DrMike2000

It could work against you if they kept the 16 target cap.

I don't know how the targets are chosen, but if it isn't the closest 16, firing off an AoE that large in a room with 2 spawns could have some odd effects, like completely missing the enemies standing next to you.

Thats a very cool idea.

It would be great to have options like your character catching fire, or glowing or emitting an energy field. The effects are all there in terms of art.

Shields can softcap and get resistance and increased hitpoints, and increased killspeed through AAO and Shield Charge.

SR just gets softcapped defence and gets by fine without a self heal.

I dont think Shields need a self heal, having got a Scrapper to 50 with the set.

Dont slot any Immobilise in Crushing Field. It recharges in 8 seconds and lasts many times longer.

You could replace that with an Accuracy.

Another couple of good things to slot in there though are the Ragnorak knockdown proc, or the Gravitational Anchor chance for hold. Both of these turnt he power into a really good soft control as you know enemies over or make them float into a short lived gravity style hold. It looks awesome.

I slotted the Ragnorak proc and 5 Grav Anchor pieces for the 10% recharge bonus. You could lose dome of the slots in Health, RotP, maybe the Slow %age in Gravity Distortion Field?

If you're struggling for keys (and I can fully understand this on a Dominator) I'd suggest taking sprint off one of your mouse buttons.

Set up another key to turn it on (e.g. right arrow) and have your typical opening attack turn it off. eg

/bind 1 "powexec_slot 1$$powexectoggleoff sprint"

Where did this debuffer/buffer distinction come from? I think you're overgeneralising.

Healing/non-healing and buffing/debuffing overlap.

Empathy - healing buffer
Dark - healing debuffer
Force Fields - non-healing buffer
Trick Arrows - non-healing debuffer

Traps is a mixed buff/debuff set.

BTW - two Empaths on a team can AB each other and keep everyone else double Fortituded and provide 24/7 Regen and Recovery auras. Chances are they won't, but their contribution can be much greater than two trick archers in my experience, if they do this. Which is a big if...

Traps provides layered defence when it matures.

+Def from the Force Field generator, -To Hit and -Dam from Seeker Drones, and +Regen from Triage Beacon, hold from poison Gas Trap and Caltrops breaking up enemy AI.

Your allies who are taking the hits will also have their own defences matured, and have bigger pockets so that they typically have a green pill for emergencies, which will happen rarely.

I don't know how it handles sewer runs, but non-healing sets tend to do rather badly there from what I've seen. Sewer runs are an oddity, in that AoE heals are one of the best mitigations going for them.

At low levels, spike damage is low, so healing works well. And defence/resistance powers havent been slotted or even taken yet, so FF, Sonic, Cold and Traps aren't offering enough in the way of mitigation to make patch-up heals unnecessary. This all changes by the early 20s as people get their core powers together and Sos. By then your FFG will be offering +22% defence, so between that and Manouvers, you've turned evreyone into a SR scrapper on SOs... almost. And you're also providing other sources of mitigation, like I said.

When you get to level 27 you can put the Stupefy "Chance for KB" proc into just about any Energy Melee attack. 20% chance to send the target flying. It works rather nicely in Energy Transfer for pure visual flair.

The Kinetic Combat "Chance for KD", in contrast, will just knock them over.

Another vote for Radiation Emission.

I've used it on a few characters for probability control or reality alteration.

Useful pool powers to complement Empathy:
Leadership (all of them), Grant Invis, Hasten to make your buffs come up faster.

Pools not to take:
Medicine. Its redundant and inferior to Empathy.

Blast sets to look into:

Dark Blast, slotted for -To Hit, allows you to spam -30% To Hit on enemies just using Tenebrous Tentacles and Nightfall. This will make your whole team much harder to hit.
So if you want to defend your team better, go this route.

A /Emp Controller will probably give even more defense though, through their controls.

