Doctor_Kumquat

Three cheers for the Reformed badge - and yes, Gaussian has a large Longbow base for you about 5 missions in (the one after you fight Sefu in a small warehouse with some longbow). With a large team (or just set for x6 or x8 now) you can go from 0 to badge in just a handful of runs. It's far and away the least painful way for heroes to get it (currently), and (not that it counts for anything) I had phenomenal drops from that mission both times I grinded it.

On topic: Umbral's link is probably solid. Piercing Rounds should likely be in your chain somewhere if endurance isn't a concern, but don't quote me on that one.

Tangent: I can also vouch for Statesguard's general badassery.

My three SoA are Huntsman Hrothvar, Web 2.0 (Crab), and Shirala (Bane). Naming conventions consistent with an Arachnos agent always work (Operative, Huntsman, Arbiter, Fortunata, etc.), but spider puns of any sort are pretty standard.

Then again, nothing is in place saying that your Arachnos soldier has to be standard. You could make a Bane spider wearing neon orange and green striped tights with a jester's hat and call him Blueberry Turkey, if you wanted to.

For Corruptors, the damage cap should be 500%. This includes the 100% base damage of your attacks, and the ~95% damage you get from slotting it up to the ED cap. Therefore, you have room to benefit from around 300% extra damage buffs before hitting the damage cap. Even with fully saturated Soul Drain, you will still have plenty of extra room for more damage with all three of those listed buffs active.

Taking the snipe or not is a matter of personal preference. Cracking open a new group of enemies by diving into your regular attack chain will do more dps than sitting back and sniping. However, there are times that you really don't want a particular enemy to be able to do ANYTHING before it drops; (de)buffers can be extremely annoying if you give them time to set up, and one-shotting them with your snipe can be the most effective way to approach the battle.

However, I could not in good conscience advise any blaster who can take Build Up and Aim to skip them. While Aim alone, as you have experienced on Corruptors and Defenders who have lower base damage to begin with, does not produce a very dramatic difference in battle, a Blaster using both Aim and Buildup start out a fight by dealing almost double their normal (slotted) damage. That makes a VERY noticeable difference in how fast you can wipe out a group. Aim and Buildup are how a Blaster makes good on their general premise that the best defense is an overwhelming offence; if all (or most) of your enemies are dead inside a 10 second window, they're not as likely to have time to tear you apart.

You don't necessarily need to grab them RIGHT as soon as they unlock, but they should be pretty darn high on your list of priority powers. At the very least, try taking them and using them extensively for a while; you'll see the difference. Fulmens has long advocated a blaster training exercise, where you load up on a tray of purple insps, go to a hazard zone, and with the safety net provided by chugging 4 lucks at a time, experiment to see how many enemies of various levels you can kill normally, with Aim, with Buildup, or both.

Claws + SR = Epic.

As to your build, you have two core problems. First, you need to be aware whether you want to slot up sets for typed defense (smashing, lethal, energy, etc.) or for positional defense (melee, ranged, AoE). Kinetic Combat is awesome for sets like Energy Aura or Ice, but not nearly as efficient as Touch of Death / Mako's Bite for a /SR brute, which use positional defenses.

Second, your slotting weight is backwards; you have your attacks 4-slotted and your defenses 6-slotted. Unless you're adding in some special/unique IOs on the side, like a Kismet +Tohit, you should 4-slot your defenses (at most), and 5 or 6 slot all your main attacks. Your defenses are good to go as long as you cap out their defense, and throw in a splash of endurance to taste; your attacks have a lot more attributes that all need some loving. The set bonuses share the same priority; aside from Red Fortune, the defense sets don't have any really exciting perks after 4 slots, and those can be replicated with more effective things like Mako's Bite.

Sonic Blast has three cones, which you might have confused. Howl is your basic damaging cone with -res, Shockwave is a 100% knockback attack, and Siren's Song is a Mag 3 Sleep; Shockwave and Siren's Song are the only Sonic Blast powers that do not debuff, giving up their -res in exchange for their status effects. Screech, the single-target stun, still does pack -res (and has a nice long duration on it).

