Adeon Hawkwood

The upside of both of those being that you can use them from range (and in the case of Rain of Arrows without needing line of sight). Conversely Hail of Bullets has twice the recharge, less damage than Rain of Arrows (although slightly more than Full Auto) and requires you to pretty much be in melee range of the enemies for the entire duration. The small defense buff does help with the latter admittedly but I would stay it's still harder to use than the other two and the double recharge is painful.

I do wish they'd increase the target limit on Full Auto thought .

Now assuming you time it perfectly the Force Feedback Proc will be up one-third of the time (this represents the best case scenario).

Eclipse needs 300 "points" to recharge. Let X be equal to the amount of recharge you are getting from slotting in eclipse plus global recharge from other sources.

When the FF proc is up you'll get 2 + X points back per second and when it's down you'll get 1 + X. So over the course of 15 seconds you'll get 20 + 15X points or (4/3) + X points per second.

Without the FF proc you'll get 1 + X points per second.

So the percentage improvement from the FF proc is (4 + 3X)/(3 + 3X)

What does this mean? If you have no slotting or global recharge then the FF proc is, at best, equivalent to a 33% global recharge buff. If you have 95% enhancement in Eclipse and no global recharge then it's equivalent to a 17% global recharge bonus at best.

Yeah, I've been thinking a bit about this and I'm inclined to say that Dual Pistols is one of those blast sets which really needs a lot of powers to be effective, especially for a Defender/Corruptor.

If you look at the "generic" Blast set you have the following:
3 Single Target Attacks
1 Cone
1 Targeted AoE
1 Aim
1 Single Target Mez
1 Snipe
1 Nuke

Obviously most of them don't follow this exactly but it's pretty much the base version that they differ from.

So... in general with the generic set you want 5 powers: the 3 single target attacks and the 2 AoEs. This gives you a decent single target attack chain for tough enemies and AoE damage for dealing with minions. These 5 powers also tend to be in every set (although in some sets the format for them is a little unusual such as Ignite for the third st attack in AR). The other four powers in the set (Aim, the Snipe, the Mez power and the nuke) are the more skippable powers (depending on the rest of your build) and are also the ones most likely to be replaced with set-specific powers.

In Dual Pistols three of these four powers are replaced with other powers that are generally more attractive than the original power (in 2 cases MUCH more attractive). Swap Ammo replaces Aim, Piercing Rounds replaces the Snipe and Hail of Bullets replaces the nuke. Swap Ammo and Piercing Rounds are both VERY attractive to a defender since they increase your ability to perform your primary goal of debuffing enemies, in particular Swap Ammo allows you to tailor your debuffing to fit the situation. Hail of Bullets is less attractive since it isn't quite as good as the other crashless mini-nukes (Full Auto and Rain of Arrows) but for a Defender who will be in melee range anyway (such as Traps or Kinetics) it makes a lot of sense.

So for a Dual Pistols Defender we have got the 5 damage powers most Defenders will want plus two powers that provide solid increases to the Defenders debuffing potential. The last two (Suppressive Fire and Hail of Bullets) are less essential but depending on your primary there is a good chance that one or both will be useful to the Defender.

The net effect of this is that Dual Pistols is a more power intensive set than most other Defender secondaries (for example on my Traps/AR I only have 6 AR powers but on a Traps/DP I would take or even 9 of them).

Now the question I'm sure you're thinking is "but Adeon, surely a Defender doesn't need all 5 damage powers?" Well technically no he doesn't but for most sets skipping them is a poor idea. Archery and Radiation are the main exceptions since the lower than normal recharge on their first two blasts make it easier to spam their T1 blast and skip their T2 but for other sets the longer recharge means more downtime between blasts without this. As for skipping the AoEs, doing this decreases the value of the blast debuffs. The debuffs in blast sets are relatively short duration and often impossible to enhance (for example the -dam from using Toxic Ammo) as such stacking two different AoEs provides better debuffing than you get with just one. This also applies to skipping one of the single target blasts when you are fighting a tough AV.

The primary purpose of blast sets for a Defender is, of course, damage but the debuffs they provide do have utility and it's important to keep this in mind when planning out a defender build.

In that case Spines and Dual Blades are the best options with on PBAoE and two medium cones (compared to the PBAoE, one wide cone and one narrow cone in most other sets). Melee sets all have relatively limited AoE damage, it's part of what balances them against Blast sets. Blast sets get better AoE but it tends not to be PBAoE since characters with Blast sets don't like PBAoE. And of course except for a few Defenders/Corruptors (like Traps) who have high defense most Blast set ATs are a bit squishy.

EDIT: Here are the red tomax pages for Brutes and Scrappers. You can scroll down and see at a glance what AoE capability each set has:
http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/power...etype.php?at=5
http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/power...etype.php?at=9

I don't think there is anyone who thinks the market as currently implemented is perfect. However like you the majority of people who understand it recognize it as a decent compromise system that is a lot fairer to casual players than most other systems would be. The changes we generally want are more about tweaking it to make it more accessible than burning it to the ground and starting over.

