Kellaris

A couple suggestions from my personal favorites list:

Ice/Dark Corruptor - Feels a bit like a controller. Tar patch + Ice storm slows everything to a crawl, panics and tears apart weaker enemies; Throw in a Blizzard and you seriously damage and disable bosses as well. The anchor is nice, but not really required for every spawn once you get fearsome stare. Two holds (at least I took two of them) lets you lock down most trouble enemies very quickly. The pet fills in the gaps with random healing and a very powerful -tohit aura. For some reason, Ice's largest single target blast has a large tohit debuff in it, which stacks nicely with dark's debuffs.

Plant/Storm Controller - I have an ongoing love affair with confuse, which seeds of confusion satisfies early on. Between freezing rain knocking things over, carrion creepers being a disruptive distraction that knocks things over, lightning storm knocking things over, they barely even get a chance to beat one another senseless unless you root them. You also have tornado and hurricane available to unleash if necessary. Feels like very controlled chaos with a reasonable amount of damage.

Neither one has terribly high maintenance (shields, buffs, etc), and are fairly versatile as far as offense and defense. Both solo fairly well and feel like they're making a sizable difference on teams. Both had very tight builds for me though. Wanted more slots than I had.

Damage per animation time at 50, as corruptor, unslotted, with standard, cryo, or chemical ammo (Arcanatime included, and hopefully calculated accurately):

Pistols: 35.11
Dual Wield: 29.79
Empty Clips: 16.43
Bullet Rain: 15.78
Executioner's Shot: 31.9
Piercing Rounds: 33.33


Damage per animation time at 50, as corruptor, unslotted, with incendiary ammo (DoT damage averaged):

Pistols: 35.11
Dual Wield: 37.95
Empty Clips: 20.71
Bullet Rain: 20.07
Executioner's Shot: 40.03
Piercing Rounds: 39.74


Damage per animation time at 50, as corruptor, slotted (max enhancement levels, proc damage averaged), with incendiary ammo.

Pistols /w 5 piece decimation (minus proc) + touch of lady grey proc: 78.49
Dual Wield /w 5 piece decimation + explosive strike proc: 79.56
Empty Clips /w 5 piece positron's blast (minus dmg/range) + touch of lady grey proc: 51.28
Bullet Rain /w 5 piece positron's blast + explosive strike proc: 50.02
Executioner's Shot /w 5 piece decimation + explosive strike proc: 80.91
Piercing Round /w 5 piece positron's blast + recharge IO*: 82.97

*Would probably use another proc here instead of the recharge IO, but tried to keep slotting similar between similar powers.


---

Empty Clips' and Bullet Rain's damage are unimpressive for their lengthy cast times, but I'd prefer to not be shooting single targets when 10 enemies are clustered together. However, if you primarily solo with low enemy numbers, they could be considered skippable.

The only powers I would consider skipping would be Suppressive Fire if you don't want/need a CC, and either Executioner's Shot or Piercing Rounds, since they're very similar as slow single target attacks.

Piercing Rounds is about 60% more expensive, has double the recharge, double the range (of ES), and can potentially (but rarely) hit multiple targets or be used as a res debuff with standard ammo. Executioner's shot has short range, reasonable endurance cost, an accuracy bonus, and is easier to form a complete attack chain with.

If you tried using a Pistols -> Dual Wield -> Pistols -> Piercing Rounds -> Pistols -> Dual Wield -> Pistols attack chain with 101.25% global recharge (the above slotting, hasten, and no additional recharge), you'd run into a delay where dual wield has 1 second left on recharge and PR has 3.4 seconds left on recharge. It would be very hard to eliminate this delay with more recharge. An attack chain that used Executioner's Shot instead would be seamless fairly easily.

As DP and traps, I dropped executioner's shot after playing with both for a while. I found that few things were still alive after 7 attacks (in a team), and that target switching or using my secondary was sufficient to fill the gap. I may pick up executioner's shot back up if I start to really miss having a sustainable attack chain (itrials, AVs, and such). I was considering dropping suppressive fire, but it has proven useful against a lot of the problem enemies in the 40+ levels.

