DrMike2000

I disagree, Mondo. Empathy's got defensive buffs in Fortitude, Regen Aura and AB - all make the temamates they're buffing much more survivable.



Oppressive Gloom is brilliant in my opinion, its one of my favourite Defender epic powers. Dark pit will make it especially useful, since the stacked stuns will stun a boss easily.

I just stuck 3 Recharge in Recovery Aura. It doesnt need frankenslotting like you've done because while its up everyone has more end than they can use, doubling that doesn't really help much. Or are you getting some set bonuses in there?

On the subject of set bonuses, my advice is to chase +Recharge wherever you can get it. (eg dont stop at 3 Cloud Senses) Empathy really benefits from having Fort, auras and AB up as much as possible.

Nice Fortitude slotting by the way, I never realised that was an option. Must go and look at my empath again now....

Mind Control is a much better solo-er if you take Levitate than if you dont.

It does 33% more damage than Dominate or Mesmerise, and does Smashing damage, especially nice against robots.

If your concept includes a bit of TK as well as telepathy, you're golden, otherwise, you may find Mind Control a bit of a drag if you skip this power. For a pure telepath, I'd prefer a Psi Blast Blaster or Defender.

Cool. Thanks for clearing that up.

I picked up resilience on my Regen scrapper when I hit 30 at the weekend, and was under the impression it would allow me to rez using a wakie and hit the ground running due to the innate Disorient protection.

It didn't, the disorient Resistance helped me come round quicker, but not immediately. I checked the power description and saw that it was currently giving me 3.99 Stun Protection.

I'm sure Ive seen guides saying you can do this.
This protection will increase in level, does it reach a point where I can rez and be un-stunned immediately? Is the post-rez stun Mag 4?

You can build a "ranged tank" Force Field Defender with pretty much capped defence to everything.

Slotted Dispersion Bubble, Weave and Manouvers, and non-slotted Hover/CJ puts you at 32% Defence, and you can get this by the mid-20s. Build from there with set bonuses to increase your Melee, Ranged, AoE and Psi defence. By the mid 40s you can be packing 60-odd% Smashing/Lethal resists too.

There are more slightly out of date details in the link in my signature.

Don't bother with Provoke - all your teammates will be invulnerable too. I highly recommend Sonic Blast as a secondary to provide some offensive debuffs.

I found this to be a very good antidote to scaredy-tanks.

Traps would work well for this approach too, since FFG gets a slightly higher base Defence than FF, but you already said you dont like the playstyle. Force Fields will allow a fast moving team to move even faster just due to the increased confidence they get when nothings hitting them.

I've never played Stone Armour, specifically because of the trade-offs in Rooted.

Being unable to jump and move slowly because you're using a god-mode toggle is fine. It introduces gameplay tension - "can I jump that lip and run up there under sustained fire, or stay turtled up and go the long way round?" is an intersting and viable choice to have to make in combat.

Being unable to jump and move because you're avoiding being one-shot mezzed is a pretty unacceptable trade-off for a tank. "Should I stay here behind this kerb or get stunned and killed?" is not a fun decision.

So, yeah, I'm behind these suggestions.

You've pretty much summed it up there.

SR also waits until 35 to get any AoE defence out of Hide.
It has better Defence and also close to 90% Defence debuff resistance once you slot everything up.

Radiation Blast for Corrupters and Defenders has the first two attacks doing below average damage but recharging more quickly than most sets.

Most blast sets have a 4 second and 8 second attack as their Teir 1 and 2, Radiation Blast has a 1.5s and 4s recharge attack.

So Corrupter/Defender Rad Blast is more frequent attacks that do less damage. Neutrino Bolt can feel like fighting with a laser pointer at times

Radiation Blast for Blasters was tweaked to suit Blasters burst damage role, and has Neutrino Bolt recharging in 4 seconds, X-Ray Eyes in 8 second like most Blast sets do. The Blaster version do correspondingly higher damage even before the Balster damage scalar is applied.

So, yes, Radiation Blast will produce less damage per attack than other Corrupters, but roughly the same overall damage over time. Cosmic Burst is the same damage as Power Burst ie a standard 10s attack, so that will even it out a bit.

One way to take advantage of this peculiarity is to stick damage procs in Neutrino Bolt. The procs have a change to go off per attack, and so will trigger more frequently.

Here's a really good link that covers the basics of enhancements:

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Enhancements

The section "Slotting and Stacking" covers most of what you're asking.

You'll probably also want to consider slotting your secondary powers as well.

On Defenders, Electron Haze does around 40% more damage than most AoE's. It may be worth checking if this is the case with Blasters.

I think Sonic's an excellent choice for a team support set. It really shines in bigger teams, which is fair enough because it's quite poor solo.

Healing is useful. You'll often resistance cap any Scrappers and Tankers on your team, so they're looking at a very slow bleed of damage. I havent tried using an interruptable heal on a Sonic Defender taking a back seat though. It could help you to build up some AoE defence so you can get in and heal without taking splash damage. Luckily, Aegis is there for you.

I'd look into getting Short Circuit at least, if not Ball Lightning. If you're running on teams it should be safe enough to use some AoE once the aggro's controlled, and you'd have the added bonus of end drain to further aid your team if you go with Short Circuit and maybe even Power Drain later on. If you skip Short Circuit, you're really skipping the main reason to take Electric Blast.

Voltaic Sentinel is a bit weak. Its not bad DPE and DPA and so on, but tends to spread its damage around and never really defeat anything.

And no, I dont think you're being too Defendery. Good team support can be worth its weight in gold.

One alternative would be a set of alternate animations for an existing set, eg Martial Arts.

