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iirc neg energy is the least resisted damage type a player can use.
Fire and cold are next.
worth being aware of is that with the extra damage effect that fire carries even in the face of resistances it is almost always the most damaging choice you can pick.
psi is nowhere near as little resisted as some people seem to think. It is resisted quite commonly in 'typically encountered content' and it is often resisted to a large degree as well.
The statement about AV's rarely resisting psi is however accurate. Especially if you face the ones with god mode powers. That said, psy blast for defs and blasters and corrs deals a lot less damage than some other sets, so whether it is worthwhile to pick just for that is debatable. ie. a fire/traps corr will still rip through most AV's (even ones with godmodes) faster than a psy/traps corr. The only truly remarkable psy using set is illusion.
edit: didn't consider toxic as players by and large have very little access to dealing toxic damage as a significant portion of their total damage...yes even banes lean toward mostly non-toxic damage. -
I love inferno on my fire/cold, but that is because i can have enough recovery to power right through the crash. Hated the crash on my elec/elec cause you have to pop a blue anyway to fire off powersink, plus piwersink is a tiny aoe.
If I had my way they'd still crash hard, but not right down to zero end. The toggle drop is annoying and in my mind I just add the time it takes to retoggle to the cast time.
As a result i feel i can often do about as much damage with fireball+rof+firebreath+fireball, but with much less restriction.
Unless the plan is to make them like prenerfed shield charge (fast cast,fast rech, built in mitigation to use it, hit really hard still) then i'd go in the opposite direction and like more damage. But i'd mostly just like hem to only take you down to about 5-10 end. -
Quote:I have a hard time believing that an intelligent person would say that with the intent of meaning what we are seeing with IO's+incarnates.Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison
I believe it was Arcanaville that said it first.
This is a super hero game. The very idea is to be overpowered.
But then I don't think she meant it like you think she did...
The level of power we are capable of reaching right now is not good for the game. It would be ok in short bursts, like you enter a special mission and the dimension uber buffs you, but continually displaying the level of power available now is bad.
As bad or worse than the relative degree of power we can now possess is the unlocking of abilities that make everyone more and more similar. It is a pretty bad idea in a game that has heavily invested in the promotion of multiple, unique and highly divergent toons to then draw them closer and closer together in performance regardless of environment as well as closer in play experience.
You can say i'm off base, but a heavily io'd, softcapped, t4'd defender plays way more like a heavily io'd, softcapped, t4'd scrapper now then it ever has before. They are still different kinda, but they are converging and what you can and can not do with them ingame is converging be it solo, or teamed.
If you have a toon that can do everything, there becomes less reason to make another one that will just end up being able to excel at everything as well. -
popularity and/or fun is really a seperate thing from the relative strength and performance of a blaster.
I mean they make things go boom and hit like a mack truck for the first 30 or so levels. They are devastating in the early game.
Not sure about most people but the higher level my toon gets the less likely I am to willingly delete it. For me a toon that hits 30 is unlikely to be deleted until i run out of slots on the server. As a result I've had 2 of my 3 lvl50 blasters sit in the mid to high 30's for an extended period of time before eventually pl'ing and double xp'ing them to 50.
When every other AT I have played seems to get stronger and stronger as they level blasters kinda go in the opposite direction. However, given the investment of time and effort I'd already sunk into them I eventually just sucked it up and finished leveling them despite them being nowhere near as effective as i'd hoped they would be.
So to sum up the main issue for me is that they start off like a bat out of hell and if you have experience with the other AT's you have an expectation that you will continue to get stronger and stronger, but they don't. They peak early and really fizzle out. Unsatisfying (for me) if you care about the process of ascending to the pinnacle of super poweredness. However, if you are a habitual alter and rarely break out of the level 30 game then blasters are likely the best ride you can go on. -
Quote:I think the issue is right now the only place where flexing the muscles provided by incarnates is on the incarnate trials, but lots of people would like somewhere to showcase them (and need them) where they aren't grouped with a dozen plus other people.Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect
What do you suggest? We make the game harder so Incarnates don't feel overpowered? That'll be REAL fair to the people who don't have or want Incarnate powers (yes, they do exist).
.
Basically we now have people hammering through lvl 50 tf's by themselves with fair ease*. So an incarnate build has the choice of crushing lvl 50 content by themselves, or being forced to team with a dozen or more players to experience content that warrants (debatable) that level of power.
* No not every incarnate build, but for the people that optimized their builds before incarnates it is a very real situation for them.