I've played dark and poison, but not together. I don't think the pairing would be especially powerful when compared to other corruptor combinations, but it does have some possible synergies with stacked -tohit, and life drain making up for poison's lack of self heal. However, I think venomous gas would be very difficult to use effectively along with dark's aoes, since they're all cones.

You already know about poison, so I'll just give a few comments on dark blast:

The single target damage is kind of low or middle of the road. Gloom does nice damage, but takes almost 5 seconds to deal it all (activation + travel time + 3.6s DoT). Life drain is a nice utility power for a secondary that has no self heal, but its damage is a bit low for a blast. The overall AoE damage is... passable, but you have to work for it. Two different sized cones are a little awkward to use together (or three if you use torrent), but you can try slotting a +range enhancement in tenebrous tentacles to keep from having to run back and forth to line up the cones as much.

Dark pit is a trap. I recommend against taking it unless you're going to use it as a set mule. It has an even more severe accuracy penalty than AoE control normally has. It only affects minions unless you have something else to stack with it. And it only lasts for 9 seconds at level 50.

Blackstar has a hefty -50% tohit, which I really liked having on my crash nuke. Lack of aim makes it less exciting than it could be though.

Edit: If you really wanted a poison and dark character for concept reasons, you could also consider radiation blast and dark miasma. Aside from the odd noises some of the blasts make (and x-ray eyes), radiation might pass for poison. Just a thought.

I have a 50 plants/storm that I consider quite toothy, and am currently working on a poison controller. I have a few comments and suggestions about your build, but I am by no means an expert.

In no particular order:

Many of your powers have low amounts of accuracy slotted. Your envenom and weaken have no accuracy slotted. Without tactics, significant global accuracy, or even a kismet:+acc, I think you're going to run into trouble hitting things.

Your hasten has one slot. It's lonely.

You may want an endrdx in burnout. At 48 endurance and -25 max end, I think I would flatline my blue bar and detoggle myself if I tried to use it in a situation where I actually needed it. (after having just blown several expensive long cooldown abilities)

Venomous Gas' debuffs are flagged to ignore buffs and enhancements. You can remove many of its slots for use elsewhere. I was going for 2 endrdx, an achilles heel proc, and possibly a touch of lady grey proc.

Poison trap does not currently use procs correctly, according to Negate, here: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...81&postcount=6 You could get a few more slots from here to move around.

Roots can dish out respectable damage with containment. You may want to give it another slot to raise its damage.

I strongly recommend using coercive persuasion: contagious confusion proc in seeds of confusion. It's probably my favorite proc of all time. Drop the pure confuse IO if you prefer to not 6 slot coercive persuasion. Any large group you SoC will generally have enough procs go off that the bosses will be confused as well.

If you plan to use spirit tree much, you may want to give it additional slots if you can spare them. 4 Heal/Rech IOs would ED cap both heal and recharge, but 3 would likely be close enough with a spiritual alpha.

Carrion Creepers could use different slotting if you're going for damage. I'm currently using 4 procs (trap of the hunter, explosive strike, impeded swiftness, and positron's blast), and 2 generic recharge IOs. 3 damage/recharge IOs and 3 procs would probably be better but I haven't switched yet. You may want to consider giving it an accuracy instead of one of the procs as well. I was counting on my freezing rain and tactics to help out in that department. I found this guide to Carrion Creepers helpful when I was trying to figure out what they did and how to slot them, hopefully it's still accurate: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=127023

I would suggest slotting Fly Trap with 4x expedient reinforcement (leaving out acc/rech and +res aura), the touch of lady grey proc, and achilles heel proc. You could also drop the expedient reinforcement rech/dmg/end and put in a shield breaker proc, but I'm unsure if this would increase overall damage output.

I would move the unbreakable constraint proc from vines to strangler, possibly dropping the other proc from strangler and replacing with a lockdown quad. You could put a different proc in vines, but as it is strictly an "oh crap" power for me that gets used maybe every 10 minutes, I would use a lockdown quad in it instead of a proc.

You may want to consider a different epic pool unless you chose psionic for concept reasons. With ice, stone, or mace, you can aim for the smashing/lethal softcap, or get within 1 luck range of it quite easily. Leviathan or fire would likely give you superior damage and some endurance recovery. I found the patron pets to be prone to doing adorably stupid things, but overall put out solid damage over time if they survive.

