A Man In Black

Just sayin'.

Augh, that cover is awful. It's ugly and overcrowded, and White Alley Brawler and whatever it is that's going on with Sister Psyche both make me feel vaguely queasy. I don't mean to get all scans_daily, but I'd really rather avoid any sort of art that reminds me of Greg Land.

I realize these are the official forums, so you're going to get a certain amount of "Yay, my favorite characters from the greatest developers ever" noise, but I really don't think this is putting the best foot forward.

Will First Ward have contacts/missions for heroes and villains, or will it be limited to use by Praetorians?

Working on an introduction/overview:



Electric Armor is a resistance/healing-based defensive armor set for brutes, scrappers, and tankers. (Also stalkers, but they aren't covered here.) It offers a nice mix of extra damage, soft control, and well-balanced resists, and can support the appetite of a high-endurance offensive set with its endurance-management tools.

Electric Armor is second only to Fiery Aura for increasing your offense, and is arguably on par with Shield Defense (albeit in a completely different way). Like Super Reflexes, Electric Armor gives you a substantial recharge boost (20%, the same as two full Epic/purple IO sets), smoothing out attack chains, giving you better uptime on clicky buffs, and making AOE and utility powers more effective. It also has a damage aura similar to those in Dark Armor and Fiery Aura. Damage auras aren't as flashy as big attacks, but since they're always on and ticking away, they do a great deal of damage over time.

Electric Aura also gives you a bit of soft control, similar (but inferior) to Ice Armor or Dark Armor. Power Sink and Lightning Field combined can help keep weaker enemies drained of endurance, reducing their attack rate significantly. This is even more effective when combined with other sources of endurance drain, such as Electric Melee or Mu Mastery attacks or support from endurance-draining allies.

Power Sink not only saps enemies of endurance, but also refills the user's endurance. Properly slotted and used on cooldown with only one enemy nearby, Power Sink more than offsets the endurance cost of every toggle in the entire set. In addition to Power Sink, Electric Armor has Energize. While Energize is chiefly used as a heal, it also grants a Conserve-Power-like buff that reduces the cost of all powers (both toggle and activated) by about 60% for 30 seconds. (In fact, Electric Armor once had Conserve Power instead of Energize.)

Electric Armor also has some of the best-balanced typed resistances of the various resistance-based sets. An ElA character is particularly well-protected against the most common damage types. With properly slotted shield powers, that character will have more smashing/lethal resistance than any other save Invulnerability, and hardcapped resistance to energy attacks (75% for scrappers, 90% for brutes and tanks). The remainder of the resistances are well-balanced, with respectable resistances to fire and cold (~40% for scrappers and brutes, ~55% for tankers) and passable resistance to negative energy (~30% for scrappers and brutes, ~40% for tankers). Electric Armor characters also have respectable psychic resistance (~40% for scrappers and brutes, ~55% for tankers) unlike most sets; instead, they are vulnerable to toxic damage, with no toxic resistance outside Power Surge's limited duration.

These well-balanced resistances are important, because ElA does not come with any defense, to avoid attacks. Any defense to layer on top of its resistances and healing must come from inspirations, invention sets, pool powers, incarnate abilities, or outside buffs. It also lacks any Defense Debuff Resistance, or DDR, so enemies which debuff defense (such as Cimerorans, Syndicate, Paragon Police, or Knives of Artemis) can stack debuffs to get a very high chance to hit.

This general lack of defense means that attacks with debuffs attached with hit more often, so Electric Armor relies even more heavily than some sets on its debuff protection and debuff resistance. This is a mixed bag. Electric Armor has the high protection against hold, stun, and sleep attacks typical to armor sets. Where it's unusual is that Electric Armor is nearly immune to endurance drain or recovery debuffs, common on enemies with electric attacks. It also has better than average resistance to recharge and runspeed debuffs, common on enemies with ice or psychic attacks. (It also has very high resistance to teleport attacks, but that's more of a PVP concern.)

Where ElA is chiefly deficient is in its knockback/repel protection. While most armor sets are nearly immune to knockback and repel through a combination of protection and resistance, Electric Armor characters can be knocked back by high-magnitude knockback effects and have no protection against repel effects. (The only common repel effect in PVE is exploding objectives.) In addition, this knockback protection doesn't work at all while the character is flying or jumping. ElA also has no particular protection against confusion, fear, or blind effects, as well.

If you're building a pure farmer, don't build for SL defense but do slot Fences for damage. Also, your shields are overslotted, you're slotting the pure damage purples over the procs, and Healing Flames is underslotted (and the procs will have terrible uptime).