Sonic Blast gives -20% Res on a group with Howl, and much more single target -Res in the single target blasts. This will really help your team take down hard targets like AVs. Go this route if you want to support your team's offensive capabilities. You can't slot your blasts for extra -Res, but you can slot them for recharge to stack more -Res.
Sonic Blast also has an AoE sleep, useful for when a secodn spawn gets aggro'd, so it adds some defence there.

A /Emp Controller can't do this.

In both cases, beware of aggro you may draw, as you can't defend yourself very well with Empathy.

And if you're going to do this, don't be afraid to stick a damage enhancement or two in those blasts when you get the spare slots. You'll be using them anyway, and every little bit helps.

Does Targetting Drone provide any +Perception? And I think it has some To Hit debuff resistance.

Either of these could be quite valuable in the right circumstances. But, yeah, the power's more insurance than a way of life these days.

If you want some Psychic Defence, turn to Vanguard.

The Vanguard Crafting table allows you to make a 30 second Psionic Defence temporary power that lasts for 30 mins toggle time, 150 vanguard merits to make. It provides 25% Psionic Defence.
Taking part in a Mothership Raid should get you a good way there.

The Elusive Mind accolade from Rikti Invasions also provides 25% Psi Defence in one minute bursts on a long timer.

Between the two of these, you can take the hits from nasty Psychic bosses at the ends of missions if you're running in small teams.

Either one with a small luck pill gives you 37.% Psi defence, close to capped with Energy Cloak or Weave also running.

I agree with AirHammer about Disruption Field. The way it works really brings the sets solo-ability down. -Res is one of the set's key strengths, and solo, you're reduced to a single target debuff.

The explanation I've heard is:

You target enemy and run Black Hole toggle one them. They phase.
Next frame, they are phased, so you can't affect them, therefore the toggle stops running.

However, something's off there. You can run Radiation Infection on a Carnie Illusionist and it doesn't switch off when they phase. It may stop radiating - To Hit from them, but the toggle sure keeps on running.

So in short - I don't know for sure.

TT:Manouvers , slotted: 16%
Manouvers, slotted: 5.5%
Cloaking Device, slotted when supressed: 6%
Combat Jumping 2.5%
Steadfast Res/Def IO in Bane Armour: 3%

That's 33% to everything

CTefensive, slotted will softcap your ranged defence, so you need to find about 12% for AoE and Melee.

Razzle Dazzle in Pummel is 2.5% to each
3 Touch of Deaths in melee attacks is 11.25%, so you're pretty much covered for melee now.

For AoE Defence, Aegis in Bane Armour (5 pieces) is 4.6%, we need another 5% now...
3 sets of Ruin in Ranged attacks should do the trick.

That should all get you there.

A controller Immobilise or hold with Containment, does equivalent damage to a Defender Tier 2 Blast, assuming you're slotting your holds for damage.

So the baseline for a Controller is like a Defender with two Tier 2 Blasts.
Propel does twice that (but slowly), Spectral Wounds and Levitate(Mind) are close to Tier 3 blasts.
Lift(gravity) is like a Tier 1 Blast roughly.

So a lot of Controllers have decent-ish single target chains.

Controllers really don't get a alot of AoE damage though, which is king of the PVE game at its most basic (eg radio missions), whereas all Defenders get a couple of decent Tier 1 Blast-damage level AoEs.

Yeah, I'd post if asked for any examples.

I agree with PennyPA, I don't think there's really anything new you could do with a build to make that huge a difference.

Once you understand the basics of the game mechanics, and look up the info for IOs and powersets its all fairly straightforwards to figure out how to max out certain aspects of your character or balance between various aspects.

Yeah, I reckon Sonic Resonance could do with some help too.

The sleep hole is worse than it is on FF-er's for the reasons you mentioned. And I do belive that the sleep hole could be removed entirely for both sets without overbalancing them - it does look like a remnant of some older-style thinking.
Both give up quite a bit for their mez protection - no heals, no offensive buffs in FF's case, and Sonic gets a fairly narrow spectrum of effects compared to many other sets.
Its -Res effects are not as fantastic as they could be either, considering that this is meant to be a speciality of the set. I'd go for making Sonic Siphon stackable.

