Fernandes

Spectral wounds, aside from being awesome, has a lovely animation for an attack power. You make this sweaping, dismissive gesture and a blue aura appears around them. Its marvleous for a kill shot since, it looks as if you dismissed them with casual contempt and they promptly keeled over and died. Or perhaps tahts just my imagination at work.

For a more traditional "pwn in the face" ending, Energy Torrent (hero-side) or Thunder Strike (for my villain) are my favorites - the emote, special efects and sound effect, to say nothign of the actual knockback, both combine to give me that satisfying visceral (and highly genre-appropriate) sense that I just blew the guy through a goddamed wall.

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First post but who said I'm new, not my fault every time I stop playing to go do something else in my life they delete my old account.

Thanks for the oh so friendly return to the forums and try to help out dig tho, gee what a guy.

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Welcome back.

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Power Boost followed by Accelerate Metabolism should increase your Speed, Recharge, Recovery, Damage and Resistances while that particular buff lasts.

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AW, first post and wrong information, oh to be new again :P. Again, PB does not boost recharge. It also does not boost the +damage portion of AM either, not the recovery (which recovery and regen are the BIGGEST things i wish powerboost DID affect).

Henceforth, the only thing powerboost affects on AM is the run speed.

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Hmm, I think you may be right - I dont think it will even boos thte mezz-resistances either. Of course, thats probably a good thing. If PB boosted +resistance, things could get out of hand in a hurry.

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First post but who said I'm new, not my fault every time I stop playing to go do something else in my life they delete my old account.

Thanks for the oh so friendly return to the forums and try to help out dig tho, gee what a guy.

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Meant no harm by it. And that really sucks they deleted your old account I thought they kept it forever?

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Heh.. no! As an old UO veteran (I still play, actually) I used to assume that all gaming companies are as accomoidating as EA. But no such luck. My own account was once inactive for a time, and when I came back it was gone. Woe to we who let our account lapse for more than a month or two, for our veteran rewards are in serious jeaperdy!

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This prob could easily apply to an any Primary/Kin controller I guess, but my toon is a Fire/Kin.

So the situation is that this is turning out to be the most exhausting toon I've played now that I've gotten her to higher levels.

Tossing smoke & the other holds, trying to use all the Kin powers on enemies too, keeping the fire monkeys up and making sure everybody has SB & Increase Density up... It's a severe workout. More than any defender or tank I've played.

I *do* manage to do it all. Usually by throwing a few fire or kin powers at baddies, then SB/ID on one teammate, then repeating the entire pattern, moving down the list to the next teammate for the buffs. etc... That seems to sort of work.

I know some trollers only buff the main tank, or forget about SB altogether, etc... I figure my job on a team is to contribute the maximum amount I can bring however.

Any suggestions for making this a bit easier? Macro chaining powers perhaps?

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Smoke... LOL! Honestly the debuff is very small. Itssituationally useful for preventing additional agro from other near-by spawns, or as a form of getto stealth, but its not somehting you need every battle.

Also, my advice would be tos top trying to keep ID permanent on all your team-mates. With a 30-second timer, its just not worth the trouble. I dont just mean that in the sense that its annoying, I mean that that time could honeslty be better spent on things that make a bigger impact on performance. If there is somoen who doens't already have mezz protection who seems like they could use it (and there are no empathy or thermal controllers to give them longer-lasting buffs), or if you're primary tank is getting overwhelmed with mezzes (a very rare occurence unless you're primary tank is hopelessly incompetant, but stranger things have happened) then help them out.

Speedboost, fo course, is awesome! Everybody can use that boost, and at a 2 minute timer its easier to keep up. Not also that its not only useful for people who's endurence is failing them - it also has a potant recharge buff.

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You can "buff" PA with effects such as Enervating Field and Freezing Rain (-Resist), but that is the only way.

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This.

This is why Illusion is traditioanly paired with sets that have significant offensive debuffs (debuffs that make your opponents easier to deal damage to; notably -resistance). The synergy is quite potant. Of course, in the case of some sets (radiation) there are other synergies as well, but this is a significant one.

