PunkRolex

My DM/SR scrapper is defense capped too all positions and has permahasten. I also soloed every mission from every contact I got up the hero side of the tree and all the villain stuff available in Oroboros. While I had defeats here and there, I had absolutely no fear of EBs at any point of my toon's career and fought almost every signature character post-35 as an AV, though I did have to drop Malaise down to an EB. I couldn't dent the GM version of the Kronos Titan from Crimson's arc, but it couldn't kill me, either.

I made that toon to take a grand tour of the CoX content, but badges are shockingly easy to come by.

Petless Bots/FF Mastermind. All four travel pools.

I've found it handy a few times. Most impressively, I've used it to keep dangerous bosses on the ground where they can't hurt anything. I like it most on Defenders. Knockback usually sucks, but sometimes it's better than doing one quarter of normal damage against a highly resistant opponent.

I have a defense capped Fortunata that has all kinds of goodness going for it: all kinds of control, decent damage, useful team buffs and boatloads of survivability.

Any Permadom is also an amazing all-around character.

As someone with more than 300 levels of Rad, I've got to go with that first. It offers a little bit of everything and it's well understood by everyone at this point. Even in the (sigh) rare cases when it's not, there's always the AoE heal and resurrection powers that match up with what idiots think support toons should be doing.

I'm going to place Cold second. Most of the Colds I've teamed with haven't taken, or were not diligent about applying the shields. I know it's a great set and I wish more people played it.

I'd put Kinetics third. Kins don't bring as much to the table for squishies, but melee-types deservedly love them. +Recharge, +EndRec and +Dam are the key ingredients in a team that can steamroller through everything, and Kinetics brings all of those things.

Dark is next. Debilitating debuffs, huge heal. It probably deserves to be higher on the list, but most of the time when I see Dark these days, it's in its lesser MM form.

My first 50 was an Empath and I put about 1500 hours into that toon, but Empathy, Pain and Thermal are very "meh" sets to me, in part because of the healer association and in part because they just don't bring as much to the table as those first four. Thermal is the best of the bunch.

TA players are usually awesome, experienced folks who were looking for something different. That said, on a team their contribution sometimes gets lost. I feel like TA should've been a control set instead of debuff.

I'm also kind of ambivalent about Traps. I just don't see it doing as much. I liked it better when puking was more reliable.

FF and Sonic absolutely have their place. FF is an absolute game changer for a team in most scenarios. Everyone loves it. But it's boring as all hell to play. Sonic is the opposite: the bubbles AREN'T a game changer, even in spite of how good they are. The -res powers make up for it, but in general I think Sonic's contribution to a functional team is pretty small. Stuff dies a little slower and people live a little longer. Emphasis on "a little." I'd rather have almost anything else.

Storm just needs help. I have about 70 levels of Storm and I still don't like it. At least eight out of 10 people who are playing it probably shouldn't be.

I had the pleasure of getting in a PuG a while back that might as well have been a duo between an SS/Fire Brute and a Plant/Cold Controller. The rest of us were there, and we were not necessary. The carnage was awesome to behold.

I took a Plant/Ice Dom from 1 - 30 over the weekend. I was very pleased with my overall performance; I spent more time solo than grouped but I felt I had good things to offer in both settings.

My previous Dom experience s with a Mind Dom, from CoV launch to roughly I10 or I11. On that toon I made frequent use of all my primary powers. They all brought good stuff to the table.

But on my Plant Dom, I found myself really only using my single target hold and Seeds of Confusion with any regularity. I made slotting investments in my AoE hold and the Slow/Immob quasi-pet, but given how seldom they're up, they don't seem terribly effective. Am I missing something or is Plant really that much of a one-trick pony?

Necro/Thermal should be decent, if unexciting as a Mastermind, though it probably meshes better with Bots or Demons, which already have pretty good resists to stack with its shields. I don't see /Storm as being terribly helpful for the Zombies, either. I've never done /Pain.

