Rigel_Kent

My two ideas for snipes:

1) Backport the dominator sniper attack adjustments to corruptors, defenders, blasters, and any other AT with a snipe I'm forgetting about. That is, increase damage scale from 2.76 to 3.56, recharge from 12s to 20s, end cost from 14.35 to 18.51. This would probably be the least controversial change.

2) Make all interruptible attacks for all ATs autohit. To-hit rolls only exist to add uncertainty and keep players on their toes a bit. Interruptibility already adds uncertainty, so there is no need for a to-hit roll on top of that. Sniper attack IO sets would need an adjustment, but they're in need of an overhaul anyway.

Just for shiggles, here's what direct ports of a few broadsword powers from the scrapper version would look like in the hands of a level 50 defender. I assume the defender ranged 0.65 damage scale is used so as not to unfairly penalize them, much like melee ATs get to use their melee damage scale with ranged powers.

Slice: 8s recharge, 8.53 end cost, 1.05 acc, 44.46 damage, -12.5% defense for 10s, 130 degree melee cone
Build Up: 90s recharge, 5.2 end cost, +20% tohit for 10s, +80% damage for 10s
Parry: 3s recharge, 4.37 end cost, 1.05 acc, 30.36 damage, +20% def(melee, lethal) for 10s
Whirling Sword: 14s recharge, 13 end cost, 1.05 acc, 36.15 damage + 10.84 DoT, -12.5% defense for 10s, 8' radius PBAoE
Disembowel: 10s recharge, 10.19 end cost, 1.05 acc, 70.85 damage, -12.5% defense for 10s, 75% chance for mag 4 knockup
Head Splitter: 14s recharge, 13.52 end cost, 1.05 acc, 93.98 damage, -12.5% defense for 10s, 60% chance for knockdown

Damage numbers compare okay to blast sets, though the damage typing is horrible, of course. A solo defender would two-shot many even level minions with Build Up, Head Splitter, Disembowel; +1 minions if solo. You give up range and wide radius areas of effect, but look at that Parry! The devs would have to think of something creative to substitute instead of Confront/Placate/Taunt.

I don't think I've ever seen more straw men in one thread. Some of you really should know better.

It appears the devs will be improving the mission next year. All is good.

I realize this is an old thread, but:

Oh, thank goodness you posted here.

Normally, I advise against rolling Empathy as your first defender. And definitely against Empathy as your first character. It's got so many traps and pitfalls in its design, such as misleading power descriptions (Fortitude can be used on more than one target), and putting its always useful powers in later levels than its situationally useful powers, thus training you to use less useful powers more often.

That said, Garent's build will help you avoid some of the pitfalls. It's still up to you to remember the always useful stuff, like Cosmic Bursting away nuisance minions and LTs, buffing as many teammates as you can with Fortitude, and helping wear down the enemies with your wide radius AoE attacks, comes at later levels, while all the healing you were doing before level 12 becomes less important in the later game.

Some build options you might take:

Adrenalin Boost: In normal circumstances, AB caps the target's recovery, making endmod enhancers useless. However, if you have a nuke happy blaster or corruptor (or defender!) on your team, AB with 1 endmod enhancer can cancel out the nuke's recovery debuff and get them back in the fight faster. If you think you'll be teaming with nuke happy teammates a lot, try adding 1 endmod on top of the 5xDoctored Wounds. You could probably 1-slot Resurrect if you need to free up a slot. If you're quick with Vengeance, having to rez more than 1 person will be a rare event.

Electron Haze: In cone attacks, range enhancement can make it easier to hit more targets. Every time I respec out of range in a cone attack, I go crazy trying to hit more enemies, and end up respec'ing the range back in. If you think you'd prefer to hit more targets reliably, rather than to sometimes do higher damage, try swapping the Lady Grey proc out for a basic range IO.

Skip Recall Friend. Recall Friend is for when you're the first to the mission door, or for when you're stealthing through missions. As a flier without Afterburner or stealth, neither of these situations applies. Resurrect and Vengeance are meant to be used in battle; empaths are way too busy to be sneaking away behind a corner, doing a six second recall friend animation, and then rezzing. I'd grab Aim instead.

