Draggynn

Of course the nice thing about Freezing Rain is that in can stack. In ideal circumstances (see my guide for a greater explanation of Freezing Rain's "bug" and why ideal circumstances are almost never met) with enough recharge you can hit 90% -resistance. It's because of this stacking that recharge in Freezing Rain is so valuable. Of course, if you don't have the endurance to do it, or your play style brings you up against few enemies that are long fights, which it sounds like may be true for you, then being able to stack FR isn't particularly useful.

Although you have no to-hit bonus, you do have about 60% in accuracy bonuses, so I don't think you're going to have the to-hit problems you think you will. Especially when coupled with Freezing Rain/Tornado. I would consider shifting those kismet slots to conserve power or hasten. I'd also probably make the second IO in fly a BotZ for the bonus. otherwise looks good though.

I'm glad that you've found a system that works for you, and it's an interesting suggestion that the immobilize IO in tornado helps when pinning with hurricane. Count me skeptical, but intrigued. With the repel and KB from hurricane and KB from Lightning Storm, I find that keeping enemies pinned is not a serious problem, but I can see the potential of that being beneficial.

However you appear to have missed part of my point on procs, which to be fair was rather buried and is spelled out in more detail in my guide.
A proc in Tornado amounts to an 11% damage increase (if tornado is in contact with enemies all the time as you're suggesting). Thus tornado will deal more damage simply by slotting more damage. Granted, Procs offer a potential for burst damage, which may be deemed more beneficial, but I know I would rather have more damage output overall. (Since burst damage becomes less relevant against harder targets).

I think that defense is less important on a controller than it is on a corrupter since you have more forms of damage mitigation. I was a long hold out on not building for defense, but was amazed by what I could achieve when I finally gave in and built for the soft cap. Suddenly +3x8 were a cake walk.

True, I would not suggest going for high recharge unless you were willing to take a recovery power. Barring a recovery power you pretty much have to go with endurance bonuses to keep storm viable. However, if you can find an endurance power that you can stand (I like conserve power personally) I think you'd be pleasantly surprised by the difference recharge can make.

Of course what matters is that you find a build that works for you, I apologize for offering suggestions when none were asked for. I just see builds and feel the need to comment for the benefit of other folks that may come through the thread. Because playstyles and builds can be so varied, as a rule I generally don't post builds but simply offer suggestions and guidelines so that people can create a build that works for them.

Zep, I don't think this will work as well as you think it will. First of all, procs in tornado are a little rough to begin with because Tornado tends to run all over the place, so it is possible for Tornado not to be in contact with an enemy when the proc fires. In addition, this proc will not suppress knockback. Although it may be immobolized (3 chances per tornado, once every 10 seconds) the enemies can still be knocked all over the place, and tornado will have to go chasing after them. Not to mention that Tornado in general does not fixate on a target. As a result you will see minimal gains in Tornado's damage.

It is also worth noting that damage procs in tornado are often a poor decision. For the reason given above regarding procs and because Tornado deals an awful lot of damage on its own. Unless you're near the ED cap, Tornado will generally deal more damage from slotting more damage than it will from slotting a damage proc. The details are presented in my guide.

I would advise you to look into taking an endurance recovery power to help mitigate this. Consider taking Hibernate. Drop one of the leadership toggles, bonfire, the coralax, etc. This should help to substantially mitigate your endurance troubles.

Also, looking at your set bonuses they seem to be a little scattered. My general advice is that there are two approaches if you want to maximize your benefit from IOs. This first approach is to focus on recharge. More recharge means more LS, more FR, more Tornado, more of all of those high recharge heavy hitters. The second approach is to focus on defense, and reach the soft cap (45%) for either ranged or smash/lethal (because we have hurricane, I recommend ranged on a stormy if you go that route).

Since these builds are works in progress I won't provide more extensive feedback, but I'm happy to provide it if you are interested.

What I thought Bubba was going to propose originally when he started talking about the point system for this year, was a system the removed the necessity of eliminations entirely. As someone who will never participate in the contest due to lack of talent, my comments should be taken with a grain of salt.

If I were to run the contest, I think what I would do would be to have every month be open, and points would be awarded based on coming in first, second, third, and a token point for participating. Then at the end of the contest whoever had the most points wins. This allows folks that don't have the time commitment to just jump in for one month, or if one month become too busy, they can skip a month, but return to the contest once their life calms down. I understand there might be some sentiment that this was unfair to the folks who participate every month, but I figure they'd get an inherent advantage by having more opportunities to earn points.

I think the way the points worked this year, although intriguing, probably created more controversy than they provided improvement to the contest, although I did like the idea of being able to avoid elimination. But as I said above, I'm really not attached to the elimination concept.

Just a quick note, on the synergy of /ice. If you go with /ice, the synergy is not so much in the slows (Storm can floor movement and recharge on non AVs enemies without a secondary) but rather because ice storm and blizzard use blaster modifiers and are therefore more powerful than they should be on a Storm Defender which couples incredibly well with Freezing Rain's resistance debuffs. As Rigel mentioned, storm's general ability to keep things in rains helps as well.

/dark also gives you additional -to-hit to contribute to the defense from hurricane + steamy mist.

Honestly though, as Rigel said, you can pick just about any secondary and be fine. I've enjoyed my time tremendously as a storm/psy, although its synergy is not as high as some sets.

Beautiful piece Liz, and thank you for posting despite the drama. For those of us who simply observe, the real joy in the art contest is seeing beautiful art from all of our talented competitors. Thank you also to DD for posting even though officially you weren't in the final round, as other folks have said you've improved tremendously during the contest.

It was always my impression that the purpose of the FArt contest was to give artists a reason to push themselves, especially those that were perhaps not as disciplined on their own, and that the contest was never actually about "winning". Thus I've been baffled and saddened by the drama that has occurred over the last two years.

