So my Sonic guide is finally done, over a month after having posted the last guide (whooooops). Hope you guys enjoy it and maybe, just maybe, even find it a little useful
Okay so you guys know how FF is hugely effective but also super boring and lame? Yeah, totally. Okay so Sonic is like FF, except with resistance instead of defense and awesome instead of lame. Why yes, that is the raddest thing. That’s very astute of you, I’m impressed.
But Silas, I hear you cry, you are a guy who is known for saying all kinds of stuff all kinds of times, how do we know this is a time when you’re not saying stuff that is totally wrong?
WELL I NEVER. I speak 100% truth, all the time, every time. To suggest otherwise is as offensive as well, most of the other stuff I say. But I will indulge you, dear reader. Behold!
Why Sonic Resonance is Awesome and Anyone Who Says Otherwise Is A Butt:
• That’s right, a butt. I don’t take any guff from these swine, man.
• Defense buffs are ridiculously easy to come by but resistance ones are not, this makes sonic especially valuable because…
• Sonic buffs resistance bunches. Assuming you don’t fail at shielding (a generous assumption but let us continue for the sake of argument) you can be giving the melee (gross!) types about 23% resistance and the squishies 40%. This is hella good.
• As well as buffing team resistance a bunch, you also debuff the enemies resistances a bunch.
• Mez protection and resistance for you and your closest friends. Awwwww :3
• Powerful large AoE debuff/control power. More on this later. (oooh, suspense!)
• A single target (therefore not terrible by default!) enemy phase power for instantly nullifying large threats. Also harassing blasters in RV.
• Low maintenance team resistance buffing set
Sonic Siphon: foe -res (all)
Slotting Recommendation: 2 accuracy, 2 recharges. You want this to hit and you want it to recharge fast. An end rdx if you want.
How to Use: To debuff resistance, dood. Use at the start of your attack chain, spam on tough targets. Bear in mind that while the duration is much longer than the recharge it does not self-stack, so once you’ve already hit one target with it hit another when it recharges. Don’t only use it once a fight on your target then go about your business. The more you spread this around the more stuff dies and lo did the people rejoice. There’s generally a lot of AoE -res flying around on teams, and some even from you as a sonic, but single target -res debuffs are relatively rare. The short recharge gives you a versatility that isn’t present with the AoE -res debuffs.
Sonic Barrier: ally +res(smashing, lethal, toxic)
Slotting Recommendation: Max out the resistance values and get a reasonable amount of endurance reduction. You want the shields to mitigate as much damage as they can, but buffing an entire team every 3-4 minutes can put a real hurting on your blue bar so getting good end rdx values are a must. In terms of sets Titanium Coatings and Impervium Armours are good because both +hp and +recovery are very handy for a sonic.
How to Use: Target ally, buff ally, go about your business. Scale up as necessary for number of team mates. This and Haven mitigate a lot of damage so keep them up. They animate fast and recharge faster so there’s no excuse. I bind mine to G and H so I can easily click my way down the list hitting those 2 keys. While I’ve not tried it myself, using the numpad for team mate selection is also very effective (as in, numpad1 selects whoever is in the 1st team slot, whack buff keys, hit numpad2, etc)
Sonic Haven: ally +res(fire, cold, energy, negative energy)
Slotting Recommendation: Same as Barrier. You can’t really skimp on the resistance values of either of these because Barrier protects against one of the most common damage types (smashing) and Haven protects against the other (energy). Plus Haven has all the exotic damage types. Invulns will love you.
How to Use: Same as Barrier. Man, this kind of thing makes my job so easy. Not needing to think++
Sonic Cage: awww man what I have to explain a bunch of stuff for this one, my past extravances have caught up with me at last :C
Okay, okay. Fine. Its an enemy phase. You know how Hibernate and Phase Shift make it so the bad men can’t touch you any more? It does that to a single enemy. But Silas, what the hell I mean really what that is terrible why would I want to do that when with an enemy it is ME who is the bad man. Well, I say, shut your face and keep reading.
Slotting Recommendation: This only takes acc/end/rech/range and of those only accuracy is really important. This is because at base the duration matches the recharge so once you’ve got global recharge and/or Hasten in the picture its not an issue because you’re not generally going to want to have more than 1 thing Caged to begin with. What is interesting to note is that acc/mez HOs will enhance the mag of the phase. I’m not sure what Mag you need to phase a +3 or +4 AV, I was able to do it with 2 lvl 50 HOs so about mag 8/9. I’ve since upgraded them because well why not and more accuracy is good times.
