Ice/Sonic - what was I thinking?

[Heraclea 1690]

About a year ago I rolled an Ice/Sonic defender.   I recently picked this character back up and started playing her semi-regularly, and recently got the character to 50.  I usually try to have some kind of concept or synergy in mind when I choose powersets, and I can think of none here.  My thoughts are:

 

1./ Experiment to see how invisible and un-annoying I could make the Ice armor buffs.  I seem to have succeeded, in that it's hard for me to tell who has 'em or when they wear off. 

 

2./ Place to absorb all of the spare armor set enhancements lying around the base.  (Done; so what's next?)

 

3./ Swiss army knife debuff machine. 

 

So tell me:  what I should be building for and what goals I should have for this defender? 

[Uun 249]

I've got a Cold/Beam that I'm pretty happy with. Cold doesn't take a lot of slots to be effective, and several of the powers are skippable entirely (Snow Storm, Frostwork). Other than keeping the shields up and using Sleet on every spawn, I primarily spam Infrigidate and blast stuff. I tend to save Benumb and Heat Loss for AVs or particularly annoying bosses because everything else dies so fast.

 

I'm not a fan of /Sonic, but you should be able to stack a lot of -res. Consider putting the Annihilation proc in Howl.

[Linea 85]

The Alpha build is a pretty standard if old Linea Armored Build.

I do not at all recall what I was doing with the concept builds, but at a guess I was looking into Resist Based Builds ... which I do /not/ normally recommend on 75% resist cap ATs.

 

Cold Sonic Dark - Eve Concept 2 - [i25].mxd Cold Sonic Dark - Eve Concept 3 - [i25].mxd Sonic Cold - Alpha 1 - [i25].mxd

[Darkir 269]

I assume the concept was to spam a ton of -res with double sleet, all the Sonic powers, and heat loss for something like 150-180 -res on a target

[Doomguide2005 465]

Excellent TEAM debuffing for hard targets.  Solo can be very safe with Siren's Call then single target destruction and in either case one of the best nukes around which can be done very safely Howl, Siren's, Dreadful Wail.   Any tough target left hit them with Screech (now at mag 7 worth of stun coupled with 12+ seconds yet of -40 resistance to build off of).  And the shields take both Damage Resistance and Defense sets which between them and Arctic Fog is a whole lot of spots for placing the ever growing list of special IOs in those sets.

[Onlyasandwich 67]

On 2/14/2021 at 6:45 PM, Heraclea said:

Sonic

For the Sonic bit, this thread has a good conversation on optimal slotting for these powers:

 

Sonic is a great team contributor, but can struggle to kill hard targets by itself unless the team is piling on. A proccy hold, and proccing out screech or shout really goes a long way to making this feel a lot better.

 

Obviously this approach sacrifices  some slotting opportunities for other priorities like ranged defense, but I think having beefy blasts on cold is especially important, given that you will be spending a lot of time on your secondary.