_Echo_

Never had the patience to play */Traps with Trip Mines etc. while solo, but I can definitely see the potential fun to be had if everyone else on the team had */Traps too, ie. all 8 players with a like-minded tactical set-up, plus the set-up itself takes one eighth of the time. Then Full-Auto-times-eight... the screen would fill with bullet casings and little orange/grey numbers!

I've never tried an Earth/Storm personally, but this guide on the US forums made me very tempted to give it a go

Four location AoEs!

EDIT: Not to mention that Earth/Storm is probably the most visually spectacular combination out there!

Well I already mentioned earlier that all-Kinetics or all-Radiation teams would be stronger than an all-Empath team. We're not under any illusions here.

This isn't an excercise in min-maxing, this is just trying something a bit different.

As said above, both Earth/Kin and Fire/Kin are great combinations.

Earth's powers contian a lot of -def, which will help your Kinetics hit more often.

Speed-Boosted, Fulcrum-Shifted Imps are really quite terrifying to behold.

Agreed. Once you get your Kinetics powers up to speed, Flare's long activation time will likely become very annoying for you.

I ran up this quick one for Emp/Sonic:

Name:
Level: 50
Archetype: Defender
Primary: Empathy
Secondary: Sonic Blast
---------------------------------------------
01) --> Healing Aura
01) --> Shriek
02) --> Scream
04) --> Heal Other
06) --> Hasten
08) --> Combat Jumping
10) --> Shockwave
12) --> Fortitude
14) --> Super Jump
16) --> Clear Mind
18) --> Recovery Aura
20) --> Amplify
22) --> Shout
24) --> Acrobatics
26) --> Regeneration Aura
28) --> Siren's Song
30) --> Assault
32) --> Adrenalin Boost
35) --> Tactics
38) --> Dreadful Wail
41) --> Oppressive Gloom
44) --> Dark Embrace
47) --> Soul Drain
49) --> Vengeance

Looks like you had the same idea I had - use the excessive regeneration and healing on this team to feul a perpetual Oppressive Gloom

Heh, well if we can get a team of 8 together, I might very well go for it. More names:

Tough Love
Yes Hard Feelings
Heartbreaker
Lovebite (or Love Bites)

This stuff writes itself

[ QUOTE ]
Wow, so now there's the idea of an all emp/ offender team?

Crazy people.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm very tempted to give this a go. Oh, the names you could come up with for a violent empath! It's almost too much to resist. Right now I'm thinking of calling her Love Hurts.

Yeah, Haze is annoying for that. One of the reasons I like Sonic so much is you have some nice mezz effects and xero knockback except for one of the cones which has 100% chance of knockback (whihc makes it somehting you can depend on if you need it).

I would've suggested Rad/Sonic for the -res debuffs... but then how much debuffing do you need on a team with 8 RI/EF/LR?

Doesn't PFF also have a pretty hefty Resistance buff? Out of curiosity, is that worth slotting?

Sonic Blast is an awesome set, damage-wise. Resistance debuffs allow your damage to exceed the damage cap, too.*

*Correct me if I'm wrong, Max!

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Also you can't triple stack Fortitiude on everyone... can you?

[/ QUOTE ]Each empath can keep 3 people perma-forted, maybe 4 with the +rech from AB.

[/ QUOTE ]

Awesome... Did not know that!

*rolls an empath*

My favourite Offender CONCEPT had to be the Rad/* Offender who let their teammates die so they could cast Vengeance and then go to town with Fallout. As such, you could SKIP Radient Aura. Something about being able to heal but choosing not to is just really creepy for a Defender - especially if you don't tell the PUG you just joined why I heard a team of 8 such folks could lay waste to pretty much anything, but that was before (and probably why!) they made Vengeance unstackable. I never got to try that build out myself

EDIT: For missing out some important words!

[ QUOTE ]
One idea I fancy trying is the empath offender duo. While empathy is generally regarded as the worst set for building offenders, if you paired two together to exchange buffs, they should be awesome.

The logical extension of this is the all-empath offensive super team, with everyone with tripple stacked fortitude, AB and enough regen/recovery auras to make a regen scrapper look positivly underpowered.

[/ QUOTE ]

The Empath Offender duo/team sounds like a neat idea, but I just can't see it being better than a Kin-duo or an all-Rad team to be honest

Also you can't triple stack Fortitiude on everyone... can you?

For some reason Lift does half the damage of Levitate. I've never understood why.


EDIT: Yes, Dimension Shift has proven a lifesaver at times. Based on my experience in the all-Dom teams, I may have to now wedge it somehow into my Grav/Ice Dominator build...

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
With both AM and Conserve Power in your locker, and maybe a little liberal slotting, would there be an arguement for non-Stamina?


[/ QUOTE ]

I would say take stamina.

