Avalanche_EU

I've tried a few dark/*s but just can't seem to get them past their teens despite them being so powerful. There is just something ugly about the black, pixellated mess that it makes all over the floor that puts me off Shadowfall in particular, looks dire.

It also doesn't mesh with my usually brightly coloured spandex or patent leather, shiny outfits. I refuse to add to the server's overpopulation of demonic horned, black clad heroes.

But now I'm seriously interested in a hot pink /psi affair. Hmm what primary to choose for next alt

Max is right, don't bother with an end in teleport. I used to have 2 range 1 end and then 3 range and now just 1 range since a recent respec. I teleport around mid-fight quite aggressively to get my hurricane where it's needed fast as well.

When I respecced my FF/sonic to a total support toon with just primary and pool powers I played for one evening and then stopped playing him completely for months. It was utterly dull.

I swung the other way completely with an offensive build with only leaping and fitness pools and lots of sonic blast powers. I'm really loving him now. The sonic set is great for when you find yourself soloing as siren's song and screech make life as a FFer blissful.

BTW you don't really need endredux in your two team target bubbles. I can rebubble a full team in a crisis mid-fight with force bubble, combat jumping, acrobatics and dispersion bubble running and barely notice it. I only have 1 endredux in each toggle as well.

I like VS. If you're going to be taking time to kill a spawn then it's very good damage per unit endurance and easily up all the time. You also don't have to slot accuracy as it seems to have 200% base. It fires rapidly, every 2-3 seconds and does roughly charged bolts damage, until the timer runs out.

If you're going to be mainly AoEing large spawns of minions/lieuts then it's probably not worth taking.

Does the -Spd and -Rech in glue arrow stack with multiple applications from the same defender? I find glue arrow refreshes very quickly and was going to slot 1 Rech 3 Slow on my TA.

Is there a point to having it up ultra fast otherwise? It's perma with one recharge SO even without hasten up.

I've just had great difficulty all week trying to find a team up for the respec trial with the freaks. I can't even play my FF/sonic because the lying fiend that is repulsion bomb keeps jumping off my quickbar and laughing at me.

If anyone is up for it tonight (Friday 27th) then can you post here or message me on @Alith.

Thanks.

Can I ask what the recharge time on screech is like? I'm only half a level away from it on my FF/sonic and he can be a bit squishy at times.

Can you siren's song and then break sleep with it on every mob and drop them one at a time and is it fast enough to stack on bosses?

Corruptor rain powers do fantastic total damage but have the unfortunate effect of making mobs flee the area. Flashfire + fire cages + corruptors firing off AoEs = dead mobs fast.

Also you can AoE immob a group of mobs around a corner or from behind an object by just having line of sight to one mob on the edge of the pack. That way you don't get hit and you can prevent large spawns from swarming your team.

There are plenty of uses but like people say, if nobody has aggro and you hit AoE immob in plain sight of mobs then you will have all the aggro. You just have to be sensible in using it.

The main reason to take fire cages is the fast recharging combination of flashfire and fire cages effectively being a ranged AoE hold.

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One damage type is never a bright idea.

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Err, could you be more offensive? Especially when you then go on to describe a combo that has only elec damage in it, like almost every */elec combo you could pick.

In my quiet time I solo now and then in Crey's and hunt Freaks. My lightning storm (a huge source of aoe damage if used correctly, especially for a defender) and elec blasts both get a bonus. That's great synergy from where I'm standing and it's just me so I can pick and choose what I want to hunt to pass the time.

In a team.. does anyone honestly care what damage type each team member has vs the mobs you're fighting? I've never once heard anyone make a comment like that, or pick someone for a team based on their damage type.

I would work in snow storm, freezing rain and hurricane by lvl 12 and get 4 slots in each asap. They are the three powers in storm that are must-haves. You can get away easily with 1 Endredux and 3 Slow/Recharge/ToHitDebuff in each one. The -Def on FR is fierce even unslotted and I've never felt the need to add enhancers to that.

EDIT: I have fly on my ice/storm with 3 fly SOs in it. I'm not sure why anyone would need endredux in fly as it's a travel power and the only thing you might want to travel with is steamy mist. You can have fly (with no endredux) and steamy mist (with 1 endredux) active with 3 slotted stamina and fly indefinitely.