It wouldnt even need to be every animation, just say extra options for Thunder Kick, Storm Kick and Eagles Claw that use the left hand and shield. Powers like Dragon's Tail (which is kind of hard to re-imagine doing with a shield rather than your foot) just dont get the extra option.

These animations only appear when you have Sheild Defence as a secondary.

The next problem is then making sure these animations work with all types of shields, eg round ones and rectangular riot shields.

I guess the devs do have bigger fish to fry.

What would work nicely for a number of sets is to give Boxing in the Fighting pool an option of using your Brawl animation. This would give you shield bashing, kicking archers and gun butt-ing as part of a useful attack chain.

...once power pools get customisation of course.

I second everything Biospark said.

Your 2xAcc, 2xRech, 2XDam slotting in your AoEs and Will Domination is a great way to burn through endurance, since you'll need more attacks to defeat an enemy due to the low damage, and you'll be firing off your expensive attacks more often.

Poor end management can leave you in that nasty situation where you dont have the 1/4 end bar required to fire off Recovcery Aura when it comes up.

2 Recharge in Resurrect (which uses half an end bar)? I'd maybe jsut slot one end redux in there. Fortitude could use 3 Def and 3 Recharge. No teammates should be relying on the To Hit enough to make it worth enhancing, whereas the Defence bonus benefits greatly from slotting (its the same as FF's ally bubbles), and recharge means more teamates can get it.

I'd look into IO's. A couple of good sets to start accumulating are:

Thunderstrike, for 6-slotting in single target attacks. This gives +Recovery, +Accuracy and +Ranged/Energy/Negative Defence per set.
The enhancement bonuses for the power amount to 3 Damage SO's, 1.75 Acc, 1.75 End Redux and 1.75 Recharge, ie over 8 So's worth for 6 slots.
Start with one of these in Will Domination. You can get 4 sets of this with Psi Blast, which amounts to almost 2 SO's accuracy in each power and an extra +28% Accuracy as a global bonus (since you like high accuracy).
This global bonus also works on temp powers like Sands of Mu, giving them a decent accuracy. No more Sands of Whiff!

Doctored Wounds, for 5-slotting in healing powers. This gives +Recharge, very good for an Empath. The enhancement bonuses for these ar around 3 Healing SOs and over 2 Recharge and end redux.

Both sets are cheap-ish and dont require expensive salvage.

Fair enough.

Besides, there's always the Vanguard Shield (25% Psi Defence, I believe) temp power as a handy stop-gap for the odd Psi boss, and that doesn't cost slots, only Vanguard Merits. Combined with the Elusive Mind Accolade (another 25%), you can cap your Psi Defence for a minute at a time, although I'm trying to think of the situation that really calls for this kind of burst protection. The Clockwork King GM maybe?

Is the Impervium Armour +Psi resist piece unique? I've seen conflicting evidence in game and on various sites.

If it isn't, I had some alternate slotting mapped out that used 6 pieces of these in TI, Unyielding and maybe one of the resist passives later on. Combined with a few full sets of Crushing Impact you could get around around 30% Psi Resist.

Nothing brilliant, and certainly not as optimal as Reactive Armours and Aegis, but it could help close the Psi hole a little bit. If these pieces are unique.. well, forget it.

On the second day of I9, one of my characters got a pair of Fairy Wings and sold them instantly for 40 million.

I bought a whole heap of expensive but useless rubbish to boost his passive regen, not really a great idea for a Kinetics Defender.

Much later, I spotted the +Regen unique in Health and decided to respec and sell it. I accidentally typed 4 million instead of 40 million (its current worth) and it sold immediately for 6.
At this point in time this was more money than I'd ever seen in game, just gone.

I've since learned how the market worked, and made my first 100 million with this guy.

Good questions.

Both Tier 1 and Tier 2 Hand Grenades reported the same damage values.

I was unable to craft the Tier 2 recipe until I'd deleted the Tier 1 recipe. It was greyed out and said "You already have this power"

So, each tier behaves the same barring the salvage cost, and you can only have one of them at once.


Old powers like the St. Louis Slugger seem to have three tiers too now.

Wouldn't Illusion Doms provide a whole new play experience rather than dilute any existing experience?

Drop Phantom Army, and wade in with impunity with your melee attacks. I dont think any powerset pairing currently pairs taunting pets with low personal defence and melee damage, it could be interesting.

The core Dominator tactic of "tie them up then beat them up once its safe" still applies. In this case the "tie them up" part often becomes "distract them with taunting indestructable pets", but its still an extension of the basic playstyle in the same way that IllusioN Control extends general Controller control.

Wouldn't a stalker satisfy this best? Go for MA/SR maybe for a character with no other powers, or EM/SR and treat the glowing hands as just an ingame effect. (That's what I do with my EM stalker, who's a boxer with an invisibility device)

Alternatively, make a Scrapper with the concealment pool. Stealth won't give you full Invisibility, and Invisibility doesn't allow you to use your attacks, but its definitely effective. I used this pool on my first character, a Blaster, and swore by it.

With an Illusion/FF controller you're still going to be creating visible force fields and using some kind of mind powers most of the time, so even skipping the pets is going to feel pretty concept breaking.

New defiance has made Blasting a lot easier than it used to be as this is the really mez-heavy part of the game.

Being quite literally able to kill a Rikti Mesmerist in your sleep instead of being slowly chain-mezzed to death is great.

Thats my solo experience, I tend not to take my Blasters on large teams.

This gives me an idea - has anyone ever completed a Malta mission solo on a Blaster while perma-stunned? It could be done, drunk-walking through the entire mission using your tier 1 and 2 attacks. Extra points for wearing a zombie version of your normal costume..