What is the best soloing AT combination for hard content?

[FFFF]

I've been enjoying Sister Valeria's story arc with my MA/Inv scrapper. I realize it's not an optimal combination, but with Incarnate powers, she powers through +4/x3 without dying, but with some close calls.  I'm curious to know what other folks have used to take on this arc at +4/x8 (which my scrapper couldn't do without dying a lot). 

 

For those who aren't familiar with the story arc, the missions contain upgraded Cimmeroan traitors, lots of Warshade mobs, and most irritatingly, teleporting Immune Surgeons. The missions also feature a lot of elite bosses (Minotaurs, Cyclops, and Warshade Novas). There are some mobs with 2-3 elite bosses. Some of the groups are close enough to have 3-5 elite bosses at one time, not including ambushes which can contain them too. 

 

So if you wanted take on this story arc again, what would you bring? 

[Warshades]

16 minutes ago, FFFF said:

For those who aren't familiar with the story arc, the missions contain upgraded Cimmeroan traitors, lots of Warshade mobs, and most irritatingly, teleporting Immune Surgeons. The missions also feature a lot of elite bosses (Minotaurs, Cyclops, and Warshade Novas). There are some mobs with 2-3 elite bosses. Some of the groups are close enough to have 3-5 elite bosses at one time, not including ambushes which can contain them too.

 

Don't think I ever ran through this one. Generally speaking, tanks have the easiest time surviving against heavy hitting mobs and also do excellent AoE damage to help reduce the mob size (though it would likely take longer to clear through the bosses/EBs).

 

With regards to Warshade/Nictus spawns, reaching 100% recharge debuff resist should fix any annoyances here since their powers primarily debuff recharge and not accuracy iirc. The bigger issue would be Cimeroran Traitors as most of their attacks cause defense debuffs and once your defense is floored, you'll end up taking some heavy damage (this issue is worse for scrappers who max out at 75% damage resist caps compared to tanks/brutes being able to reach 90%). 

 

Generally speaking, I would run a tank if I wanted to do this at +4/8x with minimal risk of dying.

• Invuln in particular stands out since they can easily hit 90% s/l resist and can hit high defense values with invincibility when surrounded by mobs. I would also try to pair it with a heavy damage dealing and damage mitigating secondary attack set, most likely Battle Axe. The one downside to invuln is it doesn't directly provide any damage buffs via attacks or buffs from the armor set, so it would take longer to kill mobs.
• Shield should also be capable when built for heavy s/l resist and would be much better on damage output, but it does have lower max HP while lacking a heal, so you may end up wanting something like rebirth radial destiny slot. 
• Stone armor should also be capable with a stronger focus on s/l resist buffs, I would certainly still run it outside of Granite.
• Energy aura, when fully built out, should also be able to handle this arc at +4/8x, but it does have a bit of a weakness to negative damage. 
• SR in theory should manage just fine if you focus on resist bonuses. With it's 95% DDR, you literally have 0% chance of your defense failing and falling below 45% and in theory, you should be able to cap your s/l resist at 90% at around 40% HP left (from the passive scaling resist effects), but at that point it's kinda down to RNG. You could easily slot power transfer chance for +heal in stamina/harmonic mind and some other uniques like panacea and preventive medicine in health for sustainability, but you may still want rebirth radial in case you hit a particularly bad string of luck and get hit more often than 5% of the time. 

If you want something other than a melee char, MMs with marine affinity should be able to manage just fine even with additional EBs in mobs as long as you're just fighting 1 mob at a time. Demon/marine, merc/marine, and necro/marine would all work well. 

 

If you want to take a slower approach, Phantom Army on a controller is an option. Illusion is unfortunately dreadful for clearing mobs so I wouldn't recommend it, but they are a safe option that will eventually kill everything once you hit perma PA. 

 

Lastly, anything that can stay at range by hovering and building for high range defense would in theory be able to manage just fine. Fortunata Widows have solo'd ITF at +4/8x and outside of some extra EBs, it should manage just fine for this also. Cimerorans in particular are extremely weak to psi damage. 

 

 

[Six-Six]

Bane

[Yomo Kimyata]

For me, the answer to something like this is scrappers.  It's always scrappers.  I've been able to play every scrapper I've gotten to 50 through a series of +4/x8 content solo, and some are markedly easier than others.

 

I've not run that arc in recent memory.  The problem I always run into with Cim content is that every minion has defense debuff powers and resistance to mez (through boss shouts), so blindly setting +4/x8 and running through pell mell is a recipe for disaster.  Also, very few of my preferred armor types have much or even any def debuff resistance. 

 

That said, I think my staff/bio scrapper could do well with something like this; I'll check it out.

 

 

[EnjoyTheJourney]

A hover-blasting sentinel could do very well with that content. A few combos that seem likely to be capable include water / super reflexes, beam / bio, and fire / bio.

Defense debuffs aren't as frequent and threatening when hovering for most content, including Cims. Nukes and other AOEs would tend to quickly defeat trash mobs. That leaves a war of attrition taking place between bosses / EBs and the sentinel of choice. All of these combos above have access to a functional amount of healing / absorb that recharges in a fairly short time and with good builds they'd probably be up to the task. 