Regarding your "defender first" attitude... stereotype issues aside, everything but those two cones will debuff, and by keeping up a steady attack chain, you can massively amplify your whole team's damage output on hard targets. You're Sonic/Sonic, if I read correctly; Sonic Resonance has powerful tools, but is a very hands-off powerset most of the time. Once you've slapped your buffs on your teammates, and toggled up Dispersion and Disruption, the only active powers from your primary to worry about for the next 3 minutes or so are Sonic Siphon (non-stacking, long-duration single target -res) Liquefy (6 minute recharge debuff), and maybe reapplying Clarity if there are mez-heavy enemies around. If you aren't planning on blasting the crap out of everything, what ARE you going to do inbetween buff cycles? By maximizing your own damage output, you also maximize your team's damage output, and vice-versa.

I do not know the specific stats on the LRSF heroes and who (if any) are protected from end draining beyond the standard enemy level and rank resistances - I suspect Synapse might be protected, for example, but have not personally tested it. However, I DO know that a team of electric blasters can completely sap Archvillains with little issue. I've watched, and participated in, electric theme teams that neutered everything that dared challenge us within seconds.

Master-Blade's criticism, I believe, refers to the contribution of a lone electric blaster versus the contribution of a lone _____ blaster. Indeed, Electric is pretty much the bottom of the barrel for pure dps concerns, and alone, their sapping potential isn't that impressive outside very specific powerset pairings. It's when you get a couple of them together that their endurance drain goes from an interesting gimmick to borderline-overpowered; if three or four electric blasters stealth up to a group of enemies and hit Short Circuit in sync, nothing in that group will ever get more than an opening shot off before their end hits 0, and thanks to the guaranteed -recovery in Short Circuit, they'll never be able to even brawl you as long as someone uses it again every 10 seconds. Archvillains take a bit longer to drain, but an 8-man electric blast team can still floor them in short order.

Plant Control is wicked-awesome as soon as you get Seeds of Confusion; it's on such a short recharge (especially with Siphon Speed and/or Hasten available) that you can bust it out on pretty much every group. While Plant doesn't have Hotfeet, and your Flytrap won't be putting out as much DPS as a pack of imps, your AoE immobilize does serious damage and Carrion Creepers are epic. It may not be QUITE as efficient at farming as a fire/kin, but it's incredibly powerful, and becomes so right out of the gate (instead of waiting until the 30s before you get good). Since you've already tried fire anyway, I vote Plant.

Dual Pistols fills the unique role of being a blast set that can provide -damage debuffing. 3x Enervating Field is pretty potent already, shaving around 2/3 of the target's damage away... but -dam, like +resist and +def, is a boost that gets exponentially better results the closer you come to the cap. With chem rounds being spammed on a defender, you can come pretty darn close to permanently flooring an AV's damage. Although Hail of Bullets is getting buffed in I17, Archery would still provide a bit more damage thanks to Rain of Arrows recharging in under 20 seconds thanks to 3x AM + Hasten + slotting, and has better range. If boosting the team's damage output is your sole priority then go Archery, but Archery or Dual Pistols will both be able to fill things with holes quite effectively.

If you are open to other possibilities, AR and Ice are unique on a permateam with controllers, in that even on defenders, Ignite, Ice Storm, and Blizzard all use Blaster damage numbers. Ignite (and the others, but they have large AoEs and slows) benefit greatly from immobilizes - if you have a crowd under heavy Plant immob-spam, Ignite is the strongest single-target damage a defender could possibly dish out. AR has more AoE attacks than Ice but Ice Storm and Blizzard (far and away the strongest nuke you could have) balance it out.

Also, if you weren't going to already, your trio should run 3x Assault with the 3x AM. You'll have more than enough endurance, and more dmg = more better.

The best primary powerset to pair /energy (or most anything else) depends on your preferred playstyle.

