OVWyx_EU

Whichever you fancy, but for soloing, the corruptor will definitely be better. The Defender would be manageable once you have Cosmic Burst, prior to that, you may find it somewhat frustrating.

Either are characters that will function at their best in larger teams.

Rad does go with Kinetics though. The defence debuff compliments a set that requires you to hit with most of the powers, and the AOEs do quite nice damage once you put yourself at the damage cap with Fulcrum Shift.

Don't know.

From here. It seems to indicate that it's a "gift", at least that's how I read it, but I may be wrong.

The 20k prestige per member shortly after I11 should help.

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20,000 Prestige
Also after the launch of Issue 11, all Supergroups will receive an additional 20,000 Prestige per Supergroup member, meaning SGs could acquire up to 3 million Prestige based upon their Supergroup membership roster! Actual date will be announced shortly.

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Edited to add: Once you know when that date is, there's nothing to stop you sending yourself a buddy code, having a free account for 10 days, and padding out your SG with 12 level 1 alts (or more, if you can be bothered), which may solve a lot of your prestige problems all in one go.

I actually hadn't thought about the implications in the second tier attacks. I'm unsure as to whether I think this is a good thing or a bad thing to be honest. It would certainly have a negative impact on a couple of my characters, including one of my favourites, but I'm also objective enough to say that I know Ice Blast is "a bit good" at the moment.

My current time to go through my main "chain" (the three attacks and Freeze Ray) of single target on Ice Blast is 4.24 seconds. The total combined BI of the chain is 279.16. The time would rise to 4.91, a rise of 15.8%. The loss in DPS would be noticable, but not horrendous, if I took the hold out the equation it would obviously be more significant, but I use that an awful lot. The rooting issue for PvP seems less drastic to me, I've played characters that have longer animation times, as long as the leaping powers are well slotted it's manageable, although harder.

Electricity Blast takes 6.24 seconds to go through the single target chain of two attacks and one hold, for a combined brawl index of 155.14. This will fall to 4.84 seconds, a drop of 22.4%.

Even with these changes, Ice Blast is still considerably better in terms of single target capability.

I'm dubious about this though, I'm always particularly sceptical about the dev's ability to do anything involving blasters given a history of screwing it up royally whenever they've tried. Changes to animation times on all the sets needs decent and objective testing, and I still think Elec and Archery will be considerably sub-par with these changes (although elec would gain quite a bit from it).

I'm still not convinced an accross the board solution is the answer, the sets are meant to have different strengths and weaknesses. It's going to need tweaking for individual sets.

I also think that until they sort out what they're going to do with Defiance, it's impossible to get balance sorted.

Edited to add: Ice and Fire Blast outshine everything else by miles. Someone should try to decide either: that this is the standard they're working towards on blaster sets, and bring the others inline; that these two sets are overpowered, and should be brought more inline with the others, or; that they're after something in between.

Personally I don't think that they should be working towards the standard of the "worst" sets, they don't really feel like blasters at all, I'm not sure whether I think everything should be brought up to the standard of Ice and Fire or whether they should be aiming just a little lower.

Oh, you can't spec fire blast out, unless you take flares.

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Perhaps it would make more sense if they looked at an overall balance on the blast sets, rather than knee jerk reactions to individually weaker powers within otherwise good sets.

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From the Dev quote: "One of the thigns we want to do for blasters is normalize the attack times for all of the 1st and 2nd tier powers. What we'd like to shoot for is a 1 second activation time for 1st tier powers, and a 1.67 second activation time for 2nd tier powers."

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Unless they also have the same damage, endurance cost and secondary effects, that is not really a balancing exercise.

That's without even considering the first two powers within the context of the sets as a whole.

Dubious, really.

Every issue recently has seemed to include small buffs that effect the strongest sets the most.

More damage for Fire Blast, better animation time for Bitter Freeze Ray, quicker animation time for Flares....

Perhaps it would make more sense if they looked at an overall balance on the blast sets, rather than knee jerk reactions to individually weaker powers within otherwise good sets.