[dzyp2]

It's not the fashion that it once was, but dark/shield scrapper. You can stack your DDR so taking the +DDR destiny gets you 90+% DDR most of the time. Dark melee adds some survivability you'll need. Dark melee may not top dmg but if you can saturate soul drain it's no slouch either.

I have a build where I take psi as an epic so I kill the cim EBs faster. With this build, I've done the first ITF mission, kill all, +4/x8 no deaths, and kill the ambush at the end. It shines in this kind of content.

[FFFF]

4 hours ago, dzyp2 said:

It's not the fashion that it once was, but dark/shield scrapper. You can stack your DDR so taking the +DDR destiny gets you 90+% DDR most of the time. Dark melee adds some survivability you'll need. Dark melee may not top dmg but if you can saturate soul drain it's no slouch either.

I have a build where I take psi as an epic so I kill the cim EBs faster. With this build, I've done the first ITF mission, kill all, +4/x8 no deaths, and kill the ambush at the end. It shines in this kind of content.

Psy is great for the kill shot against all Cim EBs including Minotaurs and Cyclops. 

[Plutonix]

Fire/rad sentinel or psi/rad sentinel or rad/stone brute

[Uun]

Illusion Control paired with Dark, Poison, Rad or Time.

[Yomo Kimyata]

On 8/12/2025 at 1:44 PM, FFFF said:

I've been enjoying Sister Valeria's story arc with my MA/Inv scrapper. I realize it's not an optimal combination, but with Incarnate powers, she powers through +4/x3 without dying, but with some close calls.

 

Ok, I'm a few missions in on my Staff/Bio scrapper at +4/x8, and here are some of my scrapper-related thoughts.

 

Thanks to the Traitors, this is a tough slog for any melee secondary set without a fair amount of defense debuff resistance.  Every mob will debuff you, and they also reinforce each other both defensively and by providing resistance to mez effects and knockdown/back.  Martial arts/Invulnerability, even with the recent boost in defense debuff resistance, is going to be tough simply because MA is predominantly single target, and in order to survive each group you need to take out as many enemies as possible as quickly as possible, since a minion is going to debuff you as much as a boss will.  The teleporting Surgeons are annoying, but not as much of a problem as I had assumed they would be -- they tend to get right up into melee range a lot so AoEs take them out pretty quickly.  What I did not expect or like were the traitors who turn into or otherwise spawn nicti, mainly because once they spawn, rather than go back to their original spawn point if you are defeated, they camp your body.

 

My M.O. here has been to make a targeting macro to hunt out the surgeons and to start combat with a slow snipe from my epic pool (Moonbeam).  There seem to be two surgeons per spawn, and if I draw the whole group, I'll break line of sight, pop Shadow Meld before they converge on me, then I go to town on all the minions and lts.  Once they are out, I'll focus on the spawned nicti, then finally the bosses.  Between Shadow Meld and various heals, I'm usually ok but sometimes things go sideways.  Ageless Radial helps with providing some defense debuff resistance, but you really need to be proactive and pop it before you need it.

 

So far, that's the main issue.  The Ravenna Conclave and the EBs don't feel like any sort of a threat in comparison.  I haven't gotten to the AVs at the end of the arc yet, so I'll check them out later today!

[Sovera]

If you want to start early then a Tanker. Depending on the flavor and twinkage tankers will start soloing at 0x6 by level 4-6 and 0x8 by level 8-10 which, so far, I've not been able to replicate with other ATs. Once at 50 nothing changes except they will slowly whittle away at durable enemies such as AVs (not uncommon to spend 6-7 minutes hitting one in the face) but this is not particularly felt (though spreadsheets show it) during regular missions since low HP mobs combined with Build-up (+Gaussian) allows to keep things moving. Because of this being particularly felt during leveling they actually solo faster at the difficulties I'm talking about.

 

If strictly at level 50 then maybe a Scrapper, in particular if not shy about using inspirations. Bonus if picking up a secondary with an agro aura.

 

Brutes are sturdier than a Scrapper (especially with inspirations in play) but can't match that brutal crit sequence. Mind you this means knowing how to leverage a Scrapper's crits.

 

Stalkers will match a Scrapper's output but further benefit from 90% of the time deciding when and where to start combat. The stealth allows to pinpoint the target that has to go first. But they have no agro auras which will slow everything once it comes to strict mission clearing.

 

Sentinels play well with the initial burst of Aim (+Gaussian) and then unloading nukes and AoEs since that usually murders 3/4 of a group. Especially the hover using Sentinel who then fights from the air. I'd want to say that, about, 15 seconds into the fight the Sentinel has bursted in a way a Scrapper can't match. But after the 15 seconds-ish the Scrapper handily catches up. Further, Sentinels also don't have agro keeping so runners will run even though being ranged mitigates partially. A well built Sentinel can do pretty decent ST damage matching Brutes and outpacing Tankers but still behind Scrappers. To be fair everything is behind Scrappers, even Scrappers not following a rigid build and epics and slotting. Simply picking a Scrapper and expecting big damage is not how it works and double this during leveling.