Doctor_Kumquat

Temp HP is alive and well in 4th ed. too (my Artificer hands it out like candy), along with oodles of other games (Mordekaiser is my favorite melee champ in LoL, etc.).

But yeah, looking forward to Bio Armor / Nature affinity if they're allowing us to use damage absorption shields for the first time in ever, since (I would expect) they will effectively let us achieve higher-than-hardcap HP levels.

Snipers are totally doable. My Arch/EM blaster (for a time) slotted his blasts with Centrioles (dirt-cheap dam/range HOs) on top of the perma-on-SOs Boost Range from energy manipulation, and let me tell you, having cone attacks with over 100' range is a really nice deal. I have since replaced the Centrioles with Thunderstrike IOs to chase their juicy ranged defense bonuses, and picked up Clarion Radial to pick up the slack when I really want to reach out and blast something.

As a result of my enhanced range, Fistful of Arrows can hit entire groups, guaranteed, without even needing to worry about optimal positioning. I can open up against most any group of enemies with BU + Aim + RoA + Explosive + Fistful from beyond their sight radius, and the AoE combo can level the majority of the spawn before they can retaliate, proving the "damage as defense" axiom valid (though I still like having defense as defense as a backup). As a side perk, Teleport becomes INSANELY fast at getting you around town when you have Boost Range and Clarion Radial on top of slotting it up (preferably with some Blessing of the Zephyr IOs for extra defense).

Beam Rifle / Energy should work just as well. It's tier 9 has a longer cooldown than Rain of Arrows, but aside from that, blasting the crap out of baddies from ~175 feet away is pretty darn fun. No, you can't leverage your MAXIMUM range from inside many mission maps, but you can at least shoot from the maximum range allowable by the map geometry. If you go this route, I highly recommend picking up Combat Jumping, and learning to joust around in battle (if it isn't already second nature).

Using Traps (instead of building a blaster) is also a viable / tasty option, and may even be more powerful during extended engagements, but corrs/defenders lack the same burst-damage punch that a sniping Blaster would bring to the table, if that's what your goal is. You can immobilize/slow the enemies and keep them at range, or lay out a minefield if they try to close the gap, or you can just stay at longer range with Boost Range. They all have similar effects, although hard immobilizes will make the baddies try and shoot you at range instead of attempting to charge at you (and therefore not shoot at you, doing less damage).

My blaster really likes the Diamagnetic proc to stack with his IO'd ranged defense; after hitting a crowd with an AoE volley as an alpha strike, they are very unlikely to hit me back. If your /WP scrapper is also moderately IO'd for defense, such that he is at least in the 30s to some common attack types, then Diamagnetic could provide a significant jump in survivability against the enemies inside your whirling blades of AoE doom. It'd probably be less awesome than on the blaster, just because the blaster can start the fight with ranged AoEs so every enemy starts debuffed instead of having to engage them in melee after they've probably gotten a shot or two off, but still pretty sweet. If your only defense is coming from Heightened Senses, and you aren't stacking much on that, then the -tohit will be less noticeable, and I generally wouldn't recommend taking Diamagnetic just for the -regen unless you really want to try and solo giant monsters or something.

Gravitic is one of those interface options that almost no one takes for their own characters, but would be really cool if other people took. It's one of the ONLY sources of -special in the game, and the -slow could be very helpful on a melee character so enemies can't run away effectively.

If your character concept is looking for something that slows down mobs, either one could work effectively (slow their reflexes so they can't hit as well / regenerate as fast, or actual slowing). If your build isn't designed such that the -tohit from Diamagnetic is really juicy, then I'd recommend giving Gravitic a try.

I love my Elec/Nin. I haven't IO'd him extensively yet, but even on largely an SO build he's incredibly effective. I figure that if running 90% SOs with no incarnate perks yet can let me solo through +1/6 DA missions at a solid clip, then my stalker is doing something right. Yes, he does have a weakness to hordes of -def debuffing enemies, but a pre-emptive dash of luck is usually enough to compensate unless I'm in way over my head. I haven't had any significant problems running him on the 'lesser' iTrials as a base L50, either.

*shrug* I significantly prefer the orange ring, since I don't want to have to monitor my extremely cluttered list of buffs for whether I have two or three stacks of Assassin's Focus. The clear feedback lets me know if I'd have a guaranteed crit, which is sort of a big deal. More to the point, the Assassin's Focus buffs fade over time, and if I'm running from one enemy to the next, I don't know whether they have started to fade yet or not.