But again, I thank all of the artists who participated for their excellent submissions this year, and perhaps next year we can get it right.

Alright, you are very tight on slots, but there are 4(5) potential slots that can be moved while keeping your 56.9 second recharge on PA:

1 (possibly 2): you can afford to drop one 7.5 bonus down to a 5% bonus and keep your 56.9 second recharge according to mids. granted it may be off by .05 seconds, but a .05 seconds won't make much difference as to how many attacks the AV can get off. (In fact, I'd guess with Arcanatime, things are identical, but I'm too lazy at the moment to check to see just how much leeway Arcanatime buys you on recharge.) Convert the KBs in Lightning Storm to Decimations. (You will then need to swtich the glimpse of the abyses to unspeakable terrors, or recoup another slot and drop spectral horror for flash, which you will fill with 4 basilisks. If you do that you can also switch from Gale to hover or combat jumping for more defense, might be worth keeping for the 3 points KB protection, hard decision.

2,3) I would sacrifice the two slots in fly, they are not getting you enough set bonuses to be worthwhile, and chances are you're hovering in combat, not flying.

4) the final coercive persuasion (hard to say on that one, and it depends on how much damage you find you need). You should rarely need to survive more than one hit so the extra 5% ranged defense should be mostly unnecessary, but it may make you feel safer knowing you have it.

Where to put those slots in no particular order (Don't have the energy at the moment to do specific numbers so these are very general and based on broad assumptions for simple calculations, and I make no promises these calculations are correct):

1) An Achilles' heel proc in Freezing Rain (+4% damage with perma FR, we'll say 20% of the time is a 20% increase actually slightly better than this since you'll have a chance to proc at 0 10, 15, 25, 30, etc, but you have to factor in the self suppression)
2) A damage IO in Tornado (+4 dps/ +8 if you have two out)
3) A damage IO in Water spout (Probably the Raganarok pure damage) (+ 4 dps / call it 6 because you can have 1.5 out)
4) Javelin Damage proc in spectral wounds (every 2.5 seconds is even better than every 5 seconds in LS) (+5.5 dps assuming used as soon as recharged)
5) The pure damage Apocalypse IO in blind (obviously swap in the other Apoc to spectral wounds) (+4dps assuming used as soon as recharged)
6) damage proc in Lightning Storm (every 5 seconds in LS is better than every 10 seconds in WS or Tornado) (+3 dps) (offered since the javelin proc is rather pricey)

My recommendation of swapping a Dark Watcher in Hurricane still stands, and depending on the AV, I'd likely run Steamy Mist over SI.

Thanks for the recommendation. You can find the guide in my sig. It can be a little overwhelming but can hopefully answer any questions you might have.

The revised build looks solid, a couple small things though:

Freezing Rain: I would swap out one defense debuff IO for an endurance reducer. 18 endurance is not insignificant, and although the extra debuff can be nice in FR, the base modifier is high enough, it's not a necessity.

I think swapping to electric mastery for electric fence, since it does -kb, is a fine decision. (Although personally, I'm partial to conserve power, and therefore usually give up the immobilize)

Based on the way the proc behaves in other summon powers (my familiarity is with Lightning Storm and Tornado which are technically pseudopets and therefore obey slightly different rules) I would guess that there is in fact a chance for the proc to fire on you when you summon Phantasm.

Regardless, the advice is the same though. Slotting the proc in Phantasm is mostly useless and there are much better ways to use that enhancement slot.

The damage cap for a defender is 400%. Note that all powers start out dealing 100% damage. This means that the power a damage "delivers" can be no more than 4x it's base, and that it takes a 300% damage buff for a defender to reach their cap. If you have a 95% damage increase from enhancements, and then a 100% damage increase from another source (say fulcrum shift) then the attack deals 295% damage. Any attack that would "deliver" more than 4x it's base damage, will simply deliver 4x it's base damage. more info on limits here

I say "deliver" because damage resistance effects how much damage is taken after the damage is received. Thus you can deal more than 4x damage by reducing an enemies resistance to that damage type. more info on resistance here

My guide goes into a fairly thorough explanation of slow and -recharge. As you can see from the earlier page the -movement floor is -90% and the -recharge floor is -75% (powers take 4 times as long to recharge) so the answer is that snow storm and freezing rain together will put enemies at both the -recharge and -slow floor unenhanced. Again, for details, see me guide.

The term soft cap mostly just applies to total defense and is 45% defense. Because of the way defense is calculated, in non incarnate (and non-tip Devouring Earth) content, having more than 45% defense does not reduce the chance that you will be hit. Of course extra defense helps if your defense is debuffed or if enemies have +to-hit (or you're in incarnate content where the soft cap is 59%) but because of this, many players target that 45% number and then stop. It is called the soft cap because your defense can actually go up to 175%, it just doesn't matter after 45. The definitive guide to defense in the game is Arcanaville's here

Honestly, my guide will answer just about any question you might have.

Yep, as others have said, just about all debuffs (and buffs) in this game will stack from different users. Certainly all Storm powers will. Even different Freezing Rains from the same hero will stack. There are only a handful of cases that come to mind of powers in game not stacking from different users.

The Achilles' Heel proc will not stack from any source, same user or different. And there is a limited number of times that the incarnate interface procs will stack. There may be other examples but none that are coming to mind.

Of course once the debuff floor is hit, additional debuffage will have no visible impact. However, the amount of debuff is still tracked, so that it may overcome subsequent buffage.

In the case of hurricane, regardless of how much you debuff to-hit enemies will always have a 5% base chance to hit. If you have debuffed enemies below that level, then it will take a more substantial buff to their to-hit until they are able to pick themselves off of the to-hit floor.