The Speedster - Elec Armor / Dark Melee / Soul Mastery

[Rigged]

I was inspired by this thread to try to create a speedster with as much unsuppressed movement speed as possible while keeping the build functional for normal play (that is, Incarnate content and the MLTF/LRSF at least). I have personally tanked the LRSF with this, though I had to pop insps while tanking Recluse. I thought I would post it in this forum too.

 

TL;DR: 81mph perma unsuppressed runspeed. This can be increased with the Supergroup Base Runspeed buff (1hr) and Clarion Radial Destiny (75% uptime).

 

 

Screenshot is in combat.

 

Here's what I came up with. I've tested it over the weekend, and it is surprisingly fun, and effective! May I present Zippy-Zap, a time traveling speedster who can inflict entropic damage by vibrating really fast.

 

The build is linked below. Note that for some reason, MIDS Reborn displays runspeed wrong for me, starting with a base 21mph rather than the actual 14mph, which screws the display in the editor.

 

1) Electric Armor.

I know a resist set does not scream "Super Speed", but COH does not exactly animate defense vs resist all that well, so it's not really interfering with the aesthetic so much. The main thing is that for our mitigation set, we need one of Elec Armor, Bio Armor, or Super Reflexes, because these are the sets with a Swift analogue built-in. Elec Armor has one advantage: with this many resist armors we have no problem filling them with the 2-set bonus from Aegis, which gives +7.5% runspeed. I did actually seriously consider going Super Reflexes instead, but I very much dislike clickie mez protection since I tend to forget it.

 

2) Dark Melee.

Because of Shadow Maul. One neat thing I discovered while making this character: If you color Soul Noir with pure yellow, it looks like energy melee. Note: Because I am planning to use Shadow Maul a lot, and because I am picking a resist set, I have decided to make her a Tanker, which gives higher resist caps and dramatically increases the cone radius and target cap of Shadow Maul. This isn't as contrary to a Speedster's concept as it sounds: A speedster has no special offensive power and they serve as very good distractions for enemies. It amuses me because a part of Zippy's character concept is to be constantly taunting opponents, like Spider-Man, so being a Tanker will let her do that a lot.

I also picked Soul Mastery, but that's not essential, it just does more damage than Mu Mastery (cones proc more often, and Obliteration gets an extra damage proc from -tohit) and I am planning to have incredible mobility to position the cone anyway.

 

3) Concealment pool

This gives 3 defense powers to mule LOTG and the Gift of the Ancients proc, which is not unique. I admit I tend to like this pool for characters with no defense powers in their primary/secondary sets to mule LOTG. But you know, it does give us a second travel power in the form of Infiltrate, which this build gets up to a permanent 97mph (the runspeed cap without Super Speed/Speed of Sound). This lets you jump over the occasional building without having to build up speed first. Also, it lets Zippy vibrate her teammates into invisibility, which I always found useful for helping a lowbie.

 

4) Super Speed pool

If we could get more than 4 pool powers, I would totally pick Speed of Sound instead, but we cannot. Zippy gets hasten and Super Speed. Now, Whirlwind is a very cool super speed power, but it's not very useful so I decided to skip it. We need Super Speed to get the +30% runspeed cap boost, and also so we can slot the Thrust proc, which gives an unsuppressed, enhancable runspeed bonus. I considered taking Flurry, but with 165% recharge, I am Shadow Maul'ing every 5 seconds anyway, so Flurry is kind of extraneous. Also, Flurry sucks. It does terrible damage and the secondary effect is Disorient, which means your proc options are limited to the melee sets only.

 

5) Musculature Radial Alpha.

The +runspeed boosts Sprint, Swift, Lightning Reflexes, Super Speed, and supposedly the Thrust proc. It also gives you a bit of extra END recovery and increases your END drain from your damage aura.

 

6) Ageless Core Destiny OR Clarion Radial Destiny

I didn't get Clarion, because I wanted powers that would be up 100% of the time. However, the +runspeed boost would bump your speed quite a bit for the 75% of the time it was up. The issue is that without Ageless, you will be running out of END a lot. This can be mitigated by dropping one of the Concealment powers (along with 7.5% runspeed and LOTG) to get Power Sink. Also, a tank with natural mez protection doesn't really benefit from the main power of Clarion. Fortunately, in groups I notice a lot of blasters and defenders will give me Clarion anyway.

 

Final results: Running Sprint AND Superspeed (no temp buffs), I have 81mph perma unsuppressed movespeed. Which is pretty good for a fully functional build that can tank almost all the content outside of starred TFs which I have not tried yet, with 165% global recharge before Ageless and pretty decent damage from procs. You also have 90% Smash/Lethal/Energy resist, 80% Fire/Cold resist, and 50%ish negative resist. 20% defense to everything, and 300%ish regen. Surprisingly functional for a concept build that spends around 10 slots on runspeed.

 

Tanker - Electric Armor - Dark Melee.mxd

Edited March 28, 2023 by Rigged

[hakurr]

cool concept not the way i would go but it is about what you want to play only thing you might want to look at is Lightening Reflexes you have to run speeds in it i would take 1 out if you look at your numbers you get the exact same bonus from it with 1 slot as you do 2 that gives you a slot to put somewhere else.

[Rigged]

6 hours ago, hakurr said:

if you look at your numbers you get the exact same bonus from it with 1 slot as you do 2

 

Uh, no? A second runspeed IO in LR gives around 1-2 mph of unsuppressed movespeed. You can indeed take it out to lose that, but you are actually better off dropping one of the Gift of the Ancients procs, ideally from Grant Invis. The goal of this build is to sqeeze out as much unsuppressed runspeed as we can, though.

[hakurr]

i stand corrected i did not look at the run speed it does change