DrMike2000

Oh yeah, tactical teleport would be awesome.

I've tried all sorts of camera angles and bind set ups, but getting teleport to work on a melee character during combat is an exercise in frustration due to the immobilise and hover at the end.

To anyone jonesing really badly -

Start a new character on another server and then transfer them over to Virtue once its back up again.

Either will make you bulletproof.

S/L will protect you from high damage melee attacks liek Freak Swipers, Rikti Swords etc.

Ranged def protects you from a lot of annoying mezzes, Malta Sappers, Carnie Mistress psi attacks and so on.

So if you're a hover blaster, Ranged Defence is probably better. You can hover out of the way of melee. If youre a blapper, S/L defence is better - a lot of enemies dont use ranged mezzes if you close with them, like Rikti Memserists.

This is all very cool, because Ranged attacks take Thunderstrike and melee attacks take Kinetic Combat.

If you could create a new power using the existing mechanics, what would you go for?

Some I'd love to try out:

Teleport with +Def per click. Similar to how Parry/Divine Avalanche work, I'd love to have a character whose movement power was their defence - the moment they stop 'porting around the battelfield and stand still they can get hit.
You could do something similar with a Shield Charge type power for superspeedsters. It could be a moderate single target damage or even small radius weak AoE with a quick recharge (eg 12 seconds), but the main idea is that running around a lot improves your defence.

Reliable sapping: a single target -Recovery -End power that could neutralise a PVE opponent in one hit with the correct slotting. End Drain is an interesting control mechanism, but currently mostly reliant to Short Circuit, a PBAoE in a blast set.

Eclipse/Drain Psyche/Sould Drain/Dark Regen variants.
Currently there are self buffs that add Resistance, Recovery and Regen, To Hit and Damage buffs and Heal per target. If you've played with any of these you'll know they kind of steer your playstyle a little, and you're always salivating for that perfect buff where you get ten icons on your bar.
What else could this extend to?

A +Recharge per target would make a Brute look relaxed. Put it on a long recharge (say 240 sec, 120 with enhancements) but with a +25% Recharge per target for 30 seconds it can come back in a minute or so.
I don't know how you'd justify this power concept-wise, but then again, Eclipse doesn't make a whole lot of sense either. :P

Invincibility/Rise to the Challenge/Against All Odds variants
Toggles that improve the character based on the number of targets in melee range. We have Def/Acc, Regen and Damage currently.
Improving Recharge or Recovery in a similar manner could make a good Beserker type power.

Divine Avalanche/Life Drain/Follow Up variants:
We have melee attacks that improve defence, health and to hit/damage.
Having a melee attack that improves Resistance or Recharge or Regen would be possible. Hmm, not sure any of these really grab me.

Anyone else got any ideas?

Force Bolt is an awesome power indeed.

I've recently made a FF/Energy Defender and planned on skipping it due to redundancy with my primary. In the end I was forced to take it to fill my quota of pre-level 6 powers, and I havent regretted it.
Fast recharge, 100% KB and very high base accuracy keeps the boss of my choice flying through the air. Circling them to keep tossing them back to the melee-ers on the team is one of my favourite minigames.

I hope they don't hold back on proliferating sets for this reason.

I can see the 3 melee classes each having a role when Going Rogue comes out.

Scrappers do the highest damage from the offset, and due to their high base damage they benefit more from damage buffs. This doesn't become apparent until SO's in some ways.

Say at level 10, a Brute ansd Scrapper are both using Nimble Slash during a prolonged fight, with the Brute at 70% Fury for +140% damage. Neither are enhanced for damage, just a bit of acc and end redux.

Brute does 35 *(1 + 1.4) = 84 damage
Scrapper does 52.5 * (1) = 52.5 damage

The Brute appears to be much stronger once they get their Fury on.

Once they get to SO's though, they both gain .95% damage

Brute does 35 * (1 +.95 +1.4) = 119 damage
Scrapper does 52.5 *(1 + .95) = 102 damage

Add in one serve of Blinding Feint and Power Up (or Build Up for other sets) to give an extra +80% damage:

Brute does 35 *(1 +.95 +1.4 +.8)= 145 damage
Scrapper does 52.5 *( 1 +.95 +.8) =1.95+.8= 145 damage

At typical post 22-conditions, the damage is tied, but the Scrapper is not having to maintain Fury to do it.

I've found Scrappers to be pretty average before SO's. At that point they start to gain the advantages of the high raw damage numbers, their defences start coming together due to enahncements and power selections being available, and they can get Stamina at 20.
Tanks definitely shine after SO's, or rather fail to so before then.

Brutes on the other hand are fun right out of the box.

My point? Don't compare Scrappers, Tanks and Brutes until you've got them to the mid 20's. The lower levels are deceiving blue-side.

I don't see Insulation Shield from Force Fields being poo-poo'd exactly, but very few people seem to know about its End Drain resistance.
Great against Clockwork in the early levels pre Stamina, Arachnos and Freaks in the middle and Malta and Carnies at the end.

