Beauregard

And you'll note that I specifically stated that the level of recharge necessary to make that chain work was impossible. So I have to wonder why you're intentionally trying to mislead people here.

The reality is that Kinetics/Sonics is a classic "it looked good on paper!" build that fools a lot of people. They think of it as "damage buffing and resistance debuffing" when the reality is that it's "damage buffing or resistance debuffing". You can do one or the other well. You can't do both because you don't have the time.

But every time I point out this simple truth, Sonic fanboys come out of the work to spew nonsense like "you can stack up to 100% resistance debuffs!".

If you enjoy playing Sonic Blast with Kinetics, go right ahead. But if you switch to a different blast set, you'll almost certainly notice a marked improvement in your capabilities.

1. Movement speed has caps. The fastest possible build is a */Energy Blaster using Teleport. The next fastest is anyone else using Teleport. But pretty much any super-movement power other than Teleport is going to hit the hard cap with minimal effort. All those +% bonuses to movement speed are normally wasted except for combat movement.

More importantly, the only real bonus Kinetics has in movement is Siphon Speed. Which doesn't make Super Speed significantly faster due to those aforementioned caps. So Kinetics isn't really a good choice from the movement aspect.

2. Stealth belongs to Stalkers and Illusion Controllers. For all intents and purposes, Stealth only has a limited number of useful breakpoints. You can be visible to everything. You can be invisible from normal mobs at long range. You can be invisible from normal mobs at close range. Or you can be invisible to snipers and normal mobs.

Only Illusion Controllers/Snipers can achieve the latter. Super Speed + Celerity: +Stealth achieves all of the other levels. This tends to make the Concealment pool pointless.

This also means that if you're thinking of Stealth'ing the mission and teleporting the group to you, you're doing the wrong build - the Stalker/Illusion Controller in your group is better suited for it. Especially given that your build won't be able to survive long enough when you get spotted by immune-to-stealth enemies (which do exist).

3. You don't need Teleport to Teleport. Most of the time when someone stealth's a mission, they're actually using a Veteran power called Assemble the Team. It does have a long recharge, but normally you can't do missions fast enough to worry about it.

4. Kinetics/Sonics sounds a lot better than it is for buffing/debuffing. The problem is that the two sets are totally at odds with one another.

Kinetics is only truly great for buffing +damage against groups of enemies. Sonic is only worthwhile for debuffing resistance against single enemies. Kinetics requires you take a lot of time using Kinetics powers. Sonic requires you chain-cast Sonic attacks to build up resistance debuffs.

It is the wrong direction. Transference restores over 100% of your endurance every 10 - 15 seconds or so. Spending that kind of endurance - especially with a slow activation set like Sonic - is pretty much impossible.

Aside from what I mentioned above:
1. Transfusion. Transfusion tends to heal its targets from "as near to dead as you can get and still not die" to "full health" anyway, so you don't slot those healing procs into Transfusion. You slot them into your own Health.

2. Increase Density. Yes, it provides +resistance. But it's only one type of resistance and, let's face it, you can just heal the damage. Normally this is the power you'd take at 49 just because you want the option of removing status effects and you need a power with no extra slots to fit your Steadfast/Gladiator's into.

3. Speed Boost. Slotting this power is a waste of time. Transference restores more endurance than anyone could ever conceivably use.

4. Dreadful Wail. 'Crash' powers like these are generally horrible for support archetypes since they shut you down. Once you use this power, you're now standing in the middle of a mob of enemies - the most dangerous of which are both alive and not stunned - and all of your tools for staying alive and killing them are unavailable. Good luck.

5. Power Mastery. This is a head-scratcher. You get absolutely nothing from this epic pool. You don't need Conserve Power at all since you've got Transference. Total Focus is an extraordinarily slow melee attack on a build that has about 2 secs worth of survivability that close to an enemy and Temporary Invulnerability is basically the same power you'd get from any epic pool. Indeed, you managed to avoid the one power that's the entire raison d'etre of the pool: Power Build Up.