That said…
How to Use: Sonic Cage is a tricky one. While hitting something with it
does instantly take it out commission for 30 seconds which can be a lifesaver, you also can’t affect the target in any way. So unless you don’t need to smash the target for at
least 30 seconds, don’t Cage it. Though something being Caged when you want to kick it in the head is a minor inconvenience at most, its fairly irritating. That in conjunction with Cage only really being useful in a few fringe cases means if you’re not sure, don’t use it.
Caging Stuff For Fun and Profit: The fringe cases. The RSF (maybe STF too?) and ITF. Both have AV-level baddies that are worth taking out of the fight for 30 seconds without hampering the progress of the team.
Caging Romulus’ Nicti on an ITF can be very useful.
Here’s a diagram to show which fluffy bundle of love does what. Teams with a fair amount of buffing/debuffing or not a lot of damage, I cage the Healing Nictus so Romulus dies faster. On teams without a lot of buffing/debuffing where people are taking a lot of damage, I cage the Mire Nictus. I never bother with the Summoning Nictus because it’s not a big threat and more targets = bigger Heat Losses, Fulcrum Shifts, Soul Drains and other delicious things.
On RSFs, it can come in handy because there are several times when you’re fighting a bunch of Heroes at once and being able to take one out of the equation is great. Cage whoever is a)not the current target and not going to be the next target and b)would otherwise be a threat. As in, caging Manticore is generally a waste of time. If you’re doing a speed run, (especially with nukes/shivans), keeping Valkyrie caged to ensure she dies last can be very helpful.
In the final fight, Statesman. He hits ludicrously hard and usually can’t be taken out until Unstoppable drops. Bam, Cage, no more States smashing people to bits. BaBs and Citadel are also good targets to Cage because they hit pretty hard too. Most importantly, make sure whoever you’re Caging isn’t going to be the target for the next 30 seconds.
Disruption Field: ally PBAoE –res
Slotting Recommendation: 2-3 end redux. This thing eats a tonne of endurance.
How to Use: chuck on an ally. Everything around them gets resistance debuffed. What’s rad is that aggroed by this gets cranky at whoever the toggle is on, not you. What’s not rad is that this is an offensive toggle and so gets turned off if you go out of range (about 100yds). So due to the way maps in this game are built, every time you or the ally go into an elevator Disruption shuts off. It can be pretty irritating on maps with a lot of elevators but it is worth it.
Sonic Dispersion: PBAoE +res(all) +protection (hold, immobilise, stun)
Slotting Recommendation: Similar to Haven and Barrier, but more important to get good endurance reduction since you'll be running this all the time. Make sure the resistance is maxed out because this in conjunction with whatever APP/PPP shield you get can give you pretty respectable resistances.
How to Use: Turn on, profit. Pretty straight-forward. Everything around you gets resistances and mez protection. This is great because you can hang back in the backlines and make the squishies tougher and mez-protected. Which is awesome. Don't worry too much about keeping all the squishies in its range because of Clarity, just try to position yourself sorta-centrally to the team.
Sonic Repulsion: ally PBAoE foe KB
Slotting Recommendation: man do not even
How to Use: Don’t. It’s a turd. It uses a lot of endurance to do a thing no one wants done. Its totally counterproductive to Disruption Field. Skip it, don’t look back.
Clarity: ally +resistance (hold, sleep, stun, immobilise, fear, confuse) +perception
Slotting Recommendation: Just an endurance reduction, really. It’s fine with a single slot.
How to Use: Since Sonic Dispersion already provides protection against holds/stuns/immobs the usefulness of Clarity is diminished. However, if the team is running around a lot so they’re not going to be in range, Clarity is worth throwing out. While Fear and Confuse are fairly rare Clarity does come in handy for those times.
Liquefy: location AoE -tohit, -defense, foe hold, minor DoT, knockdown
Slotting Recommendation: This is a tricky one. Liquefy does a bunch of cool stuff which you want to enhance, but it also takes like 20 years to recharge so you want to max that out too. The hold and damage components are really pretty negligible so you can ignore them, it’s the -tohit and -def debuffs that are secksi. Personally I think it comes down to personal preference/build which you choose to go for. I went with Dark Watchers and an Achilles -res proc. Hami-Os are also a good option for this power, uhhhh, Lysosomes I think. Gotta emphasize maxing out the recharge again though, this badboy takes an eternity to recharge because of retarded power balance formulas, yay.