All the blaster changes I've seen both implemented and discussed recently have seemed very poorly thought out from an overall balance point of view. This fits the trend.

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Solo, a good Stalker will not be able to kill a good Blaster.
Solo, a good Blaster will not be able to kill a good Stalker.

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True, but the blaster has to be constantly aware and will be engaged by other targets in the zone, the stalker if he's careful will not. The stalker can select his engagements, the blaster can not. Zone PvP has little to do with 1v1, but about how well the characters function in the environment they're forced to fight in, and how well they can force fighting only in situations that are to their advantage.

For that, assuming a moderate level of player competance, nothing is better than a stalker. Except maybe two stalkers.

Frostbreath is one of those powers which is great damage, if you have someone to herd for you (with rad secondary you could actually do it yourself using Radiation Infection), if they're not being grouped, it's really never seemed worth it to me, as you rarely hit more than one or two.

I find status effects are little problem when soloing. Particularly not with ice primary where you don't even need to carry many break frees, given how good Freeze Ray is. It's only really against Carnie or Malta that I need more than a couple a mission - I normally take six into Carnie and Malta missions, although rarely use more than three or four, better too many than too few generally.

Edited to add:

Corruptor sets that I think are most geared to soloing:

The best soloing corruptor primaries are probably Ice and Sonic. Both offer solid single target damage and a "status effect" power (a hold for ice, a stun for sonic). Ice is quicker animating, but sonic has a much more noticable secondary effect. Fire is also very good damage, but lacks any sort of damage mitigation which may be a pain at higher level. Energy has reasonable ST damage but again, no real "damage mitigation" unless you count knockback, which may cause more problems that it actually solves with a lot of secondaries.

The best soloing secondaries would probably be Rad and Dark, as almost all the powers you take will be of benefit to you as well as a team, although Kinetic is also pretty good for fast paced play, and less toggles to get knocked off if you do get stunned or held etc. At higher level Cold is also very good, but at lower level probably not the best - the shields are obviously no use to you while soloing.

My Ice/Thermal is level 50. She's great fun, definitely one of my all time favourite characters and I've made far too many. Although I mainly team in CoV the character can and does solo quickly, reasonably safely, and always on relentless. This is with Thermal secondary, which of the nine powers that are available (I took eight - all except the res), has only three that you can use in solo play. Despite that she solos pretty well, simply because of how good the ice primary is.

G'wan, make an Ice Corruptor, they're fun.

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You may get some use out of it pre-endurance recovery power. After that it's useless and only rewards poor play.

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Agreed. It's about the only inherent I can think of that runs contrary to your role.

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Defiance encourages bad play, Vigillance rewards it, questionably, I have never found any use for either in PvE past hollows level.

I actually don't think either AT needs a massively powerful inherrant, but something basiclly useful for doing your job in a team well would be good.

Ice Blast with anything on a corruptor is fine for soloing, the single target damage is good, and Freeze Ray is an excellent hold, so with the debuff available in the rad secondary you should have no problems at all.

The AOE damage is actually not bad on ice at all either, but ideally you want someone grouping and then locking the mobs down either with slows, holds or immobilises to get the most out the AOEs. If you mostly solo, they may be less use to you, unless you want to slot both Ice Storm and Lingering Radiation heavily for slows.

When soloing my stalker I tend to sort of stealth the maps, but stop and kill a group whenever AS and build up are recharged (which will let me take out a group in just a very few seconds) then hide again etc.

I don't tend to stick to paper missions (too boring apart from anything else) and found that it's actually not a bad way to trundle through content. If you run arc missions, in addition to being a little more interesting, you also get "end of arc" bonuses, which do give a fair amount of experience. I seem to remember levelling quite quickly on that one soloing up to about level 30ish, when I think I may have accidently made another corruptor and got side tracked.

I don't believe you!

Nice though Web Envelope is, I'd go with a resistance based shield, and just buy web grenades from SC - villains almost always seem to control the zone on Union, and I don't normally find I need more than 6 in one play session. They're not as good, but they normally do the trick, and the defence shield really is pretty poor.

