DrMike2000

Force Field + Kinetics works really well, Ive done that.
Kinetics love defence and mez protection, so Traps should be a good match too, and a bit more aggressive than FF, ie faster defeats less safety.

FFG + double Manouvers, all slotted is 32% defence, equal to SO-slotted Super Reflexes. Combined with the big heal and your other mitigation from Traps, you'll be plenty safe enough.

So yeah. Good combo, and good luck with it!

I'd go Web Grenade if you dont have any other holds or immobs. Being able to nominate one enemy as the healing/buffing post and stop them moving is a big bonus to a Kin. With Dp (which has a hold) I'd maybe go 'trops instead.

A quick run down of the support sets. They're pretty well balanced by now, so no-one stick out as the best or worse. Have a look through the guides stickied at the top of the forum for more details.


(btw Calling them healing sets will draw the Healer Police out - in brief Defenders do much more than heal, and that isn't always recognised. )


Empathy: Heals, and has long recharge buffs that give godly boosts to your favourite temamates. Requires thinking as to who you buff and when. Poor solo-er

Dark Miasma: All rounder that debuffs enemies damage and accuracy, has a good AoE combat heal that requires an enemy to hit, and good control. Greta solo and on teams.

Rad Emission: A bit like dark Miasma, a toolbox debuff/buff/heal set. Best powers require using an enemy as an anchor to radiate the debuff, so you can get annoyed if teammates kill your anchor. Best powers come early. Good soloer.

Kinetics: fast, unsafe seat of the pants set. Boosts team damage and speed. Big AoE heal that requires an enemy, but little else in terms of safety. Buffs are short lived, and can get very frantic if you try to keep everyone Speed Boosted.

Storm: Chaotic knockback, requires some skill to play without annoying teammates. Powerful toolbox set once you master it. Good soloer.

Force Field: Makes your team unkillable once it matures. Does very little else though. Laid back. Buff the team every 4 minutes and blast in between. No heals, doesn't need them.
You get a big bubble that gives you and your team mez protection.

Sonic Resonance: Makes the team tougher and the enemies softer. Laid back like Force Fields. No heal. Big anti-mez bubble like FF. Poor soloer.

Cold Domination: Similar to Force Fields but with better tools and slightly less defence. Very good against big hard targets apparently. No heal.

Traps: Toolbox set. Gets a anti-mez bubble pet (Force Field generator.) No heal but a +Regen stationary pet. Longish recharges on some powers, so you're doing a fair bit of thinking. Good soloer.

Trick Arrows: No heal, debuffs, may be a bit underpowered in some areas, especially team safety. The best powers come late in the set and have long recharges, so you tend to approach each fight a bit differently.

Apart from Empathy, most sets scale smoothly to full teams of 8.

Dual Pistols works best for Defenders out of all archetypes.
Blasters do more damage obviously (about 50% to 100% more) but the debuffs associated with the alternative ammo types like -Dam are better for Defenders.

I'm not a big fan of Archery because it has no secondary effects. It really shines with Rain of Arrows, which comes at 38 for Defenders, so its long road for your first character.
Some of the same can be said about Assault Rifle - it has little to no secondary effects to take adavntage of the good multipliers defenders get for them.

Give Emp/Dual Pistols a try - its probably best out of the three. Its certainly not a bad place to start for a team support/offence character.

If you're not totally sold on Empathy, I'd give Dark Miasma a look - that was my first Defender and its very powerful healing and debuffing set that keeps teams very safe.

Controllers are generally better team support.
They offer crowd control and support powers like healing, buffs and debuffs.

Defenders are more of a "combat medic" with support (healing, debuffs and buffs) and a side of decent damage that shouldn't be ignored.

Support in CoH is much more than healing. The buffs and debuffs tend to be pretty powerful compared to a lot of other games. Team with one Force Field Defender and the whole team takes very little damage. One Sonic Defender can make the whole team twice as tough and do 60% more damage. And neither of them heal at all.

These support powers enhance a team big-time, but are not needed - you can get through most of the game without having a support character, and definiely dont need a dedicated support. Its possible to do your job as a supporter to the max and attack at the same time.

So:

1) If you want to try damage and support, go Defender.
2) If you want a more team oriented support, go Controller.
3) If you really wnat a support Defender, go Dark Blast for extra -To Hit in your blasts, or Sonic Blast for -res to help your team defeat things faster.
4) If you do go Empathy, take the buffs. Fortitude is a must have.

Better yet, experiment. This game was made with alts in mind, rather than playing one main and sticking with it.

Didn't Task Forces always play at the highest level?

eg a level 10-15 Task Force (Posi) would spawn as if the players were all level 15?

This was back before merits and XP when exemplared, so Task Forces used to be a choice between getting no XP or punching above your weight. I hardly ever do Task Forces, so Im not sure, but I think thats how it was.

You have to be mindful of global recharge bonuses too.

Many players ahave achieved perma-Hasten by getting +100% Recharge through set bonuses (or powers like Accelerate Metabolism of Quickness), and therefore all temps get +180% recharge or so from Hasten plus the bonuses.

