Wilfred

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I hold strong opinions regarding defenders who never use their secondaries, and regarding teams that don't like said usage. Gah.

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Wilfred - My kind of guy! Have you noticed its usually blasters who hate defenders using their secondaries?

I swear I had a blaster leader who had somehow ended up in melee range and was being killed by a Lt. Used a TK blast to diffuse the immediate problem followed with usual heals and buffs. Then got yelled at saying why hadn't I taken Absorb Pain as i should have used that instead. Some people can't be helped. Never mind - sorry for veering off topic.

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Veering off-topic's good, but this is a can of worms that's been opened a few times before and usually ends in flaming

I think I'm an anomaly, because people do tend to die while I'm busy typing away in team chat. But hey, it's only debt... right?

Any Psi defender without Will. Dom and TK Blast is missing a huge amount of potential team-saving power, and also missing out on more fun than a barrelful of angry chocolate-covered weasels. I'll always remember rolling an Emp/Rad; I'd had my Emp/Psi def at 50 for about a year, and I got ordered by my team leader in the Hollows to take Rez instead of Fort. As he quite reasonably pointed out, he kept dying (being a tank without any protection who kept plunging headfirst into 8-man spawns at +1 to him).

Neither his needs nor mine were being fulfilled; he needed slapping and telling not to be such a daft bugger, and I needed a new keyboard and some plasters for the large bashmarks on my forehead.

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Had a fair few leaders who think empaths should only ever take passive powers and are mortified when I actually blast somebody!

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Don't get me started!

I hold strong opinions regarding defenders who never use their secondaries, and regarding teams that don't like said usage. Gah.

Psi Blast is glorious, I've had my Emp/Psi since about a week after the EU release and still play him. If he was a 'pure' empath (ha!) he'd have gone stale a long time ago.

The concept wouldn't really be broken... the repulsion bomb goes up in the air and drops down flat on the targeted ally, so knockdown is almost more conceptually sound anyway.

Knockdown... this is going to be a must-have power, it really is. Wow. Better than a smack round the head with a shiny shuvle.

As already mentioned, it's fine although you might struggle in long battles if you have expensive toggles running or fire off your attacks a lot.

If things get tough, ask the rest of the team if they wouldn't mind taking more damage. You can help this by stubbornly refusing to use fortify or to heal them above half health. In this way, you should be running on a decent amount of vigilance. Which is nice.

My first attempt at any sort of creativity. Bear with it, you might just like it

Wilf's take on CoH

Ah... well...

Sonic is mostly very short ranged; you'll be in close. Some of the attacks do -res, so your next attack will do that little bit more damage. It has a cone sleep and a single target disorient by way of control; in PvP the sleep will be good for bubblers, and the disorient for anyone with Acrobatics. It also has a cone knockback power, if you're into that sort of thing. The attacks are fairly widely resisted, being largely a mix of smashing and energy damage.

Psi, by way of comparison, is very long-ranged. The snipe is the joint longest unenhanced range in the game (along with Moonbeam, iirc), and the two powerful 'bread-and-butter' attacks, Will Domination and Telekinesis, also have a very long range on them. All of the attacks slow the target's recharge speed a bit. There's a lot of control in the set - a single-target immobilise, knockback, sleep and disorient, and an AoE knockup power. The damage is less resisted, being mostly pure psychic, although one attack has a smashing component to it too. It lacks an aim power, however, so you won't have a mini-buildup which is so useful in PvP; I consider this easily outweighed by the generally higher damage output and lower res/def to the set.

The nukes on the two sets are more or less identical - both PBAoE with a stun.

ps. Mid's is lying to you. Dark Servant lives longer than its own recharge, it is to all intents and purposes perma.

Both can be brill in PvP. Dark/Psychic is often stated as great because of the potential for great damage, control, and slows. Storm/Psychic will create utter chaos. Dark/Sonic, awesome res debuffs therefore great damage with a touch of control. Storm/Sonic... pretty good knockback control, again, brilliant for creating chaos.

They'll all be good in both PvE and PvP.

If you're used to blaster damage, I think I'd be tempted to give Dark/Sonic a whirl. I personally love psychics, because of the large amount of single-target control available.

If you're standing at the back healing, there's something wrong. There's a little-known cheat the devs coded specially for empaths...

If you don't want to cheat, don't read the rest of this post.


...


Still herE? OK. Right-click 'Heal Other', then left-click the secret option 'Remove from tray'. Do this for all of the powers that are green. Now move your attack powers into the spaces vacated by them and if anyone asks you to heal or buff you need to copy and paste this line -
'OMG i bin palyin tihs chracter 4 aegs i tihnk i no hoew 2 do my job', and hit enter.

The words 'Cheat Mode Enabled' will now flash up on screen, and your gameplay will have become approximately 30% more fun, although efficiency of the team may drop by as much as 89.4%. But what do you care - you're having Funs now.

(standing ovation)

Herd cap needs to be addressed.

Inv doesn't. I'm not a very good tanker, but I found I could survive quite well and hold enough aggro to keep the team alive fighting 52-53 rikti on an 8-man team. I needed some support, but not the full-time attention of an empath.

