Doctor_Kumquat

Who? Mako
Huh? Sharks
What it do? Sharks
Why would I want this? Sharks
Use small words: Sharks

^ WIN!

Although I usually avoid farming.. I have to hand it to TopDoc here. He has created a mobgrinding machine that is elegant in its brutality. A masterpiece of single-mindedness. It should come as no surprise that PL meh Farmer (love the name) is the third-fastest farmer on record (that posts to the forums at least). Anything with permadom WITHOUT Hasten is a force to be reckoned with (and everyone who thought it needed stamina is grossly underestimating DP).

Thanks for the guide, High Beam. My arch/em blaster is about 2/3 done with his Ouroboros challenge badges, and your guide was tremendously helpful for the mid-level arcs, since I never run the original contacts in there anymore. TFs + Striga + Croatoa with enough scanners to get to each Safeguard and occasional contact dips to get badge/temp power missions can usually take my heroes all the way to 35, if I agree to join ANY pugs on the way. Thanks to the new Defiance and Archery's inherent accuracy, the player debuff is a total non-issue for me (especially if I just alternate Aim or BU on each group), so I usually do the player debuff with no insps and the no temp powers restriction (they wouldn't hit anyway) to streamline the process until the last two sets, where I can turn off my epics and will have to do four runs. In any case, while running Wincott and Penelope for the first two rounds were obvious choices, the rest were not (I never would have thought of the second Levantera arc for 45-50, or the Sky Raiders one for 20-25, especially), so thanks for the tips.

Positron is indeed quite long, but not QUITE as arduous as many people give it credit for. Not the sort of thing you tend to repeat more than necessary, but not the hellish marathon of dooooooom it is proclaimed to be. Biggest tip would be to have everyone on the team at lvl 14 or 15 to start (or with enough L15 mentors to sidekick anyone that isn't), on HEROIC (only the team leader's difficulty setting matters on a TF, but in case he/she disconnects and the star is handed off, it'd be nice if most of the team was on heroic too), with a small team. This keeps the huge spawns of CoT ghosts on the manageable side (which will floor your accuracy in a heartbeat), along with preventing the vast majority of boss encounters. Even with a sub-optimal team, it shouldn't take more than 3-4 hours if you know what you're doing. Also, Red Tomax's guide (www.coh.redtomax.com) is a tremendous torrent of info on.. basically every contact and power in the game.

At least for my archer, the limiting factor to the rampage speed is the recharge on Aim and Build Up, not RoA, since I wait to fire RoA until those two are up, so it kills everything with the alpha instead of just deeply wounding them. That being said, if you will eventually have your pocket kin running around giving you perma-FS, then damage buffs beyond that grow irrelevant, and you truly can just fire RoA every time it comes back up (wicked fast). Overall though, while very different from my own build (I traded about 10% rech, 30% acc, and the toxic resist for 30% ranged defense and a crapload of saved influence on avoiding purple sets), a very solid build for the blaster (though the apprentice's slotting looks really really screwy, even for a pure buffbot).

[ QUOTE ]
Im trying to wrap my brain around a Toggle based confuse power.

[/ QUOTE ]
Think Ice Control's Arctic Air, but replace the slow with dmg, and I think you'd be close.

First impression - That's... actually pretty cool.
Second impression - if they dare to take out the sweet sweet sound of my Rain of Arrows I will punch a kitten.
Third impression - Thank $Diety for April Fool's Day.

Honestly though, if X-Ray Eyes from the rad blast set actually announced PEW PEW LAZ0R BEAMS! every time you used it, I would laugh so hard...

Improvements are mostly on the /WP side:

HPT certainly benefits from 6 slots, but heals should go in before res. RttC gets 3 +heal slots, ASAP, end of story. It is the most valuable defensive toggle in the set, and should be treated as such.

In that same vein, all of the individual WP toggles are fairly endurance-light. If you want to cut down on your endurance usage, you would be far better off by throwing a slot for end redux on all those currently-five-slotted attacks than you will by twoslotting your toggles for it. With QR AND Stamina, you won't have real endurance problems anyway unless facing sappers.