On the other hand, when I'm on a PUG with my FF Defender, I bubble everyone up and then I end up leading the charge, that is a kind of poo-pooing of my Force Fields I suppose.

Yeah, Brutes are that much fun.

I've got 3 on the go: Mace/Willpower, Fire/Fire and Dual Blades/Elec.
Brutes relish ambushes rather than dread them, they thrive on situations that would spiral out of control for a Stalker or Dominator. They're fun in that way. I especially like Brutes with damage auras, Fury works very nicely with them.

If you slot for end redux over damage, so that you can keep going for longer and let Fury take care of your damage, you'll have a ball.

Force Fields or Sonic Resonance.

I'd vote for Sonic Resonance.

A Sonic Defender at minimum makes everyone around 60% tougher and do 30%-60% more damage without having to do anything other than buff everyone every 4 minutes.
If you go AFK, the let-down on the team is noticable, but they can adapt.
Until 20 you have the perfect excuseto do nothing else, since Dispersion, Disruption Field and Shiedls will take all your endurance.

With Force Fields, you're making everyone 90% tougher and thats it. If the team get into the swing of this and you go AFK, it can lead to some pretty quick wipes.

With either set you'll definitely be appreciated just for turning up.

I'd choose Rad/Sonic or Rad/Energy

As already mentioned, Sonic Resonance is team oriented. I think its the worse solo set available to Defenders.

Kinetics is slow at first, picks up later, but is always really dicey seat of the pants play, and really benefits from having a tank or scrapper buddy who can run in first.

Rad Emission on the other hand can positively benefit from being solo, in that no-one but you will kill your Rad Infection anchor. All the best powers are available early on.

For the secondaries:
Rad Blast is cool, but its big hitter and mez come at level 28. Its a long wait till then.

Sonic Blast is hands down most effective because of the stacking -Res to boost your damage. It can be recoloured these days and appear to be psychic blasts of some kind quite easily (either telepathic or telekinetic) if your concept calls for that. Sonic Blast also has some very good damage mitigation - a fast cycling area KB and an area sleep will add a lot of extra safety if you take them.

Energy Blast gives you knockback for extra damage mitigation and a good attack chain very early on. Your biggets problem for soloing is a lack of mez of any kind - you can't reliably stop a Tsoo Sorceror teleporting away or a Paragon Protector from activating its godmode power with just knockback. It looks and feels great otherwise, so if concept calls for it, go for it.

You could simulate this effect by eating a tray full of inspirations.

I'm not a huge insp-muncher on any character, but least of all on my MM's, because I find it kind of fiddly to drop them on the pets, so they tend to stack up in my tray.

So eating a few lucks and damage pills for the final boss in a mission would definitely give you that "Ha ha! I've been holding back until now and letting my minions do the work! No face the true might of Doom!" feeling. Put your pets into bodyguard mode as well - that shifts power from them to you.

Best of all, you can do it today with what we have in game.

Yeah, you'd have to take cost into consideration, and a whole bunch of other factors.

Is it realistic to expect anyone aiming for this to get the Steadfast unique? (125 merits or several million). What about redside? What about the other PVP IO unique that gives +3% Def?

What could help would be a programme where you could add some standard solutions into your build at the click of a button, eg.

Leadership pool:
Manouvres
Manouvres slotted with Red Fortune
Manouvres slotted with Red Fortune + Tactics with Gaussian

Fighting Pool:
Tough with Steadfast unique
Tough with Steadfast unique & Aegis
Tough with Steadfast unique & Aegis + Weave
Tough with Steadfast unique & Aegis + Weave with Red Fortune

Nice work.
I've never paired up Storm and Energy before, but I've played both sets a bit and really enjoyed them.

I'd slotting a little bit differently from you in a couple of cases:

- Steamy Mist
This is really crying out for slots, since its end heavy and both the Def and res bonuses are very nice. If you go Res IO+2 Res/End and a Def IO with two Def/End you're pretty much capping all three aspects of it - Resistance, Defence and end cost. Putting the Steadfast in there seems a bit of a waste.
I ended up putting the Steadfast and 5 Aegis (not the unique) in Tough - that gives you not only excellent actual bonuses but +4.6% AoE defence. Do that for the epic armour too with the PVP +3% Def IO if you've got one.
Melee Defence isn't really worth chasing if you run Hurricane - anything that engages you in melee will have a huge To hit debuff applied.

BTW - I really dug this power working with my Dark armour tank - the extra Res against Fire, Cold and Energy was just perfect.


- Freezing Rain.
I'd definitely slot recharge over def debuff. Once you're in the 20's you can hit most things with 95% accuracy pretty much, for special things like MoG'd Paragon protectors you have Aim and yellow pills. But I want Freezing Rain up every fight. You can also get a bit of extra Res debuff in there with the Achilles' Heel -res proc.