How to Use: Throw it under nasty stuff. It’ll mitigate a fair amount of damage as well as making the stuff hit by it die faster (especially if you’ve got the Achilles proc in there, which you should do. Don’t make me come over there.) The recharge
is long enough that you don’t want to throw it out on stuff that’s about to die because it’ll be a waste, but it’s an all-round handy enough power that you want to throw it out as much as you can. Search your soul and find the middle ground between these two paths. Godspeed, man.
How to Not Be Awful:
• Keep shields up. Not hard, make team strong like mountain. Silas not want hear excuses. I’ve got them bound to G and H which is clearly the absolute best thing to do, because I did it that way.
• If you’re fighting stuff like Rikti (mainly just Rikti, tee bee aych) that has Sleeps aplenty, throw out Clarity on the squishies in your buffing cycle because Dispersion doesn’t protect against it. If you get slept well then haha sucks to be you. Or hit a break free. Equally viable tactics.
• Sonic is all about resistance, either buffing or debuffing. You want to be on the ball about both. As such, don’t neglect throwing out Siphon because you’re chasing teammates all over the map to shield them, just throw out the shields on people as you have time. What I usually do is buff between spawns, while my AoEs/Liquefy/Siphon are recharging.
• Do something about endurance consumption. Sonic sucky sucky your endurance long time. Especially if you pair it with an endurance intensive primary (like most controller primaries or Fire Blast). Options: Conserve Power, Power Sink, +recovery bonuses (about 20+% should do the trick along with decent end reduction), latching onto a kin and nevernevernever letting go, there are a lot of things you can do. Just, you know, do something otherwise it’ll be agony. I personally got CP and +recovery bonuses (in addition to accolades to boost endurance so the recovery bonuses work off a higher base)
• Funhouse by Pink is a godawful song and if you like it I hate you so, so much. Especially if you like it enough to buy it therefore making radio people think it’s a great song to play and goddddd this is the 3rd time it is playing today make it stoppppp ; _ ;
• Okay so I know sonic is all about resistance but I’ve gotta stress that you also do your fair share of stuff-deadening. Not much point throwing out a tonne of -res if you never take advantage of it yourself too. Especially since you can (and should) take it upon yourself to Siphon big nasties and kill them. Pchew pchew.
• Practice situational awareness for Siphon. While it recharges fast so throwing it on the wrong dude is not a big deal, it is worth prioritizing what needs to go splat first.
• Protip: if you take Sonic Cage at 41 or below, hilarity ensues if you go into Warburg with a friend, drop team, Cage them and run away giggling. :3
• Live on time, emit no evil. Well, okay, maybe a little evil is okay.
How Silas Be Doing It:
Behold!
Notes
• Accolades. Awesome in general but especially so on squishies and especially especially on sonic because the increased end helps with the end costs and the hp layers well on top of the resistance you get from Dispersion/APP/PPP shields to make you less likely to get splattered.
• I do have Power Sink
and Conserve Power, but tbh if I ever think of something I want instead of PS I’m dropping it. I never use it, my recovery and CP are more than enough to keep me going.
What Goes Well With Sonic:
I personally went with fire because fwoomf stuff dies awesome. The high ST and AoE damage works well with your -res, so you bring a lot of offence and defence to a team. Buuuut very end heavy.
Sonic Blast is a good option, since its very light on endurance and all the -res stacks. Your res debuffs from Siphon/your blasts will also help out with keeping the team from getting mauled if there is someone with damage debuffs on the team because of how -dam and -res work. Damage debuffs are more effective when a target has its resistances debuffed.
Another good option would be rad, since you can put Achilles procs in the AoEs so you’re bringing a lot of -res and -def to the team. Its also fairly light on endurance.
Endurance consumption is something to bear in mind when picking a primary because of how end-heavy Sonic is (even moreso if you can’t/won’t get your grubby mitts on a Numina +/+ or a Miracle +rec)
Go forth and shout at dudes
I keep reading bad comments about smoke flash's accuracy animation time and radius. However in Mids' I see a sizeable accuracy bonus of 30% compared to what people say is a penalty of 20%. The radius at 20 is not huge but it's not small either and the activation time is under 2 seconds... so the question is: has this power changed significantly and is it better now or is it still next to useless?