5 minute recharge would mean something like a 1 min 40 recharge for buffs that last 1 minute, ie Eye of the Magus/Demonic would be up more than it was down.

Geas of the Kind Ones offers +100% recharge. That would then recharge in 90 seconds or less, ie 30 sec downtime for both Eye of the Magus/Geas on a perma-Hasten build if you fired them off as soon as they were up.

On my level 50 Grav/Emp I've got Eye of the Magus and Geas of the Kind Ones down to about 8-10 minutes (depending on the Force Feedback proc), at which point they already feel like they've become part of my regular playstyle, almost like a mini-Incarnate system when I got them.


The Crey Pistol is another matter by the way. 1 miunte recharge or less for that baby!

I'd say yes, SR has had some of its territory encroached on by IOs. If cost isn't an issue and you dont mind having a visible shield, it has very little unique going for it, it even takes half your career to get any decent AoE defence and its a tight build.

Blaster /Devices is in a similar boat -anyone can get Stealth and the increased chance to hit of Targetting Drone through IOs.

Same with weapon sets that offer +Acc or sets that have -Def as a secondary, they're less valuable than they used to be.

Has anyone else tried this (either dual box or duo)?

Inspired by the awesome power of my Empathy duo, I've been levelling a Pain Domination/Energy Blast duo recently, and been pleasantly surprised to find that it doesn't completely suck. I've had to delay fighting +2s until the mid 20's, and have had my fair share of deaths along the way.

I'm currently 27, and the star power so far has been Soothing Aura. I hadn't really twigged to how useful an animation-free heal would be until I saw it in action - what doesn't kill me quickly never really has a chance.

Next up, of course is World of Pain, my first decent mutual buff.
From there it looks like the big milestones are PainBringer at 38 and Charged Armor at 41 (capped resistance to S/L/E + huge regen is a very powerful combo).

So it looks like this will scale up rather well as I level, after a bit of a slow start. Has anyone who's tried this got any comments or tips?

Sounds like a great concept for a Super Reflexes character to me.

Its a cool idea, but I dont know if its anything that can't be done already in terms of the game mechanics implementation.

Thats a pretty cool idea.

Something of the order of the Leadership toggles (+15% Dam, +5% Def, +10% to Hit) would work really nicely for a full team after an hour or a few missions.
I guess you'd have to consider Task Forces as an upper limit case, where a team often stays together for an hour or two at least.

Most PUGs Ive been on are rolling teams, sometimes the membership has changed almost completely over the course of my play, so you'd need details of how quickly new members get the buff, how they reduce for each person who leaves, and so on.

But yeah, I really like the idea. Encouraging teaming and team-leading is a good goal.

Where do FF and Sonic Defenders stand in this proposal? Squishy or non-squishy?
They have native armour and mez protection.


The reason Resistance IO bonuses aren't very good is that Resistance, once granted, cannot be taken away. (Well, except by unresistable -Res debuffs, which are very rare if they exist at all these days). Since resistance resists resitance debuffs, the only way to counter it is to pile on more damage, which affects those with and without resistance equally.

Defence on the other hand, is countered by anything with Aim or Buildup, or a DE Quartz resonator, or Fortitude, or def debuffs. Pretty much half the enemy groups in the game
have some counter to defence. And these counters make a huge difference to those with defence, but never more than double the incoming damage to those without defence.

Pink lightning (like Biospark's avatar) is also very cool, if you've read Grant Morrison's "Crisis Times Five" JLA arc.

Johnny Thunder's Thunderbolt gets ret-conned into a 5th dimensional imp (like Mr. Mxzyptlk) called "Yz" who is summoned by his name being spoken backwards ("Cei-u") and appears in a burst of pink lightning.

And yeah, I realise that may be complete gibberish if you haven't read DC comics

Why would I want to grab a nearby object when I can show off and grab something from the other side of the city with a wormhole and throw that instead?

/e rolls eyes

If you're going to bend space, do it properly!

The problem with taking Group Fly into a click is that the target has no way of landing, since they can't turn the toggle off.

With Inertial Reduction, you can not jump by well... not jumping, but you still cant turn it off and jump normally.

With fly forced on you for the next 60 seconds or whatever, you could be locked out of using certain powers.

Rooted and Granite Armour could be made to negate the flight, that would make sense, but what about Hot Feet or the Earth and Plant powers that require contact with the ground? What about Grounded in Electric Armour?

"Click Group Fly" really needs to add a temp power to the user or something, or cancel itself when the target presses down, or something like that. With either of these its not obvious how to implement that in a nice intuitive way.

As it is, Group Fly can be a griefing tool. This would make it worse.

Its far from a simple problem to fix Group Fly. I love the idea of the power, but its a real pain to implement just right.

I am very partial to yellow lightning.

That should work nicely with red Radiation Emission too.

I've always felt that lethal resistance is overstated.

My MA Scrapper was MA/SR, a nice thematic pairing but not much else.