I've always figured that Inv prospers by being able to drop the s/l damage virtually to nothing, allowing the tanker to cope with the rest of the damage through tactical inspiration use, DP, Unstoppable, running away, aid self, yelling "HEEL MEH PLZ", or whatever other methods come to mind. Tanking isn't restricted to standing there taunting and hoping to hell that they don't overcome what HP regaining you can muster - you use scenery, positioning, and movement to keep yourself standing.

There's very few enemies in the game that do no s/l damage. On top of that, we've very respectable defence.

I wouldn't expect to go and herd a roomful of +3 rikti without some support. But I can tank them well enough for the team.

I always slot defensively - the tohit buff is pretty huge already.

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And yes, you do feel guilty when you lose someone. Part and parcel of being an Empath.

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Dunno about feeling guilty... I'm generally chuckling behind the keyboard because my Vig is running full guns.

I Fort the frontliners. I can keep 4 Forts up reliably (5 sporadically, if I'm really on the ball) which is usually enough for the tank, whoever's doing the most AoE damage and whoever I think would be most [censored] off by a red glowy bit ruining their perfectly planned costume.

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(unless you bribe Wilf with some biscuit based goodness)

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That's risky. Pick the wrong biscuit for the occasion and I'm not responsible for my actions.

We're a small, select and fairly friendly bunch - which means there won't always be people about to team with. When we do play, it's mainly for fun, with a bit of serious levelly, too. Monday and Thursday evenings (7pm+) are SG team nights, Union villains and heroes respectively, with Sundays from 2pm reserved for Defiant heroism.

We don't prestige farm. Our base is functional, and has TP pads to everywhere we're likely to want to go, so we're not greatly interested in getting more prestige for the sake of it. Influence is way more important these days, anyway.

We're nice, awfully nice mostly.

Possibly not the best. As you'll be roughly in the middle of the spawn, the cone's effectiveness will be limited unless you're constantly repositioning. Fire Sword Circle/Combustion spam along with taunt should keep you busy anyway.

Spad's got a penchant for playing the tough builds - I suspect it's Graniteless on purpose.

I'd say if you're not going granite you may be able to counteract rooted with the swift slotting and a look at +runspd sets.

There's a lot of toggles if you intend to fight something that does a wide range of damage types (Arachnos, CoT, maybe Creybe)... Good luck with endurance!

Try and get it 6-slotted - any range you can wangle in there will be well rewarded.

I looked into improving my psi defence with set bonuses - I found I couldn't wangle much in without seriously compromising the rest of my defences. So I just suck it up and take it like a man. In a bunny costume.

Mag 3, with a chance to crit. It'll hold lieutenants always when it lands, and bosses very occasionally.

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Believe me when I say the damage is not low.

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The numbers and my personal experience say otherwise. It's possibly because I have a kin/psi at 50, and a couple of other kins at varying levels to compare it to - I know what a kin def should be capable of, and my kin/elec just wasn't. At the end of the day, Ball Lightning and Short Circuit were the two best attacks (barring the nuke) - and they had to be slotted for end mod to make an effective sapper, seriously limiting the damage that can be slotted. You can make a powerhouse, or you can make a sapper, but you can't excel at both at the same time (at least, until 50 IO's). Fulcrum shift and siphon power multiply damage by the power's base, so having a moderately higher base damage across the board, even if it doesn't look like much of a difference, makes a huge difference when it's multiplied by a maxed-out FS.

Knockback, correctly used, is some of the best control in the game. It can be used to stop mobs doing things, to group mobs, to scatter mobs, to put mobs somewhere else. End drain is nice, but is not the be-all and end-all of control available to a defender.

Everyone's so sold on Kin/Elec - I have to offer up my experiences, even if it goes against the grain.

My other argument is that there's an absolutely vast number of Kin/Elecs already - be different.

I don't find the attacks in elec particularly appealing - I tried a kin/elec briefly but the damage was low (with the exception of the nuke, which was awesome) and it didn't have that many straight-up attacks. As a Kin, I play very offensively, defending from the front, as it were, and the high-damage energy blasts are better suited for that purpose. Psi, Son, Elec and Rad would be my kin choices.

There's some tanks that insist on herding every single mob ever, even if they're already stood in a nice tidy bunch. It irritates me something rotten.

I tend not to herd on large teams, only ever on smaller teams. It's good for me as Inv/Fire, the closely packed groups are marvellous for Invincibility, Combustion and Fire Sword Circle.

On large teams, two mobs is about the limit of what I can safely keep aggro'd on me, and even then some tend to slip through the net. A lot of tanks seem to forget that when fighting higher level foes, your taunt won't stick for as long.

Anyway, large mobs: Jump into one side of mob while taunting the other side, then fire off a combustion for good measure in case Invincibility has missed anyone. Smaller mobs: grab a couple of mobs to a corner. But there's just no point risking overflow aggro by grabbing too many. Specially now there's cone/AoE caps too.

Every build in the game works.

Pros - Dark is very powerful, Elec gives extra control to what is already a very controllery primary, the Nuke on elec is awesome.

Cons - There's little synergy besides a doubled-up hold, elec is pretty low damage. Your sig says you already have a kin/elec, and variety is the spice of life.

WarEngine just hit 50 on his Dominator, Enviro-Mentalist.

Which means he's filled up all of his Defiant slots with 50's, I think.

Gratz chap!

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-Dam isn't very good, actually.

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Nonsense, he's a great player and a lovely bloke!