Note that PA CAN (unless Im mistaken - whcih is always possible; I havent tested it) recieve a boost from the %chance for build up proc in the ultra-rare pets set if it is slotted into PA itself and procs.

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Primal's is Power Boost -- however, Illusion doesn't have many powers that will benefit much from Power Boost.


lol wut?

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Power-boosted, vanguard-medaled EM Pulse. Makes me long for the days before there were such things as target caps. Aside from EMPulse, Flash, and St holds, Spectral Terror is fun to powerboost. Not only will you make its cycling mezz effect much more potant, but you wioll also double the -tohit debuff it comes with from 15 to 30 percent. Powerboost obviously works wiht your heal as well, although its still a bit gimpomatic, and green inspirations are still a better bet for healing in the thick of combat. It does NOT work, as most know, with your toggle debuffs. Or rather, it does, but it will only enhance their effectiveness while its active - you cna't cast them during its duration and have the enhancement effect linger even after the boost ends as you could with a click-to-use debuff like, say, freezing rain.

All in all, I found powerboost an extremelly useful addition to my pwnzimicating capabilities It made a big, big difference in performance. I just found indomitable will better. As Local Man reminds us, however, getting indomitable will permanent is not a job for the faint of heart (or poor of free time), so if your build wont be that high end, then definately, definately look to primal forces as a strong second choice.

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I just wanted to clarify, that power boost only affects spectral terror, for about 13ish seconds max while it is buffing you, as does any buff applied to a pseudo-pet power.

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If you say so, I believe you - I never did any serious testing on the subject. I can only say that I felat as if I was being hit a great deal less than when doing the same thing with a normal ST.

Resistances, and spead, yes. Dmage, Recharge, adn recovery buffs are not enhanced by Power Boost. Beleive me, this is one I tested at considerable length. I only wish it worked like that but there is no such luck.

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Earth/TA. Lock thread.

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This. Mind/TA would have more signle target control at the expense of some AoE lockdown ability.

You might be surprised at how much damage fire controllers can do. I suspect 2 of you could indeed kill an archvillain assuming you had enough A) Defence, and B) patience.

On a more direct note, the build above seems to have a lot of non-set IOs, and mot of the sets it has are fairly low end. Are you making a conscious choice not to try for the more ludicrously expensive loot, or are you open to high end builds and thats just the stuff you have lying around for the moment?

Freakshow would be my choice.

Excellent then. Thank you - its good to be sure.

I know, I know, I am t3h n00bx0rZ! As a four year veteran of contorller si already feel embarassed just for asking. But while experimenting with builds, I recently noticed that MId's Hero Designer was not adding the containment damage to my epic attacks. Since none of my characters currently have anciliary power pool attack powers (blackwand FTW) I can't test it.

Im curious - is this a glitch in Mid's Hero Designer (which seems to have frankly fallen a little behind the times in terms of updates lately), or does containment actually not affect APP attacks? The former asnwer seems a lot more likely to me than the latter, but it never can hurt to make certain.

Mostly the extremelly long duration comes in handy in huge battles, such as those found on the Lady Gray or Imperious Task-Force, or against huge ambushes spawned during more important archvillain fights (which are fast becoming a staple of new high level content, including the ITF, LGTF, and Statesman's Task Force). You hold them and leave them tehre for a few minutes while you and the team focus on other parts of the battle, and/or killing the archvillain. Also useful, in much trhe same way, if you play with incompetant teams that sometimes accrue more agro than they can handle (also known as all pickup groups in this and every game ever). As a general matter though, you're right, the super-duper duration is superfluous, but when it does come in handy, its extremelly satisfying. As a general rule, I just used to popo power boost before each fight. Vanguard MEdal sat in my tray barring unusla circumstances. The PB would make sure the hold lasted more than long enough to finish the encounter. It could even make Flash seem impressivley long lasting.

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Primal's is Power Boost -- however, Illusion doesn't have many powers that will benefit much from Power Boost.


lol wut?