I don't know of a way to disable it, much like I don't think the combo-centric melee sets can choose not to have their combo indicators light up, but that doesn't mean there isn't one.

Fortunatas are indeed a bit more suited to what you're describing, with more control powers and massive defensive potential, but you certainly CAN build a ST-focused (or even ST-exclusive) blaster. If you go that route, you'll give up a good chunk of the damage mitigation for some more damage dealing. Building a blaster for ~+60% damage would be a neat trick, and on top of Defiance, you'd be floating near +100% damage before Aim/BU or any external buffs came into the picture. Tasty.

The real question is why you'd WANT to make your blaster ST-only, aside from PvP purposes, when blasters have the potential to do so much more AoE damage. If you're running "regular" missions, a Blaster's main contribution is the power to lay waste to entire groups of baddies simultaneously with large AoE attacks; the overall DPS of an attack chain where you spam AoEs vs. lots of guys will dwarf that of even the most optimized ST specialist. If you find yourself running lots of incarnate trials, or high-end TFs, or Mothership Raids, or similar areas where you have lots of higher level AV/EB level guys that will take a lot of time to whittle down, this is where having a dedicated ST specialist would shine. Soloing at something like +2/x1 would also make single-target damage a strong priority.

So yeah, you can do this, it's just a question of whether you want to do it. If it sounds fun, knock yourself out.

I'd throw in a recommendation for a beam rifle defender or corruptor. Beam rifle stacks very well thanks to both of you getting to leverage your partner's Disintegration, and a little (de)buffing goes a long way towards keeping your duo upright, even without a dedicated damage sponge. On a duo, defenders would get +20% damage from Vigilance, which narrows the damage gap between defenders and corruptors a bit; defenders get significantly nicer (de)buff numbers than corruptors, although the significance of that varies on the sets you use. A Dark/Beam defender would add incredible durability to your team, while still allowing you to focus most of your combat time on blasting. Dark would cripple the enemies through AoE slow/fear/-res/-dam/-tohit along with a solid heal and AoE stealth.

Your largest hurdle would be mediocre AoE damage output, but Beam isn't that horrible at dealing with crowds, and hard targets will be in for a world of hurt.

I can fully support the Catalysts being account-bound, but character-bound seems a poorly implemented. The character-bound idea works well from the standpoint of redeeming them from Superpack rewards, which I am seriously considering getting some of. You have some number of catalysts available for redemption on the character of your choice, at which point they become character locked; if you didn't want that character to have it, then you shouldn't have hit the button to claim it.

However, these catalysts are also available as rare drops from enemies on incarnate trials (or iTrials), and this is where the character-locking model falls short. My personal situation: my blaster on Freedom has snatched a full set of Blaster's Wrath ATOs from Wentworths. Great deal, some of the best inf I've ever spent, given that (IMO) the set is superior to the majority of purple IO sets. I am now trying to iTrial my way towards getting 6 catalysts for them (1 down, 5 to go). Drop rates to be determined, of course, but I hope to get the others within a month or so. That said, my Blaster is my most played character, and given that the ATOs appear to be unique, after my blaster gets all 6 ATOs upgraded, any future catalyst drops he receives will be literally useless, until / unless future ATO sets are released.

Incarnate supplies (threads, etc.) seem like a reasonable comparison, since the catalysts appear to only drop from iTrials so far. There is a reasonable upper bound to the amount of threads / components any one character has utility for; once you have your favorite boost upgraded to tier 4 in every available slot, your zeal to accumulate more of them will logically decline. That said, there is still some use for earning more; you can either hoard them in anticipation of new Incarnate slots opening up (saving up a reserve of Shards to upgrade into Threads when Judgement and friends became available), or craft new varieties of incarnate powers; a different Destiny buff to suit your league's needs, different Lore pets for different character costumes/motifs, different Alpha boosts depending on if you're PvPing or running TFs or soloing or what-have-you.

With the catalysts, there may be future uses for them coming down the pipeline; I would hope so, but I (and most other players) don't have any evidence what timeframe we are looking at for that. If not, they will become literally useless drops on a character that already has a full set of superior ATOs. Going back to the Incarnate salvage idea, with the introduction of Astral Christie and Empyrean Michael (sp?), the dev team introduced a way for players to transfer what were originally character-locked items (astral/empyrean merits) to other characters on their account through the global email system, albeit at a slight fee, and I would hope that some similar arrangement could be made for this new flavor of character-locked item.