Having both Conserve Power and AM is nice because you can alternate between faster end regen, and end discount. Since end regen from AM isn't as effective as the endurance discount, that's where stamina helps.

[/ QUOTE ]

Funnily enough, my toon Miss Guile is a Ill/Rad Controller whom I'm developing without Stamina. It's an experiement I decided to start a few months ago to see if it could be done.

She's now lvl 30 and by using AM with Hasten (to make sure AM is up as often as possible), her endurance is buffed about 2/3 of the time (I can't recall exactly, my hero planner's not on this PC).

I had to skip some power choices obviously - Group Invis instead of Superior Invis, and no Choking Cloud (didn't want it anyway) - but she solos on Invincible without difficulty and her endurance fairs even better in teams.

My one area of concern is EBs and AVs, when fights run on long enough to drain her end bar. Her next power choice is going to be Phantasm, which will up her sustained damage output and passive damage/control output a great deal.

Even if that doesn't fix the AV problem, well she can still solo AVs better than any of my other alts - and she's still leveled faster than any of my other alts too!

I know you'll probably think me crazy for attempting this, but at the end of the day, if it didn't work for me I would just respec her into Stamina, no biggie. That day hasn't come yet.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Rad, as I understand it, is one of the lower-damage blast sets available.

[/ QUOTE ]It's AoE potential is very high, and the ST damage aint too bad either.

[/ QUOTE ]

My mistake then. Don't always believe what you hear.

Sorry, I didn't mean to pan the Rad Blast set in general. I made a Rad/Kin Corruptor not long ago and am enjoying it.

I didn't mean to come off so harsh in my previous post, but Ice really is a better set for the Traps secondary and for PvP, no question.

That said, the holds and slows you get from Ice/* would be very handy for PvP.

Ice is also a higher damaging set than Rad, and has two really nasty AoEs (Ice Storm and Blizzard) that work very well with Scourge.

Rad, as I understand it, is one of the lower-damage blast sets available. The -def effect in all its attacks is nice though, and it has a sniper attack unlike Ice.

Ice is probably the better set for PvP overall.

[ QUOTE ]
Its looking like hasten is going to be a must for doms. Unless they increase the recharge of the domination power, you will be sitting there with a full domination bar and not being able to use it. With hasten it will be better, get a kin on the team and we should be able to stack domination

[/ QUOTE ]

My point exactly. I've never had an issue with the filling speed of my Dom bar, solo or in teams. I'm almost always left waiting for the Domination power itself to recharge. :/

That said, I'm not too fussed about the fighting of AVs. I was always more interested in the prospect of a general buff for Dominators to help them in the 99% of the game that isn't the LRSF. I just wish that what we've been given had more of an effect, or at least (as far as I'm concerned) any effect at all.

For completeness and accuracy's sake, there are two buffs...

[ QUOTE ]
Dominators will now build Domination faster depending on the size of the Team they are grouped with. Each member of the team (aside from the Dominator himself) increases the speed of Domination gain by approximately 16%. Note that this bonus does NOT apply to the existing bonus Assault powers gain in PvP. The maximum bonus to Domination will happen in a full 8 person group.

Base Domination gain increased by 50% (to 3 points per attack up from 2 points per attack.)

[/ QUOTE ]

...and they both increase the charge rate of the Domination bar.

That melee damage change has been around for a while, I think.

Unless there's a bulletpoint that's been left off the I8 patch notes stating Domination's recharge time has been reduced drastically or eliminated altogether, this doesn't really count as a buff becuase it doesn't actually have an effect :/

Kinda annoying, really.

I would take Acid Mortar as soon as possible, at lvl 10. Its -res effect is fantastic and will help a lot with the Fire Blast set, which has no secondary effects of its own.

I'd also take Caltrops much earlier. It vastly improves your survivability in the early levels of the game because enemies will run around it instead of attacking you. Plus it's some auto-hit DoT, which is nice.

Thanks for the advice.

My original plan was to take both Siphon Life and Healing Flames, along with the endurance healing powers from each set, to try and hopefully create a Brute that has little need to rest and lose Fury.

I've taken Siphon Life for now and I'll see how it fares once I get to lvl 22 and put SOs into it.

Hmm, then it may just be the offensively-oriented teams I've been ending up in. I'll swap out the recharge for a second fear enhancer and see what happens.

Thanks for your recommendations. I was expecting to have to 6-slot it! I decided in the end on 1 Accuracy, 1 Fear and 1 Recharge.

As I'll be running with Tactics and Radiation Infection most of the tiem, 1 Accuracy should be plenty. The recharge is there for those occasions during long fights where the victims around the Terror have been wiped out, so I can re-summon it to a new location to incapacitate the enemeies still standing - this tends to happen to me a lot when teaming.