David_Yanakov
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Posts
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Joined
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There are a few reasons I like Ice matched with thorns. Number one is the way it looks when you match the color of your crystal spines to the ice powers. You sprout ice shards instead of spines.
Possibly the best PBAoE toggle available. It does draw some agro if you like to wade into melee without a good tank but offers quite a lot of defense through mitigation as well as slowing your target so they can't run away. If you're making full use of the AoE potential you get with thorns, you're going to be drawing that agro anyway.
With an Ice/Thorns, you should never get hit with a melee attack. Between thorntrops, arctic air, ice slick and glacier as a panic button, melee attackers will have the deck entirely stacked against them. Even if they do get a swing in, they have to deal with 50% -rech while doing it. This allows you to focus fully on ranged defense, leaving you open to pump your damage up as high as it can go. Best of all, all those controls are either toggles or make good lead ins for attacks. Shiver will add more -rech but can be skipped, as can flash freeze. I like to keep flash freeze because sleep powers make great set mules for some very cheap purples and it comes in handy when a second spawn is too close and needs to be delayed for a bit. Frostbite is skipped every time because with all the slows you really don't need to immobilize at all and it will get you killed 90% of the times you actually use it.
Earth is good for stacking -def with the effect from your thorns but honestly, how much of that do you need? -
I've played a sniper build before and while teamed, it sort of worked but was less useful than the standard 'let the tank keep agro and blast away' playstyle. It only really works on open maps and you need to work with a partner in order to hit targets you can't see. It also nearly requires that you hoverblast since you can't kill with just the snipe fast enough to keep a spawn from closing in on you when you have to root yourself to attack. /EM has some great mitigation tools in the knockbacks but they're rarely enough to get a snipe in at close range and aside from the buffs, the secondary is useless outside melee range. Even with power pools, there is no immobilize or hold that works at a range longer than any other attack in your primary.
With beam rifle I think you'll be happier at a shorter range spreading disintegration across hordes of enemies and helping your team steamroll rather than hanging back plinking every ten seconds. Solo, the same tactics you would use to keep enemies at a distance work even better when you unload the entire arsenal at them while they're glued down. Snipes can be fun but even twinked out they can't carry the game alone. -
If you're going to make a build specific to the demon farm, a Fire/Fire brute would be the way to go. The smaller radius on FSC is made up for by the higher damage once resistance numbers are factored in. You do want to go Brute over Scrapper so that you get a taunt effect in Burn else the spawns tend to scatter.
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Necro meshes way too well with Traps for me to want to play other secondaries. For ninjas, any of the buff inclusives would work well. Trick arrow would be good except that masterminds only get 1/3 as much out of it as defenders. With a set that already has less powerful versions of debuffs from other sets, it's a deathblow.
Ninja/Thermal works very well. Poison can be good but it's a very single target combo. Force Field is always survivable but you'd probably miss having a heal. I can't offer any opinions of Time as I've not tried it at all with masterminds yet.
Dark or Thermal would be my first picks for Ninja. Particularly now that Twilight Grasp got fixed. -
In addition to all that good stuff, the number one reason Traps is such a great secondary is that there is never any reason for you or your pets to have to absorb an alpha ever again once you get up to Seekers. It is incredibly rare for my Thugs/Traps mastermind to die, even compared to my other, non-Traps masterminds.
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Crane Kick is entirely skippable now that Cobra Strike got changed from a gauranteed stun to a 75% chance to stun plus identical damage. Crane Kick is now only really useful now for looking awesome and for throwing problem mobs out of the herd so the blasters can focus on them.
The 20% recharge and defense debuff protection in Super Reflexes are great. It's a bit on the defense side of the scale so you won't get the same sort of damage numbers as you would with shield but I don't think it would be enough either way to really be noticeable. My vote would be to follow your concept and not worry about the small stuff. -
I'm a big fan of versatility. To date I've run this toon as a Huntsman type back when VEATs were new it allowed even small teams to plow right through content like it wasn't there. Now that I've returned I've found it to be a mite squishy and at the same time, lost my aversion to wiggly legs due to some of the new costume options really clicking. Budget is 700 to 1 billion inf plus 5-8 A Merits. I'm not worried about incarnate stuff yet as that will fall into place once the core build is complete.
My main goals are tankability and team support but big, big orange numbers are never a bad thing.
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I'm a big fan of versatility. To date I've run this toon as a Huntsman type back when VEATs were new it allowed even small teams to plow right through content like it wasn't there. Now that I've returned I've found it to be a mite squishy and at the same time, lost my aversion to wiggly legs due to some of the new costume options really clicking. Budget is 700 to 1 billion inf plus 5-8 A Merits. I'm not worried about incarnate stuff yet as that will fall into place once the core build is complete.
My main goals are tankability and team support but big, big orange numbers are never a bad thing.
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I'd just like to add that Kinetic Melee's assassin strike animates a third of a second faster than any of the others aside from Ninja Blade. It animates a full second faster than that one.
It also has a great mix of quick moves for minions and powerhouses for bosses with quite a decent aoe tossed in for flavour. -
Soul Storm also has the best after-animation pose in the game going for it.
