Advice sought for a Marine/Dark Defender

[biostem]

Hi all!  Been trying to get into another support-oriented character, and I really want to give marine a try.  How's it pair with dark blast?  I'm not looking for a specific build, but any advice, tricks, or tips, would be greatly appreciated!  Thanks for reading!

[Auroxis]

As far as AoE goes, Dark doesn't pair amazingly well with Marine due it putting you in Melee range which isn't great for tight cones like Tenebrous Tentacles and Nightfall. However you still have Blackstar which puts you there, and if you bunch mobs up you can still get some mileage out of a procced Torrent. You can pick up Dark Mastery here for a thematic fit and a way to get more burst AoE with Gauss procced Spirit Drain (Oppressive Gloom should stack with Dark Pit, but I never tested how viable that is).

 

For debuffing, Dark's -ToHit pairs nicely with Marine as you don't have that much +Def on it outside of Barrier Reef. So it shores up that defensive layer nicely.

 

For DPS, Dark is fine with Moonbeam and procced Gloom+Torrent, but isn't anything special outside of that. Marine helps on that front as procced Whitecap + Shifting Tides covers your DPS in teams. Picking up Fire Mastery for procced Char+GFS will help further with DPS, but may be a stretch thematically. Consider getting procced Weaken Resolve to get some more -res for your team in your rotation.

Edited December 29, 2024 by Auroxis

[Camel]

I have a Fire/Marine/Fire Corrupter and I love it! 

Some Marine tips:

WHITECAP! It's incredible. You can trim it light and just use a +5 Acc IO, the FoG -resistance proc and the Force Feedback +Recharge proc. You can add 3 damage procs as well and it does respectable damage. It really amps up everything the build has to offer when slotted this way. More DPS and more survivability with your long cooldowns coming back online. It's one of my favorite powers ever, it has so much utility. You can even target friendly targets to teleport to them! Just don't try to use it on the control panel in the ITF though!

Shifting Tides is pretty good too! I run Ageless and Recovery Serum on all my builds so I don't worry about end drain that much, so I typically slot this with a +5 To-Hit IO or a +5 Damage IO and have been seeing a lot of success. Insta cast it on the most aggressive tank and stay near them to forget about it. You can also keep the toggle on when going through doors, elevators, etc if you time it right and go at the same time with your anchor lol. It gives really nice bonuses across the board and can get you a MEATY amount of +Damage when paired with Tide Pool.

You can get massive +Absorb with Barrier Reef if you keep spawning a new one, it overlaps for some time and even on my Corrupter I was able to get to 800 absorb on top of maxed health. So, I technically had 2400 health on my Corrupter. This works on everything, but it's sort of a pain to keep re-spawning it for the advantage it brings. But you can do it! I I try to max out defense values first but don't skip on the absorb values either.

Toroidal Bubble and Power of the Depths both offer endurance management, but I've always considered that secondary to the +Res and +HP/Regen. If you have the spare slots, feel free to slot some endurance in there. I mentioned earlier I run Ageless to max DPS in proccy builds, so I wouldn't slot endurance even if I had the spare slots.

I skip Brine on all of my Corrupter builds and a fair amount of my Defender builds too. But it has more uses for a Defender and is a pretty good opener on hard targets. Shoal Rush is also skippable and is probably the least useful tool in the set while being pretty handy at times.

Auroxis nailed it on the head with Dark Blast AoE. It would still work, but it wouldn't be as seamless as throwing out a PBAoE attack like Fireball after using Whitecap. Tenebrous Tentacles, procced Torrent and the Whitecap slotting I mentioned earlier would rotate really quickly with a full proc build and feel really nice with effort. I would also recommend the Dark Epic as well as the Fire Epic, giving the slight edge to Dark because having Spirit Drain and access to +To-Hit is going to be huge for you since you don't have an Aim style power. I would look into the Leadership pool and grabbing Tactics for that reason alone as well, you can also slot the build up proc in there and the chance goes up the more people who are also running Tactics while teaming. You'll want to be chasing a lot of +To-Hit to make sure you don't encounter too many moments where you wish you had an aim style power.

Edited December 30, 2024 by Camel