Silas

That's what I'm saying, that support characters are far from limited.

All of the support characters/ATs can solo. Granted, some better than others. That's why I said go for one of the support sets that are more geared towards general support, not one more ally-buff based.

Some of the most powerful characters in this game are support.

And by IT IS DONE I mean Traps guide has been posted.

Am now taking suggestions for other guides to write.

Ready?

Go.

Traps. Like Trick Arrow, a high damage/debuff support set, with the only buffing of teammates in a placed +regen beacon and a dispersion bubble. Traps is much-maligned as being gimp and bad and sucky and that it causes impotence (Spoiler: NOT ACTUALLY TRUE! I tested it and now I have to pay child support :C)

So.

Why Trapping Is Awesome and You Want To Do It:

I’m going to divide this bit into two sections, one dealing with the merits of Traps in and of itself and the second for Traps with IOs for shenanigans.

By itself:

• Mez protection on a squishy is great and defense stacks with all kinds of stuff for getting punched in the face with less frequency. Which, if you ask me, is a pretty desirable outcome. I don’t know about you, but I get a lot of use out of my face for eating and it’s where I talk from (mostly) so I like it to be relatively punch-free.

• Several very effective ways to mitigate alpha attacks via mez, debuffs or diverted aggro.

• Powerful -regen debuff and AoE hold (plus puke animation is hilarious)

• -res -def debuff pet that can be aggroed

• Trip mines. They go boom. Hard.

• An absolute beast against AVs and GMs because PGT is by far the most powerful –regen debuff in the game.

With IOs:

• Easily softcapped defense with the FFG
o Which means you can get much more use out of the otherwise easily interrupted Trip Mines

• High recharge means you can have several of the Mortars out for huge debuffing

• Lots of awesome proc oppertunities (more on this in individual power sections)

• Due to the summoned/placed nature of the set (vs toggles) the set benefits immensely from high recharge bonuses because a single trapper with good recharge can essentially be 2-3 trappers.

• An absolute beast at soloing AVs and GMs because of aforementioned softcapped defense, high debuffs and flatlining their regen. Short of Hami, there is almost nothing in the game that is more than a speedbump to a well built trapper.

And so:

Web Grenade: foe immobilize -fly -recharge

Slotting Recommendation: In my build I didn’t have any slots for this. Fortunately its pretty potent at what it does right out of the box. In my old build, I largely ignored this in favour of the AoE immob from the Mace pool. I’ve since respecced into a more AV/GM soloing friendly build, so I slotted this instead.

How to Use: anything you want to stay put, chuck this at it. Simple, effective power. For all of the complexity and nuance in Traps, this is a nice straightforward power. Also nice to keep melee-happy bosses out of your face which they might otherwise cleave in twain.

Caltrops: location AoE minor DoT (lethal) -speed

Slotting Recommendation: I didn’t take this because I didn’t have the power slot, but its still a handy power. I’d say it depends how you want to use it. The damage is decentish over time and the slow and recharge stats are decent at base. If you want it for a damage power (more on this below), slot a set of Posis. If you want it as a slow power, one or two recharges and an end/slow would do the trick.

Proc Shenanigans: While it doesn’t take as many sets as the MM version (don’t ask me why) you can still put several procs in it which can be quite effective.

How to Use: As a slow: Area denial. Anything that is on top of the caltrops or runs onto them will immediately want to run off. They will do so sloooooowly. This means for the duration of them slooooowly running off, they’re not trying to impregnate your face with bullets. This is Yay.

As a damage power: well, caveat first, it does its damage over the entirety of its duration. So if you slot damages in it, see that it does more damage than Rain of Fire, don’t get too excited. Rain of Fires damage is done in 1/3 the time and over a much larger area, not to mention the SuperScourge. But, unlike RoF you can easily have 2-3 Caltropseseseses out at once. So for AV/GM fights, it can add a surprising amount of damage. It’s uh, of very limited damage use for anything short of AVs/GMs though.

Triage Beacon: placed PBAoE +regen buff

Slotting Recommendation:

Old Build: I went with 5 Doctored Wounds for the set bonuses and to max out the healing/recharge. The regen buff from this isn’t incredible and is definitely hindered by the fact that the Beacon doesn’t move so its only good while you’re fighting by it, but it’s a nice bonus during AV/GM fights.

