Argentae 3.0 Mind/Kin in the era of the new TK

[Argentae]

 I owe Onlyasandwich  a build for Arg, I was going to post one months ago, but work got hectic, and when I pulled up my last Arg build, it... Well... It was bad. 🙂

 

So recently, I've been working through my old favorite builds, dusting them off and working on getting them set up with decent IO sets again, as I have a habit of stealing purple sets from recent projects to outfit the latest project as soon as it hits 50. 

 

Plant/Dark (Dionysus) was the last one I dusted off, and I'm reminded just HOW durable that build is. It's a Tanktroller in many ways. The triple threat pet corp (Flytrap, Fluffy, and Fortunata) with Fade on and Spirit tree out becomes increasingly effective at surviving most anything esp with a decent Soul Absorption hit for Flytrap and Fluffy.

The downside to Plant/Dark is that outside of when Carrion Creepers are summoned right after a decent Soul Drain, the Boss clear speed on +4X8 can be a bit slow. Plenty of AOE dmg, but taking down the bosses can take a bit. 

 

So after playing Dio for awhile I decided to pull up Arg and see how she plays with the new TK.
It's a VERY different style, and I'm going back and trying some things I gave up on in the past, so doing a fair amount of  experimenting.

So I've been playing around with options and sets for a few days now and am currently playing a prospective Mind/Kin/Energy combo that may or may not be where I stop. One of the experimental things is seeing if Evasive Maneuvers (EM) can be used as part of an alpha strike mitigation strategy. Last time I tried this is wasn't worth it at all. All EM +def suppresses as soon as you attack or interact in any way. For Mind/Kin that's not that crippling as you can use Confuse, Mass Confuse, and Mass Hyp all without suppressing the +def, so it's potentially useful for setup. 

Last time I was working with just the +Def from EM itself with strong slotting which gets +20 to everything, which is nice but not really enough. This time I'm pairing it with Power Boost which brings the total +Def values up a LOT when you pop it before triggering the spawn. Jury is still out about how effective it is, but it's certainly nice walking in with pretty much all +def at the soft cap. Playing around with turning off stealth to trigger the alpha strike to get the spawn to clump up around me before I use MC or MD for AOE control while the +Def is stratospherically high, it shouldn't suppress if they attack me. I have no pets or pseudo pets to cause it to suppress either.

Playing around with experimental sequences I ended up faceplanting a fair amount, until I decided to quite trying to play it like Mind/Storm/Ice where I put together a long AOE attack chain, prep bosses with Confuse then MC the whole spawn, hit TK on a boss and just hammer the whole spawn with that AOE attack chain.  Mind/Kin is really ALL about just clump them up, Fulcrum Shift to hit +300 dmg cap and then watch the spawn just MELT. 

So far I only have a proced out Terrify and Dmg slotted (collecting the procs for it now) Energy Torrent for AOE, but honestly, at +300% dmg buff that's more than sufficient. I'm collecting the procs to turn TD into a procbomb as well, not sure why I can slot Ranged AOE Dmg procs in TD, but it allows them, so it should hit HARD.  Not sure if I'm going to stay with /Energy but so far it's working well. Energy Torrent (ET) is awkward with TK as  ET only has a 40' range cone and TK maintains the hover at 50' IIRC. If I hover in a bit before firing off ET I get enough of the spawn to be worthwhile. 

I may go back to /Ice as Frost Breath and Ice Storm both do excellent AOE dmg with TK.

I have the +Immob unique in Terrify so that helps a bit to maintain the containment. Might build some immob in to the incarnate choices as well. 

A lot to play with, but using TK to clump a spawn up tight makes it trivial to get a really solid Fulcrum Shift hit. And really, as long as you don't die, a full +300% dmg buff really is all you need. 🙂

 

I find it interesting that I dropped Tactics going from Arg 1.0 -> Arg 2.0, but Arg 3.0 is using a lot more procs instead of purple sets,  EVERYTHING Mind/Kin does has a to hit check, and it SUCKS so badly when you miss, that I've gone back to Tactics (Fully slotted with Gaussian for the + Ranged Def and occasional 10 sec Build Up).

More to come, and I'll start posting builds...