There is also a general recognition amongst such people that you can't effectively adjust market prices by changing the market mechanics (or at least you can't adjust them in a way that would favor the majority of the player base). If the devs wanted to decrease prices they would need to either reduce the rate of inf generation for level 50s relative to everyone else, increase the rate at which inf is removed from the game or increase the supply of items (by increasing drop rates). Playing tricks with the market mechanics won't impact any of these, increasing the listing fee would but that has it's own set of issues.

Basically the idea is that you press the macro for the ammo type you want to use and thereafter every time you move forwards or backwards it will attempt to activate that ammo type if it isn't already on. The PR macro then toggles off any ammo types you have before firing Piercing Rounds and after four seconds the ammo type macro you set will turn it back on when you move.

The only issue I've found so far is that it won't try to toggle it on if you just hold down W or S, you have to actually start pressing them.

Just an FYI, Cloaking Device and the Concealment pool are mutually exclusive, you can only use one at a time.

You can also put it in sprint if you want to save a slot in Combat Jumping (which I assume is what you meant since Hurdle can't take set IOs).

In the micro scale you are correct, the fee lowers profit margins which limits what gets sold and pushes prices up. However in the macro scale Transhade is arguably correct (although I suspect not for the reasons he thinks). The market fee is the only reliable Inf sink in the game, if it was gone then very little inf would leave the game and we would get inflation driving prices even higher with more and more items selling off market.

I think it depends a lot on the player and the set. Most debuff defenders can solo reasonably well, not as well as controllers due to the lower damage mitigation but well enough (Traps Defenders in particular make excellent soloers but Traps is an edge case).

Agreed, I think it did a decent job of making solo defenders reasonably comparable to solo corruptors (especially for debuff based defenders) but I agree that it widened the gap between the good soloers and the bad soloers.

*cough* Yeah, given how many times I've used the Web 'Nade/Ignite combo on AVs with my Blaster and Defender you'd think I'd have thought of that. I'm claiming temporary insanity caused by space imps.

That sounds about right to me, I'll concede Controllers do have better single target damage. I'm less sure about AoE damage, I think Fire and Plant Controllers probably outdo Defenders but the other controllers are a bit light there. I'm pretty sure an AR or Archery defender could out AoE a non-Fire or Plant Controller but those are on the high end AoE damage wise.

Actually I think the Vigilance fix is enough to stop from corruptors completely replacing defenders. As I mentioned above the difference between the two in a team environment is basically negligible and I really doubt most team leaders would specifically pick corruptors over defenders anyway. My main concern was that the higher base damage of corruptors makes them a lot more enjoyable to solo so people would opt to make corruptors over defenders since it doesn't hurt the team and is more fun when not on a team. The vigilance buff brings the defender's damage up to corruptor level assuming 95% enhancement and neglecting scourge. Obviously Corruptors still get a small damage bonus from scourge and the fact that other damage bonuses benefit them more but it greatly decreases the solo speed difference between the two.

EDIT: Of course I tend to agree that controllers are stronger than both corruptors and defenders.

Hence why I specified against AVs since you don't generally get containment there.

If you include containment then the average controller has three single target attacks all of which are damage scale 2 (1 base doubled for containment) and have recharge times of 4s, 8s and 8s. Conversely the Defender gets three blasts with recharge times 4s, 8s and 10s and damage scale 1, 1.64 and 2.12. Even factoring in that Defenders get 18% higher base damage I think the Controller does have a slight advantage but it's not that big (if someone wants to do the math and figure the actual DPS of the attack chain please feel free). Obviously there are exception to this, an AR defender for example gets enough damage from Ignite that as long as the enemy requires more than 10 seconds for the controller to kill he will almost certainly pull ahead and certain Controllers get an extra or better attacks making them pull ahead.

I'm not convinced that Controllers do out-damage well built Defenders even with pets and epic (Fire control being the main exception) simply due to the fact that Defenders get a much wider range of attacks and normally have more AoEs than a controller. Against AVs the higher damage scale on the Defenders higher recharge blasts combined with the general lack of containment on AVs also shifts things in the Defenders favor. However given that I will say the damage difference between the two is pretty small at high levels. So I do agree with the general sentiment, Controllers bring comparable damage, only slightly lower buffs and more control to a team than Defenders do.

That being said from a practical point of view once you start stacking multiple support toons on a team it doesn't matter a whole lot whether they are Defenders, Corruptors or Controllers. The team is going to rock anyway. The game is so ludicrously imbalanced in favor of the buff/debuff sets that once you start stacking those it doesn't really matter which type of support character you have.

The other thing I will note is that Defenders do generally have more room in their build for things like Leadership powers without sacrificing from their buff/debuff set since most blast sets are effective with only 5 or 6 powers and Defender epics aren't as essential as Controller ones. Controllers conversely need to take more powers from their control set and generally need at least 3 powers from their epic in order to bring up their damage.

Yeah, but there's a mid point. I have characters I play every so often. So they're rarely offline for the entire 21 days but not logged in often enough to catch them on day job day.

Of course not, we would be the world's number one Superhero themed hat simulator.