New Build: Much tighter on slots, had to go with just 2 heal/recharges for this. Still decent heal and recharge values, with my global recharge I can have two of them out reliably. Suits my purposes just fine.

How to Use: Since a)its +regen not a heal and b)its not a huge regen buff if you only drop it when you’re low on health you’re probably still going to get smooshed. If you/the team is moving fast generally don’t bother, but if you’re about to go into a tough/likely to be longer than 20-30 seconds fight drop it down before you engage. It’s by no means dramatic but is definitely nice, especially if you’ve got high defense so not a lot of damage is coming through to begin with. Even more if you’ve got 2 of them out.

Acid Mortar: placed pet ranged AoE -def -res (all) minor DoT (toxic)

Slotting Recommendation: This is one of the gems in Traps, even moreso with IOs. What’s important is to max out the recharge as well as to get decent values for accuracy and defense debuff. Once it hits it’ll easily keep hitting, but it has to hit in the first place so for higher level stuff and AVs with +def godmodes make sure you’ve got good accuracy in there.

Proc Shenanigans: This badboy takes a whole slew of procs. If I could, I’d 12 slot it. Unfortunately, you’ve got to strike a balance between delicious, delicious procs and getting good enhancement values on it. Because the shots the Mortar fires are AoEs, the Achilles -res proc is very effective in it. The most cheatyface option however, is a Devastation proc. For some reason, despite being AoE the Mortar takes ranged damage sets. The Mortar (especially with 2 or more out) can hold a lot of a spawn as it just poots out its rounds. Its awesome. Try it. The negative damage proc from the Lady Grey set is also quite nice, but I didn’t have room for it sadly.

How to Use: Drop at the start of every fight. These will debuff the mobs significantly, so dooo eeeet. The thing to note is, they’re summoned pets. This is awesome because you can get several of them out at once and they draw aggro to themselves giving you more room to breathe. This is not awesome because: they can be dumb. They may choose to shoot at that single dude shooting at it rather than the rampant Chief Soldier or the clustered minions waiting to be debuffed for obliteration. This is unfortunate. I’ve not noticed much difference in their targeting preference based on being dropped in the middle vs. outside of a spawn, so don’t worry too much about it. As long as they’re in range its fine.

Force Field Generator: summoned pet +def +protection (hold, immobilize, stun)

Slotting Recommendation: Max out the defense value. This thing provides a huge chunk of defense, downside being it can be destroyed and is a tad on the slow side so the protection it provides can be spotty if you move fast. It recharges very fast at base (15 seconds) so you can always resummon it if its way behind you. It does cost 13 end which is a tad on the costly side if you need to resummon it a lot so if you’re going for sets get some end reduction in there.

Proc Shenanigans: None. Don’t be fatuous, Jeffrey.

Poison Gas Trap: PBAoE foe hold, vomit, -regen -recharge

Slotting Recommendation: This is another gem. While not as awesome as it was (and oh my god it was so awesome, so, so awesome. And by awesome, I mean fanfuckingtastically broken-awesome). You want to max out the recharge on this because it makes up a significant portion of your damage mitigation so you want to be able to drop these as often as possible. I went with 5 Unbreakable Constraints because extravagance turns me on and the set bonuses/enh values are boss. Also a Lockdown proc.

Proc Shenanigans: Not quite as uh, effective as before the fix. (And I say fix, not nerf because if you saw any trapper with a clue use it it was very, very evident how broken it was. Delightfully so, but still). Its not really worth it to put damage procs in anymore, but the Lockdown chance for +2 Mag hold in it is really, really great.

Seeker Drones: summoned pets, disorient, -dmg, -tohit, -perc, low damage (energy)

Slotting Recommendation: These puppies are quite nice. While they do all kinds of spiffy debuff stuff and stun, imo the real benefit of the Seekers is for aggro. Summon them in the middle of or in front of a spawn and they will lazily float into stuff allowing the mob to waste their alpha on them before going poom and debuffing stuff. At which point you have laid down the Mortar and go pew pew. So uh, to that end, you want to max out the recharge on them. (Seeing a pattern here?) The -tohit is reasonable but nothing huge. I myself went for 4 Dark Watchers Despairs for the bonuses. While you can put a Devastation hold proc in there to stack with Mortar and PGT, its much less reliable and while I did like it, I couldn’t justify it in my final build. If you’ve got a slot I would though.

Proc Shenanigans: As mentioned above. The damage procs aren’t really worth it.

