JuliusSeizure

You should ignore any naysayers in this thread. It truly shows how rectilinear the thought process is here-- it's all about thinking inside the box. I have a Beam/Dark and chose this build over Mental Manipulation because there is excellent synergy available.

First, the much maligned Dark Pit is VERY potent for this combo. Beam Rifle has access to a 100% chance mag 3 Stun in Lancer Shot, and a 66%/100% (when disintegrating) chance stun in Overcharge. Dark Pit allows you to reliably stack mag to stagger bosses with Lancer Shot, and it will stun nearly every minion in a spawn while you target bosses and Lts with beam rifle to spread disintegration.

Beam Rifle is also one of the highest single target DPS sets available, and Soul Drain provides the best sustained damage buff. I have taken Leap Attack, which happens to have the same recharge as Soul Drain, and use it to quickly place my Blaster in optimal position for the PBAoE while staggering the spawn with knock down and allowing my Blaster to survive long enough to hop back out at range or hover virtically above the spawn on outdoor maps. People claiming that a PBAoE damage buff has no synergy fail to realize just how great the rewards are for proper use: Leap Attack-> Soul Drain -> Vertical Hover takes all of 5 seconds to execute. The next spawn is met with Dark Pit -> Overcharge ( damage buffed at +150%).

On top of this, your bread and butter skills (Soul Drain, Dark Pit) are used upfront to augment damage/survivability. This causes very little redraw for outsize rewards within the combo.

The melee attacks hit hard, but you don't really want to use them very often as Beam Rifle is a set that is optimized when the rifle is used almost exclusively. However, you have some great options to socket melee attacks with Cloud Senses for +recharge and +max endurance or with Kinetic Combat for S/L/M defense. Out of all the melee attacks in the set, I would say that Touch of Fear is the most useful for this combo. It is an excellent tool for stacking -ToHit on enemies, and 4 sockets of Cloud Senses is all it needs.

The "shadows" of your character as they animate Hail of Bullets, Piercing Rounds and Bullet Rain used to be transparent and a light blue color. They are currently black and opaque, and look flat out terrible. A similar issue is happening with the Dimension Shift CC emote.

Is anyone else experiencing the same issue? The graphics bug seems to exist across multiple computers running the most recent nVidia drivers.

I strongly-strongly recommend a Bots/Time/Mace Mastermind. It is... close to being game breaking. On single origins. In fact, a fully decked out multi billion dollar Illusin/Rad is not much better than a well built base IO Bots/Time/Mace. It's insane.

When was your previous subscription set to lapse, or the billing cycle set to renew for a given month? You don't get the points when you put money in if there is still time left on your previous month's subscription. So if you fist subscribed on September 5th, and you add more money for the next month on September 29th, you wouldn't receive the Paragon Points until the 5th of October when your monthly subscription cycle refreshes.

I I think that's how it works, but I am not sure how it works to be honest...

I think it is -75%, which would quadruple the recharge of an enemy's attacks.

Spring Attack is a wonderful skill on my DM/ELA Brute.

Now, whether Spring Attack itself is a good skill or the AoE damage of Dark Melee is astoundingly terrible is up for debate...

The only advantage that (Poison) Poison Trap has over (Traps) Poison Trap is the lack of interrupt and one second animation. I love this aspect of the (Poison) version.

That said, while the (Traps) version has an interrupt period and long animation, it also has Seeker Drone to eat the alpha and provide AoE stun and -ToHit as well as FF Generator to protect the caster. This makes the (Traps) Poison Trap very reliable to cast, and well worth the SIGNIFICANTLY superior array of effects that it offers.

I could live with the current version of (Poison) Poison Trap if the set outside of Envenom and Weaken wasn't so inferior. Why the heck does Time have a superior -Heal debuff?? I can understand how Time would have superior -Regen, and it already does, but Poison should have higher -Heal, to name but one disparity between Poison and a top tier support set.

I too have a Beams/DM, and it appears that we are a rare breed. I took the combo for two skills, Soul Drain and in particular Dark Pit, which I see you neglected. Dark Pit is probably the most important part of this combo, because it lets you stack mag with Lancer Shot and Overcharge. I would NOT neglect taking this skill as it is pretty much the only reason to go Beams/DM in my opinion.

Soul Drain is a great skill, but I have found it to be most useful against AVs, where even against one or two targets, it offers the best boost to sustained DPS out of any build up power. It's also useful if you have solid control or buffs on a large team. Blasting with a 10 target Soul Drain gets silly.

Having played both a Poison Corruptor and a Time Manipulation Corruptor to rather high levels at this point, it definitely feels like Time Manipulation is WAY overpowered.

