Is Ice/Dark viable?

[Therumancer]

Back when I played this came many years ago I was largely using an Ice/Darkness Corruptor. I had to quit playing a few months after villains came out because something the devs did to the game made it so I kept getting "mapserver disconnects"and even their tech people couldn't figure out what went wrong. It irritated me at the time enough where I gave up on the game, and I didn't like how their people kept acting like it was my fault when everything was fine before.... whatever they did.

 

At any rate at the time I was playing I was doing pretty well solo with that, as I wound up having multiple crowd controls, self healing, good damage, and even a bit of stealth. Most groups I joined had no issues with me as well, but my super groups were continually telling me I'd have to re-roll (or respec) if I wanted to do endgame stuff with them because at that time the game was developing more of a "metric" due to people complaining the content was too easy and a lot of the endgame stuff was far more complicated and required people to do specific things and use specific builds. While I'm pretty casual, I would like to eventually see some of that stuff, and I'm not sure how much time I'm going to have to build multiple characters especially seeing as I'm also playing another MMO which I have enough of a hard time with on some levels.

 

I'm just wondering with the passage of years if a character like this would work for both solo and team play? If not does anyone have any advice on what kind of character I could mostly solo with, and would still be welcome in most groups that run this kind of thing occasionally. I do note that there are some talks about people wanting to "speed run" content (a problem with a lot of MMORPGs) and I have no problems with that, so if that is how people do play, what actually works for that kind of thing, while remaining a decent solo experience since I imagine I will be soloing a lot.

[Sir Myshkin]

The biggest advice anyone can give you about this game is "Play what you find fun." If anyone tells you differently, they're lying, or don't understand the core concept of what City Of Heroes is.

 

Given that, your old SG-mates didn't know what they were talking about. There's not really anything wrong with Ice/Dark. Dark Miasma is going to give you a load of effective debuffs, and Ice Blast has a few solid heavy hitting attacks and a location-based Nuke, which is rare. I myself am considering re-rolling an Ice/Dark Controller into an Ice/Dark Corruptor specifically for the increase in damage it'd provide while keeping the theme I was after. Ice Blast will be a pretty significant ST focused set with some good back-up patches. If you want more AoE and room-clearing capability, especially solo, than I might suggest Fire Blast instead (and you could just recolor it blue and pretend it's Ice :D ).

 

Play what you find fun.

[Omega-202]

My current "main" is an Ice/Dark/Dark corruptor.  Is it the strongest build in the game?  No.  Is it still really strong when played to its strengths and able to contribute on top tier teams?  Yes. 

 

You're not going to be as unstoppable of a tank-mage that a Fire/Time/Dark is, but you bring additional tools to the table that they don't.  They may have higher defense, faster aoe damage and group recharge buffs etc., but you have an aoe rez that can bring a mothership raid back from the brink, built in stealth, a better heal, dark, psi and energy resist and way more control. 

 

At lvl 50 with full incarnates, I can solo +4/8 groups with ease.  I don't do it as quickly as a fully kitted out Brute, but i can do it very safely.  Fearsome stare + 35% defense floors a full mobs chance to hit, I hop in the center, hit soul drain to cap damage and then drop a blizzard/ice storm and tar patch on them.  Add in defensive Destiny, melee Hybrid and Rune of Protection, you can survive in melee for quite a while.  Blizzard is the highest damage attack in any ranged damage set, it just takes a longer amount of time to do it than other nukes like Inferno. 

 

Ice is also the single target king.  Your standard attack chain has 2 holds in it so anything you're attacking is not attacking back.  Both freeze ray and b-freeze ray got large damage buffs late in the game's life and are your two best DPA attacks, in addition to decent holds.  Add that to the -regen in both Twilight Grasp and Howling Twilight, and you have a strong anti-AV set.  1/3 of the time, the AV will be frozen (when purple triangle protection is down) and the other 2/3, they will be slowed, and have their damage and acc dropped by Darkest Night, while having their regen heavily hindered. 

[Doughboy]

My Ice/Dark corrupter just hit level 38 last night and it’s a ton of fun to play. I do very well on teams and have no problem solo.

 

I’m just getting to the point where I’m going to start using IO sets and that should make the character even more powerful.

 

Btw, I’d love to see IO build advice if anyone has suggestions.

[Griffin]

I used to run a dark/cold corruptor on live that was pretty mean, but the damage ice does is hard to get away from. Outside of the heal you get from /dark, I like /cold more as a secondary.  dark/ has a lot of mitigation built in, and the damage will be even better now if you can get moonbeam (the snipe) to fire instantly.

 

This is just a suggestion. Like others have mentioned ice/dark can do just fine so play hat you enjoy. 

