in the running to score a drop when a damaged opponent is defeated, even if it is defeated by a confused ally.

With added damage from procs, Aura of Confusion becomes an extra attack, as opposed to simply being a method of control. You can even use it to 'nuke' objects in mayhem missions!

 

Confuse becomes less relevant (than just dealing damage) for some content at high levels, although I find myself occasionally casting it when I want some 'help', or to slow down a particularly tough opponent. I have the Contagious Confusion proc in the single-target Confuse.

[Gulbasaur]

14 hours ago, tidge said:

Confuse becomes less relevant (than just dealing damage) for some content at high levels, although I find myself occasionally casting it when I want some 'help', or to slow down a particularly tough opponent. I have the Contagious Confusion proc in the single-target Confuse.

I move the proc between the two confuses pretty much every time I fiddle with the build - I'm not sure there is a best way. Either it procs on the AoE with its own AoE effect adding some extra magnitude or it procs on the single target adding some extra minions and lieuts. It's Six of one, half a dozen of the other.