A modified version of Synergy is available on my website - it allows keystroke broadcasting so that eg. pressing 1 on the main computer fires off the power in both characters first power tray slot. Its also hard-coded to not broadcast the enter key to avoid accidentally spamming chat with the second character.

I've also got my bind files and a guide available, all in the link in my sig.

As for the extra $15/month being expensive?
Get out! Its less than the cost of eating out, or going out for drinks, or renting DVDs once per month.

You do know about the 45% softcap, Myriad?

In the absence of to hit buffs or defence debuffs, any defence over 45% is wasted.

Defence debuffs are kind of common, so you could make an argument for building for over 45% defence, but there's probably some more you could get out of your build if you're prepared to lower your Ranged Defence a bit.

CoX is a mature balanced game, so that the overall performance gap between powersets is probably no worse than 80%. In other words, any well-built post-SO scrapper can mow through crowds of bad guys with at least 80% of the efficiency of the best combo, whatever that is.

This goes for all archetypes, not just scrappers.

I've seen a spreadsheet detailing average enemy resistances. Lethal came out slightly worse, but was doing something like 92% full damage across the board compared to 96% or 97% for fire and smashing.

So when people say "lethal is more resisted" or "fire armor is squishy" its true, but not like twice as bad as the alternatives.

Levelling my 50's I went for:

FF/Sonic: Ranged, AoE, Psi and Melee Defence in that order. (Thunderstrike, Red Fortune, Devastation, Scirocco's Dervish)

Kin/Elec: Accuracy Bonuses (I used Sands of Mu a lot for superspeed concept, and Kin powers need to hit), most other stuff is redundant with Kinetics.

Sonic/Energy: Ranged and AoE Defence, Recovery (Thunderstrike and Aegis, Blessing of the Zephyr)

Storm/Ice: Recharge (Positrons Blast, Decimation) and some Ranged Defence. Recovery too.

Dark/Rad: no real focus that I recall, a bit of everything really.


In general, I usually go for Thunderstrike and Positrons Blast with any blast set, unless Im chasing something exotic, like using Devastation to cap Psi Defence on my Force Fielder.

I've been playing characters ten at a time for a while.
I made two groups of ten characters and levelled them together in mix and match pairs dual boxing, mostly by myself, sometimes with a teammate or two. One such group made it to 50 in just under a year.

I've recently rediscovered the joy of playing a single character in large teams.

So I think that means I've got 11 characters on the go, one group of ten, one single.

It's absolutely brilliant.

I love being able to play till the wee hours on a Friday night.

I like the set - I've had a Sonic/Energy I solo'd to 28 and deleted, another one at 50 who I dual boxed with, and a Fire/Sonic Corrupter on the go about level 20.

I think the biggest problem the set has is that it's terrible solo, probably the worse Defender primary to do so with.

You get:

- Sonic Siphon, only really worth it solo if you are going to take more than three atatcks to take down a target, hence good for speeding up boss-killing by 30%.
- Sonic Dispersion. Gives you mez protection, this is very good. Also gives you 25% Res vs most attacks, which isn't that great when you could play a Blaster with 20% more HP.
- Sonic Cage. Not bad solo, but has its problems.
- Liquefy. Very good, but on a long recharge.

So soloing a radio mission, you have a couple of tools for the boss at the end (Liquefy and Sonic Siphon), but for the rest of the time you're a Blaster with mez protection and half damage who gets their powers later.

Playing in a duo, its different - the Sonic set really starts to shine here. When I dual box I select the character who needs the most attention as front, ie typically a melee character or one who relies on click activity to survive. The back character on my second computer will be on follow and targetting through the main one, fully attacking and so on but getting slightly less attention from me.

My Sonic characters almost always take the back position. The front character takes most aggro, and they're tougher thanks to Sonic Shields. This puts Disruption Field on the character Im controlling most actively. The only time I'd want them at front is to place Liquefy, and that's one click every 2 minutes maybe?

So the set to me feels like its really designed to be passive and take a back seat. Unnecessarily so, I think. The only two ally-targetted toggles in the entire game exist in this set (Disruption Field and Sonic Repulsion), it feels like they're a failed experiment one of the powers designers tried in I5.

In short, its a very useful but unrewarding set as it is now.

Letting an Empath use Fortitude and Adrenalin Boost on themselves would be way overpowered.

Fortitude gives 24% Defence to everything, including Psi, when slotted, as well as bonus damage and to hit, and you can keep it up on one or two others.
Super Reflexes takes 6 powers to give around 30% Defence to all except Psi for just the user.

You cant have one power exceeding an entire powerset like that.


A question for Psyonico - numerically, how effective is your solo empath compared to any other solo Defender, or other character you've run? Just as a ballpark figure.

I'd say my worse solo Defender experience was Cosmika - Sonic/Energy with Fighting pool and a solo-oriented build. She really did feel about 70% as effetcive as say Kin/Elec, FF/Sonic and maybe 50% as good as the better soloers like Dark/Rad or Storm/Ice.