Kaesar

Originally Posted by Madadh

FF is always beneficial to a team, unless you are running AE farms that are tailor crafted to have nothing of any real threat to your team. Massive extra Def helps offset def debuff, and helps (albeit, slightly) enemies that have insane accuracy bonuses. Also, many people lack Toxic resists, and -end resistance, and you can provide those. Also, you provide a broad area of mez protection. Granted, versus a lot of content, the team might not need some of the exotic protections you provide, and that's fine. Build to attack in the meanwhile.

If you use your team bubbles (the 2 you can't give yourself) to pick up some set bonuses, you'll most likely end up with plenty team protection anyhow, and then just focus on personal defense, and offense. A large part of your personal defense will come from Dispersion Bubble, and so heavy slotting on that helps the team anyhow.

I think it's possible to get pretty insane defensive numbers (including some pretty decent resistances) so your bottleneck solo will be kill speed and maybe in some cases some types of mez and end drain (which you can't give yourself resistance to). For the most part, you're going to be relying on positional defenses, tho, so if those are high enough, it'll only be a few types of enemies that are a pain.

In my opinion, calling repulsion field 'meh' is a vary charitable evaluation. There are a few people that have found situational uses for it. But myself, even if I grant those situation uses are fairly common (which is debatable) I'd still not consider the power a better choice than a lot of other things that you could pick. Vary rare is the alt where I don't wish I had another power pick or two. (Granted, even rarer is the alt where I didn't wish I have more *slots* but that's another story.) And yes, it drains a lot of end. It's an AoE, and unlike other AoEs, it's endurance cost goes up per enemy affected by it. So, in the instances where it is most pressing to be tempted to use it, it's most likely to very quickly eat up your blue stuff. I'm not sure I'd want it even is it had a flat end cost, but it would be a LOT more tempting a power choice. Of course, that is just my opinion, and I'm sure we'll here a few people chime in with the opposite opinion soon, so you'll have to choose for yourself and see what you think. Maybe it'll work for you and your play style.

I do like force bubble, situationally. It's often quite helpful solo, but takes a lot more finesse and practice to use well on teams. And, a lot of the time, the best way to use it on a team is to leave it off. Persoanlly, I'd take it, use it solo to your hearts content, and get used to how it affects the enemies, and how you can herd them up, or bunch them in different ways, and then not use it on teams at first. When teaming with friends or people you know, let them know you wanna experiment with it, and if they're cool with that (and friends should be) use it as you see best, and get feedback. PUG teams that dislike it will often only focus on the negative effects and not give ya good feedback on what they found helpful. If you get any feedback at all. Friends teams will tell ya what you did with it that was good, and what was a pain in the backside.

Elec seems to me a tad light on damage, and potentially high on mitigation, if built to sap. Your primary is quite durable, too, so you will likely struggle on damage output more than survivability.. I'd say you could solo a lot more than you'd want to try to solo, because who wants to seed 3 hours per mission. I honestly can't ever seeing this being a farming alt, but I could see +1/x6 maybe being doable in not too much time... Assuming you build for damage output form the elec, and not for sapping.

For generally solo survivability, I'd say hitting the 30s in positional defenses is a good start. If you can't get all 3 positions, I'd be willing to see a lesser value for melee, as you can Force Bubble, or KB to keep melee at bay. Truthfully, I don't think getting ontot he 40s or even capped to ranged and AoE should be TOO tough, but it's been a while since I worked on my FFer.

And, you always have PFF to fall back on, so....

Originally Posted by Flower

Well the CEBR map is designed for Claws/Electric Armor brutes so any blaster would not do well on it. No mez protection and little defense or resistances (especially to energy which is what that map is designed for) will mean you won't stay around long enough no matter how much damage you put out.

Dark blast is a good set. I view the -to hit as a nice addition but it alone will probably not help with survivability. First, there is not enough, the powers that have it only do 5% unenhanced. Second, most are single target except Umbral Torrent and Tenebrous Tentacles which are cones so delivering the -to hit to a mob can be very tricky, stacking it and keeping it up can be very difficult. Only Blackstar will deliver a significant -to hit to a entire mob but then that leaves you drained of endurance so killing everything is more important then debuffing them. Against a single hard target you will be fairly successful, against lessor things you had better be killing them faster then you can stack -to hit or you are already in trouble.

About Death Shroud, it is a good power but unless you are survivable it won't do much good. Unfortunatly it doesn't have the -to hit in it and the damage is low. Over time it will chew minions and Lt. up but you have to live for that time.

A Dark/MM will be nice. Drain Psyche at level 20 and life drain at 26 combined with some defenses and the -to hit will increase your survivability.

If your goal is to power level without using the invention system I would suggest blasters are not the place for you. Scrappers and Brutes do that much better. Blasters are the king of damage and good build with IOs can be very survivable but at low level and without IOs blasters are more of a low number of hard targets toon where power leveling takes a large number of equal or lower enemies. Blasters have good AOEs and can take out large numbers but they can't really do that at low levels like CEBR is designed for.