I like the balance between offensive and defensive that Sonic provides, but I think it covers too few late-game holes.
No Psi protection - some could be put into Clarity. Clarity deserevs a bit of a boost since some of its effects are redundant with Dispersion.
No endurance management tools or end drain resistance - some could go into Sonic Haven or even Sonic Dispersion.

There are plenty of teammates who need these much more than the extra S/L Resistance by the later levels.

All number assume SO slotting:

SR Scrapper:
30% Def to most things (6 powers)
+20% recharge (Quickness)

Self-buffing Empath Defender:
24% Def to everything including Psi (Fort)
+100% Recharge bonus

The empath has 80% of the defence of SR. Power pool boosts (Hover/CJ, Manouvers) will close this gap, since the defender gets better modifiers. No DDR for the empath.
Empath gets better recharge.
So its close, with the SR scrapper coming out as maybe 20% better defensively, the Empath has way better Recharge.


Regen Scrapper:
+400% Regen (Integration + fast healing)
+1000% Regen for 90 seconds every 325 sec (instant healing)
+60% recovery (Quick rec)
+600 heal evry 30 seconds (Recon)
+1000 heal every 180 seconds (Dull Pain)

Self-buffing Empath (+100% Rech from AB factored in):
+1000% Regen (AB)
+1000% for 90 seconds every 170 seconds or so (Regen Aura)
+1600% Recovery (AB)
+266 heal every 3 seconds or less. (Healing Aura)
+500 heal every 3 seconds, if this counts as a self-buff? (Heal Other)

The self-buffing empath wins hands down here. The scrapper gets bigger heals but less frequently, and far less regeneration, both constant and from the emergency god-mode powers (IH and Reg Aura).

The Empath wins in sheer regen numbers. The scrapper has more HP, so that helps close the gap.

(I havent mentioned the offensive buffs from Fortitude, BTW.)

This is what I had in mind when I said a self-buffing empath would have the powers of both SR and Regeneration.

Magic J.
You made a suggestion. Based on in-game experience and the numbers I ran before making my Empath duo, alarm bells went off, and I pointed this out to you. I'm not trying to be a jerk here and disagree for the sake of arguing, so I'll stop here.

Superspeed's balanced as it is - fast straight line movement in exchange for probelms with verticals. Would you swap some ground speed for the built in jump? (It also has a very nice pre-cursor power compared to other travel powers)

As it is you can get Hurdle and Ninja Jump without costing an extra power pick and use them with Superspeed for good vertical movement. And the devs make money from this setup if you buy the BBooster pack, so I doubt they're eager to change that.

I've dual-boxed Empathy/Energy Blast defenders.

I already know that its incredibly powerful.

You rarely get hit, you heal any damage almost instantly, your blue bar never shifts, you can't be mezzed, and your attack chain consists of cycling Explosive Blast, Energy Torrent, Power Blast and Power Burst.

That's a bit much for a team-oriented character solo, isn't it?

I think there is a need for a speedster powerset.

My Speedsters were Kinetics Defenders/Controllers, who used Siphon Speed to get unsupressed superspeed in combat. This felt great (especially with Sands of Mu), except for the fact that Kinetics forces you to stand still near enemies to heal of buff yourself rather than keep moving.

I'd love to gte a melee oriented set that gave the same feeling.

I wrote up some ideas here last week for superspeed (and other movement-based sets):

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=229452

An alternative take here from Steampunkette:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=229407

Nice punchline!

I've only rolled architect tickets the once. I was quite sursprised to get a Regenerative Tissue +Regen from a Bronze roll, I'd assumed they were Pool C, and not Pool B. I really freaked out when my next roll was also a Regenerative Tissue +Regen.