Most ranged defender?

[ParaBruce]

Just about every power set sometimes brings the character up toward the action with PBAoEs and all, but I'm curious what folks think would be the sets - primary and secondary - that work most effectively while standing way back.

 

[Yoru-hime]

There's nothing in the Trick Arrow/Archery combo that requires you to be in melee range and quite a bit of it offers -SPD to keep enemies from reaching you even if they try. If you absolutely didn't want to get close enough to smell the baddies, it'd be a way to go.

[SmalltalkJava]

Here is the T9 nuke PBAOE vs Ranged flavor

 

 

Primary Ranged Nukes

Archery

Assault Rifle

Beam Rifle

Electrical Blast. (But Short Circuit is pbaoe)

Ice Blast (has ice storm and blizzard range AOE )

Water Blast

 

 

 

Primary PBAOE Nukes

Dark Blast

Dual Pistols

Energy Blast

Fire Blast (but has rain of fire)

Psychic Blast

Radiation Blast

Sonic Attack

Edited August 7, 2019 by SmalltalkJava

[ParaBruce]

2 hours ago, Yoru-hime said:

There's nothing in the Trick Arrow/Archery combo that requires you to be in melee range and quite a bit of it offers -SPD to keep enemies from reaching you even if they try. If you absolutely didn't want to get close enough to smell the baddies, it'd be a way to go.

 

Interesting! I tend not to think of TA in defenders, but then Force Field, which I do think of, also needs or at least strongly benefits from the Medicine pool. Thanks!

 

2 hours ago, SmalltalkJava said:

Here is the T9 nuke AOE vs Ranged flavor

 

 

Handy! Thanks!

[_NOPE_]

Force Fields, of course. The main majority of the powers are all about "keep away from me!"

[Yoru-hime]

Force Fields simply redefines where melee can take place as "somewhere else". 😄

[ParaBruce]

Yeah, Force Field is probably the obvious pick here, with the character just needing to be close enough for Dispersion Bubble to do its thing.

 

On the side, I am sad that I can't seem to find anyone else's FF/water blast build, as I think it'd be fun to dabble but don't want to assemble one myself. Ah, well. To the lab. Igor! More forelimbs!

 

Edited August 7, 2019 by ParaBruce

[Gentoo]

I don't post or read people's exact builds, but I had a lot of fun with FF/Water. Remade my old "Mighty Maid" character that way. French maid running around splashing soap on foe and friend alike.

[ParaBruce]

That's good encouragement, at least. 🙂

 

[_NOPE_]

1 hour ago, Gentoo said:

I don't post or read people's exact builds, but I had a lot of fun with FF/Water. Remade my old "Mighty Maid" character that way. French maid running around splashing soap on foe and friend alike.

That's flipping brilliant, but the name makes me think of something else....

 

 

[Sir Myshkin]

I remember the days when you would bring a Force Field user into the Terra Volta trial and have them port underneath the reactor and turn Force Bubble on. Of course the GM's didn't look to kindly on this exploit, but it sure was funny.

[oedipus_tex]

This is a little hard to answer because there are multiple contenders depending on what you are looking for. I'd basically break it down like this:

 

PRIMARIES

 

No PBAoEs/all ranged:

Water

Beam Rifle

Ice

Archery

Assault Rifle (NOTE: Many powers are cones)

 

Only PBAoE is the Nuke

Psi (NOTE: All powers in this set also have +20ft extra range)

Fire 

Energy (1 cone, 1 sphere)
Sonic (all cones except PBAoE nuke)

Dual Pistols

 

Heavily Shortchanged if not played PBAoE

Radiation (technically can be played at range, but those blasts are sloooow)

 

Mix
Electric  - Has a PBAoE endurance crash power but a ranged nuke

 

 

SECONDARIES 

 

 

No range restrictions due to no enemy affecting powers

Empathy

 

 

Only restriction is distance to enemies

Thermal

Force Field

Sonic Resonance

Pain

 

 

Mostly ranged, but relies on cones which require positioning

Dark Miasma

 

 

Mostly ranged, but has powers which can function up close

Storm (Hurricane, a PBAOE repel/-tohit power)

 

 

Has some optional powers/skippable that are effective at close range but this doesnt make or break the set

Time

Radiation

Poison

Nature (NOTE: An unusual situation where the heal power is a cone, which benefits from standing back)

 

 

Somewhat shortchanged at far range

Cold Domination (mainly on high recharge builds, to missing benefits of Heat Loss when not up close)

 

 

Crippled at far range

Kinetics

 

 

Impossible to classify

Traps

Edited August 8, 2019 by oedipus_tex

[ParaBruce]

That's some nifty spectrum-making!

 

[Hyperstrike]

On 8/7/2019 at 10:40 AM, Yoru-hime said:

Force Fields simply redefines where melee can take place as "somewhere else". 😄

I'm stealing this quote!

[Coyote]

Just to note, the last post from Oedipus_Tex missed Trick Arrows, which has no powers that benefit from being close to the enemies... it's all good up to max range.

[_NOPE_]

Tex also mixed up primaries and secondaries...

