Symphony/Storm

[Meknomancer]

Haven't seen one of these yet and since its 2 powersets i love i decided to give it a go. Mids has been hard work, aiming for 45% ranged and 75% s/l on a build with no heal and attempting to proc out as much as i could to squeeze out some extra damage. Would appreciate anyone looking over it/critiques/rip it to shreds comments:

 

Well build 1 worked out really well, but the constant repositioning and total chaos was a lot of hard work so i enhanced a 2nd build. Defensively it sucks but i got in all the powers i wanted and just slotted them the way i wanted and its a ton of fun.

 

SYMPHONY STORM - Controller (Symphony Control - Storm Summoning).mbd

SYMPHONY STORM - Controller (Symphony Control - Storm Summoning).mbd

Edited April 20 by Meknomancer
add 2nd build

[EnjoyTheJourney]

The build looks really good👍. Hopefully you can reserve the name "Symphony of Thunder" or "Conductor of Storms" or some such for it. 

It seems highly likely that you know the following, but here goes ...

If you can make endurance work with Agility core alpha then that might complement your build quite well. A bit more defense would offer a little more build flexibility while still remaining soft capped to range. Storm loves recharge almost as much as it loves making a stormy's endurance bar disappear forever. An extra 33% recharge from Agility would help to more frequently summon freezing rains, tornadoes, and lightning storms. Endurance modification would also help to manage the endurance-swallowing beast that is storm. 

Intuition radial offers range and slow, which would also be quite helpful. But, it doesn't offer recharge and recharge seems to be what makes storm sing. 

Edited April 17 by EnjoyTheJourney

[Meknomancer]

15 hours ago, EnjoyTheJourney said:

The build looks really good👍. Hopefully you can reserve the name "Symphony of Thunder" or "Conductor of Storms" or some such for it. 

It seems highly likely that you know the following, but here goes ...

If you can make endurance work with Agility core alpha then that might complement your build quite well. A bit more defense would offer a little more build flexibility while still remaining soft capped to range. Storm loves recharge almost as much as it loves making a stormy's endurance bar disappear forever. An extra 33% recharge from Agility would help to more frequently summon freezing rains, tornadoes, and lightning storms. Endurance modification would also help to manage the endurance-swallowing beast that is storm. 

Intuition radial offers range and slow, which would also be quite helpful. But, it doesn't offer recharge and recharge seems to be what makes storm sing. 

 

Agreed on all of the above. And yet i'm still building towards musc radial, damage+end mod. With indom will i can skip clarion for ageless and not worry about endurance (had some embarrassing toggle drops so far mid tf's but its only vet lvl 3) I'm pretty sure agility is going to mess with the procs firing off and i'll always take musc/intuition when i can i'm a big fan of the extra damage on AT's that have almost none.

 

Your spot on about recharge but the biggest problem i'm finding is lack of slow resist, original build had about 60% but i had to drop almost all of it to get the def+resists up, turns out that was the right way to go after a few itf's and aeon no way i would have survived the aggro when i got stuck soloing stuff without it, the few times i've been 'glued' i had to turn on ss and waddle backwards. If there was anything in the build i could change i'd put in more slow resists and take my chances on the ff+rech firing off to keep attacks cycling.

 

So far its tons of fun. I do love symphony procced out cones they hit way harder than you'd expect and the single target stuff is just about sufficient. Would be nice to get some achilles proc in freezing rain/annihilations in the cones but i really struggled to find slots, it was all i could do to keep the procced out sleep cone in it. Artillery set in freezing makes me sad but i don't see myself surviving any speed runs/harder content without the defence.

 

Thanks for looking it over, i always miss stuff i have to respec out of/into later, already onto 2nd respec, i'll stick with it for a bit til i get t4 ageless and see how that affects things. I have to wonder if agility recharge messes up proc rate will ageless? I don't really do math/city of data so i'll just play the game and find out the hard way.

 

The names! i totally forgot to check what was free. 

Edited April 18 by Meknomancer

[EnjoyTheJourney]

To address your question, recharge in the alpha from taking agility would affect proc rates. Ageless will not affect proc rates. Also, despite saying you're not about numbers your build is really solid through and through. 

You could take the procs out of one primary power and put artillery in there. Dreadful discord or enfeebling lullaby could be good picks for that because they have slower recharge and if you math out how much extra DPS you lose by taking procs out of one of them, it's not that high. You'd gain some slots and could find room for a -res or two, which would further help damage. You could squeeze a slot into brawl and get 15% more slow resistance there and get the winter's gift 20% slow resistance unique IO into the build. Agility could help you take that further, in case you ever decide to experiment with it. 

FWIW I resisted taking non-damage alphas for quite a while. But, having experimented with agility, nerve, cardiac, and vigor for different characters I've found that they can all be very reasonable choices, depending on the build. 

[EnjoyTheJourney]

You can laugh at or curse at the attached build, if you'd like. But, hopefully it provides some fodder for thinking through the alpha choice and how to get some more slow resist into the build. 

I went ahead and put agility core into the build. You can click the button for it on and off to see how recharge figures and damage numbers change when you have it and when you don't have it. Check out the better recharge on freezing rain (helps the whole team's damage, as well as yours) and (especially) the better recharge on your single target powers. Check out the longer time interval with multiple tornadoes and lightning storms up. Notice that agility doesn't adversely affect your AOE powers much because of their long recharge, and that their availability improves with agility. When you account for better recharge, meaning greater availability for your ST powers, the "on paper" DPS isn't radically different for your single target powers with agility core (single target powers are the most adversely affected for their DPS, at first glance). When you factor in that some percentage of damage will end up being "overkill" damage (which is wasted damage) and that more frequent power availability with agility means quicker mob defeats, agility can lead to smoother and quicker battles than musculature. 