[Hjarki]

You're not going to be as unstoppable of a tank-mage that a Fire/Time/Dark is, but you bring additional tools to the table that they don't.  They may have higher defense, faster aoe damage and group recharge buffs etc., but you have an aoe rez that can bring a mothership raid back from the brink, built in stealth, a better heal, dark, psi and energy resist and way more control.

 

Ice/Dark will also have higher damage.

 

The main issues are Rains, procs and debuffs.

 

Blizzard is simply better than Inferno. It does more damage natively - and does a great deal more once you account for Scourge. It's also significantly safer than Inferno since it can be used at range and you can pump its damage (via debuffs) after it has already paralyzed a spawn's ability to hurt you. While Ice doesn't have a counterpart to Fireball, the fact the 4th best AE attack on your Fire Corruptor is more effective than the 4th best AE attack from your Ice Corruptor ends up being not terribly important at 50.

 

Procs are the next issue. Consider Bitter Ice Blast. It does ~200 damage with damage bonuses. If you've also got it slotted for Apoc/Impeded Swiftness/Cloud Senses, that will approximately double this. While you can slot Blaze with Apoc/Javelin, it's still not going to do as much damage as your BiB. The single target disparity only deepens once you realize that you can only slot 1 Apocalypse proc - and that leaves you with only Javelin/ATOs for the rest of your powers (and you probably can't slot the ATOs optimally since you need the set bonuses).

 

The last issue is the fact that Dark has a -30% resist debuff on 2:1 recharge:duration while Time has a -22.5% resist debuff at 3:1. With perma-Hasten levels of recharge, that means all of your damage on */Dark Corruptor will be about 20% higher than the */Time Corruptor (at least for long-term static fights).

 

Your standard attack chain has 2 holds in it so anything you're attacking is not attacking back.  Both freeze ray and b-freeze ray got large damage buffs late in the game's life and are your two best DPA attacks, in addition to decent holds.

 

Bitter Freeze Ray is a high damage attack, but not a particularly high DPA attack - it's not appreciably different from your basic attacks. Arguably, Char (from Flame Mastery) is a better choice since it's equivalent dpa, also a Hold and has a lower activation time (Corruptors thrive on tiny, fast attacks rather than big, slow ones due to Scourge).

 

[Papaschtroumpf]

Bittter Freeze Ray is such a slow animation! It's weird too because all other ice animation are so fast (a definite plus for the set).

Ice storm is a great mitigation tool in addition to damage and synergizes well with tarpatch. blizzard is decent Size damage and also great on top of tarpatch.

 

I'd say the damage may not be quite as good as fire/dark but survivability might be better.

 

I already had a fire/dark and a fire/time so I rolled an ice/rad and live that too.

[Omega-202]

Generally agree with a lot of Hjarki said, but I have some further input:

 

Re: rains, I agree that ice storm and blizzard are monstrously good, especially with tar patch and scourge, however there is definitely something to be said for fireballs speed.  The rain summoning animations are a bit of a chore, but i personally don't mind the trade off.

 

Re: procs in BIB,  I've tried proccing it up (and alternatively FR) and found that at 50 neither was worth it.  Slotting 3 procs means that you're otherwise compromising your stats in that power, almost writing off the power for set bonuses (unless you only want the 3 slot recharge bonus in Scourging Blast).  I also feel like I need at least some recharge slotted into BIB to make a consistent attack chain, which lowers the proc chance.  I might play with it a bit and move my SB set around to see if its worth it, but I dont think that the damage ends up being that much better, especially since proc damage doesn't benefit from soul drain.

 

Re: tar patch, totally with you, its awesome.  just wish the animation was quicker.

 

Re: BFR, I would have previously agreed with you, but the animation is absolutely worth it after the late buffs.  Despite its long animation, its the best DPA in the set outside blizzard (check the in game stats).  Also taking char means not taking Soul drain, which is a game breaker.  Perma soul drain is game changing amounts of damage and, in my opinion, invalidates any other epic pool choices.  Also, bonus points to BFR (and FR) for being able to slot 4 Basilisks Gaze for the 7.5% recharge + 2 lvl50(+3) damage IOs to optimize damage, hold, recharge, acc and end redux. 

 

 

[Hjarki]

Re: BFR, I would have previously agreed with you, but the animation is absolutely worth it after the late buffs.  Despite its long animation, its the best DPA in the set outside blizzard (check the in game stats).

 

These are the numbers in-game (Level 1, but they scale the same):

Ice Bolt: 9.5/1 = 9.5

Ice Blast: 15.58/1.67 = 9.3

Freezing Ray: 20.9/1 = 20.9

Bitter Ice Blast: 21.66/1.07 = 20.2

Bitter Freeze Ray: 26.22/2.5 = 10.5