Silas

Happy Birthday Myr, but you need quite a few more before you can be a real cranky old man :P

My EM/FA brute does massive ST damage, just, y'know, slooooowly. Once he's got Fury built up he 1-2 shots most things.

That said, since he's IOd out for a lot of recharge and kills stuff in 1-2 hits, the thing hurting me the most isn't the enemies, its ET.

Either ET being made AoE (like BaBs is, iirc) or TF being sped up would be very nice. ET may be goddamned slow but at least it hits hard. TF doesn't feel like it hits nearly hard enough to justify the ponderous animation.

Uh okay having just scanned this two things jump out at me.

Firstly: Using Rain of Fire as a mitigation tool/area denial is a huge waste. It does immense damage. While Fireball does its damage immediately, RoF does much more damage and over a wider area. With Fulcrum Shift it does obscene damage, especially with Scourge.

Secondly: Hasten is not a 40% recharge bonus, its 70%. If you're not a fan of the power that's fine but I would strongly recommend it for a kin precisely because it stacks with Siphon Speed, bringing Fulcrum Shift and all your AoEs up faster.

Haha, awesome.

Well dang, consider me corrected. Cheers for the info

Areeeeeoooo areeeeeoooo Internet girl alert

I agree.

I don't see it ever happening, but it would be nice if most KB attacks were changed to KD. I say most instead of all because there are some powers that would be overpowering when changed to KD (like Hand Clap et al). That way if you wanted KB all you had to do was stick a single KB IO or SO in there and off you go.

Another issue as I see it is chance-for-knockback. If I've got knockback, I want it to be 100% reliable. On the rare times I use Hurl on my brute, its because I want something to be knocked back for positioning purposes. KB is sketchy enough as mitigation, it doesn't have to be unreliable on top of that imo.

Great guide. I want to give you kudos for a very balanced and informative guide. While you did partially address it I think its really important to stress when it is and isn't appropriate to dual box. In my opinion, if you're soloing, if you're on a small team with friends, if you're farming, dual box away. Go nuts.

But if you're on a larger team or a TF then I think most people should strongly reconsider dualboxing. Even if they're some kind of gaming god octopus and can play 2 characters at the same time with the same level of skill as they would just one (I have yet to see anything beyond basic competency from someone dualboxing but that's another issue, heh), the fact is that they will take up 2 spots on the team and receive twice as many rewards as anyone else.

This is especially important on TFs because someone dualboxing will receive twice as many merits for the time spent, but more importantly someone else who might have wanted to join couldn't.

That's just my take on it. I think dualboxing is great and all and if I could stand to have an account without all the bells and whistles of my main one I would have gotten a second account long ago I just think it has a time and a place, and that people who already dualbox or who are thinking of starting should be mindful of that

Edit: wow Gibson you're right haha, I totally didn't even notice this was a thread from 2006. Wild.

Archery works fine too, Fistful and RoA are both fantastic AoE powers. I would just say unless you went Archery for concept or whatever, Fire would be better. While I love Arch on my Arch/TA corr, on my dark I prefer fire because there's no redraw.

It is true that Fire gets its AoEs early, which makes fire/dm a monster very early. Fireball and Tar Patch by 4 makes the lower levels a breeze. The thing about RoA is, its a fantastic power but the animation is a little on the long time and dark is already a set with some sluggish animations. Once Tar Patch is down I can chuck out Fireball and lay down RoF and then I'm relatively free to react to the battle as it progresses with the rest of my dm stuff and blasts.

The other thing about Archery is that while Fistful rocks enough that its not such a big deal, Explosive Arrow sucks. The values are bad on it and it does knockback. Knockback you don't want, because stuff goes off the tar patch and out of DN.

If you're not totally set on archery for concept I would recommend you reroll fire/dm. Its a monster from very early on right through to 50. You'll thank me once you get Rain of Fire

You're discounting IQ

Yeah, having almost everyone on only a few channels would be great, I think the problem is most of the people who aren't on the forums and stuff like casual players just aren't aware of BMT.

The obvious solution is for the BMT Ops to go stand in Atlas Park and blind invite everyone they see to the channel

The thing about recharge Enh in pets causing their powers to cycle faster got changed a while back.