I dunno, maybe they need an "incarnate" difficulty setting for normal content that ups the tohit floor of normal mobs and enables extra powers or something that is commensurate with reward*.
*Cause there is no reason to ever use the 'buff foes, debuff self' settings from a reward perspective unfortunately, which is likely why they are rarely utilized. -
Quote:It is undoubtedly a tedious grind. But it doesn't take any skill or build knowledge to unlock a level of power that is on par or higher than most uber tweaked IO builds prior to the incarnate system.Originally Posted by Tenzhi
Slogging through the incarnate system seems like an awful lot of rather tedious effort to me. Hence why none of my 50s have done so enough to even have a Tier 1 crafted.
A min/max IO'd incarnate is still > A crappy incarnate build, but it barely matters cause both can crush pretty much anything the game has to offer. -
If blasters had attacks as strong as the ones being used in this thread they wouldn't have any problems
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Quote:I don't personally see that as a solution. It used to be a lot of fun tweaking a build as much as humanly possible to get it to perform above and beyond. Now anyone willing to slug through incarnate system can do what those toons could do and more with almost no effort.Originally Posted by Amy_Amp
So exempt down, or don't play end game content. I have characters who at best solo on 0x3.
For someone that likes putting a ton of effort into their toon to extract every ounce of performance turning and telling them to purposely handicap themselves isn't much of a satisfying solution.
But it isn't like min/maxing has disappeared with incarnates, there is still a world of difference between a crappy incarnate build and a min/maxed one, but it barely matters because both of them can blaze through pretty much anything the game has to offer. -
fire/time/stone troller would be my choice.
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Quote:I say do it. But probably not for the same reason as the other poster.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
You should know I send virtually all of my analyses to the devs, and usually discuss their conclusions with them. I am always holding Aces. I just usually have no desire to beat other people to death with them.
Usually.
If you have privileged and relevant (as in not ancient and outdated) information to the discussion it seems asinine to me to withhold it and even lord it over people.
How you present it is your own choice. If you feel it necessary to berate other posters with it then that is up to you. It is the internet after all and we all need to feel important sometimes. -
Quote:ya no doubt.Originally Posted by Pasiphae
I'm gonna assume you've never played a /Cold.
The correct answer is:
earth, plant
paired with
kin, cold
which combo you choose depends on preference for damage and survivability and what kind of content you like to engage.
that isn't to say there aren't a lot of fantastic troller combos that are highly effective. Nor am i saying that the above combos are the must 'fun' -
Quote:there is some strange logic going on in this post.Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect
So, if blasters were adjusted so they were no longer the "worst" choice for a particular task, it logically follows that something else would take their place as the "worst" choice.
Would you rather play AT leapfrog, where in any given issue a particular AT is the "worst"? Makes more sense to me to leave it as it is and let people play what they enjoy playing.
There are many reasons why someone might shelve their blaster in favor of something else. I'm not going to go into all the possible reasons, but I'd be willing to bet "Some guy on the forums said they were numerically inferior and AT X was better" was not the reason for very many of them at all. In fact, I'd go so far as to say the number of people that was the reason for is pretty close to zero.
And at any rate, EVERY AT is superfluous. You don't NEED any given AT or power set to succeed in the game. This month it's blasters getting the hate, next month it will be defenders, or tanks, or scrappers, or controllers, etc.
If these forum debates had ANY truth to them at all, no one would play anything but whatever was deemed to be the best brute this month. Since people DO play other things, quite extensively, the whole argument is a bunch of hot air.
Interstingly enough, corrs,defs, trollers and mms all exist in a realm of being reasonably well balanced against eachother. This is despite them being an order of magnitude more difficult to balance than the 'damage' ats. They of course are plagued by intra at balance issues, but are pretty good across ats. Any disparity is pretty easily covered by the large differences in playstyle.
Blasters on the other hand have intra set issues as well as issues when compared to other ats. Which is sorta sad cause they only by and large bring one element to the party - damage.
Of course many of you are right, blasters do enough damage. Perhaps they arent the issue cause it is prwrty easy to design a functioning hammer. The issue is that everyone else has been given too much damage in comparison.
Now widespread nerf probably isnt going to happen. THe opposite is being handed to us with incarnates as the devs seem to no longer care about tankmages. But it still doesnt alter the basic fact that blasters arent up to snuff. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Deathstroke33
I've been hearing a lot of good things about cold and have been thinking about giving that a shot. Not sure yet what I'll pair with it yet but that will come with time.