Rad isn't as bad for zone PvP as people would have you think, the -def can be very effective, it does work better with another character who can do more ST damage though, but then thermal is a fairly support orientated set anyway so I don't see a problem with that.

Cosmic Burst is extremely good. Do plan to slot for movement in hurdle and combat jumping though to help you use it more safely, and I still keep a HO slotting in the power (2 acc/def debuff, 3 dam/range, 1 recharge IO) rather than set IOs, which I find to be far more effective. The rooting is long even with leaping powers slotted so you want to start it from a fair distance, slotted movement powers help to keep down the time you spend on the ground.

I'd take all three single target attacks, neutrino bolt and x-ray beam are reasonably quick animating, although comparatively low damage, but firing them when you've nothing else to fire keeps damage and -def ticking over, and once scourge kicks in, x-ray beam at least will give you acceptable damage against a squishy.

I'd focus set bonuses around accuracy and recharge, with any movement bonus you can get thrown in too (Thunderstrike sets, Positrons Blast if you keep any AOEs, Doctored Wounds in the heals), get aim slotted with tohits (or membranes if you can afford them) in addition to recharge. Essentially if you can land Heat Exhaustion, Melt Armour and Cosmic Burst, your team mates should be able to take care of the rest.

My stalker got well over 200 kills before being defeated in PvP zones. All the deaths I had on it were due to my own mistakes - I often don't have the patience to play it properly, I prefer the faster paced play you get from playing squishies, it was more of an experiment than anything else.

The build has no set IOs other than a stealth IO and the character is level 32 and has been for months - no tier 9 secondary power.

They are totally undetectable if they want to be, so can engage or not as they see fit, picking off targets that are weak or when they are distracted.

The only good thing about stalkers in zone PvP, is that 99% of them are played badly. I have to admit that I really hadn't realised quite how good they are until I'd played one.

Even at the damage cap, you're nowhere near being able to kill a boss with a nuke.

Inferno will do the most damage out of the nukes (more than Nova with the DoT) and KB doesn'treally mesh that well with Kinetics overall. I'd definitely put Energy as the worst match for Kin.

It depends on the enhancement.

KB protection IOs work constantly, providing that all the usual rules about your effective level compared to the level of the enhancement aren't preventing it from doing so, and you haven't exemped below the level you took the power you slotted it in. You can, after all, slot them in buffs in addition to in toggles, which you never use on yourself at all.

My Ice/Rad controller gets really excited about KB too.

She's been shelved at level 40 in a several month long sulk caused by over exposure to peace bringers.

Rad or Fire.

Learn to love the aggro.

I'd say your tanker probably isn't doing as good a job as you think they are.

Ask your tanker to turn the mobs away from you when fighting anything that does nasty cones (malta and nemesis are probably the worst) and you'll be fine. With fortitude on there's no reason at all your tanker can't stay alive long enough to turn groups, get aggro, and move the mobs away from any distant snipers if required, even discounting the liklihood that in an 8 person team there will be other buffers/debuffers in the team.

Sonic secondary is very good from a soloing point of view. Kin/Sonic, Rad/Sonic or Dark/Sonic (probably not in that order) would all work well.

Repel is very high end usage (you definitely couldn't run it much before stamina/transferrance), and not great at all in PvE. It scatters the mobs and to play kinetics you often want them close to you.

Again, because Kinetics is a pretty "close range" set at times, I'd question the use of a snipe. It's a defender snipe, in a set with no aim, you're not going to actually kill anyone outright with it, the range on lower damage attacks is absolutely fine for pull (plus, lower damage attacks are generally better for pulling). I'd go for the regular single target attacks over the snipe - you can use them mid-fight much more easily.

At low level I would either go down the route of taking a travel power, or get Inertial Reduction and maybe Hasten, both is probably overkill when you lots of other nice powers to pick from - not that I wouldn't necessarily end up with both. In addition to which if you intend to fly when fighting, even if you don't plan to take stamina, swift is useful to help with flight speed. Siphon speed only does so much.

Increase Density is a good power, I'd want that in there as soon as it's available.

Don't worry, I'll keep you alive, honestly!

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