If I recall correctly, it was because some powers like Lightning Storm were crazy-powerful so they made pet power recharges not affected by your recharge slotting. Which, I think, was an unintended side effect to begin with.

You might also want to consider dropping Powerboost, Soul Drain and Soul Storm. Powerboost will only boost the duration on Stunning Shot and Transfusion. It might also boost the end drain on Transference/Fusion but I don't think so, so its not really worth it imo.

As for Soul Storm, Stunning Shot is much better for mezzing a single target because of its recharge/duration values and it also doesn't cause redraw. The thing is you don't have any other holds to stack it with.

Soul Drain has a crazy long recharge and Fulcrum Shift is a much better damage buff. You don't need the +tohit because you've got Aim which recharges much faster.

Instead of those powers (and Aid Self) you might want to look into the Leadership pool. Tactics and Maneuvers (not Assault because of FS) are great for you and teams and Transference will help with the endurance costs of running them as well as your armours. Vengeance is also fantastic to have.

Unfortunately none of the Patrons have any great synergy with Kinetics. What you could look into is switching Patrons to Black Scorpion and building for s/l defense. Should be quite easy to get up some decent defense and it'll make you much more survivable in melee for FS.

Take it if you need it to fill out your attack chain for recharge reasons or for set bonuses, skip it otherwise.

Since the animation changes its not a terrible power, its just Fire Blast is much better.

Ew oh god no that was not a Mencia reference D:

edit: a Legorobot reference, if anything

Defeat Hard Case.

Some kind of Mayhem missions event? They can be pretty wild and fun on big teams and Invader is good times.

So people play villains it's hard to find teams and since it's hard to find teams no one rolls villains. Possible Solution: static teams. I've never done one but it seems like it might work, people may be more enticed to roll a villain if they know they're guaranteed teaming.

Another possible event could be a villainous MA arc contest? Get people to make and play each others villain arcs? Gets people (ideally) playing villains...

It is. I actually think I've got a screenshot of me nailing a friend in the face with Hurl on my laptop.

Love is, right? Haha

t Amy, its my sub fee I'll cry if I want to, cry if I want to

t Horuslein, Good times. I think I'm gonna make another storm corr, ice storm this time. Just so I can say I have one of every corr secondary. Chicks dig that, right?

t DaveMebs, This is also true. Elec also has the pet to contribute more damage, though its more useful for defenders than corrs. Being able to easily lock down several bosses is a plus, I just went with fire because of all the AoE goodness.

I think he means the in game mobs not other players, dood.

Although, Fun Fact: I have had people complain about my purpled out characters on a team. I was on my fire/dm corr on an ITF and the tank got tetchy. He didn't like that I was all zoom zoom pew pew and the team was steamrolling without him going in and hitting an aoe and hitting taunt and then hitting his macro to let us know that yes it was safe and that yes, we could engage.

I took it at 49. Its a nice tool to have, but you won't be using it very much in general play. I run a lot of TFs, especially ITFs and RSFs, so I get a fair amount of use out of it.

On those TFs its handy but far from essential to have. I use it to Cage the healing Nictus (the one on the left of Romulus facing him), on Valkyrie if its a speed RSF and we've got Shivans out so she dies last. In the last RSF mission its good to Cage Statesman so he doesn't tear your team apart.

It's a judgement thing. At a given time in the last fight of the RSF I'll cage whoever is A)the biggest threat and B) not going to be our target in the next 30 seconds. So Statesman/BaBs/Citadel generally.

So uh, if you do a lot of TFs it can come in handy. Otherwise its fairly skippable. If you do take it, put a couple acc/mezz HOs in it if you can afford them. They boost both the accuracy and the mag of the phase. I don't know just how much mag you need to phase a +3 AV, but I was able to do it with 2 lvl 50 acc/mezz HOs in Cage.

As for the defense thing, defense is pretty much always great. I personally didn't bother as I found my corr to be tough enough as is with Charged Armor and Dispersion and I built for +rech and +rec. If you want survivability, you might want to look at a build with Aid Self in it. That greatly improves your toughness as well as being a much smaller investment in terms of powers/slots than building for defense.