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Power-boosted, vanguard-medaled EM Pulse. Makes me long for the days before there were such things as target caps. Aside from EMPulse, Flash, and St holds, Spectral Terror is fun to powerboost. Not only will you make its cycling mezz effect much more potant, but you wioll also double the -tohit debuff it comes with from 15 to 30 percent. Powerboost obviously works wiht your heal as well, although its still a bit gimpomatic, and green inspirations are still a better bet for healing in the thick of combat. It does NOT work, as most know, with your toggle debuffs. Or rather, it does, but it will only enhance their effectiveness while its active - you cna't cast them during its duration and have the enhancement effect linger even after the boost ends as you could with a click-to-use debuff like, say, freezing rain.

All in all, I found powerboost an extremelly useful addition to my pwnzimicating capabilities It made a big, big difference in performance. I just found indomitable will better. As Local Man reminds us, however, getting indomitable will permanent is not a job for the faint of heart (or poor of free time), so if your build wont be that high end, then definately, definately look to primal forces as a strong second choice.

Powerboost does not affect recharge. At least it did not when I experimented wiht the set a while ago. If have evidence that it does, please tell us. Either its a rather serious bug, or I am about to change epic pools and rework my sets!

Also, with permanant AM for +60% recovery (when slotted) and the right unique enhancements, I find tha endurence quickly becomes a non-issue for ill/rad controllers. With a bit of endurence reduction in your powers youll be laughing. I dont even carry blue pills any more - even after popping EMPulse, following it with high endurence powers (psionic tornado, spectral terror, and/or lingering radaition would be good examples) or a continuous attack chain, I find I never have occasion to use them. Literally endurence potiosn would sit in my inventory for months at a time doing nothing while I emptied row after row of greens and purples (though this latter phenomina may be partially related to my to engage the next spawn whenever I damn well feal like it whether the team has caught up with me or not... but I digress). I mention this because, it tends to obviate the need for conserve power, consume, and other temporary endurence-boosting powers. Of course, I suppose if I had one of those powers I could do wiht less -endcost enhancement in my big ticket powers, but I find they are all already optimized for the more important things (acuracy, recharge, and dureation/damage) and that theres really nothing more to be gained by switching around endurence for some other thing. Your mileage may vary.

Also, I agree, if you do want an end booster Conserve Power is much better than consume. MUCH better. But perhaps you want fire anyway (notably for fireball) so knowing that you're going that route anyway you decide to pick up consume. I certainly wouldn't recommend taking Primal Forces JUST for conserve power.

Also, its true that not everyone puts the time and effort to make an absolutely maxed out uber-build. Its simply that as a completly unashamed elitist. Personally I find that ill/rad is a build that really benifits a LOT from someone who's willing to invest serious money in it. For more bang for your buck at low levels of fake, virtual income, I would tend to recommend fire/rad instead.

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The four reasons I wouldn't go with Earth are (a) it doesn't have a fast recharging single target blast to make an attack chain, (b) Since Ill/Rad has a heal, Earth's Embrace isn't needed that much, (c) the AoE damage attack has very short range, and (d) the Earth armor is really ugly. My stone tanks were designed with the armor in mind, but not my Ill/Rad.

Still, Seismic Smash makes the Earth APP very tempting.

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(a) With the amount of recharge I plan to pack into this build, my attack chain can be Blind, SW, Blind, SW... or hell, maybe even SW, SW, SW much like the neutrino bolt.

(b) I didn't plan on taking Earth's Embrace. I don't even use my heal, to be honest.

(c) The short range is annoying, but I'm willing to trade that for more control (good stun), which the other sets don't offer. Psy comes close with the knockup, but this has knockdown and stun.

(d) I don't plan on using the armor, only taking it for a place to slot LoTG. Although, I might just take acrobatics instead.

And yes, from my limited experience so far, seismic smash is incredible. I don't even have it slotted yet!