Overall, your build is at cross-purposes all over the place. Kinetics thrives on maneuverability, yet you've managed to build what is perhaps the least maneuverable character imaginable (Super Speed with no vertical movement power). You're making a glass-cannon-style Kinetics build that doesn't go for defense, yet emphasizing melee-range attacks. You've got nothing useful to do where Kinetics excels (mass AE), and too much to do in a single target AV/GM fights.

So it's tough to know where to begin to fix it. If you want the concept you're talking about, it involves a different selection of sets/archetypes. If you want to do a Kinetics/* or */Sonics, it involves a different concept.

This is the sort of comment that really makes me wonder if the poster actually plays the game. Except in very long AV/GM fights, Defenders tend to be constantly switching targets rather than concentrating on one target because the targets don't live that long.

To generalize a great deal, Sonic blast powers do 30% less damage in anticipation of the fact that you'll do 40% more once you've used two powers. Which is a nice scheme except for the fact that you won't ever get a chance to use that third (and subsequent) power on the bulk of what you fight.

It's also a scheme that really falls apart when significant parts of your 'rotation' are non-Sonic abilities from your primary.

Even on AV/GM fights - where you do blast away repeatedly on the same target - shaving 5 secs off the fight is far less important than actually surviving the fight in the first place.

That's why "good single target damage" tends to be the "she has a nice personality" of power set descriptions. Single target damage isn't really what matters in a Blast set - you're going to get very similar performance from virtually any Blast set in that regard.

Getting 100% debuff on a single target is impossible. As a Kinetics, getting even a 20% debuff 100% of the time is problematic enough.

If you're fighting an AV/GM at 50, you'll use:
Siphon Power about once every 8 sec
Transfusion about once every 4 sec
Fulcrum Shift about once every 20 sec

That means over 50% of the time you're using some Kinetics ability and we haven't even talked about Siphon Speed and Transference yet.

And in any situation except fighting that AV/GM, Sonic is horrible. It has bad AE and its single target damage is dependent on repeatedly blasting the same target.

No one is saying he has to stop playing it. We're just trying to tell him what to expect in the road ahead. Most players who haven't played Kinetics at a high level simply don't grasp the sheer intensity of the Kinetics set, so it's rather easy to imagine you can just sit back and blast away when you really can't.

A 500% regeneration debuff is effectively a 'free' 40 dps or so on a level 50 AV. However, normally this merely bridges the disparity between the dps of melee non-support toons and ranged support toons (melee don't need to spend time debuffing and their attacks are inherently higher damage).

As for Corruptors/Controllers solo'ing GMs where melee archetypes couldn't, you're talking about a past bug where Radiation Emission wasn't impacted by the AV protections or purple patch. So a RE Corrupter/Defender could deal the equivalent of 1305 extra dps on a level 54 AV - a target that ordinarily reduced a player's damage by over 50%.

Well, the baseline for high end Corruptor recharge is 35% + 70% + 90% = 195%. Which means before you even get to set bonuses, you're already pushing on the best dps performance you can get from Sonic.

At no point did I recommend - or even imply a recommendation for - Psychic Blast. I merely used it as a point of comparison. Indeed, I pointed out multiple times that Psychic Blast wouldn't perform well unless you spent a ton of time doing things with your secondary.

Nor does your level of recharge really matter for Sonic performance. At any level of recharge, sets like Cold and Fire outdamage Sonic while solo. They just pull away even more as you pile on more recharge.

Again, this isn't really a debate. On one side you've got the facts - the actual numbers I posted in this thread. On the other side you've got folks who have a vague 'feeling' that isn't really based on anything except their subjective experience.

Can you use Sonic to solo an AV/GM? Sure. The lower dps isn't enough lower that it will cripple you. But should you? Of course not. Why bring a knife to a gunfight?

I always find it amazing when people try to argue against clearly posted facts. Fire has the best single attack; Psychic Blast has the best two-attack cycle. That's not really debateable - you can scroll up and see the raw numbers if you like.

The question becomes whether or not that two-attack cycle is realistic (since both attacks have recharges too long to be constantly cycled).

Any archetype is capable of solo'ing AVs because you can always use various Inspirations and Temporary Powers. The difference is that while Corruptors need a ton of help from Inspirations/Temporary Powers, the melee and pet archetypes generally don't - they've got the native pairing of defenses + offense to do it.