The way I play Necro is to leave my MM in bodyguard mode all the time and lead my band of easily-excited morons into melee the hard way. Storm is counter-productive to that on most maps; I think it works best for pets that are primarily ranged damage.

Necro/Dark is popular because there's synergy on almost every point. There's so much -toHit and soft control floating around that you are for all practical purposes a controller with bodyguard mode.

Rad/Sonic or Rad/Dark Defender
Any Mastermind, particularly a /FF or /Traps
Any power set that gets single target Confusion
Any VEAT

I bind the keys on the numpad to select teammates and RTYFGH to select my pets, with +-./ reserved for whatever buffs I have. Since I do things this way on all my characters, the only difficulty I have is adjusting between toons with different power sets.

There's nothing easier than a Scrapper. For sheer simplicity, something like Claws/WP. Very hard to mess up.

For learning the game, I'd say the right way to go is a Defender, Controller or Dom. Good starting points are probably the better-loved buff sets like Kinetics or Empathy while Mind and Earth control can provide an education as to the types and value of different forms of controls.

Doms can be hard to play, but I ultimately find them to be less frustrating than Blasters. They still need active defense and situational awareness, but they have more going on than just damage on top of damage. Plus, almost all of them get cool pets.

SS/Fire Brute
SS/Fire Brute
SS/Fire Brute

They have good resists, a strong heal and damage aura. They have Footstomp for minion-elimination and rage to keep damage generally high. Brutes have higher defensive caps than scrappers, something I expect to come into play with the rest of the team. Fire Armor also offers Rise of the Phoenix, which turns the possibility of a defeated Brute into a serious up side.

Sonic/Cold Corrupter
Sonic/Cold Corrupter

Cold's advantages are already documented in this thread. The combination of Frostworks, Ice Shield and the various debuffs should complete any holes in the Brutes' protection and go a long way to neutering EBs and AVs.

Additionally, I would expect my ideal buffers to run Leadership toggles, hover as much as possible and all my squishies to have an appropriate Resistance-based armor from their epic power pool.

Sonic/Sonic Defender

Primarily, Sonic/ is here for squishy status protection, but the +Res bubbles fortify whatever the rest of the team already has, hopefully to a point near or around the cap.

Sonic/Kin Corrupter
Sonic/Kin Corrupter

Kin has respectable -regen and obviously the +recharge, +damage and +recovery. ID also offers some S/L resistance, though that might be gilding the lily a bit.

In this scenario, the Brutes are doing the heavy lifting of clearing spawns. They're more-or-less all capped for defense, resistance and hit points. They have tons of recharge so their self heal should be available any time they need it. The squishies are well-shielded as well, and it's their job to concentrate their -Resistance attacks on hard targets.

One potential down side I can see to this team formulation is that the only toons with AoE healing abilities are the /Kins, which probably won't do the /Colds and Sonic/ much good.

I think the biggest "problem" with Mercs is that the don't do much burst damage. They pew pew pew just like Bots, and there's a more or less constant stream of LITTLE orange numbers, but not many big ones.

They also have a lot of powers that they don't really ever use correctly, something that seems to effect Mercs disproportionately compared to other pet sets. My highest Mercs MM is only a level 24, but even when I'm teamed with one I find myself wishing that toon was a Thugs MM instead. It's just sort of lackluster.

But at least they aren't Ninjas.

I have no idea what we're talking about at this point, but I would like to voice my support for getting /Sonic on MMs. It seems like a good fit, especially for Bots and Demons. I've taken FF to 50 twice, and the bubbling experience was vastly better on a mastermind than on a defender, to the point that I've resisted making a Sonic buffer until I see it proliferated to MMs as well.

I have a level 50 of each. Bots/FF and Zombies/Dark. They're both great choices for teaming, but they work best for different kinds of teams.

