Scientist

I play between 2x default distance and max zoomed out, depending on the map. This means I often miss minor details like the sex of the AV we are fighting (my friends harass me on that one in particular ) but it means if the debuff anchor for my rad cloud goes running for another spawn, or an ambush starts coming in, I can react and deal with it before it spells Doom. For similar reasons I recommend that for tanks, its generally not all that important specifically who you are attacking as much as where other spawns are.

For scrappers and blasters, not as crucial. Its not vital for them to know where every teammate and enemy in a 100 yard radius is.

As Rhynwa says, Leadership pools are handy for end game content where you are fighting +4 foes (mothership raids), sometimes with over 90% resistance to defense debuffs (STF final AVs). While you could argue those things are a small subset of the game, its the only content hard enough where those "last few powers" will make much difference, for most PvE content you could do fine with Freezing Rain, Hurricane and maybe Snowstorm.

Regarding Vengeance, in a way its a perfectly designed power; if you are using it, something is in the process of going wrong, and that will often prevent it from going very wrong. My friend took it on his triform PB without ever expecting to use Tactics and Assault just because its that good, kind of like the "throwaway" precursors for Stamina.

For Vengeance, I recommend a keybind as below;

V "unselect$$target_custom_near defeated friend$$powexec_name Vengeance"

By hitting the V key, you autotarget the nearest dead teammate body and activate Vengeance off them. Much faster then trying to select them off the teammate window and remember what tray you parked Veng on.

Though when you are tanking AVs (which comes up a fair amount in late game, and tends to be where even good teams may need a good tank) a WS starts losing ground to the PB. No bodies after the first few seconds of the fight, Eclipse wears off a bit later, and you are left hoping you don't miss on your melee heal, which is particularly problematic if the AV runs around a bit.

To the OP, if you want to mostly solo to 50 I'd suggest a PB over a WS, but if you like teaming a WS really shines on teams.

Just as a note, Acid Mortar is in fact an AoE; while it picks a target to shoot at (based on your perception range, interestingly, so if you run up to a spawn it will start shooting at it) its debuffs, procs, etc. fire against the whole spawn in the appropriate radius of the main target.

Since IIRC it fires once every 10 seconds, and Caltrops would proc once every 10 seconds it would nominally be a wash whether you put damage procs in one or the other, except that Caltrops recharges a lot faster so you will get more proc damage by stacking that then Acid Mortars.

The one proc I'd put into Acid Mortar instead is the Achilles -resist, and thats because the only thing likely to give a /traps MM any trouble is an AV or GM where -resist is key.

Do slot a bit of Acc, though, I confirmed against a MOGed Paragon Protector that its not autohit.

Nonsense, let him buy his friends like the rest of us!

Nice guide Fulmens.

The difficulty with looking at it this way, and a major reason that Spitting's hypothetical mathematical analysis of controllers vs defenders might verge on the impossible, is that the two overlap, depending on primary/secondary combo.

My rad/rad defender can solo in the Shadow Shard. My grav/FF controller has never been able to survive more then about 5 seconds past the duration of his AoE Hold, if that. In addition to that, the rad defender (at 50) has a wider variety of team friendly control then the grav does. The grav cannot even keep one spawn perma out of action, the rad can do that (mass hypnosis) plus do a very effective job of holding an active spawn via EMP and even has a ST hold to stack on bosses, plus a ST stun so, like the controller, can perma control 2 bosses. And thats without the debuffs.

Admittedly thats an extremely good defender power combo, and arguably a bad controller one (grav/FF fit the character concept, so sue me ) but it shows the difficulty of ANY universal comparison of the two ATs.

And the AoE advantage defenders may have is a substantial one, at least for AoE heavy blast secondaries, since leveling on a team is usually so much faster then leveling solo. It feeds into the niche mentioned of "players who want to play very highly team focused characters". I suspect that is a small subset of players, but for the subset that enjoys it (I happen to be one) I doubt that they'd want to give up team focus for solo focus, given the abundance of ATs that are better soloers.

And with Castle's comment one time about the difficulty they have balancing content for stacking buffs/debuffs (sorry, don't remember the exact comment) I doubt they'd want to improve defender solability without some kind of tradeoff. I think they don't mind groups like Repeat Offenders for the same reason they don't mind using Shivans, *occassional* abusive success is fine if you have to put some effort into it.

Though I do have some hopes that Arcanaville's low level soloing project may convince them to improve DPE a bit for defenders, she said they are the worst off that way.

Very good point, and yes, I think by using that slot elsewhere I can either get more damage (say by putting it in web grenade, which I can spam more than once every 10 sec) or get other benefit, like get a 6th slot into something for capping a defense.

I see one problem already; you don't want auto heal on. Much as with a regen scrapper or dark scrapper, a big part of success with the set is knowing *when* to use the heal, based on how tough the spawn is, damage type they are putting out, etc. Sometimes its right after the alpha, sometimes its 20 seconds into the fight. If you have it on auto, and it popped 5 seconds before you go in, you might as well not have it.

I'd also recommend Tough if you want to tank for medium to large teams. I have a team build with that, and a solo build that skips Tough and takes more attacks for soloing/duoing where you don't need as much protection. Yes, it would be nice not to have to dip into pool powers, but at least there are pool powers for more protection, you don't have a lot of pool options for more offense if you are a Stone tank, say. Similarly, don't be afraid to use insps, and combine them to make ones you need as they drop, so when a second or third spawn jumps in you can pop them and handle it.

Finally, taking a few more attacks to drop the bosses and spawns faster might be more useful then having *both* buildup and FE as well as "all possible shields". Definitely more useful then Temperature Protection unless you are exclusively fighting fire wielding mobs.