Unthing

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If its a pure ranged blaster your after then Ice/dev might be the way to go. Devs gives you TD which lets you drop an acc in exchange for a recharge in your ice blasts. Ive mine slotted 3dam 2recharge 1 end red. You dont have build up which means you lack the burst damage of of other sets but TD gives a perma damage buff as long as the toggle is on. It, aim and the extra recharge in your attacks makes up for the lack of BU imo. Plus you get caltrops and web nades which is great for staying at range.

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I have an Ice/Dev at level 36. Targetting Drone is nice, I only have 2 powers slotted with ACC, Freeze Ray and Bitter Freeze Ray, not because they are inaccurate, but because I want them to always hit. Also it means that if I get mezzed I can still use freeze ray effectively.

I've found that with Hasten I can get a pretty constant stream of Ice blasts going ( Ice Blast, Ice Bolt, Bitter Ice Blast and Freeze Ray ) with an occasional break in order to use Frost Breath.

He is not as effective a damage dealer when aggro is tightly controlled as my Fire/Fire blaster, who decimates mobs with AoE after AoE, but he functions far better in a PuG and solo.

Which is more useful to the raid? My tank or my scrapper? My tank has been a hami-tank a few times. I take it you already have someone for the job for tonight though...

Generally Corruptor buffs/debuffs are 75% of the effectiveness as defenders. Defender blasts are 75% of the damage of Corruptor blasts and they don't get scourge.

I'd like to join the next hami raid, the last one I was part of ( sometime last autumn ) I was using Golden Golem as the Hamidon tank and throughly enjoyed keeping the big guy annoyed whilst watching the masses wipe out the mitos.

I can bring either Golden Golem ( Inv/Fire/Pyre tanker) or Unthing ( Spines/Regen/Body scrapper ).

Given what you say about build and playstyle, I'd say medicine would add more to your team.

Whilst Maneuvers will allow you to 'cap' your teammates defence, 3 slotted Grant Invisibilty will allow you to get really close ( 43% ) to the extent that anyone with Hover or combat jumping will get to 45%.

Just a warning, Medicine's interruptibility is irritating, not for Aid Self but for Aid Other. People tend to move about when they are low health, however you can't move when using Aid Other so it sometimes takes a while to land a heal.

I've found so far that the Medicine pool ( Aid Other and Aid Self ) is good both for soloing and teams, even unslotted.

Leadership is good as you can get Maneuvers which can get your teams defence up to 45% rather than the 40% from the FF buffs. This effectively doubles the effect of you force fields, reducing the chance of enenies hitting by half.

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I also run "perma" Hasten.

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Come again?

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3 slots. not actually perma so I put it in double quotes.

On my tank, I have Rage slotted 2 recharge and 2 to hit buff. I have my Foot Stomp slotted with 2 dam, 2 recharge and 2 end reds. I also run "perma" Hasten.

This caps me against +1s, but still gives me 76% to hit against +4s ( lowest level purple minions ) which I think is enough especially as it means Foot Stomp is up more. I'm an Ice tank so my taunt aura is auto hit.

My reasoning on only 2 damages is that I was doing badly for endurance and I figured perma-Rage with it's large damage buff means that recharge is probably more important than damage, especially for keeping aggro, but also for damage over time.

Firstly if you have Hasten, I would only put 2 recharges in Rage. If not put 3. Whilst you can stack Rage with 3 recharges and Hasten, I don't think the benefits of 20 seconds of double rage are worth the disadvantage of having a rage crash more often.

I think more than 1 ACC if you run perma rage is overkill and a waste of slots. Rage provides a to hit buff which is better against really hard to hit things ( high defence and high level ). Accuracy enhancements provide a accuracy bonus which helps most against things that are easier to hit. With 3 to hit buffs in Rage, a 1 ACC attack should have be at the 95% cap for anything with a base to hit of 40% or more. That's +5s or lower, or something with 35% defence. One or 2 to hit buffs will cap +4s if you slot 1 ACC in each attack.

On the other hand, I would always 6 slot any attack that I consider effective. Foot Stomp is worth 6 slotting, recharge is useful to get the downtime down.

