Beauregard

Which is a really silly way to slot a power that you yourself acknowledged wasn't a damage power.

Those set bonuses you're disparaging are huge. A 10% recharge bonus is the equivalent of 1/4 of a slot in every power that isn't at the limit of its useful recharge. Which is probably 6 - 10 different powers. In other words, your approach is the equivalent of simply throwing away 2 or so slots. A 15% accuracy bonus is worth 1/3rd of a slot in every power that might potentially miss.

And so on.

What do you get for slotting your way? An almost negligible increase in damage on a power that costs twice the endurance to throw?

It's much like your bad advice on Tornado, where you can't seem to grasp that the primary function of the power isn't damage but as a set mule given the rarity with which its used (and the limited damage produced when it is).

How exactly do you think he's going to manage to sustain any sort of damage for more than a brief period without slotting for recovery bonuses? How do you think he's going to get enough recharge to actually run his max dps rotation in the first place?

Certainly not with your approach.

The key thing Freezing Rain needs is recharge. Can you name a set that provides near-ED levels of recharge and gives better set bonuses than Ragnarok?

Saying the best possible set for the power is "poorly slotting" is ludicrous - especially when you can't give any sort of alternative that's even close.

You're just embarrassing yourself now. If people wanted to read your guide, they would have done so the first dozen time you mentioned it. You wrote the universal-guide-to-all-Storm-Summoning. We get it. We're just wondering why the evidence of this thread suggests you weren't the right guy to write such a guide.

Consider four attack sequences at +100% damage (a bit above ED) and +300% damage (hard cap):
Follow Up/Swipe/Lunge/Swipe = 149 dps to 220 dps
Strike/Swipe/Lunge/Swipe = 149 dps to 298 dps
Gloom/Dominate/Subdue = 104 dps to 208 dps
Gloom/Dominate/Strike/Lunge = 157 dps to 314 dps

These all require recharge that's a bit less than perma-Hasten but a bit more than perma-Mind Link.

This discrepancy between melee and purely ranged is about the same as the discrepancy between Defenders and Blasters using the same power set.

No, I'm really not. We're attempting to determine what proc yields more damage. The best damage performance comes from equalizing the two factors we're multiplying together rather than emphasizing one over the other.

Dividing the attacks over time is huge because it gives an opportunity to respond to attacks rather than just going down under a withering assault.

He gains an entire power's worth of useful IO set bonuses.

Every power that could take the ATOs except for Rain of Fire already has great options to increase the stats he needs. In contrast, Freezing Rain doesn't have much that's worth slotting. You can't slot slow sets because they don't have the recharge. Defense debuff sets don't have the set bonuses he needs.

Ragnarok, on the other hand, gives him precisely what he needs.

In contrast, slotting the ATOs into a power like Blaze does nothing for him because Blaze already has great options for slotting.

Your approach either loses him an entire set's worth of decent bonuses, or replaces a decent set like Thunderstrike/Decimation with a weak one like Touch of Lady Grey/Analyze Weakness.

I rather explicitly laid out when and where Achilles' would be useful, so while it's nice to see you agree with me I'm a bit curious why you bothered with all that arguing.

As for your guide, I didn't bother to read it. Anyone who has to self-aggrandize their work that much probably didn't produce a work worth reading in the first place - and your comments here strongly indicated that you neither thought about (nor played) anything but one particular application of Storm Summoning.

Some truths about Widows:
1. Every Widow should have Incarnate-level soft-capped positional defenses. There's absolutely no reason to cower in the back with the squishies - you've got the defenses of a Super Reflexes Scrapper/Stalker.

2. Every Widow's melee is far better than their ranged. The single target ranged attacks are almost universally horrible (for damage purposes) and you shouldn't even be taking them.

3. The basic Widow rotation of FU/Swipe/Lunge/Swipe is 96% of the maximum possible rotation anyway. What this means in practical terms is that Slash is only useful if you get your jollies pretending to be a Stalker who doesn't do enough damage to alpha strike anything but minions.

4. Night Widows get two significant powers that Fortunatas don't: Eviscerate and Mental Training. Fortunatas get Aim and a ridiculous pile of control options. So unless you're a narrow angle melee cone fanatic, Fortunatas tend to be better in melee than Night Widows.

