DrMike2000

Me too. That sounds very promising.

Very cool.
Its good to know that Gravity Control has been acknowledged as having a few problems.

Is Ebil Marketeers taken as a SG name?

Or Evil Marketeers if thats too much of an in-joke to wear above your head in public.

Wall Street Crashers?
Economic Crisis?

I'd say there are two factors that make enhancement extraction a pain.

One is the cost. Respecs are a valuable commodity, but we do now have access to an unlimited number via respec recipes. So, if you can pay for it, you can salvage all the IOs you need from that character. Like others have said, being unable to extract all Ios easily is a good thing because the game really needs to hang on to its influence sinks.

The other one is the sheer inconvenience.
I've done a couple of respecs recently in order to tweak some of my level 50 characters, and yes, they are a real drag. I can't imagine they'd be too painful to execute if you were just extracting though, say if you're planning to delete the character afterwards.

So for the dev time and effort to streamline what is a pretty uncommon process, I have to say no, I can't really get behind this.

It rocks. It's insanely good.
Its a build that's full of little milestones - your effectiveness jumps dramatically with Fortitude, Recovery Aura, Regen Aura and AB, and with slotting each one.

I did it to level 39 and got bored because +4/x8 was not an option back then.
By then you can alternate auras and keep yourself AB'd at all times fro +1000% Recovery and Regen, and have 30-odd % Defence via Fortitude and Manouvers.
My attack chain became Tier2 and 3 blasts and AoEs, I think I ended up slotting Power bolt (my teir 1) as a set mule for Kinetic Crash, because I neevr used it at the Recharge rates I was operating at.

I played Empathy/Energy blast purely for concept, far from the most efficient set but it worked a treat. Emapthy/Sonic would be the most efficient as you stack your +69% damage (double Assault plus Fortitude) with large -Res's.

But anything will work. Its not complicated to play. Clear Mind/Fort/AB yourselves eevry 90 seconds, and fire off a pair of auras every time the last one drops. Its a lot easier than emp-ing for a team in terms of watching power refreshes.

Yeah, you're right about Archery, Ben. It should be classed in the High AoE group due to rain of Arrows.

My analysis compared non-nuke AoE's, but thats a bit of a false distinction for AR and Archery. Possibly for Dual Pistols as well, althought Ive heard mixed reports about the crashless nuke there.

My first Controller, and my first level 50 Controller.

Gravity/Emp is NOT the best combo by any means, but its workable, and actually makes a pretty good solo-ist. (It used to be better wehn Adrenalin Boost would double Singularity's rate of fire, but those pesky Fire/Kin's took that off me! )

Gravity Control is high damage, well, high single target damage. Propel is slow to activate, but if the 3 enemies you're facing are all held or stunned, and you';re recovering end during that animation, who cares? It's animation will make you cry on teams as you corpse-bomb yet another target, but solo it's a great power to have.

My advice:
Get the +Immob out of Crush. It recharges in 4s and lasts over 20s, so you never worry about the immobilise running out.

Get the +Regen out of Health. You aren't going to survive by passive healing, and you have a self-heal anyway.

Add some end redux and recharge to Healing Aura.
Give Fortitude +3 Recharge and +3 Defence - it provides the same Def as a force field ally bubble to All damage types including Psi.

Resurrect won't need 3 recharges. 1 end redux would be good.

Get Hasten. The faster Recovery Aura and Regen Aura are up, the better off the team are in offensive and defensive power. And +Recharge allows you to Fortitude more team members. And get as much +Recharge as you can when you go for sets.

Hope that helps, and good luck with your choice of an off-beat but fun build.

The defence in Dispersion Bubble is redundant with PFF on, but the mez resistance isn't. Always keep Dispersion on as well if you're running through a high level zone, or one stray mez can ruin your day.

Yeah, we need badges to go with this.

Gourmet: You have eaten and savoured 1,000,000 delicious inspirations

I recently set up my characters with some binds to combine insps and it rocks.

I've always used F1 to F8 for different types of inspiration (eg F1 is damage, F2 is accuracy) and now have ALT+F1 to combine oranges and yellows into damage, and so on. To save space I only set it up for tier 1 and 2 insps, since the odds of accumulating three identical large insps is small enough that you can do that manually when it occurs.

I'll try to answer my own question then.

DP/Devices is probably bottom of the heap, no Build Up or Aim and the AoE oomph of Assault Rifle swapped out for some fancy animations.

Energy Blast/Fire should be a pretty weak contender, combining PBAoE damage with knockback away from you, and no hard mezzes. Has anyone played one of them and AR/Dev and preferred AR/Dev, for example?

How about Elec/Dev? That's devices again though, which seems to be the core of AR/Dev's problems...

That would be extremely cool.

It would make Grav/Storm a very nice combo if Tornado was reduced to doing knockdown.

Come to think of it, Gravity Control and Whirlwind would be pretty potent...

Yeah, Ive got the FF +Rech proc in there.

The thing is though, if Crushing Field did apply -KB, then putting the Ragnorak proc in it would be far less useful. The way it is now, its the one area immobilise that you can spam for repeated knockdown with this proc.

Vive la difference!

Energy Blast does standard Single target and AoE - I tend to think of it as the baseline blast set.

Power Bolt and Power Blast do the same damage as most 4s and 8s blasts (ie all except fire). Power Burst does the same damage as Cosmic Burst, Bitter Ice Blast, or Blaze minus the extra DoT (which is Fire's secondary effect).

Explosive Blast and Energy Torrent do similar damage to most Blaster AoEs. Fire them off one after the other to open and they'll both trigger before anyone gets knocked out of the way.

(The Snipe and Nova do standard snipe and nuke damage too I believe).

Energy Blast attacks can also all be slotted with the dirt cheap Explosive Strike damage proc

I've been playing with this for a couple of days now, mostly fighting +0/x8 missions with two characters. And I really like it.

Ragnorak Proc in Crushing Field is a keeper!

"Regardless of what the numbers show, Devices is not team friendly"

This made sense to me.
Some powersets you can get a rough idea of how they'll do by looking at the numbers (eg Red Tomax). Others, you can't quite figure out until you play them.

eg
How much mitigation does Invulnerability provide for a Tanker? Why, 90% vs S/L, sir, if you take Fighting and slot accordingly. I can work that out without ever playing the set.

contrast with:
How much mitigation does the knockback in Energy Blast provide? Er....

Devices is a bit hard to figure out just from the numbers. Trip Mine shows some seductively big numbers. But how much of a pain is it to set up? How often will you waste your time dropping a mine in the wrong place compared to Explosive Blast, say, which does much less damage but always hits where you tell it to.

How much mitigation does Caltrops provide?

Devices isn't easy to figure out from just looking at data, and once you took it into the field you found it disappointing? Is that what you were saying, plainguy?

Talen: what combos are worse than Ar/Dev in your opinion?

Traditional beserkers don't suffer a 10 second crash every 2 minutes.

And even though the power is called "Rage" and may owe something to beserkers, its part of a set that is intended to cover a very wide range of character concepts.
I've seen Superman-type classic heroes, animated statues of medieval knights, living trees, giant mutants (well, 8 feet tall), a mass golem made out of dwarf star matter, a super-dense mutie biker chick and plenty of other Superstrong characters who don't experience blind anger when they use their strength.

A permanent toggle would actually represent all of these concepts very well.


I do agree though, that there is nothing wrong with some sets having better or worse synergy. Its bound to happen with this many options.