No, you're the one not grasping the math. Even with the debuff, Sonic's damage can't match up. Which is the whole point.

All the people saying "well, Sonic is great ST damage" are simply wrong. And I showed it rather clearly above by presenting the actual numbers - something you'll note none of the enthusiasts are willing to do. Sonic is horrible single target damage precisely because it has those debuffs attached. It is designed to be roughly equivalent to a middle-of-the-road set like Energy once the debuffs are taken into account.

A 60% resistance debuff is impossible because you can't fit that many nukes in the 5 sec window. You can potentially get a 45% resistance debuff going with a pure Shriek/Scream combo. So let's take a look at that.

Shriek is 35.04 damage in 1 sec. Scream is 80.2 damage in 1.67 sec. We'll have 30% resistance debuffs from our secondary (some have more, some have less; this is a reasonable average). In 5 secs, we can run our cycle 1.36 times and the cycle provides 30% total - so we get another 40.9% resistance debuff on average.

That means our cycle does (35.04 + 80.2) * (1 + .3 + .409) / 3.67 sec = 53.66 dps.

Now take a look at Ice Blast. It does (41.71 + 68.4 + 95.10) * (1 + .3) / 3.74 = 71.33 dps.

This is not some sort of debate over how nice the powers look. This is merely the facts: Sonic does horrible single target damage while solo.

As it was designed to do. The whole reason that Sonic has such bad single target damage is because of those resistance debuffs and what they bring for the rest of your team.

Listen, I understand math makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But trying to replace facts with blather isn't much of a technique for argument. Next time, look up the information so you don't make a fool of yourself.

For a Cold Domination secondary, probably. For most levels of recharge, Fire will beat Psychic Blast on single target for secondaries that don't require much interaction. However, a Psychic/Kinetic would probably beat a Fire/Kinetic for raw damage just because you spend so much time using buff/debuff powers in Kinetic that you just don't have enough time to fit in a third nuke for the rotation.

Well, Corruptors generally aren't built for solo'ing AV/GM since they're poorly suited for it. However, if you were building a Corruptor for this purpose, Sonic would be about the worst set imaginable. It does very low damage and has no worthwhile defensive features. In contrast, Dark and Ice give you ~15% in to hit debuffs. Considering that this is more defense than you'd get from Weave + Maneuvers + Combat Jumping fully slotted out, I'd argue that's pretty significant.

I think you're also not quite grasping the math here. The numbers I was presenting were the breakpoints at which further recharge won't increase your damage any more. Since most high end characters are aiming for perma-Hasten (275% bonus recharge), having a very low ceiling like Sonic means that even if you're doing decent damage at lower levels you'll be outclassed at higher levels of recharge. Since Sonic doesn't even do decent damage at low levels of recharge, it should showcase how badly it gets outclassed at high levels of recharge.

Beam Rifle can debuff regeneration. While it doesn't do so as well as the four secondary sets I mentioned, it will add enough to a set like Time to at least give you a shot.

I'd be wary of trying to discern fine differences like this from the numbers I posted. Consider another way of viewing damage: from their 'optimal point'. For a Cold Corruptor running an idealized debuff rotation:

Psychic = 71.5 dps @ 567% recharge
Fire = 70.5 dps @ 386% recharge
Ice = 59.7 dps @ 310% recharge
Dark = 54.8 dps @ 324% recharge
Sonic = 46.0 dps @ 196% recharge

Those are the peak (base) dps numbers for various sets. At 196% recharge, Sonic will do its best damage. Anything over 196% recharge won't improve Sonic's damage at all because you're already throwing its two best powers as fast as possible.

On the other hand, Psychic is the clear winner in the raw damage department... if you can somehow figure out how to lower your recharge by 567%. Anything less than that and it starts to lose ground (pretty quickly too - at 310% recharge, Ice is the top dog and it's pretty far behind Fire at Fire's optimal 386% recharge).

You've also got considerations like slotting flexibility. For example, Energy Blast nuking flat-out can get an average of ~24% more recharge due to Force Feedback procs. You can do oddball things like Placate with Psychic Blast or buff your to-hit with Dark Blast.