Sometimes powers look awesome on paper, and I was curious if Time was filled with those types of skills that drop your jaw in the real numbers screen then disappoint during gameplay. Nope. Everything in time is probably more potent than it appears in real numbers because of the synergy available within the set.

I'm not sure how I feel about Time at this point. My Poison character is most likely the one that I will use long term, but that is because I his costume and background story are more fully fleshed out. If I cared anything about performance-- particularly end game IO performance-- I would take Time in a heartbeat. I have no idea how some of these skills made it out of Beta while a set like Poison was ported with relatively minor changes.

I don't see Crashless Nukes or crashing Nukes that have damage commensurate with their endurance/recharge/penalty as the crux of the issue for Blasters. This discrepancy should be addressed, but it does not solve many of the problems that Blasters face.

The core issue that Blasters face is a similar problem with that of the Stalker AT-- they are both burst damage archetypes trapped in a game that has absolutely no need for anything other than sustained DPS. I view Blasters as an AoE burst damage specialist with the ability to also provide solid and rapid burst damage to single targets at range-- the most obvious advantage of ranged attacks being that target selection rarely requires movement of the character allowing for more effective spiking of damage on high priority targets (problem is, there really isn't much need for that in this game). Meanwhile, Stalkers are an entire AT built around single target burst damage delivered through Assassin Strike and augmented by Placate and Hide.

The Blaster role as an AoE/Single Target burst damage archetype is also evident in that both Aim and Buildup are nearly ubiquitous in Blaster primaries and secondaries. And while there are a few exceptions that lack these skills, these outlying sets tend to have abilities that emulate the effects of Build Up with relation to Burst AoE damage. Devices has Trip Mine and Time Bomb, which are direct correlations to AoE burst damage, and Darkness has Soul Drain.

But sustained DPS is what truly matters in this game, and while Blasters have the attacks to offer up solid sustained DPS, they don't have the durability to do such. This is why Melee ATs are much better off than Blasters. They offer 90% of the burst damage that a Blaster brings with the durability to consistently bring superior sustained DPS.

Players have already used IOs to establish that Blasters become more viable if that stack large amounts of ranged defense to augment their durability, thus closing one of the most glaring gaps between this AT and Scrappers/Brutes/Dominators. So if Blasters can't receive much more damage than they already have, should they become more survivable? What if every ranged single-target immobilize also granted 8% defense to range for 10 seconds? What if every ranged attack granted defense to range for 10 seconds, and this value scaled proportional to the recharge of the given skill? And what if every Melee attack granted Melee/AoE defense for a similar duration, again scaling with the recharge of the skill? I'm not sure if this would solve all of the ATs problems, but it would certainly lessen the glaring overall performance gap a bit, and given that the Blaster would become MORE survivable by attacking, it would further encourage their role as a DPS class.

I can POST again!!

Anyways, one of my two main characters will now be a DP/Poison Corruptor. The set is a lot of fun so far, but... It really feels lacking outside of Weaken, Envenom, Poison Trap and Venemous Gas. There is a massive wasteland of BLAH powers right in the middle of the set that are just rehashed clones of other skills with some minor value added.

• Ohh look, Elixer of Life! Reminds me of Mutation for some reason (to name but one rez)...

• Ohh look, Antidote! Reminds me of every other mez protection (but not much can be done here)...

• Ohh look, Paralytic Poison! Reminds me of Petrifying Gaze with no secondary effects...

In particular, I would love it if something could be addressed about the tier 5, 6 and 7 rehashes. Not much can be done with Antidote, but Elixer of Life and especially Paralytic Poison could use some attention. Perhaps Elixer of Life could have a moderate debuff occur around the rezed body (rez + moderate fallout) or grant a minor AoE buff for the team (rez + moderate Vengeance-type effect granting Regeneraton. +damage, and Toxic resistance). Paralytic Poison should have a desirable secondary effect, because it is too easily skipped.

I would also love to see the splash effect added to Alkaloid, with a heal at 1/2 the value being granted in an 8' radius around the primary target. The targeting geometry on Neurotixic Breath is great if you are standing 50 feet from the spawn, but terrible if you are within 15 feet of enemies, which is EXACTLY where you will want to be once you get Poison Trap and Venemous Gas. Let's widen the cone here so that the set has a bit more synergy with this regard.

**Edited for a goof**

I've never kept INF around very long, and it has always been pretty much "mined" into IOs. Probably the most I have ever had at one time was about 35 billion INF, and I generally try to keep about 18 billion available for purchases and prestige burns.

I have silly OCD formulas I like to maintain in my base, like 5 sets of every purple available for myself and my brother, or twenty sets of Panacea at 5 parts (less the proc) should we want to make a new regen or healer. My wealth is in the racks or socketed.