If nobody's supporting you -- and this will be frequent in PuGs since newbie leaders often incorrectly think "emp is all we need" -- blast cautiously. Same as you'd play a blaster with no support on the team. Aim, single target attacks, take down one target at a time, hold and stop recovery with Tesla Cage. This makes enemies a little less likely to target you.

I know, I know, it's suboptimal. You're not putting out nearly as much damage as you could. But that's the sad reality of playing a blasty type without support.

Another way to make enemies a little less likely to target you is to keep Fortitude on as many teammates as you can, especially AoE damage dealers. The more damage they do, the lower a threat you'll be considered by the AI. Recharge buffs and bonuses (i.e. Hasten) are key here, as is practice keeping track of the buffing order.

Distance is also a factor. The AI favors nearer targets over farther.

Additionally, Hover can help you stay within Short Circuit range but out of melee range. You'll still be a high threat target because you're using AoE damage from close range, but at least those sledgehammers or Rikti swords or whatever can't reach you, and they'll have to resort to (usually) weaker ranged attacks.

With support or at incarnate levels, things change. Regen Aura, Healing Aura, and your incarnate abilities will boost your survivability, especially if you have one or two key defense types boosted. Ranged/Energy/Negative defense set bonuses are probably easiest. Scorpion Shield if you feel like it. Once your defense is covered, take advantage and use your blasts to the fullest, Short Circuit and all.

Here's some "easy" Ranged/Energy/Negative defense set bonuses for Emp/Elec. Not necessarily the best in the game, but inexpensive and easy to build around, while you're still amassing wealth and learning the ropes.

Hold: Basilisk's Gaze x2 = 1.25% ranged, 2.5% energy&negative
Travel: Blessing of the Zephyr x2 = 1.25% ranged, 0.625% energy&negative
PBAoE: Eradication x3 = 1.565% ranged, 3.13% energy&negative
Ranged: Thunderstrike x3 = 1.25% ranged, 2.5% energy&negative
Resist: Reactive Armor x3 = 0.625% ranged, 1.25% energy&negative
Blasts: Defender's Bastion x5 = 3.75% ranged, 1.875% energy&negative

Besides, trying to do a serious comparison between an all storm superteam and an all trick arrow superteam would be silly. Either way, everything dies.

I have a hunch the fix will go live quickly, then. Anytime player actions can reliably crash an MMO server, it opens the door for a certain severe type of exploit. For example, look how quick the Winter Lord trial crash got fixed -- good thing, too!

Okay, I guess I should wait and see how dark doms play out before I totally write off dark blasters.

Extreme case scenario, both new dark sets for doms are zeroes, meaning a dark blaster would be a better option, if your dark ranged DPS concept demands melee and a ST hold at the cost of a corruptor's fast recharging Night Fall and buffs/debuffs.

When in a team with lots of debuffs but no crowd control, I prefer melee, even if I'm on a ranged AT.* Better to blap and keep enemies in a group hug with me inside the debuff soup, than try to keep my distance, fail because there's no crowd control, and have enemies run out of the soup and into my face at full strength.

(*By extension, when playing as a debuffer in a PUG, I usually melee. Because there's definitely debuffs on the team, and usually poor crowd control.)

P.S. Kinetics says hi.

If you're going to 5-slot heals, Doctored Wounds or Regenerative Tissue is the way to go. There just aren't any good defense bonuses in heal sets at the 5 slot level, so might as well go for recharge. If maxhp is what you're after, 3 slots is sufficient.

I'm sure other posters will chime in with excellent Empathy advice, so I'll talk about the other half of your build.

Psychic Scream and Psionic Tornado are excellent mitigation powers. Take them early, slot them generously. They can floor enemies' recharge rates reliably and with good duration. Positron's Blast, however, simply doesn't have the recharge bonus to pull it off. Go for frankenslotting instead. For Psychic Scream, some variation on 2xCentriole, 2xDmg/Acc/End, 2xRech, is the way to go. For Psionic Tornado, range slotting is unnecessary, so you can add a Rech IO to round out a Positron's Blast set, if you prefer. Take slots from Clear Mind, Rez, and Conserve Power; they only need 1 each. (And make it 1 Endredux for Clear Mind.)