My first foray into non-damage alphas was with a storm / water defender. I took musculature radial at first for her. But, I eventually shifted to agility core for her to better tame the huge endurance expenditures of storm and to have better nuke and storm power availability. More slotting flexibility because of better defense numbers was also helpful. With agility she fairly often used to solo one side of the ITF's final mission while the other 7 players worked their way through the other side of the map, on the path to the courtyard. She usually defeated a lot of mobs when competing directly with 7 other players' characters, arriving at a similar time to the rest of the team at the courtyard. That experience opened up my thinking for alpha incarnate choices other than musculature and intuition radial. 

SYMPHONY STORM - Controller (Symphony Control - Storm Summoning) (2).mbd

Edited April 18 by EnjoyTheJourney

[Meknomancer]

3 hours ago, EnjoyTheJourney said:

You can laugh at or curse at the attached build, if you'd like. But, hopefully it provides some fodder for thinking through the alpha choice and how to get some more slow resist into the build. 

I went ahead and put agility core into the build. You can click the button for it on and off to see how recharge figures and damage numbers change when you have it and when you don't have it. Check out the better recharge on freezing rain (helps the whole team's damage, as well as yours) and (especially) the better recharge on your single target powers. Check out the longer time interval with multiple tornadoes and lightning storms up. Notice that agility doesn't adversely affect your AOE powers much because of their long recharge, and that their availability improves with agility. When you account for better recharge, meaning greater availability for your ST powers, the "on paper" DPS isn't radically different for your single target powers with agility core (single target powers are the most adversely affected for their DPS, at first glance). When you factor in that some percentage of damage will end up being "overkill" damage (which is wasted damage) and that more frequent power availability with agility means quicker mob defeats, agility can lead to smoother and quicker battles than musculature. 

My first foray into non-damage alphas was with a storm / water defender. I took musculature radial at first for her. But, I eventually shifted to agility core for her to better tame the huge endurance expenditures of storm and to have better nuke and storm power availability. More slotting flexibility because of better defense numbers was also helpful. With agility she fairly often used to solo one side of the ITF's final mission while the other 7 players worked their way through the other side of the map, on the path to the courtyard. She usually defeated a lot of mobs when competing directly with 7 other players' characters, arriving at a similar time to the rest of the team at the courtyard. That experience opened up my thinking for alpha incarnate choices other than musculature and intuition radial. 

SYMPHONY STORM - Controller (Symphony Control - Storm Summoning) (2).mbd 43.34 kB · 0 downloads

 

Amazing how that looks so similar to my original build. I did have the artillery in confounding chant initially, the only difference was the winter pieces frozen blast went into freezing rain over brawl.

 

So i got my t4 ageless that fixed everything except the recharge on single target stuff, they don't quite cycle fast enough but i can live with it for the extra damage that comes from musc so far. Its an even better combo that i hoped there's synergy i didn't even consider. Confounding chants stun stacks with tornado's for purpled eb's. The contagious proc/confuses from reverberant stack with impassioned serenade. If i had an extra slot i wouldn't bother with the annihilation procs i'd toss it in indom will, psi attacks leak through occasionally and even with ageless and the ff+rech firing off, its not perma.  The artillery set in freezing rain/ageless/force feedbacks get me perma freezing somehow. 

 

1 death so far, i just stood still and let a mob of +4s melee me and didn't even reposition. Pure laziness. Its a lot of work. I'm looking to dump leaping for flight, that would allow me to hover over mobs and cycle attacks, right now i'm having to hop up in the air and pop lightning storm to prevent kb's, then jump about like a madman lining up the cones. I don't think i'll have the endurance to run hover+fly+evasive on top of everything else though.

 

I think your right about agility, i'm only getting 2 tornadoes/lightning storms out which seriously hurts the dps. Every other storm i played i'd be triple stacking. I'd love to dump that artillery set. Definitely keeping the procced out dreadful discord, its the fastest recharging cone and the majority of my mob damage once freezing rain drops. The sleep can be useful even when the procs miss but if i had to give up a single power that would probably be it.

 

I'll craft an alpha agility but thats a couple weeks away (i always make them with shards and save the threads and for some reason game bugged out and refused to give me a notice of the well for this weeks wst)  and see what the difference is, i can already imagine myself liking the recharge better.

 

Appreciate the response as always.

[Papaschtroumpf]

I've been copying the "fun build" without worrying about Incarnates, as it looked good for leveling.  

 

I took Combat Jump instead of Hover as I didn't want a hovering toon and this build has enough KB protection that taking Hover to mitigate KB is not necessary.

I added a Celerity +Steath to one of the prestige sprints so I can be fully invisible with Mist on. Great for speed TFs.

I took Hurricane at lvl50 with a single End/toHit Debuff IO in it. In this type of build, the lvl50 power is pretty optional and I like hurricane in some situations.

 

I replaced purples/Hamis with some weaker IO versions while leveling, trying to keep to an equivalent role/set bonus. for example the Unbreakable Constraint roc is replaced with a Neuronic shutdown proc, or Ragnarök is replaced with Positron's Blast, the archetype enhancement are replaced with their non-superior version...

 

Early on soloing is a little slow, that's true of most controller but it gets into its stride. I took mean while to think of control cones as damage powers even if the foes are already controlled/flopping around. This build works best for larger enemy groups/AoE, so I started soling x8+0 pretty early on, at lvl34 I'm soloing x8+1 not so much for survivability but for speed of dispatching the bosses, which take too long at +4

 

Out of my stormies it's the one I take Snowstorm the latest and I miss it, I also miss Hurricane, but it's a good way to take me out of the rut

Edited November 25 by Papaschtroumpf