Riverdusk

If I knew I'd be mostly duoing with an electric blast honestly I'd go with elec/MM. With two drainers it actually gets impressive, if you coordinate. Sonic's sleep probably won't do you much good either with a storm.

But then I've never been a big fan of sonic blast anyway. As mentioned, too many slow animations. Always feels slow and kludgy to me.

Another One Bites the Dust by Queen of course.

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...cept some people dont like ice as a power.

Guess from the amount of praise ice/ice is getting, that leaves everyone else in the dust for solo work.

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Selective reading much? I saw plenty of others mentioned.

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Ice blast is controllery enough on its own

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Most of the powers offered in Ice Blast are quality damage dealers. Aside from the two holds, its flavor is definitely "Blastery".

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I also put ice storm in the "controllery" category, now we're up to 1/3 of the set. And every blast has a good amount of slow and -recharge. And my comparison is on scale with other blaster sets, not comparing to a true controller.

Back to the OP:

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First of all it's not so much that I am looking for validation that I made a good arc. I simply do not see the point in putting effort into making someone that no one is going to enjoy.



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I guess that's where we differ, in two significant ways. One, to me it isn't an "effort", it is fun. Two, I put in that effort first and most importantly to create an arc that I enjoy myself. If other people play or enjoy it is secondary.

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I may have misspoken. Ice/ice has very good damage. I never meant to imply otherwise.

But it's easy to fall into the trap of "hold this guy, hold that guy, Shiver, Ice Storm, Ice Patch, oops gotta rehold that guy" and never get around to that actual damage.

I also found myself going "I have these REALLY GOOD things in my power tray that I just never get to because I have even better things to do instead."

It's a good "problem" to have.

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Having played ice/ice to the 40's I know exactly what you are talking about and agree. Ice blast is controllery enough on its own, it almost doesn't need the /ice secondary. IMHO something like fire/ice I think works better where you can leverage the safety of /ice better.

Tried ice/mm and it didn't click with me, just don't think I'm a fan of /mm despite it looking good on paper. Just a personal preference probably.

More recently did start an ice/electric with plans to go ice/electric/electric and have to say I'm liking it.

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The other annoying part about KB is that not everyone pays attention and you'll get a mob that gets KBed near another pack and someone runs over to kill it, grabs the other pack and then all hell breaks loose.

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Yep, that's what I call fun times. A herd and steamroll destroy team gets boring quick. Guess I've been here long enough that I'm never in a race to get to 50 anymore. A team being "perfectly efficient" so I get the best xp/min possible is the last concern I have.

Had a similar idea although my thought was dual blades, lot of cute daggers to choose from and it seemed more graceful. Hover should definitely be doable. Haven't gotten around to it yet though.

Just a quick clearing up of a few ongoing misconceptions that don't want to die regarding ice storm that were mentioned in this thread. It has normal accuracy, you will want to slot accuracy in it. It's damage is underrated, 116 at lvl 50 in a huge AoE. Basically a good power for frankenslotting with IO's since you'll want accuracy, slow, damage, and recharge all in good numbers imho.

Poor frost breath gets beaten up on too, I almost think a good part of it is its lackluster hard to see graphics. It just doesn't look impressive compared to something like fire breath, but it's a good attack.

I almost always suggest taking electric epic with ice blast, its cone aoe attack has the same range as frost breath for a good one-two punch and you then have some decent AoE not even counting ice storm and blizzard.

Wow, there are actually two TA/Electrics in existance?

I kid, but that's a combo I've never actually seen.

Actually my favorite is when I start casting a heal, get slept, heal goes off and wake myself up. Preemptive sleep cure.

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Funny, I play on Protector, who ties with one other for the lowest population server.... and I never have a problem forming a team when I want one. Hmmm....

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I find more funny that "all the good names are taken" as the reason given to abandon Freedom or Virtue. I rarely have issues with names I want being already taken and it isn't hard to come up with alternatives. Use a thesaurus, go to naming sites (google to find ones like seventh sanctum's hero name generator, babynames.com is also one I use a lot), use translators for different languages. Just some quick ideas.

Well, if you want to solo imho the top three primaries are dark, storm, and rad. You want team friendly too, rad would be top, then dark, then storm. I find it interesting that neither rad or dark are even on your list...just don't like them?

TA I have issues with mitigation, at least early game. You can also have trouble getting into teams if you are trying to just get on random teams. Random average player out there = " a defender with no heal? What is that? Me no like"

FF they can understand a bit easier, but that one can be very slow to solo with.

Cold primary I refuse to play unless they ever change the look of the ice shields, so that's the only comment I make on that one.

Out of all the ones you actually listed, storm/ice would be my pick. Very good solo and can be very useful to a team. I still prefer storm/dark blast as the best synergy for storm though. With dark blast you get an immobilize and stacking stuns and a self heal, all very nice.

Maybe there is another MMO with something like that and they got confused?

Wow, not to sound too harsh, but a long post so full of wrong.

MM overpowered? I've tried and can't get into it. Doesn't seem to offer much mitigation at all to me and a bit weak on damage unless you really need to extra AoE.

Ice and devices better teamed than solo? Completely opposite in my experience.

/Electric's mitigation only affects single targets? *Cough* Lightning clap, thunder strike. *Cough*

Boost range one of the most skippable powers in the game? Not even close. Try a AR/Energy, it lives on boost range. Any other primary with a cone attack or two can find it useful.

Well, at least I did like some of your ideas for buffs though.