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It's true that things like rikti drones, eyes of rularru, etc ignore stealth. Where Illusion is superior for stealthing is that you can confuse them to avoid detection. Powers like Smoke Grenade or Flash Arrow also work but only reduce the detection range a bit.
Stalkers also get to make use of placate to get through tight spots. -
I keep my pets in bodyguard mode almost full time. I rewrote the macros so I have an attack key that sets them to passive to keep them focused on what I want to kill if I have need of it. Target goes passive for whatever reason, slap it like you would a ranged attack and it melts. Then hit the bodyguard macro key and put them back in.
The main benefit of defensive isn't to keep the pets in line, it's that each pet increases your effective damage resistance to all types by a significant amount. With 6 pets in bodyguard mode, you're only taking 25% of incoming damage before any defense or damage resistance in your build. If you drop that down to two pets in bodyguard, you're taking 50% -
I'm a really big fan of Thugs/Traps. A huge portion of the game will feel like cheating and the rest will only require that you exercise actual caution.
For just plain fun, Necro/Traps is my favorite. Send in your lich, detonate him for massive damage, then extract his soul and resummon so you can run with two boss level pets for a couple minutes. Both Thugs and Necro are among the few primaries that allow slotting of the recharge intensive IO sets with their excellent bonuses. -
Traps is really difficult to beat for tankerminding. Being able to drop seeker drones on top of the next spawn in order to soak up all the alpha and mezzes simply cannot be matched by the other secondaries.
Time does have tools for dealing with mezzing without having to rely on Clarion or break frees. Having them along does open up horizons though. The real downside that I see is Time has a voracious appetite for endurance. If you're running Time's Juncture and don't have a huge amount of end reduction slotted, you almost have to choose between healing, buffing or debuffing. -
With basic end reduction slotting, the endurance is manageable. You do need to keep an eye on things and be willing to turn off a toggle or two if you find yourself having to slow down. Even with nothing but Arctic Air running, however, it's still a very strong support build.
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Damage is a serious issue, yes. On the other hand you can go +1/x4 at level 12 and not have trouble surviving so keeping a pet blaster or scrapper alive is pretty simple.
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The endurance use is indeed horrific. DOs are vital to being able to fight at all with both auras running. That said, running sewer trials with teams I was able to either keep healing during fights or fire off my hold to keep the bosses more helpless while providing debuff support all the while. The recovery hydra helps as well. With SOs and a recovery bonus or two, it should run fine as long as you're cautious until you get recovery boost powers.
The amount of slowing you can do is rather intense. You've got a fairly large PBAoE where run speed is floored, no one can jump or fly and all sorts of yummy debuffs ocur in addition to the occasional confuse. And then you drop an ice slick over here! A disruption field over there! Ambush! Shiver them! Buff the crap out of your team some more! New ice slick!
Yeah, it's a fun team build... -
Neutrino Bolt is what sells rad for me. With just a little bit of global recharge it comes back in less than a second so it's always available. Toss an accuracy or two, an achilles heel and damage procs to taste and it's a facemelter.
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Cage is actually not all that situational. It comes in handy as a panic button power or even if you just have too many bosses in a small area and need to put one off for a bit. It's also very useful for a lot of task forces to be able to shut down support, like Recluse's pylons or the healing nictus in the ITF. I can see it being more useful for masterminds, not less.
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Dark Miasma goes very well with Sonic Blast in my experience. Almost freakishly survivable for a squishy AT and Sonic tends to lead to very large damage numbers.
I also really like my Martial Arts/Dark scrappers. The damage aura goes a long way toward making up for MA's lack of AoE and the stuns all stack. Plus MA animations are just plain awesome to watch. -
Yeah, Facebook has no way to verify your personal information. I have one account for friends and family (still with very limitied actual personal information) and another for the character I play across pretty much every game.
Still waiting for an answer on this already used code thing tho so maybe there's something to that... -
I got a code but when I went to use it it said "This serial has already been used."
Is there anything I can do about this or are they reusing codes on Facebook wether they've been claimed or not? -
The thing that really boosted my /Shield's missing heal and heavy end usage was Hibernate.
It doesn't look like it on paper but in actual play I'm able to have it up often enough to smack it whenever my endurance bottoms out or I get hit with a cascade defense failure. Meanwhile the powerful taunt from AAO and your other powers will keep the attention on you for the couple seconds it takes for the debuffs to start clearing and your bars to refill to maximum.
Not the ideal solution for a main tank but it will keep you rolling with a high speed team quite well -
Wasting inspirations really isn't an issue in my experience. I don't even combine very often (mostly only when I see a whole lot of yellows or oranges in the tray) and just using the inspirations as they come in I tend to stay above 50% defense and 600% damage. Often I don't even have to bother hitting fury a second time.
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Also, slotting the single target attacks for their secondary effects to get the extra 7.5% recharge boosts has zero opportunity cost for a farming build. Same with slotting LotG into concealment powers. 4 ST attacks and 5 Lotg is 67.5 right there without needing to slot the AoEs for anything but damage and recharge