For reference, I'm just fine with the upgraded ATOs being character locked; if I went through the considerable effort of buying and upgrading them for a favored character, as some of the best sets in the game, I'm not about to field-strip them. The catalysts themselves, however, could use a second pass.

Given that you are operating under a variant of Limitless Radial FREEM! and you have permanently capped damage/recharge coupled with invulnerability, the straight dps will be higher on anything that can break the damage cap. Resistance debuffs and/or Fiery Embrace let you go over the damage cap by a percentage of your total damage, and therefore win.

I'm not currently in a position to mathcraft who would win overall, but my gut says that the fire/fire/soul brute would be at the top of the melee pack. Last time I checked, brutes @ damage cap would out-do scrappers @their damage cap using the same sets, because the brute cap is sufficiently higher to overcome their lower base damage scale.
Fire melee (plus gloom) has really high base damage output, and /fire means that you get to laugh at damage caps (and the best damage aura helps).

On the other hand, adding in damage procs would also let you bypass the damage cap, which is why a radiation blast procmonster works so well - load up something like Neutrino Bolt with three damage procs and a resistance debuff proc, and spam ftw. Claws would be right up there, as it can use both an Apocalypse proc (in Focus) and a Hecatomb proc in their regular swipes, plus use an Achilles' Heel somewhere in there (I forget the names of most claw attacks, forgive me).

Power Boost is pretty awesome. Blasters get less benefit from it than Defenders, Corruptors, Controllers, or Dominators do (because those ATs all can have way more buff/debuff powers in their powersets) and therefore Blasters get a much lower recharge timer on their version of Power Boost to compensate. It can be almost useless to many builds, yes - a fire/energy blaster that stays at range and skips the medicine and leadership pools won't see much point in it. However, for an Elec/Energy blaster, perma-power boost means that they can keep enemies completely drained of endurance from first contact until they are defeated, courtesy of Short Circuit. For the defensively-minded blaster, like Moonlighter, Power Boost can make a huge difference in defensive values courtesy of Scorpion Shield, Maneuvers, Weave, Combat Jumping, and/or Hover. It also turbocharges the numerous stuns in /EM's punches (and any that may be in your primary) to let you perma-stun bosses or numerous LTs with ease, makes the Medicine pool incredibly beefy, and powerboosting Vengeance takes it from "quite good" to "phenomenal."

If you think the defensive approach to Power Boost that Moonlighter suggested is so rare, compare it to Shadow Meld, which many Scrappers were overjoyed to get when they got access to Patron power pools in Going Rogue. Both powers make a similar difference in survivability, when built to utilize them, and that difference is dramatic.

For blasters that don't care about power boost, skip power boost. For blasters that can benefit from power boost, folding it into Build Up would only be a detriment.

Back on topic, Dual Pistols doesn't get much more from it than any other blaster - longer-lasting mez from suppressive fire, plus the usual benefits.

The absolute fastest way to do requires an assistant of the opposite faction and an inspiration tray of 20 awakens (and ideally an email inventory of 20 awakens). Find a Heavy that's still at its spawn point, grab it, and have someone kill you next to that spawn point. Pop an awaken, grab the heavy again, rinse and repeat until you run out of awakens. Then, go get more (ouro, Atlas/RV contacts, whatever) and come back.

The logout to character menu option is only a little slower though, if you can't find a willing player of the opposite faction to assist you.

To elaborate on what Obscure Blade said, both Scrappers and brutes can use Shields to good effect, but Scrappers are a little more efficient at killing stuff with them. The reason for that is that Brutes are designed with lower base damage numbers on their attacks than scrappers, with a very large (normally over 100%, in large battles) damage buff coming from Fury to compensate. Therefore, additional damage buffs (like that from Against All Odds) have a larger relative impact for a scrapper than a brute. Also, while a Brute's Shield Charge will still mess things up, it may seem to do as much as it "should" be. That is because Brutes have a ludicrously high damage cap (originally 850% of base, although I think it was slightly toned down to ~775% a while ago), but location-based AoE attacks like Rain of Fire and Shield Charge deal their damage by summoning an invisible, short-lived pseudopet. Pseudopet entities have a damage cap of 400%, and therefore a Brute buffed over that level (fairly common, since enhancements + Fury alone can get you in the neighborhood of 350%) will not transfer any of that surplus oomph to the blow.