How to Use: As above, in front of or in the middle of a spawn to draw aggro and go poom for debuffings make benefit glorious trapper. This is really the only way to use them, since if you summon them next to you and then run in half the time they won’t get there in time. When I said they float lazily, I mean they float laaaazily. Slower than a Tanker but at least they do some damage, zing!

Trip Mine: placed PBAoE high damage (fire/lethal) knockback

Slotting Recommendation: These do pretty good damage but are slowish to recharge so like, enhance the damage and recharge. If you could enhance to reduce the interruptible portion that’d be great, but you can’t because well, you just can’t.

Proc Shenanigans: Ehm, damage procs in them will have a chance to go off on every foe hit by the blast when it goes boom. Standard proccage affair.

How to Use: If you’ve not got a lot of AoE in your primary, Trip Mines are great. You’ve got Seekers, PGT and FFG to help you drop them without getting interrupted every second, so drop em and enjoy. Toemine away.

If you do have decent AoE in your primary, (everyone but Sonic/, really), you’ve got better AoE options.

You can stack a whole bunch down and make an awesome EB-instagibbing Trap of Doom, but it’s largely a party trick.

Time Bomb: location crappy power, teasingly high fire/smashing damage and probably knockback, who cares

Slotting Recommendation: DO NOT

…because…

How to Use: DO NOT

Seriously, it’s awful. 8 second interruptible bomb placement, goes off after 15 seconds. Maybe 20? I don’t know, nor do I care. Neither should you. The damage is tonnes bozillions but it’s not worth how stupid and fiddly the power is. You’re better off using Trip Mine or your primary when you want to blow legs off.

In making Time Bomb such total pure ***, the devs have given you a gift. You may take any other power from your primary or secondary at 38 instead. Go on, you can even take something from a pool. I won’t tell.

How to Not Be Time Bomb-wait I mean Awful

Yeah so okay:

• Since the core powers of /Traps all take a few seconds to animate, it can seem like you’re gonna be the guy who spends a fight dilligently laying Triage Beacon and looks up to see the rest of the team already balls-deep in the next spawn. Gauge the speed of the team and which power will be the most useful. Acid Mortar is almost always useful, unless the team is moving so fast it won’t get more than a shot or two off. Second on the priority list is Seekers and PGT. With decent recharge, you can easily alternate these two to absorb alphas and win the hearts of ladies. Or men? Whatever works for you, dood.

• Be fast. Being one of the fastest people in your team helps a lot in dropping your traps for a fight. If you consistently arrive last to a spawn and faff about a bit ineffectually while the team rushes on to the next spawn you might as well make a Granite tank and be done with it. So run run run. If you’re outpacing your FFG and need to resummon it fairly often, you’re doing it right.

• Positioning your traps in long fights. If you’ve got a sack of hp big enough that you have the luxury time so you can to litter your screen with all kinds of neat trappy gadgets, you have a second problem. You actually have to like, think about where to put them! Scary, I know. Here, breathe slowly and deeply while I stroke your hair. Shhhh, it’s okay.

• …what?

• Whatever, man, let’s move past it.

• Fine. So in that kind of fight (AVs, GMs, etc) put a little thought into where you’re dropping your traps. If it’s a big footstompy GM, dropping the Mortar at its feet is dumb because it’s going to get 2 shots off before the big angry thing steps on your toy and breaks it. For Triage Beacons, if the team has to kite a lot, try and place them centrally to where the team is to make the most of the radius. If the team can just sit there and mash buttons, drop them all in the same spot for great justice.

• Try and position yourself in the middle of the mid-backline of a team so as many people get the defense buff from FFG. It’s all well and good to give yourself a great big chunk of defense and get to cackle as you blast away but if all your teammates are getting mezzed and facepunched, you’re bad. Since FFG moves slowly, for the most part you’ve got to position yourself proactively, not reactively.

• Yes, snipe-pulling stuff into your minefield is totally awesome. But asking a team to sit around and wait as you do it each spawn because oh my god you guys check it out it is the coolest thing sucks. Compromise. What’s really important in this relationship is that badguys get blown to bits, right? Right. Pulling to a minefield is very, very rarely appropriate for teams. Toemining is win for teams.

• Speaking of which, on teams there will generally be a lot of damage flying around. So, you might not need to use Trip Mine. In which case, focus on Seekers/PGT for mitigating alphas and Mortar for speeding up the dying of the stuff. And y’know, blowing stuff to bits with your primary.