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So, I have this defender. Dark/elec, pretty fun on teams, and I'm about to hit level 30. Certainly I'm not the best at solo missions, and I'd like to be better. Electric blast is really not the best for damage, but I did like the idea of being a heroic sapper.

Do you guys have any build advice for a level 30 dark/elec? I have a fair amount of cash for IO's on various characters, so sets are certainly doable, though the rare ones may be out of my range.

Re-rolling is certainly an option. It wouldn't be the first time I've re-rolled a 30+ character, but I do want to keep the Dark/ primary.

Thanks!

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I'm gonna have to agree with the person who mentioned re-rolling. I played a dark/electric defender up to lvl 39ish and its dreadfully slow. I picked the build purely out of concept.

Electric blast is not for the faint of heart. You have 2 mediocre attacks, a damage over time aoe which is low damage to begin with, short circuit, which is entirely unnecessary with the debuffs from dark, an unnecessary hold, and VS, which takes like 3 or 4 seconds to cast EVERY 60 SECONDS.

That being said, I think the set could instantly be brought up to par if they made VS perma.



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As opposed to something like /sonic which has an attack which takes about 3 seconds to cast EVERY 10 SECONDS? Or /rad which is full of "mediocre" attacks with the exception of one. That electric is full of damage over time shouldn't be an issue because as has been said, you aren't getting hit. A 2nd hold isn't what I'd call unnecessary. I think electric blast works pretty well on a defender because unlike a blaster, burst damage on a defender isn't as important. But to each their own.

All that said, yea dark/electric will probably be a bit slower than some other possibilities. If you really want to be as quick as possible with a dark/ and solo, dark/ice is probably the best. /sonic is raved about, but unless it is a really hard target you have a chance to build up the -res on (purple boss, EB, AV), I think /ice beats /sonic for general solo killing speed. Plus it is hard to pass up tar patch + blaster level ice storm and blizzard.

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As mentioned, IMO the best pairings are EM (for perma-Boost Range single target "sniper" play) or MM (which addresses the existing AoE derth).



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Nope, best pairing with it imo is psi/fire. It's the only one I ended up liking. Psi is good single target damage and pretty good mitigation (it has -recharge, knockback, sleep, knockup, stun). Main thing it's missing is AoE. /fire is great for that and unlike /mm gives you something you can kill undead and robots with.

I liked my psi/fire a great deal.

Electric/Ice would be better damage mitigation if that's what you really want. Chilling embrace and ice patch makes draining pretty easy. Ele/fire would be better damage of course.

/fire is under-rated though, no doubt. a psi/fire was one of my favorites. Psi is another primary looked down upon, but with /fire giving psi the needed aoe and a damage type that does more than tickle robots, it was a nice blaster. And I always thought the psi nuke is one of the coolest, so consume let me use it a lot.

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Thanks for the replies, this thread gave me kind of a morale boost so I guess I'll give blasters another shot. Like I said, I haven't played any past 20 so I guess I haven't given them a fair shot, just keep getting sidetracked by other AT's.

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You might try an ice/ice blaster too. They are almost a controller in disguise, so might be an easier transition for you. I had the same thoughts as you and ice/ice was the first blaster I managed to stick with because it was so survivable.

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Stern_Verdict, Flight has actually been revamped. 1 enhancement in Fly and the other in Swift puts you right near the cap. It's no longer the build crippler it used to be.

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You also no longer get dropped out of the sky as often as the toggle doesn't drop anymore. Only powers that actually have -fly would do it. I loved it the first time that happened while I was flying thorugh an area, got hit by a sleep and instead of dropping out of the sky I just start coasting in the sky while asleep.

They are identical at base, but +def I find is usually better. That is because as the enemies you fight get higher and higher level than you, they resist more and more of a -acc debuff. AV's also have extra resistance on top of that, scaling up to something like 85% resistance at level 50.

So against a level 50 AV your -20% acc debuff amounts to a grand -3%. If the AV is higher level than you, it is cut even more.

You can always test yourself as well how well each works against what you normally fight, just watch the to-hit numbers in your combat window before and after.

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You'd think given the fact that there is another Hero MMO about to launch they would think twice about upsetting the player base like they have.

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There are some loud people drinking the Kool-Aid. Can be dangerous for the Devs to listen to them.

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Anything they do will upset a portion of the playerbase...and make another portion of the playerbase happy. It's just that the ones upset tend to be the only ones you hear from.

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I'm not certain about this, but I think Smoke Grenade is like Taunt in that a to-hit check is required against players but not critters.

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You are both correct.

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Would it be very unbalanced to have an optional lower power nuke at level 32? A good example would be Inferno: lower the damage to around 240 at level 50, reduce the recharge to around 75 seconds, make the endurance cost about 30, give it a new name, and make it and inferno mutually exclusive at level 32. This is not a suggestion. I plan on posting a much larger post in the suggestions forum next week so I thought it might be a good idea to get some insight from veteran blasters.

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You already have Full auto and rain of arrows. They meet your criteria of being lower damage faster recharge and not being able to be taken with the other nukes.

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They just need one of those in a set where you don't have to use a weapon.

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There's an SO market? I guess there is, but since the upside would be limited by SO vendors, I'd ignore it.



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For real quick cash to get my newbies started and to avoid the trouble of transferring inf between characters I use SO's. Buy a bunch of lvl 40-50 SO's off the market, which you can often get for less than 1k each, sell to npc for 20k to 30k each. Usually easy half a million in a few minutes. You don't even have to craft at all to make some easy starter cash. I laugh when I share that "secret" and people in game say I'm such a market player, really now?