Adeon Hawkwood

With top-line IO'ing I think the balance shifts slightly in favor the Blaster. The Traps Defender can soft-cap all positions (and in fact all positions and all types if you use Weave and both +3% IOs) but the Blaster can softcap Ranged (with some sacrifices). Since the Blaster can use Caltrops and an AoE immobilize from a PPP to keep most enemies away his effective survivability is almost as good as the Defenders and his damage is MUCH higher. Admittedly there are some groups he will have a lot more trouble than the Defender with (Carnies and Malta in particular) but against the softer groups (such as Council) I think he can solo as quickly or slightly faster. I've just finished respeccing both, so I'll try and run some tests when Ive got a chance.

I agree with you in the abstract though, the Defender's overall suvivability is a lot higher.

The requirements are that you must be level 50, have the alpha slot unlocked and have something slotted in the alpha slot.

You can (theoretically) do the TF without meeting the last requirement but in practice doing so means you will be fighting +8s at which point the only thing you can do to help your team is buff (since any attacks or debuffs will be at 5% effectiveness).

well resetting the market would involve deleting EVERYTHING (enhancements, recipes, inf and salvage) on all characters which strikes me as a rather extreme solution. My advice is to wait for the frenzy to calm down or take Solar's advice and use alignment merits (or combine it, use alignment merits to buy an even more expensive recipe, sell that and buy your kinetic combats).

As Gilia said, Force Field Controllers get PFF. As for the wiki, well it's not infallible, sometimes no one remembers to update a particular page when the patch notes come out.

I think this is true for some types of soft controls and not others. Confuse and Sleep are, like hard controls, just reduced in duration but otherwise work the same way as normal (in fact Confuse is sort of buffed since the damage confused enemies do is higher relative to your damage).

Drain and Knockback though will suffer somewhat. Drain's problem is pretty obvious, despite being a soft control the way NPC endurance works means most of the time it's pretty binary either you floor their endurance or they continue to attack. The purple patch hits it coming and going, it decreases the drain per hit and decreases the duration of recovery debuffs (which means you need to apply those more frequently). Knockback is less affected, but the reduction in magnitude means that in some cases enemies with a bit of KB protection end up not even being knocked down.

Yeah, I'll do that if I have to (although my current build is probably close enough for that without changing) but I really hope I can figure some way to make it work with pets since without them there isn't much point in having the MM (you'd get better support and more damage from a Defender/Corruptor).

I'm currently leaning towards dismissing my Battle Drones (since they aren't exactly doing a lot of damage against what is to them a +6 AV) and focusing on tight management of the Protector and Assault Bots, the question being how much damage will I really manage to inflict.

Plan B is to keep all the pets out and try to act as ambush bait rather than fighting the AV although that really doesn't feel like it will help my team.

I also figure as a bots MM I'm at least slightly better off than the sets with melee pets.

The other option is to build in S/L defense. A majority of melee attacks and a decent number of ranged attacks (especially from gun wielding groups) deal at least partly smashing or lethal damage so it protects against a more diverse array of attacks than simple ranged defense, with the downside being it provides no protection against ranged attacks that deal pure elemental damage or don't deal damage (i.e. certain ranged mez powers).

I can't check your build right now but I suspect this is the cause of your problem. You are pairing Electric Blast which is somewhat low damage put offers potentially high mitigation (through sapping) with Electrical Manipulation a set that offers decent melee damage plus some sapping and then not Blapping.

Elec/Elec/Elec in particular is a combo that really works best as a Blapper. You've got several good Sapping tools that require you to be in close, strong melee attacks and Electrical Mastery similarly supports this by giving you two panic button powers.

Obviously you can play however you want but you are essentially playing against type which is probably why you find the character weak.

I know they said that, but honestly it strikes me as a bit silly. If a patch releases something as major as a new Incarnate slot then in terms of testing and release impact it pretty much IS an issue.

Yeah, I know and yet I've had it happen to me on multiple occasions, I'll get a nice Defender/Controller heavy team and then someone declares that we need more damage.

Not a bad idea, but I think the price might need to be a bit higher. I'd say between 7.5million and 10million per IO. That discourages people from using it to pull out the really cheap stuff (which often goes in that price range).

I think it must be, I play on Virtue and ever seeing anyone complain about having a Stalker on the team. Heck, I've seen people complain about a team having "to many defenders/controllers" but never Stalkers.

The actual hard caps for these values are pretty much irrelevant since a blaster can't hit them solo (it's 75% resistance and 175% defense). In general with Defense the goal is 45% since that is the point where most enemies will have the lowest possible chance to hit you (the "soft cap").

Incarnate boosts do not affect the hard cap but instead partially ignore the ED cap on powers. In the case of defense and resistance on Blasters this is of only moderate utility since they don't actually have many powers that buff this. As an example, assume you have a Blaster with Temp Invulnerability and Tough. These two powers give a total of 31.5% S/L resist un-enhanced. With ED capped enhancement you would get 49.14% S/L resistance. Now assume you add a Paragon Cardiac Boost (which haven't been released yet but bypass the most ED), that would take you up to about 53.65% S/L resistance. So about 4% resistance, it's moderately useful but in general the Alpha Slot won't really help Blasters much defensively. The main benefit of the Alpha Slot is enhancing powers that you have a lot of and that aren't quite at the ED cap.


Hitting the resistance cap is pretty much impossible for a Blaster. Hitting the Defense cap is mostly based on IOs. Most Blasters go for either Ranged defense (especially popular with Hoverblasters and Blasters with more defensive secondaries) or Smashing and Lethal Defense (popular with Blappers). Most Blasters start by picking up some pool powers that provide a little defense (not a huge amount each but nice if you stack them): Combat Jumping, Hover, Maneuvers and Stealth are all popular additionally Weave that is also very useful if you've got room. If you're focusing on S/L then you should select either Cold or Mu for your Epic pool since those provide a S/L Defense shield.

After that it's a matter of building up defense through IO slotting. Most builds start with a Steadfast Protection +3% defense IO and then go for useful sets with the desired bonus. Ranged defense blasters start with sets like Tunderstrike, Trap of the Hunter, Executioner's Contract and Blessing of the Zephyr depending on their powers. S/L Defense Blasters go for things like Kinetic Combat (the reason it's popular with Blappers), Obliteration, Reactive Armor, and Enfeebled Operation. At this point it becomes a question of priorities, ideally you want 45% to your chosen defense, the question is what are you willing to sacrifice to get there?

Here's a list of IO sets and their bonuses:
http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/IO_Sets#Melee_Damage

Mez resistance is pretty much useless. Taking Acrobatics allows you to avoid some Holds which is useful. Other than that stacking defense is the best option. In general Ranged defense is better than S/L defense for avoiding the really long mezzes but it's not perfect.