Click_Beetle

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Look closer.

The only two sets missing a third single target are Elec and AR. AR makes the trade off by getting some nice AoE attacks. Elec's AE attacks are only better than Energy and Ice... both of which have some groovy attacks. The only really attractive thing about the set is Short Circuit, and to get any use out of it you have to totally gimp your AE damage.

Elec Primary is kind of middle of the road. It can AE, but it's not good at it. It can zap a single guy, but it's not real good at it. The only really good thing is the drain, and if you want to play with that then you're probably better off making a Defender.

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** shrug **

Like I said, this is precisely the sort of cautionary post I see ad nauseam on the board, but I have never felt the lack in play, and all of the electric blasters and defenders in my SG loves the voltage. This was one of my earliest lessons in the limits of forum orthodoxy.

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If you're using Thunderous Blast, shouldn't the proper comparison be to an Electrical Blaster?

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I dunno... maybe. Elec/ is considered the Psi of Blasters though... it's their worst set. Funny that it's one of the better ones for Defenders.

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I have an electric blaster. I've never felt the lack board folks talk about. I've always thought that particular stigma was just one of those evolved pieces of Conventional Board Wisdom (TM) that doesn't match all that closely to reality.

It's trite, but I come up with ideas in the shower. Really.

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Refer to sig, please note Grav Controller listed. I regularly use Crushing Field. Of course I have Radiation Infection to work with to help keep from getting hit. Thing here is that Tenebrous Tentacles both immobilizes and lowers the liklihood of being hit.

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How much? Did he slot it to enhance the debuff? In the initial statement, I said that if he was throwing out AoE roots and made no other attempts to forestall death by incoming aggro, he'd faceplant. That's what it sounded like was happening to me.

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Honestly, I think you're making a serious mistake through your total neglect of your secondary. Since you're /dark, you can provide a degree of crowd control as well as damage mitigation via your secondary - in addition to doing some damage.


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tried that actually back when i first started the char. died alot and took my team with me most of the time.

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That makes absolutely no sense. Unless you were doing just stupid things with the powers it is hard to imagine (a) doing sufficient damage to get aggro from someone who already has it and (b) taking the entire team with you.

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If you use an AoE immobilize by itself and then don't make any attempts to stop them from cacking you at range, it's really easy to get faceplanted. AoE roots draw aggro on you without stopping ranged attacks.

Gravity controllers face this conundrum with Crushing Field; if they don't back it up with a GDF, then they'll take big aggro from the trapped mobs, but if they do use a GDF, should they have used Crushing Field in the first place?

However, even within Dark Blast there's a solution to the problem. If you use the AoE disorient of Dark Pit in conjunction with the AoE root of Tenebrous Tentacles, it should go a long way towards not dying. A dark/dark has even more options.

On top of that, I'm not sure why the */dark defender dying would necessarily be followed by a team wipe.

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This may come as news to you, but Tankers can solo the more serious AVs. They don't even need the Blaster.

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Not any of the tankers I know. Are you talking about one specific type of tanker build?

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I see a lot of dark jealousy in here as well. I don't really understand that one. As dark is the only defender exclusive set and one that I think everyone will agree is an excellent set, we should be dancing in the streets. I choose to view things that Dark is what the devs feel a defender should be. Is that bad? If Trick Arrows and Sonics are what Dark currently is, I'd say it's a great thing for defenders, although without some changes in how shared sets work, the older sets would have the same issues as we do now.

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Amen, brother.

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Your Tanker is already nigh invulnerable. They don't need your heals. Any form of additional damage will destroy an AV.

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As to tanker nigh invulnerability, I've had to teleport too many tanker corpses (and other corpses from post-tanker-death team wipes) since release to wholly buy that line of argument.

As to any additional form of damage, I would be highly surprised to find that a tanker and, say, a lone blaster took down one of the more serious AVs. It's possible that they could, but I would be surprised by it, and I would be inclined to say that it's not the norm.

EDIT: I'm assuming that by "heals" you mean "heals and defenses", since anyone with your experience would know the mantra "defenders do more than heal" by heart already. I'm just spelling it out for the peanut gallery.

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Personally, my Scrapper has defeated I4 Infernal alone in less than 3.5 minutes. -Regen is really good. I can probably solo a Hive Monster (Quarry) with it... but you're not really impressing me with your examples.

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And I am sure we all bow before your l33tness. However, impressing you is not my overall goal. My goal is to point out that a -regen defender could have made your already impressive 3.5 minutes far, far less than even that since you wouldn't be wasting damage on the regen rate.

Doesn't invalidate the point. In the second example omitted from the quote, a tanker and I took down Infernal by ourselves staying in the green the whole time. A controller might be able to do the same thing with rad or kin, but a blaster, scrapper or another tanker ain't gonna.

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AV fights are 99% about overcoming their (stupid high) health regeneration, not withstanding their damage. While a -regen Defender can help in that regard, a Blaster, Scrapper, or Controller would have a much bigger impact in the long run.

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Actually. this is untrue. My friend was running her 47 fire/kin against Marauder to see if she could solo him. Well, Marauder waxed her big time. So she sidekicked up my mid-20s D3 and we went against him as a duo. I put Twilight Grasp on autofire, did the rest of my schtick, and the two of us killed him painlessly in a few minutes.

EDIT: Even my own SG doesn't get what -Regen can do. We went after Infernal in an 8 man team last night. 6 of the team members went to clean up the Summoning Altar and the roomful of demons while the tank went after Infernal. I tagged along with the tank and TGed Infernal for him. The tank had almost killed Infernal by himself by the time the rest of the team got back and took off his last sliver of health. And who got the congratulations for it? Hint, not me...

