Garent

Last night was more active than I've seen it before. I did two ITFs on the same character in the same day and had to take the merit reward instead of the component.

I think the only two options you should consider are nerve's defense buff boost and musculature's damage boost, since those two things are basically everything that combo does.

As far as I know, neither bosses nor elite bosses have debuff resistance from their rank. So against a +1 boss your debuffs would be 90% as effective because of their level modifier.

For a defender, ice is better than energy in both area and single target damage, but energy is better defensively. If energy torrent and explosive blast are well slotted, you can spam them all over a group and the knockback will stop the enemies from fighting back effectively. There's a high risk of scatter, but someone that can use cones well and knows have to minimize the scatter of knockback can tank for a team without messing up enemy placement too much.

I'd say it is. Archery gets much better once you get rain of arrows. Trick arrow never really "blooms".

I missed this question the first time around.

Traps and cold are pretty similar in that they both have great buffs and debuffs. Cold is a bit more defensive, while traps is a bit more offensive. Don't worry too much about AVs resisting more of cold's debuffs than traps, because slows are not cold's most effective debuffs by a long shot. Both of them supply large amounts of damage and resistance debuffing, which are the most important things you can use to debuff an AV. Both will be pretty useful in I19 content.

Random question answering: If you really want to make your cold/ice's area damage crazy, you want to put damage procs into sleet instead of damage enhancements, since those will be more effective. The minimum regeneration an enemy can have is 0%, so 100% regeneration debuffing is all it takes. However, AVs heavily resist most kinds of debuffs, so overkill is good. On an even level AV at level 50, a single poison trap will debuff 150%, which is more than enough. However, if you're up against a +4 AV, then the debuff will be about 62% (I pulled the values from memory, so I'm not guaranteeing that one) in which case two applications would be useful.

It's not a bug, it's a quirk of the aggro system. That means it's not going to be changed unless the game's aggro system is rebuilt. I'll try to explain exactly how it works.

Enemies have a list that they use to keep track of how ticked off they are at specific players. Whenever someone uses a power on an enemy, they get put on this list if they aren't already on it, and if the power does damage there's a big equation based on archetype and amount of damage that decides just how ticked off the mob is at that person. Even if a power does no damage (flash arrow) using it will still put you on this list and give you a small amount of threat.

Imagine an eight man team. Person A uses flash arrow on the enemies. At this point, the enemies have Person A on their aggro list, but they haven't been alerted so nothing happens. Person B is a scrapper with no taunt aura who runs into the group. At this point, the enemies have been aggroed and will begin choosing targets. There is only one person at this point who has used a power on the enemies, and that is Person A. Now, enemy groups make an effort to split up their attack among multiple people, so it's not like every fight you use flash arrow all the enemies will immediately spank you, and you probably won't even notice this phenomenon if you're teamed with a tanker that opens every fight with a big area attack, but over time it is very likely that you will notice that you are on the receiving end of a large portion of the initial enemy assault.

I hope that explains the weird aggro thing. I'll move on to the power itself. Flash arrow is actually a pretty weak debuff. It's 9.75% enhanced (6.25 base). Against even level enemies, this is exactly the same as buffing your entire team for 9.75% defense, except even better because you don't have to worry about exotic attack types like psychic. This seems like a decent deal, but compare it to the debuffs found in other sets. Dark miasma has two debuffs (darkest night and fearsome stare) which BOTH debuff by about 29% when enhanced, radiation infection is about 49%, and storm summoning has hurricane which hits for 58%, though it's not easy to use.

The only advantage flash arrow has over these much more powerful effects is that it is tagged to be unresistable, meaning that an AV's ability to resist most debuffs by about 85% does nothing. Flash arrow is already 1/5 as strong as other debuffs though, so this isn't that big of an advantage. Against an even level AV, flash arrow will be 9.75% and hurricane will be about 8.8%. In other words, flash arrow is 30-40 points weaker than other to-hit debuffs against most enemies, but against AVs it has a 1% advantage.

Actually, the combined animation time of those three powers is 4.752. Figuring the arcanatime for powers usually isn't necessary, but when calculating the ideal attack chain for a set it becomes very important.

I've read about an ice/cold corruptor who soloed AVs, and I've gone up against AVs alone on my storm/sonic, so I can chime in on this. Benumb is your most important power because of its damage debuff. As long as it's on, AVs will do much less damage to you and it will be the key to your sustained survivability. You need a LOT of recharge in order to have benumb as close to permanent as possible.

Aid self isn't a bad idea, but don't plan on relying on it since the long animation time will mean you spend a long time not attacking, and the AV will spend it all regenerating hit points (though this amount will be reduced by benumb). Defense and health inspirations are your best friend. Keeping a defense inspiration going through the fight and replacing it once it goes down will greatly decrease the damage you take and the health inspirations will let you recover from big hits without cutting into your damage output like aid self will.

The powers you need from sonic are shriek, scream, and shout. Aim barely increases your damage output, so it's not worth it unless you can use it for a good set bonus. Screech can be double stacked so that AVs will be stunned while their triangles are down. Using it in your attack chain will result in less damage, but you'll be regenerating health while the AV is stunned. Up to you if that's worth it.

If you get enough recharge and put the apocalypse proc in shriek, your ideal attack chain is shriek-scream-shriek repeated, throwing debuffs inbetween the two shrieks if you have one available (don't use infrigidate). Even if you don't use shout, you still want to keep it since ranged attacks are some of the best set bonuses you have available to you.

When setting up inventions, the most important bonuses are recharge, followed by ranged/area defense, followed by regeneration/hit points.