Most Dominator powersets are fairly light on the AoE damage, but /Energy is probably the most single-target focused of the bunch. /Energy also provides significant soft-control in the form of copious knockback effects. It's great for soloing, somewhat less great on large teams (where AoEs typically become more valuable, and knockback often becomes more annoying). As such, I'd try to build to those strengths.

If you wanted to solo extensively, I would recommend going with Mind Control without any hesitation. The sleeps let you lock down as many enemies as need be for a very long time (sleep and confuse powers generally last much longer than holds and stuns) while you crush them one by one with your heavy hitting attacks. Heck, I just watched a friend's mind/energy dom wreck +4 longbow wardens without any help, and he was only level 27. For extra laughs, he didn't even have Dominate (his main hold).

Ice and Fire are the most specifically melee-minded control sets, with Arctic Air and Hotfeet. For a somewhat offbeat approach to Dominating, Ice would work great. Ice offers tons of slows and knockdown, but a lot less hard control than most control sets; /Energy adds even more soft control to the mix. Ice also offers an AoE sleep for soloists, but it's a less useful one than Mind offers. Fire is a more traditional control set, with the main emphasis on slapping foes with hard controls and ripping them apart.

If you prefer pet classes but don't want to be limited to Masterminds, Illusion controllers can summon a Phantom Army (invincible, decent-damage pets that last for 90 seconds) in addition to a stationary pseudopet that terrifies everything nearby, and a 'normal' controller pet in their Phantasm (Energy blaster) which can summon decoy phantasms (more invincible distractions). Controllers do not get as much fine control over their minions' behavior as Masterminds get, but they can still be a solid heroic alternative for pet-lovers, and you can combine it with some really impressive (de)buffing sets that Masterminds currently cannot, like Radiation Emission. Oh, and controllers obviously have a full suite of crowd control powers, unlike Masterminds, who rely on their henchmen for that sort of thing.

The Hero/Villain dilemma will shortly become moot, with the release of Going Rogue in a few months, but it's something to think about.

Re: Bots/Traps - While it's a pretty popular mastermind combo, it's not just a recent fad of some sort. The reason it's popular is because the sets complement each other so well; Masterminds are typically a more passive (commonly translated as boring) archetype (especially /Forcefielders), but a /Traps mastermind has a mixed bag of powerful tricks up their sleeves to use in a battle. They can also lay them before engaging the enemy, luring them into a quick demise, which appeals to the tactical side of masterminds. A key point of pairing Traps with Bots is that both sets provide defense buffs (in the form of an AoE Force Field Generator and single-target deflection shields from the Protector Bots), which can stack to provide a very durable army of mechanized doom. Bots/Traps is one of the strongest Mastermind builds in the game, capable of soloing just about anything up to and including Archvillain-class foes.

For massive AoE slaughter, I don't think even a Spines stalker could compete with Electric Melee. Pair with the defensive set of choice (I like /Nin) and go to town with Lightning Rod, Thunderstrike, Chain Induction, and Jacob's Ladder.

Most stalkers work much better against small numbers of high level enemies than large numbers of low level enemies, but there are exceptions to every rule.

I'm 90% sure it grants a power to the target, which then fears it/its friends. Either way, it'll need the target to be alive to use it. Because of this (somewhat funky) functionality, it should still work even if the target is running away, and is outside the 30' radius when the AS finishes, provided that they did not break LoS and thereby negate the AS. It should also fear the targets around wherever the target has moved off to, rather than immediately surrounding yourself. Most of the time, those are the same position (plus or minus a few feet), but not always.

Can't open the datalink atm to check the full bonuses. It looks impressive at a glance, but some things jumped out at me:

The Tactical Training toggles are pretty inexpensive; the second end redux slot in TT:A is only saving .04 eps. If money is as irrelevant as it seems to you, why not swap it out for a Numina or Miracle for Health? Since Posi's Blast is so low on recharge, you could add a 6th slot for a +rech IO on some of the AoEs for when one run through the chain isn't enough (esp. Venom, since the debuff is so juicy), unless all that global rech from your purples and sych makes it unnecessary. I would shunt some slots from Combat Jumping (which is a pure set mule after you cap the defense) and/or Build Up (and go with a fairly conventional +rech slotting) and divert them to the attacks. Also, why stop at 4 Grav. Anchors in WAWG, and not go for the +rech at 5 there?