• When you’re kiting yourself if you go too far you can easily get out of the FFG drones range. Instantly cutting a huge chunk out of your defenses and losing mez protection = HAHA STATESMAN IS GOING TO EAT YOU. The range on the FFG bubble is big enough that you can kite around inside it, or just about at its limit. If you’re just about on the outside edge of the bubble but still have a mini bubble on you, you’re fine. The FFG moving along with you also helps, just bear in mind you don’t need to hurl yourself into orbit to stay out of melee. Not moving too far away also means your teammates can get the benefit of FFG.

• Teleport Foe. Seems really cool, isn’t that useful in practice. Anything strong enough to warrant TPing instead of pulling with a blast isn’t going to get shifted by TP Foe so it’s a party trick at most.


AV and/or GM Soloing Stuff:

Traps is the best AV/GM soloing buff/debuff set by a significant margin. This is due to several factors, most notably PGT being twice as powerful as any other regen debuff out there.

While I personally feel soloing AVs and GMs is boring as sin, I still built my Trapper to be able to since it required very little sacrifice for normal PvE performance.

If you do want to solo AVs and/or GMs, there are a few factors to note.

• Web Grenade is much more useful. On my old PvE build, I neglected it in favour of Web Envelope because the AoE immob was more useful for keeping whole spawns in RoF. For soloing AVs, Grenade is much better because it’s more spammable and it’ll keep them from running all over the ******* place (which they will want to do). The –speed/-recharge won’t matter, it’s more for the fast activating immobilize. You’re never going to stack close to enough MAG to immob a GM, so don’t bother trying. Just kite, hop around them if you want to stay out of melee.

• Build for softcapped defences. Smashing/lethal is good, smashing/lethal/energy/ranged is better. Scorpion Shield is win. If you’re a Defender, it sucks to be you. Seek solace in Sonic Blasts –res values.

• You don’t really need it for AVs, but if you want to solo GMs, get Provoke. You may be all, lol wat Provoke is bad why would you want it on a squishy. You need Provoke to solo GMs realistically because otherwise they’ll run away and/or Stomp your pets into the dirt.

• The advantage of PGT being such an incredible regen debuff is that it gives you a lot of freedom to learn how to best fight a GM. It’s easily made permanent and will flatline the regen of pretty much anything in the game. This means as long as you can damage it, killing it is just a question of time.

• If you’re soloing anything with significant AoE (i.e most AVs or GMs) don’t stand right next to your Mortars. Said this above, bears repeating.

• GMs can hit really, really hard. Drop Seekers as much as you can. –damage is made more effective by –res which your Mortars deal in spades. Less damage taken from GM = less damage needed to regen back with Triage.

• Speaking of...while Aid Self is stupid awesome combined with high levels of defences, I prefer Triage, both for normal PvE and big game hunting. With Provoke you control where the fight is. With dropping Traps you’ve got a significant amount of animation dead time, (as in, time not spent doing damage), so while Aid Self isn’t the DPS killer that it is for non-debuffy ATs, I vastly prefer Triage. 1-2 Triage Beacons always out is more than enough regen to keep you on your feet during a GM fight, barring an unlucky series of hits. Plus, it also helps with whatever accidental damage your Mortars and FFG take, which is a nice plus.


How Silas Be Doin’ It:

Silas does it thusly

Notes:

Bars look a little cluttered because of how I play this character. I’ll move stuff around depending. Right now it’s set up for general PvE. If I’m fighting an AV or GM, I’ll swap the positions of Flares -> Fireball and Fire Breath -> Provoke.

Seekers and FFG might look awfully despondent up there with the toggles but I’ve got FFG bound to Q and Seekers bound to E. That way I can easily drop them whenever I need to.

Mein Build:

Play a support set without ally-only buffs.

Dark Miasma, Traps, Trick Arrow, Storm. All of those are powerful support sets without any ally-only buffs, with the exception of Storm which has o2 Boost, which is skippable anyway.

Edit: IT IS DONE

It's a decent power, but not a must-have.

It's a pretty solid regen buff. The problem is, for most content/teams, you won't be getting much use out of it. You've really got to be around it for most of its duration for it to be worth it, which just doesn't happen for most fights.

