StabBot

Why should buffing classes be ridiculous force multipliers in these trials? If the trial is balanced around 4-5 buffers being present, and every single player having about that many buffs active at all times, then the enemies will have to be ramped up to be nearly invulnerable to any player who happens to miss said buffs or who is unfortunate to ever actually die between buff cycles.

Most sets have plenty of AoE benefit. Empath has regen/recovery aura and a group heal. Cold has resist/defense debuffs which benefit the entire league. Kin can't SB everyone, but they have FS, transfusion, and transferrence.

There are very few sets which do not have at least some powers that make significant contributions to the entire league, and you can always buff your own team regardless. However, DPS characters are no stronger in leagues than they are teams. Why skew the balance in the buffers' favor when the game so largely rewards them in the 8 man content?

That being said, you need some internal balance amongst the support characters, so there may be a few outliers that need to be improved just for the sake of variety amongst support characters. Shields may be one, but I can't think of any others, besides *maybe* thermal.

The most surprising aspect of plants on that TF is actually on the second phase. With Sleet, my creepers kill off entire waves of spawns, including lieutenants. Every time a new enemy enters the patch I get another vine, and the vines last for several spawns, so it seems like I'm building up 12-20 vines, each of which is hitting for 10-20 damage, and then proc'ing for another 60 damage fairly frequently. It's great.

Honestly I'm glad to see that the game has pulled away from the marketeering, however slightly.

I played defenders for a long time. My first three characters were defenders and two were kins.

Defender damage is not good. It's never been good. By the time I finished my rad debuff animations all of the minions in a group were long dead if a good blaster or two were present. Then, thanks to me, the bosses would melt, but wiping out the 2-3 bosses in each group hardly required my debuffs.

When people say that defenders outdamage blasters they seem to be assuming 100% buff and debuff uptime, which simply isn't possible, and even if it were you'd be spending so much time focusing on that aspect of your character that you wouldn't be spending much time blasting.

The really frustrating part is that Controllers end up outdamaging defenders. I honestly don't know why people still play non-dark defenders.

If you want to blast, play a dom or a blaster. If you want to buff/debuff, play a defender, if you want to keep a team alive, play a controller, and if you want some middleground, play corruptor.

Shield everyone, period.

Just kidding, I would say buff your own team if you feel like it, but if not it seems like you'd do fine with just buffing the tank. The one exception would be in the lab/warehouse for Lambda. Buff anyone who's close when you have the chance (which will probably still only be 1/3 of the team).

I find there's a MUCH larger emphasis on speed on many of these runs than is necessary. The groups I'm in typically finish with 3-4 minutes remaining on the clock and quite a few deaths. For me it seems like we would clear the place out almost as quickly if we just actually fought our way through the facilities and both far fewer deaths and a decent amount more strings.

After several kins I gave up on playing any squishy whose power set requires them to enter melee. You're just setting yourself up for frustration.

You should try a dom if you want to control without to wait on someone else to start every pull... or illusion if you're really married to the idea of playing a controller.

Does that panacea only proc on cast or periodically?

Unless you're plant. Plant's root does double damage and is pretty good.

I strongly recommend fire.

Plant is a ranged set and pretty much a one trick pony when it comes to hard control. If your seeds miss something you don't want to be next to it when you're trying to attack. Fire will let you do a complete attack chain from range, though you may choose to take the melee attack.

Plants also use distraction via Creepers and it's much easier to capitalize on that from a distance than in melee range.

As for ice, I don't really see the long term value of power boost with plant. My seeds have around a 17 second recharge and about a minute duration. If I had it I would probably use it most frequently with Spirit Tree and Vines. It'd be nice, but I don't think it's as versatile as fire's increased damage.


I really like Sleet so I'm ice, but I think that fire as an auxillarly is both more fun and easier. Not that I don't enjoy dropping sleet on top of creepers, but I find the complete reckless with which you can play when you have a self-res (especially with Frenzy) more appealing. That's just preference though, and like I said, I chose ice in spite of it.

If I could use Hibernate without messing up Sleet I'd enjoy ice a lot more.

Thanks for the quick replies guys.

