Necromatic

Interesting but...

As you mentioned, there are a lot of places to pick +recharge. After so much, it's diminishing returns on any extra (not the CoX definition).

I too have a DP/kin, but not very high up at the moment. I also have a 50 IO'd to the gills, incarnated /kin controller. The controller has near capped ranged and near capped res to smash/lethal. This combined with the heals and endurance mod powers makes this guy extremely durable. So, go a little less recharge and more def.

Also, HoB does not scourge like rain unfortunately.

And, I am not sure when the alpha comes in. It might be when you break stealth.

I would remove some slots from consume. I would put one in Seeds and finish Coercive to get +5 ranged def. I would also put more into lingering from somewhere. I guess ranged def is not so important on a rad, but if you lose anchor with rad infection, down you would go.

Both and neither. My most powerful toon is one purp and one orange from soft cap def and capped res. Didn't need to gimp the build since I am not pushing for either.

Also, I don't feel like I am getting wasted insp drops since I could always use a purp or an orange.

How bout, lol, electric melee/kinetics with brute fury.

Interesting...

Innate ability could (or would?) define the 'class'. In other words, if you choose brute fury then you get brute style attributes with of course whatever primary and secondary you choose.

Yeah this or wait for proliferation 3000.

Trying to think of something that would be overpowered in this case. Hmm, can't, too lazy. BTW my friend has a great idea about balancing stuff. I'll see if he wants to comment.

My plant/kin can solo +4 X8 fire cyborgs. Don't really need seeds unless I want to be lazy. I wonder which one would be faster, fire or plant for something like that.

I'm sure fire could be faster in regular missions, but for an ambush farm, maybe plant.

Skimming this thread made me realize something about my personal quest to survive +4/X8 fire cyborgs on a non-melee toon.

It is really the journey to tankmagery that is fun. Sure, in the end I can go into cyborgs and survive, heck thrive on my controller. But, I cannot tell you how much time and effort I put into him. How much fun it was to tweak builds on mids at home, at work, on my wife's computer...

All the time spent researching redtomax. And that's just time outside of the game! Accolade hunting, respeccing, farming, mishes, mishes and more mishes. All to perfect him. Is the game at fault for allowing his existence?

If it were truly impossible, if I found out in the end that it was a wasted journey, I think I might have given up on the game. I don't want homogenization. Just knowing that there is creative ways of achieving superpoweredness. Makes me hunger for the next project.

In defense of kin; there is a lot of 'rounding out' toons at the higher levels, especially post incarnate. There, the last bit of buff not generally in abundance (at least to capped levels) is +dam. To a lesser degree, +recovery and +recharge. Both are in kins wheelhouse.

Resistances and defenses are usually already high for melee toons. Squishies get those in their APP, PPPs (mine is one orange and one purp away from soft cap). Also, most high end toons have no problem hitting stuff, so -def is not so useful. -Res is very nice though, but not generally as game changing as fulcrum (imagine if there was a -res at the levels of fulcrum, game breaking for sure).

-Regen is probably the other big item. Again, kin has SOME of that.

So recap, kin has big damage, recharge and recovery, strong heals, a little -regen. These fill MOST of the blanks for your high level generic teammate and therefore brings a lot to a team.

Game play reflects this. A kin on a team makes the team considerably more potent.

The caveat, and probably the reason why kins are not so in demand, is that generally one is a enough. Several /storms, /colds and /sonics will out buff/debuff a kin of course. In fact, a couple of /colds on a team is pretty potent. The amount of -res and +recovery begins to stack with those.

Again, this is all in defense to kin (kinship ya'll know). Really, all of them are good for high end pve teams. Kin is generally better, but there are situations where it is not.

As a squishie, I like stealth and SS or stealth IO and SS for Lams. Other than that, you have Roots, creepers and lingering so you are golden for bafs. The rest is personal preference I think.

plant/kin

Plant/kin. Lol you have one already! With the changes to sb, you buff once and start laying the damage as a good plant/kin should. Even id is a team buff (at least the dam Res part).

As others have pointed out, there are a lot of kins out there so ymmv.

I hate FA. The endurance cost is too high for the benefit. If you do take it, then you'll probably want to drop the leadership pool if you have it and pick up cardiac in alpha. Why all this endurance concern for a kin you might ask? Well you don't want to spend half your time hitting transference.

On my /kin, I have two separate builds. One smash/lethal cap, the other ranged. The cool thing about the ranged guy is I'm on orange short of capped res as well. This guy is sturdy. I have a heal when I need it, and with so much res, there is a little leeway when I miss. I run the accuracy alpha on this guy MOST of time. I am experimenting with the others.

And another thing. A DP/kin has about a billion different ways to go as far as mixing different effects from DP and the incarnate abilities.

Probably not the fault of the AE system, but more of the exemplar system.

More damage versus the higher mob types. Just like I suggested.

I wouldn't mess with AoE's. There are plenty of arc-types that do AoE damage.

Heck, my Plant/kin Controller with Seismic smash can hit for 950 (according to mids, with fulcrum shift), do it safely, while spamming AoE controls and damage (not to mention creepers and fly trap). My stalker is just a little north of 1100 with build-up and being hidden.

That's just plain wrong.

Just eliminate the purple patch effect for stalkers.

Went back to 11.3 for testing. No problems so far.

Update:

Cleaned my 11.2 drivers out (uninstalled all with express uninstall all option), then ran driversweep after reboot. Rebooted again and loaded 11.7 (non control center). One more reboot.

Froze about 1.5 hours into game play. Alt-tabbed out and shut down CoX, restarted CoX and continued where I left off.

I would say that 11.7 is an improvement, but not better than my old 11.2 in the crash department.

System: i5 OC to 3.8 (when turbo is on), 5870 non-oc'd. Both are water cooled and never see above 60C. Windows 7 64 bit home prem. 12 gig configured 2X4 and 2X2. CoX is ran from raided f60s corsair ssds. OS on 80gig intel ssd.

Oh, I run HwMonitor while playing CoX to monitor temps.