Psionic Lance is a dud. Take it for concept purposes only. Consider a more practical power as a replacement, such as:
Subdue - 32% more damage than Mental Blast, same cast time. Semi-reliable root. Help keep an AV (which you can't recharge debuff much anyway) from running around and being annoying.
Air Superiority - Almost as much damage as Mental Blast, slightly faster cast time. Reliable knockdown. Smashing instead of psi damage. Juggle a mez/slow-immune target or Elite Boss all day long, plus deal with robot enemies easier. And another place for Kinetic Combat if you're into that.
Afterburner - Faster fly speed between missions. 15% enhanceable defense buff to help get past perceptive mobs. Does not suppress when clicking a glowie. Potential value as a panic button, between Afterburner, Regen Aura, and HA spam, you're really tough to kill.

In the long run, it's best to keep sets the same between ATs as much as possible. That way, balance changes can be made to just one set rather than many different versions of the same set. Specifically, it helps prevent instances of poor performing powers getting buffed only for one AT, and all other ATs being left behind (hello dominator sniper blasts).

Exception: The taunt power in melee sets sometimes gets switched out to serve different ATs' needs. Maybe a defender broadsword set would have a heavy range+defense debuff instead of Confront.

Also, speaking as a part-time blaster, I can assure you that when the devs alter sets heavily during proliferation, the results can be utterly worthless.

By the way, Parry grants melee positional and lethal typed defense. It really is as good as people say.

Defender mods would take a lot of damage out of the powers, but the defense debuff would be boosted from -7.5% to a nicely stackable -12.5% on every hit (other than Parry). This may seem overpowered, but remember, you're a defender, debuffs are your specialty. Parry, by the way, would see its defense buff go from +15% to +20%. Potentially a fair tradeoff for the loss of damage. I wonder how a Kin/BS defender would do, compared to, say, a BS/* brute.

For a power as seemingly simple as O2 Boost, its slotting can be surprisingly varied, depending on playstyle.

For instance, for me, I love it for its mez/sapper protection. So my O2 Boost would probably be 2-slotted for endredux, or something similar like Golgis. The green numbers are usually wasted when I cast it, and I don't need faster recharge, but the endredux means I can keep spamming it for mez/sapper protection all mission long if we're facing certain problematic enemy groups. (Ahem, Malta.)

I like Shout because it's pretty, and jousting backwards and/or range slotting makes a satisfying WHOOMP fly through the air, and, oh yeah, it's pretty.

For me, when I step way back from Trick Arrow and take in the big picture... my problem is this:

For a set that's all about debuffs, and exclusively about debuffs, there's a noticeable lack of pushing the limits of what debuffs can do in CoH's game mechanics. -Tohit, -defense, -damage, -resistance, -speed? Whoop de doo, the same five debuffs as every other debuff set. No -range? No -secondaryeffects? No +healresistance? No -mezresistance? No -debuffresistance? No +endcost? No -recovery (to targets, I mean, not to yourself)?

What a shame. To have a dedicated debuff set in an 8 year old game and not even attempt to explore debuff mechanics in novel ways. And this has nothing to do with power level or performance. Even if TA were outperforming other sets, it still feels like a huge missed design opportunity.

Man, do I need to level my speeder empath concept. This thread is giving me a nice tingly feeling.

Yeah, mezzes and debuffs that don't stack with themselves should be the exception and not the rule. Fortunately, except for a few non-stacking single-target debuffs of limited PvE value added in the post-PvP era (Sonic Siphon is one), they're pretty rare.

Typically I like to only see non-self-stacking mezzes and debuffs in the case of toggles (Disruption Field, for example) or tick emanations from the same instance of a pet (Liquefy, for example). Taking away the stackability on a click debuff takes away one of the few advantages of debuffs versus buffs, which don't get resisted, don't get level scaled, don't have to-hit checks, don't draw aggro, and don't have to be re-applied on every new spawn. (Insult to injury, a few click buffs are self-stackable, even.)

City of Data suggests, yes, you can have two Liquefy patches out with Burnout. Might want someone to confirm that in-game, though.

You can take the personal snipes to the PvP board, thank you.

1 second. It's not a very sticky debuff.

Even if it were sticky, I'm not sure how hot it'd be for PvP. PvP's a simple game of DPS versus regen. Debuffs (other than certain -regen debuffs artificially boosted by the devs to huge unresistable levels for PvP, e.g. Envenom) are largely irrelevant, even when they're not toggles that get knocked off every 15 seconds.