[Hjarki]

13 hours ago, oedipus_tex said:

This is a little hard to answer because there are multiple contenders depending on what you are looking for. I'd basically break it down like this:

Notes:

• Electrical Blast. While it does have a PBAoE (Short Circuit), it's not one you're ever likely to take. It does terrible damage and it can't fully end drain a target without Alpha (at which point you're simply going to Thunderous Blast them instead).
• Dark Blast. This relies on cones, which means you need to be at a precise range - and that range is never 'close' and frequently not 'far'.
• Time, Radiation, and Dark all have AE heals around the player. This means your position is dependent on who needs healing - and that frequently brings you into melee range.
• Kinetics could reasonably be considered 'long range' on a Defender. The reason a Defender would close to melee range would be to benefit from Fulcrum Shift themselves. However, between Siphon Speed, the player-centric portion of Fulcrum Shift, various enhancements to damage and bonuses like Aim, the Defender normally doesn't need to Fulcrum Shift themselves because they're already at/near the +damage cap.
• Pain Domination and Poison both have critical PBAoE -resist debuffs. This is part of the reason they're generally considered weaker sets - you can't realistically skip these debuffs as irrelevant the way you could Time's Juncture and they force you into melee range.
• Dark Miasma. The only cone in Dark Miasma is Fearsome Stare and it's an easily skipped power.
• Storm Summoning. I'm not sure I'd really put Hurricane in with the other PBAoE powers. When you first get it, it's fantastic and you can play all sorts of "I shove them in the corner" games. At 50, the relatively low magnitude on the Repel and the degree to which to-hit debuffs are resisted make it a situational power that's more defensive in nature (reacting to an enemy reaching melee range) than a proactive one (purposefully entering melee range to use it).
• Cold Domination. While theoretically you could enter melee range to receive more benefit from Heat Loss, Cold Domination is such a low endurance set that it's unlikely you'd ever need to do so.

[_NOPE_]

Just now, Hjarki said:

Electrical Blast. While it does have a PBAoE (Short Circuit), it's not one you're ever likely to take. It does terrible damage and it can't fully end drain a target without Alpha (at which point you're simply going to Thunderous Blast them instead).

I use Short Circuit - Power Sink myself. Works beautifully.

[subbacultchas]

6 minutes ago, The Philotic Knight said:

I use Short Circuit - Power Sink myself. Works beautifully.

I've used it on most of my elecs too. And I have a friend who mains an elec/dark blaster and it's one of his more used attacks, usually preceded by soul drain.

[Obitus]

2 hours ago, Hjarki said:

Storm Summoning. I'm not sure I'd really put Hurricane in with the other PBAoE powers. When you first get it, it's fantastic and you can play all sorts of "I shove them in the corner" games. At 50, the relatively low magnitude on the Repel and the degree to which to-hit debuffs are resisted make it a situational power that's more defensive in nature (reacting to an enemy reaching melee range) than a proactive one (purposefully entering melee range to use it).

This is my take too, for what it's worth.  Hurricane used to be considered the core Storm power, in part because the leveling game was slower, in part because we didn't have IOs to provide DEF and +recharge to juice long recharge powers like Lightning Storm, and in part because powers like Tornado were largely unusuable unless you had an AoE immobilize.  (And sometimes even then.)

 

Now Hurricane is largely incidental.  As Hjarki said, it can do some fun and impressive things when you're lower level, and it can help you through the occasional bad spot even later on - but it's entirely possible, even potentially quite pleasant, to ignore Hurricane for a Stormer's entire career.  Most of the time, it's more trouble than it's worth to use Hurricane proactively.  Better to build so that you don't feel you have to.

 

The signature powers in Storm go like this:  Freezing Rain > Tornado > Lightning Storm.  Toss Steamy Mist in there somewhere - hard to rank it directly.  Everything else ranges from optional to eminently skippable.

 

The TL;DR of all of my ramblings is that Storm is exceedingly well suited to a ranged-only play style; it might even be one of the best Defender sets for that purpose.  Actually, Hurricane only reinforces this conclusion, because its main use is to keep insistent melee opponents out of your face.

Edited August 8, 2019 by Obitus

[ParaBruce]

This is exactly the kind of thing I love in a forum discussion: getting a fresh perspective on things. Thanks, Hjarki and Obitus! I feel like I have a fresh outlook on Storm Summoning, and now want to mess with it some more.

 

Edited August 8, 2019 by ParaBruce

[oedipus_tex]

5 hours ago, Hjarki said:

Notes:

• Dark Miasma. The only cone in Dark Miasma is Fearsome Stare and it's an easily skipped power.

 

Do people really skip Fearsome Stare? I guess this serves as an example of sharp difference in how various players view priorities. I would call Fearsome Stare one of the key powers in Dark. It's one of the few Defender mezzes on par to a Controller mezz (so much so that for Controllers it is moved out of the Buff set and into the Control set) and although it causes Fear rather than a hard mezz, it also comes loaded with -18.75% -ToHit. 

[Hedgefund]

With the Sudden Acceleration kb2kd  proc in Repulsion Field, I put my bubbler on the front lines and play the role of a 1-man Earthquake.

[_NOPE_]

7 minutes ago, Hedgefund said:

With the Sudden Acceleration kb2kd  proc in Repulsion Field, I put my bubbler on the front lines and play the role of a 1-man Earthquake.

[Yoru-hime]

20 minutes ago, oedipus_tex said:

 

Do people really skip Fearsome Stare? I guess this serves as an example of sharp difference in how various players view priorities. I would call Fearsome Stare one of the key powers in Dark. It's one of the few Defender mezzes on par to a Controller mezz (so much so that for Controllers it is moved out of the Buff set and into the Control set) and although it causes Fear rather than a hard mezz, it also comes loaded with -18.75% -ToHit. 

I've seen it suggested here and there and I'm curious how they run that it's not considered useful. That is my bread and butter, every single mob power once I've got the recharge for it. It's both major to-hit debuff plus fear to break up the return fire. The cone is quite large too so it's not like you've got to do much to hit a whole group with it.  In small groups with no meat shield, I lead the charge with this to absorb the alpha.

 

Dark is a good enough set that I guess you could run without it, but if I had to pick between giving up Twilight Grasp and Fearsome Stare on my Dark/Dark, you can have the heal,.. though I'd miss the extra -regen. 😉