If you deal 100 damage on a 0% resistance target, you'll deal 130 damage on a -30% resistance target and 160 damage on a -60% target. The first debuff increases damage by 130%. The second one increases damage by 23% beyond that.

If you deal 130 damage on a 0% resistance target. A single -30% resistance will increase this to 169 damage.

It's not an issue of 'diminishing returns'. It's the fact that resistance and damage are both additive with themselves while being multiplicative with each other, so when you add to both you get a better return than when you add to just one.

He's playing a Fire Blast, not Fire Control. This is the Corruptor forum, not the Controller forum.

When he drops a Freezing Rain/Rain of Fire, he's doing so on uncontrolled targets much of the time. Neither of these powers has any sort of control attached other than "well, things will run out of their radius... maybe". That means the Ragnarok knockdown proc is huge. It effectively subtracts 20% of the incoming attacks that are probably going to slice through his paper-thin defenses and do some serious harm.

Fire Blast is also not Fire Control in another significant way: it places huge demands on both endurance and recharge. The easiest way to solve this? Slot purples.

Unlike Fire Control, he doesn't have a whole lot of options for purple slotting since all he has is pure damage powers in primary.

Nor does Storm Summoning help. The only purples it can slot are Absolute Amazement, Apocalypse, Soulbound Allegiance and Ragnarok. The first three aren't viable options. Either he can already slot them in primary (Apocalypse), they're wildly inappropriate/don't buff recharge anyway (Soulbound Allegiance) or they're only for a power he shouldn't be taking anyway (Absolute Amazement).

Now, he can slot Ragnarok in Rain of Fire. But he's already got Rain of Fire slotted with the ATO because it's the only option other than Ragnarok with enough single power recharge reduction and the ATO won't slot into Freezing Rain. He knows he wants to at least slot the Ragnarok proc into one of the two rains, and as long as he's putting the proc in he might as well get the 5-set bonus.

In terms of Achilles' Heel, this same distinction applies. He's not particularly worried about a single tough target. His ranged defense should be able to cover that in any case where a tank isn't mandatory. However, a small army of little targets fires off enough attacks that he's almost guaranteed to get hit - and if any of those hits contain any of a variety of control/debuff effects, he's screwed.

So dropping the AV a few seconds earlier isn't a big deal. On the other hand, dropping minions a few seconds earlier is huge. A damage proc can do that. Achilles' Heel won't - the non-AV/GM have so few hit points that you literally can't do enough damage to make it pay off.

Certainly, slotting Achilles' Heel rather than a damage proc isn't going to break the build. But it's an example of how you're taking advice that might be appropriate for one use and misapplying it to a completely different one.

Movement globals tend not to be truly 'global' in this fashion. If you want Celerity's Stealth or Winter's Gift's slow resistance, you need to turn on (or activate) the power. I believe BotZ works this way as well, but I'm not positive - in any case, he should check before slotting it.

The reason you use Ragnarok/Positron's like this has nothing to do with trying to boost the damage of the power - it has to do with the fact that slow/defense sets are horrible compared to the purple on powers that require significant recharge reduction (and, frankly, pretty horrible in general).

In terms of Achilles' Heel, non-AV/GM don't have enough health to justify using it compared to conventional damage procs. Against AV/GM, you're either fighting in team/league (probably minimizing the actual value of the -resistance debuff given all the other -resistance debuffs) or fighting solo (where you're unlikely to consistently deal enough damage within the 10 sec window to justify it).

Achilles' Heel is a great proc. But that doesn't mean you can just blindly slot it in any power that happens to have -defense attached. It works a lot better for a Katana Scrapper than it does here.

It's not 'remarkably strong'. Tornado deals about 12 dps. Once you've enhanced it, you get to around 24 dps. While it can theoretically deal damage to up to 5 targets, the chance of finding 5 targets that aren't flung away immediately and are standing in melee range of the Tornado is extremely slim. This is a nice addition to his basic dps, but that's all it is - especially given how the basic dps is both significantly larger and externally buffable.

More importantly, he'll rarely ever use Tornado. About the only fights where you wouldn't lose more damage from scattering the spawn than you'd add from the Tornado would be kb-immune AV/GM. You can dream all you want about having portable walls to bounce enemies into, but the vast majority of content has no such walls (especially at the level you're getting Tornado). Even when you do have such walls, you'll frequently just bug the mob out of Tornado's PBAoE and won't get any damage at all.

