Triple box theory crafting

[scarhead]

I solo most of the time since my family doesn't play the game as much as they used to. I like to think of ways to get synergy. I have dual boxed a bit, having a defender following a tank to help him reach soft cap easily. I mostly play melee because I like to play tough toons.

 

I recently saw something about triple boxing and it got me thinking. With a Cold/ and Sonic/ defender, I could get around 60% res to all but psi, and over 40% def to all but fire/cold. I was thinking tanker, but brutes have same res cap, so why not a brute for better damage? What secondary would be best if I get all that res and def? Seems like /Regen to finish the trifecta. So a Cold/Sonic & Sonic/Sonic defender following a TW/Regen brute, with Scream on auto-cast, defenders running superspeed with stealth proc and hover, mostly capped themselves. Seems great.

 

Then I thought, what if I get my wife to join? What would be the most synergistic AT to add? Probably blaster for the damage, plus the blaster will benefit from all the res and def.

 

Then I thought, my wife is busy and is not very interested in playing, and I'm going to be on mid shift soon for 3 months, so 3 is the likely limit, but what if I played the blaster instead of the brute? Would it be survivable enough while doing more damage? Then I thought, what if instead of defenders, I had 2 MM's? It would be a little less def and res, but a lot more damage. If I went that way, do I go robots and group fly and everyone is just flying around blasting stuff? Or do I go Thugs and stay on the ground?

 

So those are the things I'm thinking about, would love to hear some advice, pros and cons and such. I'm not a tech wizard, I have 1 monitor and 1 keyboard and no fancy software to duplicate keystrokes so I'll just be alt-tabbing between accounts. I like the sonic because it's easy and has toggles, but maybe is more focused for a brute rather than a blaster.

 

I'm looking for relative ease of use for the alts. The shields are nice because they last 4 minutes, so optimally I will only have to switch to those accounts that often to set the shields, whether it's defenders or masterminds.

 

So the question is, blaster or brute for the primary? Defenders or MMs for the alts? Stick with Sonic and Cold for buffs to get res and def, or go for something that provides healing? I wouldn't think I would need much healing with these combos, but maybe it would help the pets if I go MM? But the pets should be well protected by all the buffs. Is this too ambitious? Probably not.

 

I'm a red-side player, if that matters. Appreciate any advice or thoughts, thanks.

[Dazl]

You know the game really shines when you play with other people. 

[Psyonico]

you might want to think about a Sonic and a Thermal defender then pair it with a defense tank set (I'm looking at you Super Reflexes) then you've got nearly capped resist and nearly capped defense with just SOs.  Heck, SR can cap defense with just SOs.

[nihilii]

Something to note with blaster vs brute/tanker that may not be immediately obvious: in a triplebox setup, the chances for your support characters to get stuck in environment are exponentially bigger. It's nice to have enemies all clumped together neatly. For that same reason I also like tankers over brutes, their greater AoE size comes in handy.

 

Not to say you cannot make a blaster work... Heck, with 2 dedicated passive buffbots you can make pretty much any character work.

 

There's the alternative of making the buffbots controllers too, and just spam a level 2 AoE immobilize with them; although this is taxing on endurance.

 

Sonic is definitely one of the more hands off secondary as you can stick the shields once every 4 minutes, slap the -RES toggle on your main character, and go to town. Cold is a bit more work, what with Sleet and HL being active. If the goal is primarily defense, I wouldn't dismiss FF for this particular scenario. The defense is slightly higher than Cold, and it's nice to have mez protection redundancy with the big Sonic bubble in case things start to go south.

 

That's for a blaster, or any other AT with a 75% resistance cap. If you main a brute or a tanker, don't even think hard: two Sonic will push you to the resistance cap with ease, and that's absurdly sturdy... while also stacking 2 -30% res toggles, to boost your offense significantly.

[Col. Kernel]

If you make both of the buff bots MMs you can have your bots (not the best damage but phenomenal -Res) and replace the Thugs with Beasts (the best damage).  Take your Beast MM to Null and have them reject Group Fly.

[scarhead]

That's an interesting point about Cold vs FF. Looking at the numbers, the big differences are Melee shield: Cold has res to cold and fire, FF has res to toxic; Ranged shield: Cold has def to only energy/negative typed, plus more res to cold, FF has def to fire/cold, as well as res against end drain; Toggle shield: Cold has 8.3% def (using 2 IO's and Incarnate) and res to fire/cold/energy and slow, with a 40 radius, while FF has 16.7% def and res to hold, immobilize, disorient and 25 radius. Some interesting tradeoffs.

 

The defender numbers are so much larger than the MM numbers (47 Def vice 34, 58 Res vice 38), plus easier to handle, that's probably the way to go if my main is a blaster. I could use the MM's if my main is a brute/tanker who has more ability to hold aggro and already has some Def/Res.

 

Another factor is I starting looking at blaster builds last night (I've never played one). There are just so many attacks, how would I use them all? I got to thinking, maybe I should go for corruptor to have some more buff/debuff. Or maybe even a 3rd Defender? I was thinking Dark/Fire Defender or Fire/Dark Corruptor could be fun. I've used Dark before on a thugs Mastermind and thought it was pretty good. If my main is a Dark/ Defender, that would even easily give me enough def that I could use the lower def from the MM bot to get the added dmg from the thugs or robots and still easily softcap.

 

But would that be enough damage to roll through content? How much faster would the blaster be? These are things I don't know about, as I haven't played them as much. Can a Fire blaster (buffed to softcap res/def by the bots) kill faster than a /Fire Defender with Thugs bot, Fire/ corruptor, or TW/ brute? My guess is yes, but I'm not sure.

[EmperorSteele]

There's one other thing to be cautious of: over aggro. Even if you're a tank or brute, that doesn't guarantee that a nearby group, or leftovers from the last group, won't go after your multibox toons. I personally have found it very hard to multibox on high combat settings, because I look away for one moment and whoops, my buff-bot is dead.

 

This might actually be helped somewhat having another buff toon so that they can buff each other and mitigate some damage. Or just put a ton of inf and effort into softcapping them... though if you could do that, you might as well do that for your primary toon and not bother with the buffin' bots.

 

Also, missions with elevators are a pain =(

[Zhym]

14 hours ago, Dazl said:

You know the game really shines when you play with other people.

 

Oh, great.  You realize you just cast a "Summon @Snarky" spell, right?  Any moment, I expect him to show up and post a rebuttal, at least for PuGs. 

[iBot]

I suppose it really boils down to how much you want to manage the buff bots.  I think MMs would be nice because you could put them into defensive mode and share damage with the pets.  The drawback being if the pets go down you are in trouble.

 

Going for pure res/def is nice but also consider throwing a *dark something into the mix for the -tohit.  Also a *rad is good for debuffing the enemy which is effectively a damage buff.  The ultimate combo, which my SG has done on an ITF run, is to have 1 of every flavor of side benefit.  Naturally this isn't easily done solo but we had +/- res, +/- def, +/- tohit along with a few -regen from incarnates.  Even the MoG cyclops didn't stand for more than a few seconds when everyone was pounding on them.  Quite the sight.

 

So OP asked about a fourth, my suggestion would be add a rad corruptor flavor or definitely a dark dominator.  Really turns up the damage potential.