Oh, and not that it matters, but it appears you swapped the appropriate IOs for Superjump and Sprint; a jump IO in Sprint would be pretty worthless.

Generally speaking, you'll want to build up a significant amount of defense to one or two vectors over grabbing a hodge-podge of different defense types, if you want to go the IO'd Defense route. However, Dark/* Defenders already have a metric crap-ton of -tohit available to them, and since -tohit works the same as +defense in accuracy calculations, you don't really need much. The only time you'll really be craving +def instead of sticking with your copious -tohit is against significantly higher level enemies (+3/4s) and AVs, which will resist a good chunk of your debuffing. As such, the 'go big or go home' attitude with defense doesn't really apply; even against +4s which will resist half of your debuffs, 15-20% defense should still be plenty of wiggle room once you and Fluffy slap them with Fearsome Stare and/or Darkest Night.

Sidenote: I noticed that you have a Perf. Shifter proc in Short Circuit. You want to take that out, pronto. Like other procs, it will affect the target of the power, but since it's in an attack, that means the target is the enemy (unlike in stuff like Stamina), and it has a 20% chance of giving them BACK 10 endurance after you just worked so hard to drain them.

While my Fire/Earth dom is still in his 30s, a big component of the Patron choice in my view is the endurance recovery power. Fire/Earth is incredibly end-hungry when you go all-out, especially if you run Hotfeet and/or Mud Pots. Power Sink from //Mu is the strongest end-recovery choice; //Widow has generally superior picks aside (SOUL DRAIN!), but their end-recovery move has triple the cooldown. I'm waiting to see how end-hungry I am once I get more IO slotting to decide which to take.

As for Seismic Smash - If you're using 4 Basilisks + 2 L50 Damage IOs, it could work fairly well. They'd bring it up to ~85% damage instead of ~95% damage, and accent the hold component more. I'm strongly considering this as a late-game swap, if I decide to try out solo/duoing AVs. Lower level than that though, and you start sacrificing too much of its phenomenal damage capability for the extra hold duration (and recharge) to justify the cost.

The main synergy would be that your Forcefield Generator will boost the Shield brutes' defenses up near the softcap even just running on SOs, which is pretty awesome. Until the endgame if/when your friends IO up to supplement their defenses, your FFG will triple or quadruple their survivability - but only long as they stay within its relatively small radius. It's fine for contained, prolongued battles, but if they're running all over the map, keeping up with them could likely prove difficult. Keep that in mind.

FFG aside, Traps will help soften the enemies up for the brutes to smash through, and Poison Gas Trap would be awesome to deal with overly-dangerous groups and shred AV regeneration. However, as the posters above mentioned, brutes benefit greatly from being able to just keep rolling ahead without pausing for setup time, and heavy mezzing/distraction from the likes of PGT (and Seeker Drones) would also hurt their fury generation. You guys can work with it, and Traps is still a pretty solid set despite all the flak it gets, but a more 'conventional' buffing set would likely complement your two friends a bit more. For some of the same trap-laying, debuffing feel, you might consider a /Storm corr (Freezing Rain and Hurricane for crippling debuffs and the late-game pseudopets to add damage), or a /Kin, /Sonic, or /Thermal for powerful buff-and-go play.

You could get another Nemesis mission (at a lower level), outlevel it once, and then try it at -1 to see how it works before you get to 48 and have to make your choice. L47s should still be able to drop purples, but the price on non-purple recipes will be reduced significantly, along with the increased time to sell them. What the ideal setup is for inf/time after all the factors come together will likely vary from person to person.

The main problem with Kin/AR is that Kinetics benefits from being right up close to the action for your 20' buffs, while AR is all about lining up those big, juicy cones from a moderate distance. Bouncing back and forth to line up cones and jump in for heals/buffs can be tiresome. The random knockback on your attacks can also be a bit obnoxious for setting up your kinetics abilities.

