Happy_Thoughts

Your signature content implies you have the means to have infamy. Use the in-game mail system and send yourself some cash and go buy some SOs or craft some IOs. That will solve both of these problems.

Don't fall prey to this misconception. Experience per kill is only slightly reduced as long as you and your buddies are doing damage. But measuring experience per kill is like calculating trips to the grocery store per gallon. It's a measurement you can use, but in and of itself it's meaningless. Experience over time is the real acid test, and Seeds generally speeds up kill rate (and safety, thus less debt!) far more than the percentage of experience lost due to confuse. You come out ahead unless you're doing something very, very wrong.

My opinion is that the masses have things backwards.

There doesn't need to be a special title for defenders who aggressively use both their primaries and secondaries. That's defendering. Are you throwing offense out there? Yep, but to me that's standard defender duty.

Those that lopside themselves are the ones that should be going by some other, less glorious moniker. And "pure" ain't it.

There is a feature that may not have been implemented when last you played: dual character builds.

You can have two completely separate builds with their own power selections, slotting, and power pools (keeping your archetype and power set choices, of course), which is handy if you want to have one for special purpose—for instance, ally-only powers don't help when soloing, so you could easily put something more beneficial to you in a solo build, and switch back to your grouping build as needed.

Just talk to any trainer to set up, name, and switch between your builds. Switching can be done every 15 minutes.

Happy was actually saying the opposite.

If the original poster wants support and empathicalness to be his main thing, to the point of purposefully ignoring his entire defender secondary, then he might be happier (and certainly more effective in his chosen specialty of team safety) going the */empathy controller route.

That said, giving it some thought I can't say that your statement is incorrect either!

If you're going to skip your secondary powerset entirely, you'll find you can make a far more effective support character by creating an */empathy controller.

What I suggested to him was to do away with the targetable Oil Slick pet, and introduce a slash command that would check to see if the character had an active oil slick, and if so, light it. That way you could choose when (or if) you wanted to light it, with the side benefit that any TA user who doesn't have fire/energy attacks* could still get full use of the power.

Whatever the direction, it's years past time to ditch the current mechanic of lighting the thing. It was a neat experiment, but ultimately it failed and needs to be replaced.



* I realize that some origin powers will light it, but some people may choose other origins for concept/roleplay reasons.

It can be both weak and under-rated.

I've gone over, in great detail, why I think Trick Arrow is underbalanced on defenders. This was long ago, predating even the initial efforts on the OSA non-ignition bug (in other words, years ago). Many of my main points have been echoed in this thread.

So, rather than "*zips lips*" as a response to those answering your question, let me ask you why you think it's so strong?

Tentacles — Night Fall — Tentacles — Night Fall ... etc., with the single-target attack of your choice tossed in for bosses.

This pair of powers simply melts groups of enemies. If you put damage procs in them (Tentacles can hold 3, Night Fall can hold 2) you will never, ever look back.


As to your build, I think you'd get more mileage replacing the two Luck of the Gamblers (not the recharge unique obviously) with resistance enhancements. The teeny extra defense you're currently getting won't even be noticeable with all the to-hit buffs you're tossing around.

I also can't imagine many occasions when you'll actually need Life Drain. If you're really worried about healing, slot your Dark Servant for it and stand near him.

Erm, so, um, yeah ... I really meant to type psychic mastery, not power mastery. But you figured it out.

If you're only going to get one or the other, I'd take Psychic Scream over Psionic Tornado. Having both is nice, and depending on what you find useful from your epic you may even get them both at some point (not sure what level your character currently is). I'd personally replace Subdue, though that requires some juggling. Will Domination and TK Blast are too nice as single target attacks; though if knockback bothers you then TK Blast could go away.

Very easily done. Swap out Stealth for Hover and put in the Freebird: +Stealth (again, if you can afford it). The IO stealth powers will stack with Super Speed's stealth effect, granting you full invisibility to anything other than drones, snipers, etc. which have increased perception. The stealth effect from unique IOs lasts while the power it's slotted in is toggled on, and then for 2 minutes afterwards.