Well ill/cold is significantly better than ill/rad at taking out the big hitters like AVs.
For faster moving teams the shields are better than RI because they arent limited by things lime being enemy based or subject to the purple patch. They were just recently made aoe too so buffing everyone is fast now.
Basically sleet+shields is better for faster teams than RI+EF+LR
that said rad is stil super strong. AM is a gorgeous buff (though i love heatloss buff too).
Rad is a lot easier to build and like i said in my first post it is amazing in the pre 50 game.
Plant, earth, and ill are all tremendous difference makers with cold.
Unless you are in a hurry i'd wait to check out time manip. -
Quote:I enjoyed having 9 fire imps out.Originally Posted by ClawsandEffect
This thread has been ridiculous for a while now.
Sinple fact: People still play Blasters becuase people still ENJOY playing Blasters.
These are the same people who don't give a damn when you tell them they should delete their favorite character because it's gimped and serves no purpose in the game anymore.
You'd probably be surprised how many teams welcome Blasters for the simple reason that they don't particularly care who is playing what. The game is not rocket surgery, and if you let go of some of the anal-retentive "The team MUST have this exact make-up" attitude, you might find that you can have fun playing it with any mix of characters imaginable.
Blasters are NOT superfluous. They are just characters like everyone else, no better and no worse.
I enjoyed old PSW
I enjoyed shield charge nuke
I enjoyed toggle IH
I enjoyed old dom domination
I enjoyed defiance1.0 (way more than d2.0)
I enjoyed pre i13 pvp
Fun =/= balanced
Of which blasters are pretty weak compared to other ATs. Thankfully it doesnt hugely matter cause the game is so easy, but lots of people do care about the balance metrics.
Asking if blasters are superfluous is not the same as saying they are useless. I think that might be confusing some people. They are just rarely in a situation where you wouldnt be better served with a different AT. But the overall ease of content doesnt result in that decision being a pass or fail. So why does it matter that they are a bit weak then? It doesnt to a lot of people, but neither did some of the things i listed above. They do matter to some though. -
Quote:A brute is even less of a 'concrete example' as was claimed by an earlier poster. And has next to nothing do do with anything being discussed. Even if she was main tanking all brutes still has the same hp, res,and def caps - granite was popular because of the fact that not everyone was always able/willing to bring the optimal support setup, so the set already havigg dullpain, high def and high res made it a simplier choice. If you had a cold or two and a thermal then any brute became a granite. But you also wanted rads and kins.Originally Posted by Diellan_
Uh, guys? Reading comprehension ftl?
Now you just run it with whatever cause IOs and downgrading the sf took pretty much all the difficulty out of that task.
And she did cite that her blaster has run more rsfs than stfs, but that can only be since the sf was downgraded and we have all been massively upgraded with ios. The exampme is verging on meaningless when we have become so powerful that the rsf can be soloed by some and easily duo'd now. -
one of the most enjoyable fights i ever had was my em/fire broot vs a fire/em tank in warburg (old school ET).
It was an epic slugfest. He detoggled me numerous times cause em could stack stuns so well and i never stunned him cause of his higher status protection. I was in the red a good 5 times while barely stressing him at all and then I found my rythm with bu and fe against his healing flames. And turned the match around.
It was intense and great fun. And i've always been a much bigger fan of the run and gun style of pvp, but that session of fiteclub was great for me.
Dunno what it is like now with the crappy pvp rules in place, but i can certainly see why some people enjoy/enjoyed it. -
Ya I dunno. PA is on a pretty tight leash, they shouldn't be running off into other spawns. Click where you want them to spawn and then you usually have to invis drag them to the next group. Unless the spawns are really close together, but if PA is aggroing on them then they were going to be on you shortly anyway, so may as well be attacking an indestructible pet.
Spooky is great all the time I find. Granted you may not always see a tangible difference in gameplay, the fear and tohit debuff do significantly soften the output of most enemies.
Phantasm...ya the melee bug makes him splat pretty often. But you are probably running with a kb nazi if someone is whining about it his kb.
Flash is a pretty standard controller aoe hold. They all recharge in 240 sec. At the very least it is easy to get off for illusion as you don't tend to have a lot of aggro on your character compared to say a fire troller.