Bots give a small defensive bubble that can provide a good starting point for Tankerminding, but there are enough Brutes and Tanks wandering around that doing so isn't usually necessary. I tend to play my Bots MM like a Defender. I let the melee guys go in and grab initial aggro while my Bots stay in Bodyguard mode, then I pick a decent-looking clump and send them into aggressive mode while I concentrate on using my buffs, leadership toggles and medicine pool to help out teammates. Bots benefits substantially from teammates with control Powers, especially those that have -kb Immobilizes or Holds.

Of course, my MM is a Bots/FF with capped S/L defense, a resist shield and bodyguard mode, so she's probably better at absorbing an alpha strike than most Tanks or Brutes in the first place. She does not, however, hold aggro worth a crap.

I play Zombies on teams as a sort of junior melee-range character. My zombies stay in bodyguard mode almost full time and I rely on Air Superiority on auto-attack (no, really) to get a mob's attention. I find this easier than micromanaging GoTo, and it actually works pretty well for getting the Knights and Zombies close enough to do their best work. The Lich and Lost Soul, once they're out and upgraded, are going to provide decent-ish if random levels of control (/Dark adds even more to the mix, obviously) and -ToHit, and overall this combination is quite safe.

Zombies are slower and in my opinion quite a bit easier to keep out of melee pet stupidity compared to Ninjas, something else that should be seen as a positive when grouping.

My Necro MM works great on teams that are below endgame levels, dealing with normal mission content in moderate spawn sizes. Zombies mature relatively quickly, or at least I don't feel like I'm crippled when I'm operating without my second pet upgrade, so it's a good choice for helping lowbies. Paired with /Dark, Necro an excellent general-purpose teammate, with modest control and damage and pretty serious debuffing abilities. Given how uncommon Doms have always been red-side, my Necro has always seemed more like a Dark controller with Zombie pets than anything else.

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Necro takes more skill to play, since it requires a little pet micro.

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My Necro/Dark did levels 6 - 50 just leaving the the pets in bodyguard, walking up close to a group and hitting either Air Superiority, Fearsome Stare or Darkest Night. After the Lich and ESPECIALLY once I got Fluffy, everything was locked down and hacked, blasted and puked to death, all the time.

As a Brute I initially want the alpha, to get my fury to a nice place, and I'll take the hits to get there. Teaming with MMs and Doms makes me feel competitive; I need to be there first so my fury can stay high. If I'm not out in front, or if there's no way I can take the alpha to begin with, I'll hang back and let the MM do it.

Generally, on a villain team, roles are just more fluid in general. There's a HUGE difference between what an EM/DA wants to be doing versus what an SS/WP wants to do, and that can be further modified by the abilities of teammates; a good Bots/FF (MM takes alpha) or a Fire/Kin (Jump in, wait for FS) or Earth/Psi (no fury, 'cause nothing is even moving) will all completely change how combat is approached.

With QR, Stamina, both the Miracle and Numina's uniques, two Performance Shifter procs and ~50% endred in all my attacks, my SS/WP can still get dangerously low on end on occasion.

Fortunately, that's low on end, not completely out of end.

Claws/Regen + Plant/FF

Claws has pretty decent AoE by that point, and Regen has Quick Recovery to keep the pace up.
Plant has Seeds, which is up every fight even at DO levels, and FF gives the scrapper a HUGE boost to survivability.

I'd give a slot to a Plant/FF and the other to some kind of /Regen scrapper

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PunkRolex: At least two of the things on your "Things I hate" list have been essentially destroyed. (Outleveling content and PVP.) You may wish to update your list.


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I'm not taking PVP off the list until the developers apologize for inflicting it on us to begin with. ED is also still painful for greatly reducing the ability of my Defenders to contribute, both in the loss of perma-hasten and therefore the use of high-recharge powers, and by removing the ability to slot damage enhancements to meaningful levels. I think other ATs came away fine but Defenders got hosed, even post-IOs.

And since I'm here I'll go ahead and further suggest that the best "blaster" might in fact be something in a Defender; Illusion benefits greatly from additional recharge, so something in a Kinetics defender (Kin/Rad or Kin/Ice) might be very helpful.