A rad/rad defender is perfectly capable of performing mass lockdown with an EMP or a well-slotted Choking Cloud.

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With my Rad/Rad I usually feel like one of the most important members of any team I'm on. AM, healing, debuffing, rezzing, even quality AoE damage, what is it that I can't do?

What crazy world are people living in where people don't like getting their metabolisms accellerated?

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And two, count 'em two AoE holds, one of which is widely acknowledged to be the best in the game.

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With the way Fear works it necessarily happens. I just think it's a silly idea to try and work outside your AT when you do not have the tools to do so.

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"Not have the tools". Heh. OK. You go on thinking that.

And, yeah, Tenebrous Tentacles is the AoE Immobilize to which I was referring.

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I respectfully disagree. a Dark/* Defender should NOT be played like a controller. It should be played as an accuracy and damage debuffer. When I have 3 pets out, I can debuff damage on a single target by 95%. Can a Controller do this? The answer is no.

Just because you have Fearsome Stare doesn't mean you should play like a controller. Stick to what you're AT is for: ie buff/debuff/blasting. If a defender was playing like that on my team, they'd be kicked off.

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I have always thought playing with the mentality of this AT does X and that AT does Y and never the twain shall meet is unnecessarily limiting. A dark/dark defender has available to him a single target hold, an AoE fear, an AoE immobilize, an AoE disorient, and pets which can cast crowd control as well. EDIT: AND an AoE Slow.

Do you realize that's a better array of crowd control options than some of the official controller sets get?

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Just does not offer the challange that PVP does.

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I haven't really got that much challenge out of it. The ones I've been in and seen have boiled down to spamming some attack set the other guy's AT can't counter over and over again.

I just don't personally get much out of PvP. I like cooperative play over competitive anyway, and there's no tangible reward to Arena victories, so PvP is just lost time where I could be leveling one of my characters...

It's more like "if you can't find a team, make one".

My response was, "if you can't find a team, found a supergroup, 'cause that's what I did".

Hmmm... Defenders get higher magnitudes... I kinda like that.

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To the issue of a defender not being needed at the high levels thats total BS. I don't know who you guys are but I can't logg into the game and solo without getting a ton of tells asking if I was up for some missions.

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I got five blind invites & tell requests to team last night. Averaged out to about one an hour, but I was also on teams and out of my level range zones for quite a bit last night. If you count only the time I wasn't teamed and was in a zone of my own level, the requests average out to much, much faster than that.

I also spent part of last night teaching our fire/kin controller about -regen and what it can do for her. Many controllers understand their secondaries as well as defenders understand their primaries, as Dollhouse mentioned, but not all of them. Defenders may find that while their controller capabilities are effectively numerically equivalent, the attention paid to them is not.

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Just look at the entire FF set. PFF, Dispersion, Deflection, and Insulation operate at 80% for a Controller relative to a Defender.

Now look at everything else.... Force Bolt, Force Bubble, Repulsion Field, Repulsion Bomb, and Detention Field are *identical* for a Controller and a Defender. No meaningful differences whatsoever! Not only are these powers a highly situational bag of tricks - but the Controller can use them at *equal* effectiveness to the Defender. How's that for a fair trade-off?

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Star, if you makes you feel better, on my FF controller, with the exception of Detention Field I have only taken those powers that work at 80% effectiveness because I was more interested in my primary. I also have no intention of taking any of the others in upcoming slots when I have better EPP choices available.

On the other hand, that may not make you feel better, since it means the rest of the FF line is so lackluster I couldn't be bribed to take it with 100% efficiency.

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Why is Dark so good? Because it's like a Controller

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I have to say this is true. I usually play controllers, but I've taken to dark/dark like a fish to water because it's more controller-like than my grav/kin. That is not to say that this is a bad thing; on the contrary, it's why I think my dark/dark is so much fun to play, so I hope they don't change it.

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Jack, unless people see a *visible* sign that you are helping, they don't realize the Defenders benefit.

As a high level defender, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt what I can do, but it's basically invisible to most people. They see a blob of green or black and don't relate that to the archvillian not hurting the entire team.

Unless you can turn on exactly what a lot of defenders do into some sort of visible phenomonia, your average player may not really understand.

I'd really like an option that would put a visible "blocked" or "$damage reduced" on peoples screens in a unique color. Then they'll realize that the defender *are* doing their job, even when the green numbers aren't flying above their heads.

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I couldn't agree with this more if I wrote it myself. People understand numbers flying above mobs' heads. People understand numbers flying about their own heads. They understand some really obvious PC buffs like Clear Mind.

They don't get a lot of the others simply because there's no real indication of what they do or how well they're doing it. Heck, even the defenders sometimes sit there wondering if their stuff is actually doing anything.

Some sort of indication of a successful defense contributing to a player somehow would be spiffy.

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You know, I don't really think pets are as much the problem.

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I'm gonna have to disagree with you on that one. Controller pet powers are just so much more powerful than their other powers that it becomes a must have. It's not good for a power set to have one amazing power and eight luke-warm ones, and that's the way that many view the controller power sets.

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The only reason controllers slobber over their pets so much is that they finally get to do damage. They never stop using the other quote lukewarm unquote powers; those other powers are what allow pets to work their magic.

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i cant get anything to show up for the rikti monkey badge either, can anyone confirm actually getting the zookeeper badge at all?

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Some of my SGmates have it. You need something like ten thousand monkeys for it.

I think I have 3 range enhancers in mine to make it speedier, but I may not bother in my alts.