I mostly agree with your comments about rad. I've run it to 50 on both a corr and a def and largely feel it is overrated as an endgame set. It is awesome while leveling though, matures early and has tremendous impact on fights. At 50 though it is kinda slow and the anchor aoe's aren't that large. I feel cold is a vastly superior endgame set.
that said, the issues with rad in late game aren't really rad's fault, but rather that teams get so powerful and just munch content so quickly. It is awesome in earlier levels where fights last a bit longer and enemies live long enough to bunch up. Late game I just throw EF on a boss and/or LR on the spawn and then blast. Using RI is often a waste of time like you mention. -
Quote:Isn't that like saying that dark melee/super reflexes is flawed because sr lacks a heal? The primary provides the heal, that is one of the synergies of the set pairing, just as assault bot provides the -regen that storm lacksOriginally Posted by Psylenz
. Storm is capable, especially with bots of some amazing things, but the biggest flaw is in the lack of -regen in storm.
The def given to you and your bots by the protector bubbles more than offsets hurricane being "only" base 22.5% tohit debuff. Again it is a synergy of the pairing.Quote:Originally Posted by Psylenz
I also have to be careful with Mastermind's hurricane being a few degrees less capable in the tohit department.
Unless you just mean storm mm's in general? cause the same goes for dark mm's with their weaker debuffs and smaller radius heal. Which is to say, it is a pretty minor issue for both secondaries given the overall power of mm's. -
Quote:I hear ya. When uber buffed LRSF was first being tackled i'm pretty sure we were doing it on SO's. So not only was it harder than any of the incarnate trials currently, we were doing it with drastically less powerful toons.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
My post was in response to this:
Lots of people find the LRSF challenging even today, and even those that find it not so challenging find a MoLRSF to be at least a little challenging. Challenging doesn't require forcing people into situations where they have to overload with force multipliers, which is the point I was trying to make.
Furthermore, I was playing both Lambda and BAF on day one, again on a blaster, when we didn't have whole teams of triple shifted Destiny and Judgment wielders, and I think it was challenging at first, and *still* didn't mandate full leagues of force multipliers.
Incarnate trials don't really require much optimization because there are so many players present. There are so many players present that you will occasionally see someone(s) do next to nothing the entire time and have no impact on the outcome (not saying that is what you do).
Original LRSF you kinda needed most everyone firing on all cylinders in addition to taking toons with good group cohesion. Current RSF is easier and often run by IO'd up toons which are night and day stronger than they were when first implemented. Let alone people taking incarnates on that ride now.
lastly, death seems to be expected on the incarnate trials. Perhaps not quite to the point of a Zapp Brannigan tactic, but to the point where frequent deaths don't really hamper progress (again largely due to so many players present). On the opposite side of the spectrum when RSF first hit a single player dropping during the important fights often resulted in a wipe (and often a failed attempted). This is of course because each player was needed and was carrying a fair amount of weight on their shoulders. -
Quote:There was nothing remotely concrete about her example...Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
Because Arcanaville offered a concrete example of a case where the hardest content in the game was not only offered to a blaster but then successfully completed by said blaster, this reinforces your stance that blasters must be terrible and it's some kind of miracle that the SF even got off the ground much less was completed, what with all the blaster drool all over it.
As amazing as she is there was no way her BLASTER was on a LRSF back when it was actually challenging...
So her i18+ blaster has done the LRSF? big whoop, that SF has been toned down significantly since it's inception.
When that content was extreme, people showed by and large that they pulled out their extreme content tackling toons. Of which the teams generally had at least 4 buff/debuff and 1-2 aggro sponges, once that requirement was met then the other couple spots were given to people (helped if they were friends) with junk toons that were going to contribute next to nothing toward the sucess of the SF. -
Quote:traps is more tankermind. Storm is more let everyone soak the alpha a bit and fix as needed. Ultimately traps is insanely tough. Like you say seekers is a godly power. In fact, other than phantom army it is my favorite power in the game.Originally Posted by Arbegla
True enough. The mu electric fenses, effectively adding KB protection helps a ton against the assault bot missiles, and can even be spammed to immobilize AVs pretty effectively.
I played a bot/storm on test a few times, granted, it was on SOs, but i found it to be too 'chaotic' for my liking. seekers->poison trap->AoE immobilize followed by AM and some caltrops pretty much meant that i wasn't taking very much damage, unless i tossed a provoke in the mix.
Dropping FR, and nado on a group meant i soaked the alpha, and not having Mez protection meant that some groups would just eat me alive (i'd get mez'ed, hurricane would drop, steamy mist would suppress and my pets would run around crazy like) which made it really tough to get a feel for the damage in practice. Now, on paper it looks, and sounds awesome, but when 1 stray mez power puts such a kink in your playstyle it makes it tough to pull off.