I'm a huge fan of to-hit debuffs, don't get me wrong; it just looks like an over-specialization here. Darkest Night and Fearsome Stare are getting you close to 60% debuff when stacked, which goes up to about 77% with Tentacles and Nightfall (not slotted for debuff). Then there's the +defense from Shadowfall and Maneuvers, not to mention Fluffy. After a certain point, more debuffing value doesn't add any more actual debuffing. Slotting the attacks for to-hit debuff instead of damage gets you a net +8% to an already more than sufficient debuff value but cuts your damage potential in half (not counting 3 procs in Tentacles and 2 in Nightfall which make a significant difference).

My point is that you don't have to sacrifice damage to be tremendously good at to-hit debuffing. Though it's certainly something you can do if you feel that what you get out of it is worth what you give up for it.

These are all tremendously nice buffs. Is there a reason you're pushing them all off for so long?

Fortitude at 12 is vastly more helpful than at 24. Not that it's not useful at 24; it really is a nice buff regardless of level. But as your teammates are in Dual Origins between 12 and 22, that extra defense, accuracy and damage is quite visible in the teens (and later, too, but there's such a contrast with it before Single Origins that not taking Fortitude until level 24 begs the question "Why, oh why?"). Having Resurrect take up the level 12 slot is nothing short of tragic, especially when awakens are easily made with inspiration combining and Fortitude helps prevent the need for awakens/resurrections in the first place.

Recovery Aura and Regen Aura not only make your team unstoppable when they're up, but they're also the only two buffs you get that will affect you as well. Recovery Aura is also available before Stamina, and makes that last push much easier to bear.

As for Adrenalin Boost...if you have some reason for waiting 12 extra levels to be able to pick one teammate and turn them into a god, it's not a good enough reason. I don't even need to hear what it is. It's not good enough.

You're not taking Stamina until 30 (and you don't have Recovery Aura until 32, and not slotted until 33 at the earliest); what is your plan for endurance management?

Taking both Heal Other and Absorb Pain seems redundant to me. If you really find yourself needing that much healing, take your buffs sooner and use them. Or tell your teammates to stop being stupid. Or both.

Part of me is hoping this is just a joke build for the forum's amusement.

I'm either a buffer or a healer? What if I'm playing a set that has debuffs? What if I'm playing a set that can heal, buff, and debuff? We need a term that encompasses those rare characters that aren't one-dimensional. I propose the word "defender." This leaves specialized characters with self-imposed limitations free to use words like "healer" to announce their shortcomings to potential teammates.

While there are MMOGs that are designed to need healers, CoH is absolutely not one of them. Since this discussion is about CoH in specific rather than MMOGs in general, it's more appropriate to say, "Let's not try act like CoH needs 'healers', that's just erroneous."

The name of the archetype has nothing to do with why I don't call myself a "healer." It's because healing, while part of what I do, has never been the main or primary thing I do. That, and I actually understand the game.

Erm, nope. My kineticist, stormie, dark, and radiation defenders all "come with a heal" but I have never advertised myself as a "healer" or responded to people looking for one. If you choose to define yourself based on one power available to you, that's your choice, but don't try and make everyone else do so. While I have and use heals as called for, they are the least of what I bring to the team.

By powers available, all defenders are better classified as damage dealers since they all (including empaths) have far more damage powers available to them than healing powers. If this sounds absurd to you, consider how absurd it is to label people based on a single—and in many cases their least effective—tool in their toolbox.

First off, my AT is defender, not healer. If you mean certain powersets are healers, I'll agree that some people play that way, but the good players play as defenders.

Perhaps I'm just playing the game wrong, but I have NEVER, not once, needed a dedicated healer (in fact, those advertising themselves as such tend to be unneeded and largely dead weight in my experience). Come to think of it, I somehow manage to play just fine without a tank or DPS-focused characters along, too. Could it be that CoH actually doesn't live by the holy trinity? That's right, it doesn't. Some players live by it, but the game itself never has.

It's my opinion that anyone who feels that a "healer" is needed should just pick up the medicine pool and stop looking for someone else to babysit them.

Better kind of depends on what your concept is supposed to be. If you explain what you hope to do you might get helpful feedback.

There are at least a few things you've done in your last build that I'd be hard-pressed to recommend, but without knowing what your goals are it's hard to see where this is going.

Re: the empath and rad examples, was there some period in time when these were not the case? People never needed AE to be clueless.