To answer your other question, Broadswords and Shields pair very well on either archetype. BS's Parry will combine with the defense buffs from your shield to let you softcap your melee/lethal defenses from a very early level despite Shields being a bit less defensive than many armor sets, and they go together well thematically.

SS/Regen or Stone/Regen both sound very tasty. Whether or not they raise the regen cap on brutes, the hp/sec with all your stuff running should be absolutely ridiculous on a Brute's hp levels, and quick recovery makes everything Brutish work that much better. Outside buffs should turn you into a force of nature.

Yeah, Flashbacks should work fine. Before Issue 16, characters could not earn XP while they were exemplar'd down to run Flashbacks (or anything else for that matter), but now that you can earn XP while exemplaring, there shouldn't be any problem with leveling efficiently through Ouroboros.

The only thing I'd mention is that while Ouroboros contains all of the contacts' story arcs, it doesn't let you run one-shot missions from those contacts unless they are badge-awarding missions. Some contacts have cool one-shot missions that you can only experience by doing them 'normally' at the appropriate level, and some of them can award useful temporary powers.

I've taken my Sonic/Sonic/Psi defender through a couple dozen I-trials on Freedom, and yes, he's really handy on them. I'm also of the opinion that Sonic/ and /Sonic both go best on defenders, with the highest buff/debuff values on their powers, and the two sets pair together very well. Two Sonic/Sonics can resistance-cap an entire team (or, heck, a whole league now), and each provides at least 100% endlessly sustainable -res to help chew through those AVs like butter.

Apologies for the wall-of-text, but here's my $.02.

Notes on BU/Aim - Outside of PvP or rare fringe cases in PvE, the only thing that you need to slot them for is +rech. Aim in particular has ridiculously high base +tohit - the only thing that might still dodge you more than 5% of the time (with Aim up) is a horde of Nemesis troops with way too many stacks of Vengeance up. If you are conserving slots, use two generic L50 +recharge IOs, which will bring you to ~85% recharge slotting. If you have slots to spare and want a little more out of them, use 1 generic +rech IO, with an Adjusted Targeting +rech and +tohit/rech pair. That will ED-cap your recharge slotting, with a little extra +tohit and a minor +damage set bonus. If you were to just twoslot it, the greater uptime of BU/Aim with 2 +rech IOs will outweigh the damage set bonus of using the two Adjusted Targeting pieces alone.

Force of Nature I would recommend slotting with a mix of Resist/Recharge IOs from various sets for maximum enhancement value. Most of the resistance set bonuses aren't that stellar anyway. Temp. Invulnerability... the Steadfast Protection set bonuses aren't that impressive, and one -KB IO (which you have in your travel powers courtesy of Blessing of the Zephyr) is enough to protect you from 95% of PvE knockback. The other 5% (Fake Nemesis, Katie Hannon, Hamidon, etc.) will take at least three IOs to deal with, and isn't really worth worrying about unless you're a Fire or Dark tank who's expected to stand up to them without native protection to knockback. I usually would suggest 3x Titanium Coatings (+Res, +Res/End, and +Res/End/Rech (or Res/Rech) and the Steadfast Sef/Res. That'll give you maxed (or darn close) resistance, a boost to Max HP, and more endurance reduction than the +recovery in Steadfast Protection is worth, while being very affordable.

In Nova, Scirocco's Dervish is OK, but that set is better suited to damage auras or high-cost AoE attacks that are used often, where the endurance reduction is important. If you can afford it, the Obliteration set was tailor-made for tier 9 nukes - it caps out your damage and recharge, while adding a damage proc and top-notch set bonuses.

In the Medicine pool, I'd oneslot Aid Other (or twoslot with +heal if you want to use it more often). 5 or 6 slot Aid Self with 5x Doctored Wounds and, ideally, an interrupt reducer - that way you can use it in combat, even when you have a DoT effect like a Council flamethrower ticking away at you, if you time it right. If you had all the slots in the world, Health would get the Miracle and Numina procs along with their respective +Heal pieces, but cutting some of the enhancement from Health isn't a huge loss for a blaster, esp. if you have the Medicine pool - you can even power-boost your Aid Self, so don't worry about taking slots from health.

For your melee attacks, Crushing Impact works well as a cheap, all-purpose set with good enhancement values. For greater survivability though, 6x Mako's Bite offers a hefty ranged defense boost and a damage proc in exchange for some small cuts to the raw enhancement values. If you aren't building for ranged defense (or are low on Influence and want to stick with what you have) then use what you have.