Hi guys, sorry if this is a repost, I just got back from a break and didn't find one on this topic in the first few pages. Did they fix the NoPhase issue with Sleet which would prevent you from using Sleet if you had recently used a phase power?

I think this is a pretty clear-cut playstyle choice. If you play a controller, you're going to spend a significant amount of time controlling. After your initial confuse you'll need to follow up with holds on bosses if negating their damage/abilities is important. When you use sleep on an incoming ambush you'll need to follow up on the heavy hitters to make sure they're out of commission. To operate at full capacity you're going to need to get Sleet out before you start doing damage, and you'll be maintaining buffs/debuffs.

If you play a plant dom you'll pretty much hit one button on most pulls - Seeds of Confusion with domination will confuse everything and 90% of the time everything is dead before you need to recast, but even if you do, that's still just one button. Sleep with Dom dead stops just about any ambush, you can single-shot hold most bosses that you miss with Seeds.

A plant dom is going to spend far more time doing damage than a controller, though it's possible their net damage for a team won't exceed a controller's in spite of it - the controller's debuffs are quite good.

That being said, as a dom you could get Sleet to debuff a bit if you'd like to help with that role. As a rule of thumb I would recommend a plant dom over a plant controller any day of the week, but ice is kind of the one exception, simply because it's such a strong set and will play so nicely with Creepers. It's one of the few sets where I really think you could get away with not following up with holds on everything the confuse is too low mag to hit just because you'll have debuffed the few remaining threats enough to ignore them in most cases. In a +4 TF you'll probably need to control them though.

You can't go wrong either way, but it's up to you: Do you want to spend the majority of your time controlling and debuffing or dishing out damage?


*one other note: it's probably easier to get a TF spot as a controller still. I get the impression a lot of people don't quite understand the hard control advantage doms have

I'm also worried that Going Rogue is going to be released over the next year and a half or longer... I feel that when they sold the Incarnate system as part of Going Rogue that there was an implicit agreement that it would be available when that was released.

While I can understand it not being ready on launch (nothing is ever ready on time with MMOs), I really dislike the idea of getting 1/2 a slot per issue, when issue seem to take .5-5 months. I mean right now we're at issue 19, with 10 slots it could take years for the Incarnate system to be fleshed out at this rate.

I'm a bit worried that the content they have lined up is going to get progressively harder to challenge Incarnate players without being a roadblock. I also worry that they're afraid putting too many repetitive tasks into the game all at once (such as grinding for components for 10 slots) would overwhelm players.

I would be more than happy with just unlocking everything off the bat and letting players pace themselves how they like. Right now it feels like they're both afraid to release gatekeeper content which is simply unbeatable without powering up the incarnate stuff, and also that they're worried releasing too much grindy Incarnate progression at once will make players feel overwhelmed by the time sink nature of it.

If there is a real risk of upper tier players pulling away from the pack and content being scaled up to accommodate them, it comes from inflation making the invention sets less and less practical for casual players.

The incarnate system so far appears to be very casual, and if anything it mitigates the effects of the invention system. As far as I can tell, it's a powerful equalizer.

That being said, the upcoming AoE power (check the going rogue site) and the possible pet and other such abilities might have a multiplicative effect with IO bonuses, so maybe that will shift the balance back to the marketeers/hoarders...

When it comes down to it though, the only purples I have in my current character are confuse/sleep (well, I have a damage proc too) and I don't think even a purpled character has me beat by any significant margin on overall power, not to mention purples push you so far into ED territory that a power with a full purple set will get very little out of the non-ED part of the alpha slot, and those purple sets tend to round out enhancement so the benefits of boosting a neglected aspect of a power isn't as relevant.

If it does, it's a bug. You can't enhance Domination so the spiritual alpha shouldn't affect it, nor should it be affecting things like Sands of Mu.

Only global recharge bonuses and buffs should affect it. That being said, I don't have a low recharge rate dom at 50 to try it on, but if the slot works correctly, it won't affect it.

I got the same error message recently, they were checking my card address against the location of my IP (recently moved from Kansas to NYC) and rejecting it.