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Yar but fort gives you damage and acc, and empaths can buff you till your danglies fall off

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Fortitude is a more offensive buff than the Force Field ones. The Force Field ones are better defensively. I fail to see what you are trying to prove. Empaths and Force Fields help in a different ways in a team. Having either is good, having one of each is better.

A Dark/Dark is possibly the safest, stacked TT and Nightfall is a 20% debuff. With slotting you could make yourself and your team safer.

I'm not sure this would work but you could try AoE Electrical end drain. It does rely on getting off lots of Short Circuits very quickly. However from experience End drain is a fairly pointless exercise unless you do it very quickly. Short Circuit only drains 60% of end if fully slotted, so you'd have to apply it twice ( 8 sec recharge if you have Hasten + 3 recharges ). It might be fun on low damage teams.


It's a shame defenders don't have Fire blast really.

Ooop, misread the post I thought this was tonihgt. I may not be able to make next week.

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Really good advice , cheers guys. I have just given both toons an hours play each & am gonna go with katana for the pve side of the game, but spines seems to be so much more geared towards pvp ( which is a part of the game i have never really got into ). Not sure wether it's the regen aspect of the builds but atm it's faultless ( hopefully not famous last words ).
Tks again

BTW , is DA as good as it looks to be ( defence wise ) ?


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Spines has some nice PvP benefits, Impale being ranged and having a immob and -fly is the main one. However it is really more of a crowd control set rather than a single target set. It still does the single target thing pretty well, but not as well as say katana.

By crowd control I don't mean immob/holds and stuff, that's too subtle for a scrapper. I mean just good honest AoE damage.


DA is a good set but it is endurance heavy. It has the best self heal in the game ( IMO ), combined with all round resistance ( including Psi ), 2 crowd control power ( fear and stun auras ), a self stealth and a damage aura. It's main flaw is the lack of knockback protection.

That's one thing I dislike about this game, no solid numbers.

nofuture.org.uk is based on some form of looking at the actually numbers that the game used in I7. So it is based on stuff before that. Sherksilver is updated by the community based on any information they have got around to putting in. Both have inaccuracies and are out of date to some extent but I would expect nofuture to be more accurate with something hard to measure such as a defence number.

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Actually, fortatude with 3 def SO's gives MORE defense than what a force field defender can give... dont be ff

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According to nofuture.org.uk, which I think is the most accurate source these days ( correct me if I'm wrong ):

Fortitude gives 15% defence to all ( including positional and damage types ) as well as a 31% damage buff and an 18.75% to hit buff. 3 slotted that is 23.4, probably enough to make a defence based tanker or scrapper floor enemy to hits in most circumstances.

Deflection Shield is 15% defence to Smash/Lethal/Melee and 40% resistance to toxic.

Insulation Shield is 15% defence to Fire/Cold/Energy/Negative Energy/Ranged and AoE as well as an 86.5% resistance to recovery drain and endurance drain.

Dispersion Bubble is 10% defence to all ( including positional and damage types ) and protection to Hold/Immob/Stun ( about 2/3 tanker magnitude ).

If you add this up you get 39% defence versus all but Psi. Psi is 15.6%. You also get 40% res to toxic.

So the only defence that FF is worse than Fortitude for is Psionic, which I think only applies to a few holds, that everyone gets mez protection for anyway, all the Psionic attacks are either ranged or AoE. Also I think you can only put Fortitude on 3 people.

I like that the FF isn't that busy, provided you get into a routine with the FF applying. That means I can concentrate on blasting if I want to.

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It does on builds that are very poor endurance wise. Anyone with even a moderately sensible build endurance wise will not benefit from it, I prefer not to slot to accomodate people who make a complete mess of their own characters at the expense of functionality on my own. I guess it's a matter of personal preference.

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I would agree on that one. After all a 1 slotted Speed Boost is better than a 3 slotted stamina or a 3 slotted Quick Recovery.

Especially as anyone with such grave end problems as that can be targetted for transference, without me having to change my slotting.

The FF Sonic is going pretty well. I think the -res is really useful. I decided to forgo a travel power in the early levels in order to get the Medicine pool, this means I'm getting around with a combination of temp powers, sprint/swift and PFF. I originally got it in order to improve my solo ability with Aid Self, but Aid Other helps with teaming a lot.