Fulcrum Shifted Assault Rifle AoEs are plenty dangerous, it's just a bit more unwieldly than some other combos.

Arch/EM is phenomenal, first off. Great choice.

In Archery, you will want everything except Stunning Shot and Ranged Shot for sure. I took both of those on my archer as well, but they are the most skippable. Snipes have a number of tactical advantages, although the number of times you'll wish you had Ranged Shot instead of just leading with Blazing Arrow or an AoE are pretty few and far between. I primarily keep it on my build for pulling the AVs on the STF, for use against fleeing targets in PvP zones on occasion, and because Snipes have IO sets with phenomenal bonuses that are still affordable.

The main 'problem' with these two powers is that once you have Rain of Arrows, and you've got it down to a decently low recharge through Hasten, Speed Boost, and/or IO sets, none of your other possible opening moves really hold a candle to the glory of BU - Aim - RoA - Fistful/Explosive. When they're on recharge though, and/or when you haven't gotten that high level yet (or are exemplaring below 27), other tools become important again.

Stunning Shot has as much or more tactical utility than Ranged Shot, generally speaking. Ranged Shot is ideal for one-shotting a troublesome minion before it can respond, like Sappers and PPD Equalizers. Stunning Shot can neutralize LTs as well, and if you take the melee attacks from /EM, it can stun bosses too. Having a ranged mez is also incredibly handy to drop your targets' toggles, like the Chill of the Night aura on CoT Spectral Lords. If there's a uniquely dangerous or obnoxious guy you don't want to deal with, and it'll be too durable to take out fast enough (and RoA is recharging), this is what you use.

You could also possibly skip one of the first two blasts, though that's a bit iffier. For a very long time, my archer went without Snap Shot, substituting Fistful of Arrows for it as a filler attack against single targets when melee attacks were out of the question (Mary Macomber, etc.). It let me save a slot in my build, and since they do similar damage, it didn't hinder my effectiveness that much. However, Snapshot recharges faster, uses less endurance, can be used while mezzed (a big plus), and provides a much stronger Defiance damage buff. I would advise taking all three ST attacks from Archery if your build will allow it; in any case, Thunderstrike is a damn awesome IO set, and having more ST ranged attacks isn't a bad thing.

In /EM, you will want Build Up and Boost Range pretty much no matter what your playstyle is, because they're just that good. If you skip them, there's not much reason to take /EM in the first place. The assorted melee attacks are incredibly powerful though, despite melee on a blaster being blasphemy to some players. Energy Punch and Bone Smasher do silly-good damage - better DPA than any of your ranged attacks, for sure - if you don't mind getting your hands dirty. Total Focus isn't as good for pure DPA, but it combines high damage with a guaranteed stun, and a two-for-one is awesome. More importantly, they offer alternate damage types. Lethal damage is heavily resisted by a lot of enemies; specifically, robots and ghosts are incredibly frustrating for those who can only deal lethal damage. Conveniently enough, those same enemies take higher-than-normal damage from smashing (robots) and energy (ghosts) damage. Those missions in Striga against nothing but robots go by way, way faster if you can punch them in the face, for example. I highly recommend taking at least Bone Smasher (for a decent balance between power and speed) and probably Total Focus. Energy Punch is fast and still pretty powerful, but if you are tight on power picks and/or leery of melee, it's probably the most skippable.

Some folks hate melee on blasters because they find it too dangerous to stick around im melee range on squishies. The main solution is to NOT stay in melee for long; jousting your opponents lets you punch them in the face without fear. If you take Hurdle and/or Combat Jumping, you can bounce around your enemies while queueing up something like Total Focus, which will start animating in mid-air and finish from a safe distance away rather than right in front of that Tank Smasher's hammer. This has the added advantage of messing with enemy AI, which will often stop them from attacking while they chase after you or decide how they should proceed.

Wow.. yeah, I remember hating Marrowsnap with every fiber of my being. Of course, soloing on pre-containment /FF controllers with no slotting wasn't exactly a walk in the park.