So it makes sense to use Tornado primarily for a mule while retaining some value for when you do use it. He'll need defense 100% of the time. He only needs Tornado to do anything useful a small fraction of the time - and it's not like Blood Mandate is going to cripple Tornado's output.

Group Invisibility won't actually benefit you (or your group) much since the defense portion suppresses in combat.

+Perception doesn't actually extend your visual range. It just allows you to see through stealth. No matter how much +perception you have, everyone can see non-stealthed targets at the same distance.

You can also use Incarnate abilities to do this. However, it's not particularly useful. As you noted in your post, most content doesn't allow for the long sightlines you'd need. Also, enemy mobs can't really be 'outranged' in this fashion (to prevent precisely the sort of thing you're trying to do).

The only attacks you can really 'out range' are melee attacks. So you'll normally only see players slot Cone attacks for range (since it increases the radius of the attack).

I suspect you'll find that Teleport is actually a lot slower than other movement powers from a practical standpoint due to the mechanics. Unless you're blindly teleporting, you have to finagle with the targeting reticle and then put up with a 4 sec self-immobilize at the end of your jump.

Even without your emphasis on range, a well-designed Blaster should be able to blow apart a single minion/lieutenant or even con boss before they can close range anyway. The problem emerges when you start going to +4 level shift content, dealing with AVs or finding yourself in tight quarters.

To some extent, you're hitting on one of the critical flaws of the modern Blaster. Originally, Blasters were a lot like a ranged version of Stalkers (who came later). You could open up the battle with a massive attack that simply subtracted a key enemy and then settle down into dealing decent damage. You could also - at the expense of crippling yourself - wipe out a large spawn on a long cooldown.

Unfortunately, this just isn't a very useful ability in most of the game because almost all of the game is played at the 'me smash' level of tactics where you simply out-power any enemies.

If you want to make this sort of 'toon, about the only time you'll really see the benefits is going after hardcore badges - and probably not even then.

Technically, Conduit of Pain is a better self-buff for recharge and it can be made perma as well. There's just a tiny little limitation...

MIDs gets its data from redtomax, which gets its data from the game client. They're not independent data points.

Nor does it change the fact that the 'unresistable' flag doesn't do anything for Siphon Speed. In fact, before I wrote my reply I specifically tested it in case it had changed. I fired up a level 50 council mission, used Siphon Speed (fully slow slotted) on both a vampire and werewolf. The result? Extremely slow-moving vampire. Near-full speed werewolf. The difference is obvious.

You're not understanding my #2. It's not about reducing the aggregate damage. It's about surviving that single devastating attack. You can almost always reduce the damage from many small attacks by playing smart. But if you simply don't have enough hp + resists to survive one big attack, there's no time to deal with that attack.

However, I was trying to be complete rather than giving specific alternatives. For a specific alternative, consider that he spent 3 slots on Kinetic that could have gone to Gaussian's: 3.75% S/L + 1.875% Melee vs. 2.5% all positionals + 1.25% S/L/E/N/F/C. That's just a bad tradeoff.

The 'unresistable' flag doesn't actually do anything. That's why Warwolves still run at nearly full speed when you tag them with Siphon Speed, but everything else in the Council looks like they're swimming through molasses - the -max run speed and a tiny smidgen of the -run speed take effect, everything else is resisted.

It's the same with AV (although much harder to test quickly for yourself). They fully resist both the -recharge and the -run speed with their AV resists.

In terms of the extra recharge, it's certainly useful. However, it comes at the cost of using up (scarce) activation time. At lower levels, this is a great tradeoff. But once you've piled on perma-Hasten levels of recharge from other powers you've got so much to do that spending 2 secs to get an extra 20% recharge isn't really all that great of a tradeoff.

The movement portion is meaningless with Inertial Reduction, which can allow you to move at unsuppressable hard cap speeds. Even a little hop while you're running along hurls you forward as fast as you'd ever want to go.

Certainly, I'd want Siphon Speed as I leveled up. But in a level 50 IO build, I don't find it of much use.

I'm not saying to totally abandon defense. I'm pointing out that taking/slotting powers exclusively for set bonuses to eek out a few points of defense is a waste.