After getting to 16, I'm suprised by how many people go "Yay Bubbles!" when I turn up.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned is the secondary effect of Spines. Pretty much all the powers have DoT toxic damage and -spd and -recharge. The -recharge is often overlooked as an aid to survivability. It's of the order of around -10%, with Throw Spines being twice as good IIRC, so you can easily get a 30-40% debuff on most of the spawn from quills, Spine Burst and Throw Spines. Obviously that isn't as good as 30-40 defence from Katana, but it is free.

I found spines a very fun set but a little underwhelming at low levels, mainly because of some of the animations being pretty long. However once you have got Ripper slotted, the set becomes good. Throw Spines is then really good once you work out how to use it best.

I'd be happy to join. Whilst I wasn't an original member, I would like to see how this all defender stuff works.

I think I have defenders in the 20s, Atomic Arrow ( 26? Rad/Archery ) and Pollution Boy ( 20 dark/dark def ). Both were in the 1 AT in the past.

Tuesday sounds like a good day.

If like my Inv tank you have close to maxed out def, that def crash would mean reducing your defence to half or less. You are probably going to take 2-4 times as much damage as normal during those few seconds. However it is only a few seconds.

I can't say from experience how bad it is because I have Rage on my Ice Tank. Unlike Inv tanks, Ice Tanks have defence debuff resistance so the effect is less drastic.

Rage is certainly worth the crash.

If you continue attacking to the point the crash hits, you'll keep most of the gauntletted aggro you have collected but lose the aura'd aggro. So hit a few people just before it crashes. All tanker attacks have a 13.5 second taunt attached to them according to nofuture . If you have taunt use it before the crash too. So the aggro you'll lose would be the taunt aura aggro.

You also get a defence debuff, so you will be squishier during that 10 seconds. A foot stomp right before the crash is ideal to give you only 5 seconds of so of low defence aggro.

It's worth keeping an eye on the clock though, if you crash when you are about to enter a spawn things can get hairy for other people.

Whether you slot end reducers and how much depends on your build and playstyle.

Toggles cost less than attacks.
Shields cost about 0.16-0.25 eps, tough and weave cost 0.3ish, damage auras cost about 0.5. Check nofuture.org.uk for specifics.

I use the rule of thumb each an unslotted attack, if used when it recharges, uses 1 eps ( normally they vary from 0.7-1.2 ). Adding recharge multiplies this by 1.33, adding a end red cancels that out. If you have hasten it increases too.

End reducers in attacks are about 2-4 times as effective as end reducers in toggles. So if you have an attack you use regularly that isn't 6 slotted, you are almost always better off slotting it for an end reducer instead of the toggles.

However as damage is important, I tend to have attacks slotted 1xACC,3xDAM,1xEND,1xRCG on a complete build which means that I have to start slotting end reducers into my shields. Golden Golem, for instance, has 2 end reducers in all toggles ( including Tough and Weave ) and at least 1 in all attacks. I think some of his attacks have 2.

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I'll be happy to show Unthing on test cos hes been away and it'll be good for his Phoenix Firetank.

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I think I can guess how, but I'd like to see anyway.

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But I sometimes have enough on my plate versus some enemies and with some teams than worry about rage crash and so use foc acc for bonus to acc. Also Foc Acc under -Per conditions (Arachnos) is simply great.

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I know about the your opinions of the Rage crash. We've had that conversation before. I'm a lot more blase about it than you, but it does hurt more on an Inv. -Per is yicky, FA does solve it.

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Good to see ya back, i was wondering where ya went.

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I slunk away after getting bored. I played a few other games and then bought another month in a fit of nostalgia. It's fun again now.

I found with my scrapper that you can only go so far defensively. Often your best damage mitigation is fighting things really quickly. As a scrapper you are normally invited to teams to do damage, similarly solo you really only need basic defences and good offence to survive against most opponents. In the case where you are needed for your toughness, a defnder primary or controller secondary can usually bring far more to you ( and the team ) defensively than any power pool could.

Hasten is good on a scrapper. In fact it is pretty good on most toons. Scrapper attacks tend to chain quite easily due to their long animation times, but the later attacks are far better than the first ones. So hasten brings the big attacks back earlier which can make a big difference. It also is good for getting Dull Pain up more often.