I know, I was disagreeing with Max.

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For one, don't take storm, even though it's a great set it has zero synergy with elec (no, the drain of the cloud doesn't count )

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I don't agree. Both are energy based damage so you will get bonuses on the same mobs from your lightning storm and your blasts. Also the fire and forget nature of voltaic sentinel meshes very well with the fire and forget lightning storm, both your two biggest sources of damage over time and fantastic damage per unit endurance. Also it has a snipe, which is easy as pie to work into your attack chain as the mobs are accuracy debuffed and bobbing about on the edge of your hurricane. You don't get interrupted if something attacks you, only if it hits you.

The only thing I can see that doesn't have great synergy is that short circuit is pbaoe and you don't want to be running up to mobs that are not accuracy debuffed to use it and your accuracy debuff comes from hurricane. I didnt' take it for this reason but I took charged bolts, lightning bolt, ball lightning, zapp, voltaic sentinel and thunderous blast and find it a great set for a stormie. I might work in Aim on the next respec to use with the nuke.

Oh whilst you are on the subject... is power push identical to force bolt? Is there any power that is identical to force bolt? FB is so godly and I always thought of it as a set defining power for forcefielders. Someone once mentioned that the recharge and % knockback on the blastery versions was just nowhere near as good.

Any info on this? Thanks.

Do you not find hurricane a pain when you want to use shout? I can just see you having to get within knockback range to use it and accidently spreading out the mobs all the time... and siren's song is one of the best sonic powers but just doesn't feel very storm compatible as most of your storm powers will break sleep.

I'm sure it "works" but of all the secondary sets it looks like the one with the least synergy. They are both my favourite sets though. I can imagine that if you are in an uberteam and just use FR, snowstorm and howl most of the time that it would be a great combo. By uberteam I mean when you find that the entire spawn is dead in about 5 seconds.

I heartily recommend sonic as a secondary. Since I made my FF/sonic I've pretty much stuck to sonic as a secondary for all my defender alts.

For defenders it's 20% resist debuff per blast, which gets really crazy once your attacks cycle faster and you can whip out a shriek, scream, shriek, shout combo that will drop things incredibly quickly.

The set also has some great soloing tools but lacks decent AoE damage. Single target damage is spectacular though. You will feel like a blaster at times, especially if your primary has -Res debuffs as well. Pair it with sonic or TA primaries (which have two stackable -Res debuffs each) and you can be giving your team 100+% resist debuffage if you blast a lot. I notice the difference easily when I'm playing my sonic/sonic. Bosses just disintegrate.

I have no idea if there is a -Res debuff cap or if it just affects your damage immediately and pushes you towards your damage cap. My sonic/sonic was teamed with a dark/*, dark/* and rad/rad. With two tar patches, an enervating field and a disruption field the mobs were vaporised in seconds and I threw a sonic siphon onto the bosses for another 30% as well. I can't imagine how crazy it would have been if we had all taken sonic secondaries and spammed Howl at those mobs!

P.S. Storm is the most fun powerset in the game but I don't think that it pairs particularly well with a sonic secondary.

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One last point... hurricane doesn't need to be on all the time you know... you could always turn it off then use thunderclap, then turn it back on again?

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If you're facing minions that are bunched together then I'd go for that yes but you would most likely be looking at several attack rounds from lieuts and bosses with no accuracy debuff before hurricane recycles again.

On a side note, I recently respecced out of my three leaping powers as I already had teleport as well. With this I picked up some more blasts and thunderclap. I generally use it in a crisis to bridge the gap between being toggle dropped by a status effect and getting hurricane up and running again.

I have to agree. I have thunderstorm slotted 3 damage, 1 endredx and 2 recharge. With no hasten you can get a second storm up a few seconds before the first one dissipates.

Definately go for damage. You can get a whole spawn of mobs shoved into a corner and the storm will hit the lot with each blast. That's about 150 damage AoE every couple of seconds at lvl 36 on yellow/orange minions. It's my main source of damage. Ball lightning comes nowhere near in damage per second or damage per unit endurance. You just have to get everything tightly bunched because the AoE radius is quite small.

