General Widow questions.

[Seroster01]

As per title I have a series of high-level-overview Widow questions. On Live servers I made a very IO'd out Crab spider that was ridiculously hard to kill, ran double leadership, and had tons of def & res debuffing AOE attacks built into his kit.  He was exceptionally valuable in group content & for soloing large groups of mobs, but had very meh single target power on his own.  I'd always wanted to make a Widow build with similar levels of resource investment, but I never got around to making one before the servers shut down.  Now I have a 2nd chance, but I'm not super familiar with the Widow's ins & outs, and info about both late-live & i25 content seems just about impossible to find on the net.  So without further ado:

 

I've seen in several threads here that Widow claws are one of the best DPS chains in the game.  Is this strictly for ST?  Cause that's great & all, but A LOT of CoX's combat revolves around swiftly killing large groups of minions.  As such I'd like to know how well they do in AOE scenarios, and what powers & rotations look like for those situations.

 

How does the Night Widow vs. Fortuna choice affect the first question (and in general really), and how much of an impact is it when comparing the optimal choice to the other?

 

Kind of a tangential question, but it seems IO have undergone significant adjustments since the last time I played. Im not sure if this occurred after I quit playing live or if it's the i25 stuff.  In particular, it seems like Resistance bonuses were significantly increased, enough that it allows stacking of resistance bonuses to levels that aren't essentially insignificant (resistance set bonuses were so small that they were just about useless last I was playing).  Question part A: is getting a significant amount of Resistance from set bonuses worth chasing? Part B: are there any particular sets or unique IOS that are very important to work into the build? (I'm definitely going to use both the 3% defs). I don't think AT sets were in the game last I played & I know there's 2 of them.  Is one better than the other? Should I try to work both into the build? Part C: What sets should I Attune vs. Boost, and which powers should those each of those generally go in?

 

Last general question I have is about the old Cascading Defense Failures (CDF) problem. Have there been any changes to reduce the impact of CDFs, either in general or for SoA's specifically? Even on my Crab CDFs were a huge problem for the small amount of Incarnate stuff I did, and I'm pretty sure he had significantly better base resitances (but didn't make much use of IOs for this cause they weren't worth chasing at the time).

 

If folks can answer some or all of these I'd be very grateful!

[Seroster01]

Forgot another question, is there a suggestion for what Incarnate stuff to pick for a widow?  Mostly curious about the Alpha slot power/enhancement.