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I have about 230% global +recharge including AM and Hasten, plus an extra 55-60% from the powers themselves (I could have more but it would ony shave about a 10th of a second off the recharge times fo either one while costing me endurence reduction or some other valuable resource). Even wiht all that, I cant get a truly continuous attack chain from the two of them.

That said, I still dont bother with my patron attack on account of Blackwand does a lot more damage per activation time than any of them (a LOT more) and at 1.67 seconds ist just barely fast enough to fit nicely into the attack chain.

If you do not have Blackwand yet, then you should be aware that at 2.5 seconds of activation time, Hurl Boulder will NOT fit nicely into your attack chain. This, and being [censored]-ugly, is the only real drawback of Earth Mastery

Earth's Embrace is not as awesome as some people like to claim, but it is a good power. Still, I agree, its probably skipable if you relaly dont want it.

Fissure is a nice power, but do recall that its disorient is only magnitude 2. For some sets (IE sets that have a mag 3 AoE stun as their primary AoE control - Earth, Fire and Gravity) thats more than enough since you can stack the two to establish AoE lockdown on boss-class mobs. But you're an illusionist - you have no other stun to stack it with. That means ti will only lock down minions. I find the soft control of psionic tornado is a highly effective damage mitigator, myself, and th raw DAMAGE IN YOUR FACE orange numbers of fireball are not to be ignored.

Use your armour. Trust me.

Yes, Seismic Smash IS awesome.

Rum is for peasents. And Bourbon may be Whiskey, but it is NOT real Whisky

That having been established, welcome to the server!

By the same token, people should be more realistic about what teams they apply for. If you volunteer to come compelte level 50 content, I expect yout to be able to perform whatever role your class suggests. Its not your fault that at level 9 you can't measure up no matter how good you are, but if you can't do the job, you shouldn't have volunteered; at least not without making it explicitely clear that you are basicly looking to get power-leveled.

Personally I only ever take people over 22 (and preferably over 30) for any team excepting friends and guild-mates, but as you say, not everyone seems to quite have the intelligence to realize the limitaiotns of low level characters, and when a leader broadcasts a LFT message, people will often ask to join without providing details of their level or build (particularly when they know that they are low level or of a class you've said you don't need).

Healer doesn't always mean literal healing ability. Its a general term for support characters and classes in any MMO. Its called that because of course, in the original MMOs straight healing was essentially the only thing you could do to provide a force multiplier to the team (that is, allow the same number of people to defeat proportionally much greater threats than if they had added one member of another class/build), but as you point out thats not true anymore in all games, and certainly not this one. Still, the lingo stick,s and it works because everyone who has ever played an MMO recognizes it.

I still ask for 'healers' even though I would accept, say, a forcefield mastermind, or a sonic contorller to fill the same slot. Similarly I still ask for 'tanks' even when playing villainside, indicating not that I expect a tanker to somehow be available in cap au diable, but that I need someone capable of fullfilling the agro-management role.

The same thing it always did, it just doesnt last as long.

Water. A close second would be Earl Grey Tea, with one spoonfull of suger. Aberlour 12-year (A variety of single-malt scotch that I quite enjoy relative to others in its price range) merits an honourable mention.

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I'm thinking Earth Mastery for two powers: Fissure and Rock Armor.

Fissure lets me add kinetic crash IO set for recharge bonus.

Rock armor lets me add one more LoTG recharge.

Good idea? Bad idea?

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For my money, with the extreme +recharge that a ill/rad build thrives on anyway, Psionic Mastery is a solid choice for permanant Indomitable WIll. Mezz protection owns!

That said, assuming you dont mind the painful, costuem-obliterating ugliness of Rock Armour, or the fact that you have to stay on the groun, Earth Mastery is a very close second. Its one of the few epics for any class that really has no bad options to choose from, and it has a lot of versatility to offer any controller build.

As we used to say on the ForumFall (and they probably still do - Ive just stopped paying attention) - You need to macro up your trolling skills.

You drasticaly under-estimate the stupidity of some threads. Also, this one is more than 24 hours old.