The attacks looks decent, although I'd take Jacob's Ladder much sooner. Chain Induction's virtues/problems have been argued to death in the Brute forums, so I won't get into that here.

Aside from those important points, it looks like a fairly solid ELM/WP build for someone that doesn't want to worry about IOs.

Sir, this guide was incredibly entertaining, sir!

Thank you, Lumi... thank you. *mops up tears of joy*
That was beautiful.

If you run all of the Shard TFs and actually read what's going on, you get a pretty solid basis on what's happened there. The Cathedral of Pain was good too, although nobody has seen that place in over a year, so don't hold your breath. That being said... Manticore = love, and shard stories = love, so Manticore's continued shard stories = love^2?

*Puts on his best Positron accent*
You're wrong, Bram.

OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMGISSUE11FORTHEWIN!!!!!1! !

*Ahem* Now that I've got the fanboyness out of my system, I can properly thank the devs for one of the single nicest QoL improvements evar. *Puts on his Rocky Horror cd and starts looping Time Warp for a few hours*

Wow, way to resurrect a 2-year-old thread, Sam =P

That being said, it's still a sound concept (minus the pre-ED slotting advice).

The endurance problem such a character might have is not due to insufficient endurance slotting, it's due to disgustingly insufficient damage/accuracy slotting. No accuracy half of your attacks outside of Followup and FA? What about 1-40 where you don't have the massive +tohit? Only one +dmg in anything? You've got enough recharge that you'll have your attacks up way too fast to use all of them, but if they're just tickles, then why bother?

Your powerpicks are actually dead-on, but the slotting should be ignored entirely.

[ QUOTE ]
Great guide, I have a question though: Since ED which hit Defender dmg hard, I am not sure if certain controllers don't do more damage than a Defender in the later game with containment.

I can solo faster on my 43 Ice/Rad Controller than I can on my 50 Dark/Dark Defender.

Prior to ED you would say: If you like to do damage and blast play a Defender.... not sure if this is still the case though.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, there are certainly some exceptionally lethal controller builds out there who can dish out more damage than most defenders.. *cough* Fire/Kins *cough* That isn't to say that the average defender is necessarily weaker than the average controller damagewise though. If you build a controller to dish out the pain (through taking power pool attacks, a primary with significantly damaging powers (mind, grav, and fire mainly) and slotting them with damage, and taking a secondary with dmg buffs or -resistance debuffs, then it can be a formidable match for a defender damagewise. However, even with ED in place, Defender damage is nothing to scoff at; they can still get several ways to buff their damage in their primary (and are more potent at doing so than controllers) and generally have a much wider range of ways to dish out that damage. I know Storm/Sonics who can give blasters a run for their money in prolonged engagements, much as I know Ice/Storms who barely dish out more hurt than 'pure' empaths.

Posi, you are my hero. That is all.

Why bother spending a weekend cramming for finals when you can spend it cramming as much CoH playtime in as humanly possible?

Repentant.... You are a @#$! genius. A sick, twisted, utterly maddening genius. Bravo.

You, sir, are an inspiration to us all. Bravo.

In all seriousness though, that was a disgustingly impressive analysis of the potential benefits of stacking IO sets and updating conventional slotting wisdom to embrace the new age of I9, and probably cleared up any potential confusion anyone might have on the subject. While I have never and probably will never build a fire tanker, the same principles apply to any other field.

ST would be short for single-target (crush, lift, propel, grav. distortion) powers, not storm summoning.

Also, bravo on the grav/storm guide. It's not excessively detailed on the specific uses of some of the sets' less-user-friendly powers, but it gives enough advice for someone with half a brain to understand how they work with a little field experience.

In my experience, it's not that buildup is a /bad/ power in any way, it's just that it's of much less value to brutes than it is to scrappers or blasters. Brutes will have, with decent fury and a few dmg SO's, an automatic +200% dmg at least, and since the buildup bonus is just added to the base along with that, it doesnt have as visible an impact when you already have that much boosting. It's like popping a fulcrum shift and then a siphon power after it. Yes, it improves, but not enough for you to care.