Just thought I'd pop back into the thread to say, "OMGOMGOMG FORCE BUBBLEZZZZZZ"

My storm defender is bowing his head in shame, with his limp, little hurricane. The difference in herding is a bit like... well... using a spoon instead of chopsticks. Only rice doesn't one-shot you.

I think having blasts activate the inherent is the only way to standardise it across all the primaries. Since all the primaries have buffs/debuffs then it could be a direct % multiplier of buff/debuff effect.

It would still be hard to balance though as a set like forcefield or sonic can literally spend 100% of the fight blasting and would therefore reach ridiculous levels of protection if their bubbles/rings were buffed up by the inherent.

I was thinking of a fury bar affair that charged up to the max in say 10 seconds of non-stop blasting but then also leeched down to zero from full in 10 seconds as well. Perhaps 30-50% bonus on your buff/debuffs for a full bar? For that you would need to blast constantly for 10 seconds and then continue to blast constantly for as long as you wanted the bonus to apply.

Well we all seem to agree that defenders' playstyles and the benefits they would want vary considerably depending on which primary you choose.

So how about we take something that all defenders have in common, which is a seconary blast set? All these blasts have secondary effects so perhaps to differentiate a defender blast set from a blaster blast set (apart from the inherent damage difference) we could have an inherent that is linked with the secondary effect of the blasts.

Something like, the more blasting you do in a specific window of time, the greater the secondary effect on your blasts becomes. This would help out with soloing as well incidentally.

Or perhaps something completely different like, the more blasting you do, the less % damage people in your team take. This might make Defiant's army of empath leeches that never blast, actually take and slot some blasts and do more than stand around with group heal on auto, chatting... although that would mean contributing more than half a character to your team so unlikely to happen.

I haven't seen a vigilance whine in ages and the defender board is so slow these days. How are people finding it now that they have had a chance to use it for a while? Has anyone factored it into their builds? I know I've dropped down to one end redux in all my storm powers because of it.

Perhaps it is just the empaths that find it useless but on my FF and Storm defenders I just think it's fab. My end rarely goes down because they are both defending sets where you will have people with reduced health (even quite low with forcefield and a long fight) but not really in imminent danger of dying. You get a huge endurance discount from this.

If I solo then the end drain is noticeable, especially on my stormie. I wouldn't not say that I activate powers less frequently in groups either as I'm always using all my powers and blasting constantly, on both FF and Stormie.

So, in summary, I find Vigilance.. totally.. fab.

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FF is an amazing solo defender!
It might be a little slow, but with knockback, blasts and more defence than any other defender gets, it´s a mighty easy grind, imo anyways!

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I totally agree. My FF/sonic solos (I don't solo often but do now and then) on unyielding and between forcebolt, detention field, dispersion bubble, combat jumping and acrobatics, he's a really safe soloer. I rarely ever have to use PFF.

I absolutely adore detention field. You can just totally remove one mob from the equation and keep the rest at bay with force bolt worked into your attack chain.

Do you need accuracy in thunderstorm? I thought it had 200% accuracy base?

I don't have accuracy in thunderstorm or voltaic sentinel and I think they "miss" probably once in a blue moon, or the 5% cap.

My storm/elec gets away with 1 endredux and 3 effect (or 3 recharge in freezing rain) enhancers in most of his storm powers quite happily. I think only lightning storm has more than 4 slots. That leaves me with enough slots for two six slotted blasts, a six slotted AoE blast, six slotted nuke and six slotted hold. That's using all the slots up to lvl 40. I haven't looked at the 41+ powers and slots yet and would rather suck it and see and respec a bit instead of paper build something I haven't tried yet.

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Tanker: "I'm trying to control the aggro here, Defender, just stick to healing me"
Storm defender: "So.. do I understand you correctly in that your suggesting me to use my weak 2-3 slotted O2 boost instead of using 5-6 powers that are 6 slotted that will stop the bad guys from hitting you at all?"
Tanker: "erm.. yes?"
Storm defender: "Good to know" kick tanker/leave team.

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I had a hurricane complaint the other day from a tanker so I told him I would switch it off and see how it goes. Needless to say I healed more in 5 minutes than I had in the previous week and several people died, even with me plus an empath in the group. The hurricane went back on and I think I O2 boosted maybe three times the rest of the mission.