For survival, the priority really goes:
1. Play smart. Don't try to Brawl a full spawn of Knives of Vengeance on your Defender.
2. Be able to survive the most dangerous attack. If you can survive a single hit, you can heal/buff/flee/whatever. If you can't survive the hit, you're just going to randomly die from time to time. In the Tanker realm, this might be termed the "Lord Recluse effect". But it still holds true for non-Tankers.
3. Control the situation. Debuff/stun/hold/whatever your opponents so they can't hit you.
4. Reduce the total amount of damage you'll be taking so you're not constantly needing heals/Clear Minds/etc.

Defense falls under #4 there. It's still worth some attention, but the relentless refrain of "must soft-cap defense" idea is probably the single biggest cause of bad builds I've seen. Defense is good. But in any iTrial you'll see a few folks who took it to the extremes the OP did - wasting powers and slots on dribbles of extra defense - and who end up constantly dying because they paid no attention to the more important #1 - #3 elements.

Unless you're making a pure farm 'toon, what your defense looks like in Mid's isn't remotely what it will look like in play. The diversity of enemies means that you'll frequently be relegated to 'weak' defenses that aren't soft-capped. The diversity of teammates means that you'll often end up far over the cap even if you weren't soft-capped to start.

In an IO build, normally endurance isn't a significant problem so the major virtue of Transference is as a 'soft control' (sapping an enemy's entire endurance bar). Personally, I like Transference to be always ready and 4-slotting tends to hit better set bonuses than 3-slotting but you can probably live with just the standard amount of recharge you get from set bonuses/abilities.

However, the real issue is that Transference can be slotted with IO sets and he's dedicated enough slots to it that he would be getting IO set bonuses if he used IO sets. Just because they aren't necessarily the 'perfect' bonuses doesn't mean that they're not essentially a free benefit for the character.

And in this particular case, they're actually a solid benefit. Both level 50 end mod sets come with +hit points and +recovery in the first four slots. One of them will improve his character while delivering almost identical performance for the actual power compared to his current slotting.

Players tend to overlook the fact that Kinetics is not only the most effective damage buffing set, it's also the most effective damage debuffing set. Siphon Power is a critical part of that equation. While it may not be as impressive as Fulcrum Shift, it debuffs damage just as much. So I wouldn't worry that much about being 'dependent' on Siphon Power.

Transfusion. This power alone will probably cost you 10b to slot - and for minimal gain. You seem desperate to get +7.5% recharge from your healing power, but this is the same bonus as LotG. The rest of the benefits are fairly easy to obtain from a more conventional slotting like Touch of the Nictus/Miracle.

Siphon Speed. Ultimately, this power isn't worth it. The activation time ends up losing you more than you get back from it and a single target slow isn't a particularly worthwhile soft control.

Speed Boost. It doesn't make much sense to add a slot to Speed Boost in a level 50 build since the only players who really have end problems at that point will be melee and you can insta-restore their entire endurance bar with Transference.

Weave. HOs grant you +66.6% end discount and +40% defense. Slotting two more LotG (Def and Def/End) would give you ~50% defense, 33.3% end and more HP/Regen from the set bonuses.

Inertial Reduction. Adding two slots here would grant you 1.25% Ranged, 1.875% AoE, 0.625% En/Neg, 0.938% Fire/Cold Defense. None of these numbers are particularly impressive until you realize that you only spent two slots on them. Spending 5 slots on those Thunderstrikes gleaned you 0.75% Ranged per slot, while a full set of BotZ grants you 1.5625 positionals per slot.

Transference. You can get the same basic stats by using either Efficacy Adaptor or Performance Shift and get the set bonuses as well (although you probably want to 4-slot since recharge is important as well).

Tactics. A major reason people take this in the first place is that you can 6-slot Gaussian's for massive defensive bonuses (the build-up proc isn't particularly worthwhile since you can hard-cap your +damage).

Super Speed. The norm would be to slot this for stealth so you get complete invisible. At least slot something for Celerity/Unbounded Leap stealth (Sprint is a common choice for players who can't afford the slot).

Boxing/Flurry/Brawl. First of all, get rid of Flurry. You're not just throwing away 3 slots unnecessarily - you're throwing away an entire power pick as well. Second of all, don't slot any of these powers at all. The set bonuses may be tempting, but they're simply not worth the slots you're committing to them given that you'll never use any of these powers. The defense soft-cap is a limit, not a goal. Your actual goal is being tough enough to survive a hit or two that penetrates your defenses - if you can't do that, you'll just be dying a lot to bad luck. Once you can do that, you can simply eat an inspiration if you get in trouble.