It's also worth noting that just because you can damage the AV/GM slightly more effectively, that doesn't necessarily mean you can survive. Ice Blast has an advantage over Fire Blast in that the AV will have a significantly lower chance to hit the Ice Blast player. Dark Blast has an even greater advantage in this area.

Or you could go with Beam Rifle and just take any secondary you wanted.

1. Using Electric Fence would actually lower your damage since it's worse than either Shriek or Shout (and doesn't apply a -resistance debuff).

2. No matter how you twist and turn, there's a fairly hard limit on the number of stacking debuffs you can fit into the 5 sec window.

3. Shriek is substantially lower damage/animation than Shout, so the only reason to choose it is if it would allow you to cram in an additional -resistance debuff in the 5 sec window. Which wouldn't be the case with the rotation you're describing.

So not only would your objections have been dealt with had you bothered to read a bit further in my earlier post, but your recommendations would merely serve to lower your Sonic Corruptor's already anemic single target damage.

Now you're just throwing out spurious objections in the hope that something will stick. Instead of checking whether it made any sense, you just present it despite the fact that all of those 'rotations' work just fine with relatively standard levels of +recharge on high level characters.

Indeed, the actual effect is the reverse of what you're imagining. As you pile on more recharge and include the effect of intertwining powers from the secondary (you need to refresh those debuffs), Sonic starts to look worse and worse. If you're Sonic/Cold, you need to spend almost 1/6th of your time refreshing debuffs. Each time you use one of those powers, you're losing a -resistance debuff from your nukes for the next nuke (more than that if you're using the 'Electric Fence' method you suggest).

The other sets don't suffer this drawback. Indeed, their damage efficiency actually rises due to the fact that they're replacing the lowest damage elements of their rotation with debuffs. Sonic doesn't benefit from this effect since pretty much all of the elements of its rotation are 'low damage'.

Sonic, like Radiation, is only good in a team setting. If you're solo, it will drastically underperform other sets not just from a standpoint of damage but also utility. You may not want to hear this, but that's how the game works.

Not quite. Resistance debuffs first remove the existing resistance. So if the target has 30% resistance to a damage type and you apply -30% resistance, you first reduce them to 0% resistance. This means that you're transforming 70% damage to 100% damage, an increase of 43%. However, beyond this point resistance debuffs are pretty much just like damage buffs.

However, debuffs are crippled against AVs not only with the "purple patch" but also due to the inherent resistance against debuffs possessed by AVs. Realistically, that 60% resistance debuff is probably only reducing resistance by 24% while a 60% damage buff on an ally is providing full value.

In general, the tougher your team the better buffs become and the tougher your opponents the weaker debuffs become.

Against tough endgame content, most of the debuffs should be coming from offensive sets (not support sets). A Sonic Blaster is better than any Defender at removing damage resistance from an AV/GM (a */Sonic Defender has technically larger resist debuffs on the nukes, but he can't relentlessly pound away like the Blaster can since he has buff/debuff responsibilities in primary).

The only major debuff you're really concerned about is also one Trick Arrow doesn't get: -regen (EMP Arrow doesn't count here).

No one was arguing that the total damage contribution of the Scrapper was more than the total damage contribution of a Defender. They were arguing that the damage directly dealt by the Scrapper was significantly greater than the damage directly dealt by the Defender - which is absolutely true. Oil Slick Arrow going "boom" may seem impressive, but it's peanuts compared to what your Scrapper is relentlessly piling on the AV.

As noted above, that triple-stacked resistance debuff ends up being more like 24% increased damage. Which is nice, but not really in the same league as Fulcrum Shift, Accelerate Metabolism, Chrono Shift, or any of a number of other buffs (even accounting for them only affecting a single team).

Look at it this way: if that 24% increased damage from damage resistance debuffs was truly significant, everyone would be playing /Sonic.

First of all, you need something to multiply in the first place. The support characters don't actually deal all that much damage themselves (compared to the scrappers/blasters).