Basically any fight where you're going to be there for 30+ seconds, it's worth throwing down. With good global recharge and enhancement in the power, you can even stack them at which point they're pretty awesome.

I guess the tl;dr version is: if you solo a lot or do a lot of TFs, get it. Otherwise it's of pretty limited benefit.

Nice, grats

The Glad Fury proc and the Achilles Heel procs do stack

Uh, I don't know if its the same person, but Felecia Divine is (afaik) still alive and active on the Champion server.

Might not be who you're looking for though.

Final solution eh?

In all seriousness, looks okay? I've just scanned it because I don't have access to Mids atm but looks decent.

I'm just wondering what you were going for. It looks like you've got softcapped defenses, but your hp/rec/regen looks a little low.

Gloom is also really underslotted. True Grit needs a lot more heal slotting to maximise the +hp.

I think you'd be better served going Fighting for Tough/Weave than Leadership for Maneuvers. It'd give you better defense values as well as more s/l resistance.

For DM/FA it's a lot more viable, simply because DM lacks significant AoE in the primary.

With the other primaries a lot of the time it can be a waste of time and/or endurance because they've got much better AoEs to kill stuff.

Fire Breath and Inferno are fantastic AoEs, they just come with bigger "...but"s to them. Fire Breath is an awesome AoE, but you've gotta line up the cone to make it worth it and the animation is slow.

Inferno is a fantastic AoE but you crash your endurance, so given Fireball, RoF, Caltrops and maybe Trip Mine, you may find you don't need or want it's firepower.

Trip Mine is really good if you can leverage it, kinda poop otherwise. Pros: does great damage and can be stacked for ludicrous damage. Cons: intereuptible, long animation. FFG/Scorp Shield/Maneuvers can give you the defense you need to toe-bomb spawns with it, so you may get a lot of mileage out of it.

Time Bomb is an egregious turd and should be skipped, no ifs ands or buts about it.

Must Haves: Fire Blast, Fireball, Rain of Fire, Blaze, Web Grenade (lol), Acid Mortar, FFG, PGT, Seeker Drones.

Skippable: Flares, Breath, Blazing Bolt, Inferno, Triage, Trip Mine, Caltrops.

Must Skip So Help Me God: Time Bomb

Most of the stuff in Skippable are nice to have and round out a build well, but the core powers are the stuff I've put in Must Have.

Edit: Here's a very rough skeleton for a build. Just what powers I'd take and when on a generic IO/SO build. Seven power picks remaining for whatever you want.

Definitely go with Gloom/Dark Oblit.

With new malefactoring rules you'll still have access to both provided you take them at 41 and 44 respectively.

Edit: or Darkest Night if that's yo' thing.

On the whole looks pretty solid. I'm a big fan of the HO slotting in Snow Storm, that's pretty clever There's just a few things I'd tweak, however:

I'd drop BFR for Freeze Ray and/or Ice Bolt. While BFR does decent damage, it animates really slowly. Freeze Ray is much better for holding stuff because you can cycle it faster and for damage your normal blasts are better.

See if you can steal a slot from somewhere to put an Achilles Heel -res proc in Freezing Rain. It helps a lot with the AoE -res debuffing. You could steal the slot from Tornado, it doesn't need the Lady Grey def debuff. FR does more than enough -def debuffing and Tornado isn't really reliable as a debuff power.

I'd also rejiggle your slotting of Freezing Rain. Atm you've only got 47% recharge in it, when ideally it'd be in ED-territory. If you want to keep the LG set in there, just swap the def debuff for the recharge/endurance and that brings the recharge and end reduction up to much better values.

In all your Posi sets, I'd drop the dam/range for the proc. The Posi set is already way overkill on dmg enhancement, and the proc will benefit you much more than the range, especially on your rain powers.

While the Kin Crash set does have great bonuses, it's got really crap enhancement values. It only gives between 40-60% for acc/dam/end/rech, all of which you want as close to max as possible on Lightning Storm. I'd recommend frankenslotting LS to max out the dam/end/rech, getting a reasonable amount of acc. Thunderstrikes and Devastations are fantastic for this.

Haha, awesome Congrats you guys.

Ill/Rads ftw.

I wonder if /Regen would be overpowered if all the unenhanceable portion stuff was taken out. It just seems unnecessary and a throwback to an age where you could 6 slot Golgis in a non-click IH.

"Mostly unpublished"

all having gotten a poem published in his high school magazine 20 years ago