My experience with this and a DA/Energy Meleee tank would lead me to believe that MA/DA would be an awesome combo, allowing you to keep a couple of bosses stunned pretty much indefinitely. So another vote for that one from me.

I think it sucks that the two missions are now linked when they quite obviously don't have to be.

I support the OP in pointing out this unnecessary annoyance.

I usually get level 30 Thunderstrikes at level 27 and don't look back.

The values would increase if you replaced them with higher level ones, but they don't ever expire like normal IOs.

The level 30 set gives you ED-capped damage and +56% Acc, Rech and End redux. The level 50 set gives you ED-capped damage and +69% Acc, Rech and End Redux. (And of course the set bonuses stay the same)
Since I'm already firing off smooth attack chains more or less continuously and not missing, I'm happy not to upgrade usually. The difference will certainly fade into insignificance next to the massive emp buffs you're talking about here.

As for XP/min for various settings, I have no idea. Eryq makes a good point about drops though - they'll be better with more enemies.

I've used Group Fly on a few characters, and had a SG mate who ferried me a round sometimes, just for fun.
Its a terrible power in many ways, but it does get used.

Anyway, the mission teleport is a great idea for an alternate Tier 3. Yeah, I'd love that.

Superspeed-fast flight would be OK as a tier 3, I guess, assuming the flight cap was increased for it. (And I dont know if this is technically possible due to streaming speeds when you're flying over a map from a bairds eye view and its having to load scenery in. But, these are the days of Ultra Mode, so I guess its possible..)

Balance wise - you could have slow vertical movement cheap (2 powers) like you do now, but I bet you'd see a lot of people taking Hover and Air Superiority to get to Sonic Flight, and they're not making a bad pick either way there - Hover and Air Sup are both pretty good pre-req powers.

Of course, the question then would be - what do Speed and Leaping get as their new Tier 3s?

An attack will subtract the highest defence applicable.

So if you have 20% melee defence and 20% negative energy defence and 30% smashing defence, a negative energy/smashing melee attack will see 30% defence, cause thats the highest out of the 3 applicable values.

Defence values only add together for the same type or position.

I understand the need for multiple input streams. Sometimes it feels like one isn't enough anymore, I need more Gb/sec going through each eye..

To that end I often play two characters at once on different PCs. I rarely team with anyone else doing this, and line them up matching storyarcs. Sometimes the duo is a dedicated pair (eg two Empathy?Energy Defenders), sometimes its a mix-and-match pairing of characters from one of my groups.
I find playing with others in dual-box mode too stressful, and I can't talk (ie type, i dont use Ventrilo) when I'm doing that as well.

Other times I play one character, either solo or on teams. I'm always in character, and the main draw there is just being one of my characters and interacting with others. Sometimes I'll have Paragon Wiki up on the other pC for reference, but no videos or anything. When I'm playing, I'm playing. Teams are usually PuGs, sometimes wqith an SG-mate thrown in, and I quite like leading and recruiting.

Even solo or dual box, the characters are talking to me in my head, and feel sort of alive in that way.

Every character I play collects merits thjrough story arcs, and uses set IOs. I usually have a plan mapped out for them by the time they hit 20. I've started to get increasingly maverick with these plans - I've doen a mezzable Stalker, my current Pain/Energy Corrupter duo is slated to be low accuracy - high recharge and low end cost in their attacks so they can spam the battlefield with inaccurate blasts. We'll see how that goes

You know, I'm actually very much for a second claws set being introduced.
One without a ranged attack and 40ft ranged cone shockwave.

I still have absolutely no idea what my lion-man character is supposed to be doing when he uses Focus or Shockwave.

Yeah, Toxic DoT would be an interesting addition.

Emps vs Kins:

An Emp duo can go AFK between buffs, and watch attacks bounce off them and regenerate anything that doesn't. 2 Emps = Super Reflexes + Regen with Instant healing going 24/7.

A Kin duo has a little bit of patchy resistance (to Smasing and Energy) and relies on an enemy targetted accuracy-checked heal.

Kinetics will be much edgier and less safe, but provide more damage obviously. I'd recommend a better alternative is a Kinetics Defender/Force Field Defender duo. I played them, they reinforce each other's weak points very nicely.

But, like I said, Empathy is the one set that doesn't scale its buffs to a team of 8. Therefore it stands to reason that a set limited to "a few allies only" will be the most powerful duo set. You can't beat two Emps for all round power.

Robert:
Congratz on getting to Fortitude, you've hit your first milestone
Yeah, I'd aim to keep cranking up the level of enemies you fight rather than the numbers. Sonic excels at hard targets and has patchy awkward AoE (cones, KB), so with that in mind, slotting Fort for To Hit and keeping double Acc in your blasts is probably a good idea. Shriek and Scream recharge pretty fast anyway, and can form an attack chain all on their own. Maybe slot Shout for 2 Rech/3 Dam/1 Acc? I dunno.

My advice as always would be get Thunderstrike IOs for all of them when you hit level 27. The extra Ranged def will cap you here, and the extra +21% accuracy will be icing on the cake for fighting +4s and +5s.