Time/Sonic build critique and Incarnate advice

[Procellus]

The Angry Drill Sergeant is 50 now. I've been going off of my build here and it's been a fun ride. This guy is such a force multiplier, adding defense, to hit, regen, recharge and -res to enemies. It's a lot of fun add with the recharge there's always a button to click. 

 

As far as Incarnates are concerned I took Agility for the Alpha slot and Mighty for Judgement. I'm thinking Degenerative for Interface but I'm not sure about the Destiny slot. I know Barrier is the above and beyond common choice but with Maneuvers and a Power Boosted Farsight I'm handing out over 36% defense that's perma. I'm not sure Barrier will be worth it, but none of the other abilities really find my lost remote either. 

 

As far as Lore I'll probably pick something to go with the theme. But I'd appreciate some fun suggestions. 

Defender - Time Manipulation - Sonic Attack.mbd

[Uun]

• There's no reason to take both Shriek and Scream. Pick one.
• Distortion Field is primarily a slow, not a hold. The hold has a 2% chance to occur every 1 second. The power is also autohit and doesn't require accuracy. Generally a recharge in the base slot is all you need. You can slot procs if you're so inclined, but the results aren't great.
• If you're going to run Maneuvers and Tactics (and not just use them as mules), you'll need to slot end reduction.
• I don't recommend skipping Siren's Song. It's the most damaging of Sonic's 3 cones, plus the sleep is autohit.
• I would skip Force of Nature. 

[Without_Pause]

On 10/4/2023 at 12:30 PM, Uun said:

Distortion Field is primarily a slow, not a hold. The hold has a 2% chance to occur every 1 second. The power is also autohit and doesn't require accuracy. Generally a recharge in the base slot is all you need. You can slot procs if you're so inclined, but the results aren't great.

This would make sense as I have never deep dived into the power but felt like it was underwhelming on my Fire/time Controller so I took it out. I had it for my Time/rad, but needless to say I will rework it. 

[Psyonico]

I personally went Clarion Core on my Time/Sonic because even with soft-capped defense, getting mezzed sucks, and the T3 partial core gives you permanent mez protection.  Now that mine's fully t4'd with primary abilities, I'm building barrier for a secondary for times when you aren't fighting mezzed enemies.

[Uun]

7 hours ago, Without_Pause said:

This would make sense as I have never deep dived into the power but felt like it was underwhelming on my Fire/time Controller so I took it out. I had it for my Time/rad, but needless to say I will rework it. 

It isn't flashy, but a 20-foot AoE with 65% -recharge (and 91% -speed) is nothing to sneeze at. It mitigates a lot of damage.

[Zect]

Your build has "too much" rech. You have far over what is needed for perma-chronoshift, you don't even take advantage of the global rech you have by dropping a slot from hasten, and you still want to take agility on top of that. Cut the rech and def and invest in damage procs for dps.

 

You have a mediocre +1.9 net eps and I predict potential endurance issues even with defender inherent endredux if you really want to run all your toggles.

 

Tactics is valuable, but optional for times, since farsight gives more +tohit and +per.

 

As mentioned above, distortion field is a slow, but using it to mule basilisk's is not a bad choice normally because basilisk's is not a bad set - provided you needed the rech from basilisks (see my comment on rech above).

 

In general, take the 3 strongest ST blasts - that's screech, shout and scream. Some of my hardmode builds run screech scream shriek, taking the slight dps loss, because long-animating powers can be a liability in hard mode, but this is a niche case.

 

Agility is not necessarily a good choice of alpha for defender times. 1) it precludes you from effective procbombing. Read up on the PPM formula to understand why. 2) fenders have sufficiently strong +def powers that they should not need the def from agility. 3) perma-chronoshift builds, ie every properly built time, also have enough rech that they don't need the rech from it. The essence of time is that it already provides tohit, def, and rech in spades, and you should be trying to build for things other than that.

 

For a time/sonic, my recommendation is intuition radial: it 1) boosts your debuffs (hence avoiding the need to slot weak debuff sets), 2) adds damage, and 3) the +range works well with a blast set that is mostly cone aoes. The slots saved can be invested in procs: sirens song and shockwave are both quite proccable - sirens takes 3 damage procs, shockwave 4.

[Without_Pause]

On 10/6/2023 at 8:35 AM, Uun said:

It isn't flashy, but a 20-foot AoE with 65% -recharge (and 91% -speed) is nothing to sneeze at. It mitigates a lot of damage.

It's more that I will just change the slotting on it for my Defenders. A Fire/time Controller already has two slows and other controls.