Dark Mastery. I suspect you want the self-rez. However, not only isn't it very useful (it requires you be in the thick of things and you shouldn't be dying in the first place; it can also be replaced by VIP powers) but it shackles you with an otherwise weak epic set. You don't need additional end recovery and Dark Embrace has some of the weaker supplemental resists (Toxic, Negative).

Electricity and Psionic mastery would both be better choices. They have better armors (Energy and Psionic damage are much more common than Negative/Toxic) and they have powers that allow you 'purple diversity'. The various purple sets give such massive bonuses that it makes sense to slot multiple powers with purples (about the only really weak purple set is the one you happen to have slotted - Apocalypse). By adding Immobilize/Hold/etc. to your build, you can slot more purples and pile on huge bonuses to recharge.

I think you're trying to play a game that no longer exists. Hard controls become less and less relevant the deeper you get into the game compared to soft controls because hard controls never really get any better (you can't increase Mag very effectively) while soft controls get a lot better (you go from "I'm slightly harder to hit" to "the targets have a rock bottom chance to hit").

Now, there's nothing wrong with playing the game however you have fun. But even as you're doing so, you should try to recognize that you're making a personal choice based on subjective concerns rather the most potent choice based on objective ones.

Because of the superior buffs/debuffs for Defender, a Rad/Sonic Defender will generally outdamage a Sonic/Rad Corruptor - meaning the Corruptor variant is almost strictly inferior to the Defender variant.

Every nuke you use carries a -20% resist debuff for Defenders vs. -15% for Corruptors. AM is 25% damage for Defenders vs. 20% for Corruptors and EF is -22.25% for Corruptors vs. -30% for Defenders.

Note that this type of build is basically an AV/GM-specialist - you won't be particularly helpful in mowing down large numbers of enemies, but you'll be fantastic chewing through the final boss.

Given the triple constraint of "must be Corruptor", "must include Radiation" and "team support over all other factors", I'd say your best bet would be Radiation Blast/Pain Domination. However, getting to 50 where the build would really shine would be a long, hard process since you'd be spending a whole lot of time in melee range without much in the way of defenses to prevent you from dying there.

Enhancements will normally impact the attacks equally - if you increase damage by +95% on one, you do so on the other as well. However, I should note that Claws can equip Achilles' Heel and deliver about 20% more damage than strictly indicated by DPA.

In terms of Build Ups, these are less important for Brutes than other archetypes because they're additive with Fury. If you get an 80% 'Build Up' over time and another build only gives you a 40% 'Build Up', that's a 30% improvement in damage. The same difference when you already have +300% damage is 9%.

The attacks don't need to be consecutive. In actuality, using a defense inspiration while you're at softcap will increase the average time it takes them to start the cascading defense failure about two-fold. However, this isn't particularly meaningful when they have about a 30% chance to start the cascading defense failure on the alpha strike.

What you're really missing in this whole discussion is that you're espousing slotting to make trivial encounters even more trivial. Why would you slot so that enemies who can barely overcome your regeneration with their damage are slightly less threatening rather than slot for enemies who crash through your weak resists and do serious damage?

It's actually a bit worse than 1 in 20 since most -defense debuffs are delivered by high accuracy attacks. And I'm not sure where you're getting the "1 in 400" bit from.

The absolute floor for an attack to miss you is 5% * attacker's accuracy bonus. For example, an equal level (or higher) Archvillain will hit you about 1 in 10 times no matter what you do with your defense.

Which is precisely my point: if you're going to survive the cascading defense failure anyway, why would you build towards preventing it?

What you're doing is building a character who has unnecessary and unreliable extra defense against attacks you're not worried about in the first place - at the expense of gaping holes against attacks that will actually kill you. That's fine if you plan to make a farming toon that only faces one specific type of attack. But if you're planning to experience a broader range of content, it's a silly way to go about it.

I have a hard time believing you've actually played much of the high end content with Electric Armor if you haven't frequently experienced your defense going red even when you're soft-capped against the attack. In places like Dark Astoria and many of the high end task forces/missions, it's the rule rather than the exception.