That's all I could think of. Hope it helps.

I'd have to pick fortunata. I wouldn't say it's the most powerful character in the game, but it has almost everything I would want for the content that I'm interested in doing:


Lots of control: AoE hold, AoE disorient, and AoE confuse can be rotated constantly. One of the main blasts is also a hold.

High damage: Very fast animating single target chain melts targets quickly. Decent aoe. Exotic damage is occasionally useful.

Reasonable durability: 50%+ def vs all, and minor scaling resists. Tiny HP pool keeps me on my toes (or on the floor) though.

Decent support: Double stacked leadership and perma mind link. Very handy when exemped, but still nice to have at 50 for filling in gaps in a team.

Wow. Just spent an hour typing out a lengthy reply about one of my favorite powerset combinations and got "the form you have submitted is no longer valid" and lost the post. I wanted to cry. This version will be a bit briefer since I want to sleep today.

Is this character already 50, or is it something that you're working on? Do you plan to play on a specific size group (solo, duo, 8-man SFs?) or making more of a generalist build? Do you have a special goal in mind with your set bonuses, or getting whatever you can squeeze in?

To me, it seems that you've sacrificed some of the build's uniqueness and functionality for the sake of set bonuses, but I can't tell what you had in mind when trying to get them. Personally I don't feel the need to go out of my way for global recharge, but I do love ranged defense.

Some specific changes I'd make:

Twilight grasp: I'd drop the 5 and 6 piece bonus for 2 heal IOs. It's a very powerful heal (arguably the most powerful in the game) for when things do get through your massive to-hit debuffs.

Frost breath: I can't imagine not having this power on teams. I can usually squeeze in 2-3 per spawn. It's no fire breath, but it's very efficient if hitting multiple targets. Ice is fairly mediocre at AoE already; no need to give up half your AoE arsenal. Different people have different opinions about it, but I'd advise at least trying it out if you haven't already.

Howling twilight: I'd steal the slots from this and put them elsewhere. Great power. It works fine for me with 1 recharge though. (or add a slot and put in the stun purple set maybe) Edit to add: It doesn't work too well as a control power anymore, in my opinion. Mag 2 stun and mag 3 "afraid" just creates chaos. Minions are stunned for 10-15 seconds, which is fairly pointless. Lieutenants run to the other side of the map before walking back slowly and giving each other pep talks, which is fairly annoying unless you need to rez people.

Soul drain: I'd drop this entirely. I found it unwieldy to use for too little benefit, and I wanted to use its slots elsewhere. I took power sink instead (which can be used, with the help of any blue, to basically negate the crash from blizzard).

Dark servant: I'd add heal IOs to it. He takes care of minor "maintainence" healing in the ranged group for me most of the time while I patch up anyone who suddenly loses half their health.

Single target blasts: I'd 6 slot thunderstrike here. 11.25% ranged defense and 21% accuracy from 3 sets.

Freeze Ray and Petrifying Gaze: Having these two and fearsome stare was a large reason that I rolled this combination of powersets. I'd advise taking them both (probably late in the build though, due to the way mez lasts longer at higher level) and 4-6 slotting. Baslisk's gaze (4) and lockdown (6) are both good sets to throw in these. I wish bitter freeze ray was better/faster and I'd consider taking that too.

Blizzard: I'd use positron's blast (5) and a recharge here. Or drop it to 4 slots (2dmg/2rchg) if you need to move 2 elsewhere.

Shadow fall: With no endurance reducers, this one toggle is going to eat about 20% of your endurance regen. Nomnomnom Add in dark embrace plus not having power sink, and I forsee some endurance problems.

To answer your specific questions:

1) Hasten isn't overkill in my opinion. It's a very powerful return for a small investment. I don't think it's really mandatory with this build, but I would advise keeping it -- particularly if you drop some of the recharge bonuses, or if you're still working towards them.

2) You don't really need more defense, but out of the available set bonuses, I feel that it's one of the best to aim for. With high ranged defense it's a lot less scary to take the pitiful alpha after fearsome stare, on a medium sized team with no meatshield. Hardly required, but nice to have.

3) See comments above. If you were to only allocate two more slots and not change anything else though, I'd recommend 1 in shadow fall (endrdx), and 1 in freeze ray (it's lonely).