A note on Ranged Defense in general - with lots of places to put full Mako's Bite and Thunderstrike sets, blasters can get a bunch of this without too much effort, and it makes a large difference in survivability. Ranged defense both cuts lots of incoming damage and incoming mez/debuff effects, since the vast majority of mezzes are ranged attacks.

If you can get 25% ranged defense through sets, that alone will cut your damage intake in half. At 32.5%, you have enough that popping one small Luck inspiration will softcap your (ranged) defenses - in short, for a minute you are nearly as secure as a Super Reflexes scrapper. Both of those levels are doable without major slotting/power choice compromises. If you make a more singleminded effort, it is possible to reach 45% ranged defense on even a blaster, but then you start making more compromises on your core damage output.

You don't necessarily need to be a hover-blaster to leverage this, though it is a valid option - since you had Combat Jumping (and hurdle, though that's inherent now), you could just bunny-hop away from enemies that want to melee you, and keep firing while jumping. You can even joust past them with your energy punches if you want. Use whichever travel power you prefer conceptually - my main blaster teleports, with Combat Jumping as backup. My Sonic defender (built back in I7, before temp. travel packs were available) has never taken a "true" travel power (and doesn't have Ninja Run), because slotted Hurdle + Combat Jumping lets you bunny-hop your way around as fast as Flying, while being unsuppressed in combat. For that though, slotting Hurdle for +Jump is more effective than slotting Combat Jumping for it - Hurdle increases both speed and height, whereas CJ only really affects the max jump height.

What Stratonexus said. Pretty much the only reason to take World of Confusion below level 50 is for cosmetic reasons (you like the bubble around you).

WoC is built to be a set mule - under level 50, that means the dirt cheap confuse set for some easy +rech if you have slots to burn. The real reason to take World of Confusion is the purple Contagious Confusion proc, which makes the power's confusion effects actually noticeable, and the rest of the purple set's set bonuses (hefty +recharge and +def). If you're not going to IO it (for the IOs' effects, not the power's inherent functions) and you aren't in love with the little bubble, then don't even think about taking it.

For the vast majority of PvE encounters, 4 points of KB protection will be plenty - especially on a blaster. Going up to 12 points of protection will guard against some fringe cases of hardcore knockback - simultaneous hits by numerous Council grenades (you ate the alpha in a KB-heavy group), Fake Nemesis, and certain AVs, mostly - but at least 95% of the time, 4 points will be fine.

Unless you're a tanker whose defense set has a KB hole, or you plan on PvPing heavily, I wouldn't bother with more than a single -KB IO on any character.

Mmm, toggle Boost Range.

Mmm, toggle Instant Healing.

Meh. Hands-free auto Boost Range would be handy, and reduce the number of powers you need/want to have on autocast, but I don't think it's that big a deal.

@Arbegla: The power you are thinking of is Clarion Radial Destiny. +Range and +Special, along with comprehensive mez protection. The Radial version pays for having more than just mez protection by giving it a 30 second downtime. My /EM blaster has it, and it is a beautiful thing. With Boost Range, my Destiny boost, and slotted Teleport, I can get from one end of the Shadow Shard to the other so fast it's frightening.

I have played CoH since beta, but never bought any of the booster packs for it.

This one, though... may have finally made me drop the $10. Mostly because of the magnificent trailer for it, and because I already have a level 10 praetorian defender that it would look perfect on.

*chuckle* Pylons in 1:30 on an empath... Oh, those crazy, crazy Warworks.

I've been meaning to see how my Sonic/Sonic fares, with his Warworks backed by that much -resistance.

Doh, of course it wouldn't be able to affect Soul Transfer. Not sure where my brain was on that one.

And Talestar, about 2/3 of my playtime is on my blaster(s), and my Arch/EM blaster is actually one of the most survivable characters I have. The sig is a joke, although I suppose it's nice to see more old-school EQ vets.

Defenders do tend to be less expensive than melee ATs to IO out, in that (de)buff sets are much less expensive than damage sets or def/res sets. Stormies do make for very tanky defenders, what with Hurricane's massive debuff and such. I'd say that the Fighting pool would be a little much, but Leadership is always nice to have. Archery doesn't have much explicit synergy with Storm, but they're both powerful sets individually, so the pairing should work fine. Freezing Rain can set up your AoE combo (RoA - Fistful - Explosive) and your other debuffs can keep you and your team upright.