Second of all, you run up against buff/debuff caps. Consider that a single Sonic Blaster is going to take 80% of the 300% you have allocated to damage resistance debuffs, and you're taking another 60%. So two players have gotten you halfway to the cap on a very common debuff category.

Lastly, the multiplying effect has diminishing returns. If your target is current at -240% resistance and you bring them down to -300% resist, you've only increased the damage being dealt to them by 17.6% (rather than 60%).

What this all means in practical terms is that you want to bring the fewest - and greatest impact - support classes you can amongst a sea of folks who do little except pile on massive amounts of damage.

Before you reply, read the post. Your spurious objection was already covered.

If you're double-stacking disruption, you're obviously talking about AV/GM fights because I can't imagine minions/lieutenants/bosses lasting long enough in any decent team. And as any experienced player can tell you, debuff-intensive sets (beyond stripping the target's initial amounts of power down to zero) are horrible against AV/GM because of debuff resistances.

So your answer to "Trick Arrow is good solo, not so good in teams" is "well, Trick Arrow is great when you're effectively solo because the rest of your team is useless lowbies"?

A little hint for you: when you claim "experience", most readers understand this is code for "I don't know wtf I'm talking about". Anyone can claim "experience" on the web, and if you actually know what you're talking about, there's no need for you to do so. You look especially foolish when all of your examples indicate a sort of experience which is wildly different from the norm (as yours do).

You're thinking of Ice Storm, not Blizzard. Blizzard has both slow and knockdown components, so when you drop it most enemies just sit there and flop around helplessly getting pummeled. And, yes, it's an anomaly - but it's just about the only one of the ultimate end-drainers that's worthwhile on a support class precisely because it doubles as a control effect (the fact that it will single-handedly wipe out all the minions/lieutenants is a nice extra).

You're missing the main point, though. Oil Slick does quite a bit of damage - infrequently. So while it looks impressive, it contributes a fairly small portion of the total damage compared to buffs/debuffs. When you're comparing Trick Arrow to a set that also debuffs resistance an equivalent amount, the presence of buffs to enhance damage in that other set tend to put it ahead of Trick Arrow for a team's overall damage.

Look at it this way: with Oil Slick dealing 250, that means it's doing 1.38 dps (at +0% recharge). Fireball is 45 on the same scale, for 2.81 dps (at +0% recharge). Now, we'll use Forge on that player. 50% of 2.81 is 1.4 dps.

In other words, our Thermal Defender just managed to deliver more added damage to the team by using Forge once on another Defender who is using no attack except Fireball than our Trick Arrow Defender managed to generate via igniting Oil Slicks.

Once you add in factors like "you can Forge multiple players", "the players you Forge tend to do a lot more damage than Defenders" and "players tend to throw more than one attack every 16 sec that Forge buffs", there really isn't any comparison. Forge is ridiculously better than Oil Slick for increasing your team's overall damage. Since Thermal Defenders also get Melt Armor (delivering only slightly smaller resistance debuffs than Trick Arrow), it's entirely fair to say that Thermal Defenders are better at increasing a team's damage than Trick Arrow Defenders.

I suspect where your thought process is going awry is imagining team settings where your team is moving at an abnormally slow pace. In a semi-decent team, a Trick Arrow/Fire Defender can realistically expect to toss 11+ Fireballs for each Oil Slick they toss. Solo, this ratio is more like 2 Fireballs per Oil Slick - and Oil Slick ends up looking a lot better.

Not sure if I agree with this statement. Solo, I'd rank Trick Arrow 5th (after Kinetics, Radiation, Dark and Storm Summoning). Grouped, I'd rank it 9th (add Thermal, Time, Empathy and Sonic to the above 4 sets). The only sets that Trick Arrow really beats out unqualified for raw damage increase would be Traps, Cold and Force Field.

Trick Arrow's damage increase comes from a 3 minute recharge Oil Slick that's about half the damage of a Defender's Blizzard or Tornado coupled with 2 stacking -20% resistance debuffs.

All the other sets have 30% resistance debuffs (Traps is 26%, Storm is 35%, Sonic can stack two on a single target) coupled with buffs that vary from 'nice' (Forge) to 'omfgbroken' (Fulcrum Shift).