The nice thing about /traps is that nearly half its powers soak their own aggro. Seekers are your main -tohit/-dam debuff, and they are about the best alpha soakers in the game. AM is your main -res/-def, and it can draw aggro as well. FFG is your main +def, and it is its own target, so enemies have a chance to attack it, instead of you. All of /storms powers come directly from the MM, so all the aggro they create fall right on top of the MM.
Plus with the fact that /storm is already a pretty high endurance costing set, add in the fact that everything is 1.5x more expensive Endurance wise on a MM, and you can floor your endurance bar in record time.
They each have their pros and cons, and i do remember frosticus discussing things about how powerful bot/storm could be, but my /traps was able to meet, and exceed his numbers for DPS values before incarnated came along. The only numbers i was able to find was with the t4 Spiritual Alpha boost, and I managed to do 344.49DPS. The spiritual only really adds recharge, which helps out caltrops and AM, but as Frosticus bot/storm did 321 without the alpha boost, I'd say storm and traps are about even damage wise.
You gotta keep in mind how much some of these secondaries benefit from recharge. A t4 spiritual with the kind of rech you are talking about attached to a storm will pump out crazy dps... way more than Frost was doing back with like 60% global rech. Plus, -regen from the assault bot wasn't working at the time and pylons regen a bit over 100hp sec.
I mean who knows I guess. I don't have the time (sub just ran out, not gonna renew for awhile ) to finish my own bots/storm/mu, to see if i can't finish what was theorized. His amazing work with ill/cold and theorizing on fire/fire doms as well as banes was pretty compelling at the time. He was super fun to chat with ingame. left field ideas. Sadly, it is relatively meaningless now with incarnates, cause anyone can just summon a lore pet and rip through gm's
so there is a lot less reason for the kind of fine tuning that lots of people were doing at that time.
I don't find mez to be much of an issue on my own bots/storm, but I'm just shy of softcapped ranged/aoe def (would be there when finished). Even psy is just shy of 40%, so not much mez gets through. Even less if I tag em with cane. All bots other than the protectors are just shy of softcap to all as well, so if I want them to take an alpha they can. Granted nothing compares to seeker drones...
But again, my premise was never that bots/storm can take the beating bots/traps can. Not even close. But it can withstand just about anything the game has to offer. The damage potential is there (both aoe and st) to move through spawns and tough single targets as fast or faster than any other mm, but like many of the combos in this game with huge potential, you have to build well and play the toon a lot to unlock it. -
My fire/traps/dark is upwards of 50x more survivable than a similarly expensive blaster.
No that wasn't a typo. -res enhances -dam, of which it has in spades, on top of status protection, softcapped def, 40%+ res s/l, a heap of regen on tap means it can seriously survive 50x the incoming damage of a similarly expensive blaster.... and damage???
Damage hey? Well never having to worry about mez is hard to quantify, but it really does add a lot of outgoing damage. High uptime soul drain, with the survivability to actually use it willy nilly means damage is high enough to turn many a head...including most blasters.
Corner case? maybe. I mean rain of fire for corrs is pretty unique in that it does 3x damage when it scourges, effectively making it a nuke more or less. And the defender ported version of soul drain is on a 120 timer rather than 240...so there is that. I have no doubt that this toon can crap all over the damage of most blasters and get very close to running right up there with the highest damage blaster combos.
But then I'm compelled to ask. How many corner cases are there that allow other AT's to clearly step into blaster damage territory? (if not surpass them, but that is another discussion). I can think of quite a few, to the point that the corner is now looking like a wall.
So then tit for tat seems fair? how many blasters can nudge their way into the survivability realm achievable by the other ATs?
Sonic/em and son/ice are pretty survivable yes? then again they don't really do much damage... and they aren't really that survivable when you line them up against actual tough toons like a trapper, stormy, rad, or heaven forbid an armored AT.
Blasters are pretty fun though. You gotta keep the brain engaged to play them well, so that is cool i think. But they do kinda stink if you care about being awesome... I select and build my toons to be extremely powerful, as in signature hero/villain powerful, even if the game won't recognize me as such. So for me a blaster can't satisfy my desire to be a super powered being. Good sidekick though haha -
Quote:Just wanted to touch on this point a bit more. I wouldn't say 'better', just differently.Originally Posted by Arbegla
But against groups, with limited protection to KB, /traps will come out ahead, due to being able to control groups better, and have easier to manage high damage attacks (trip mine, caltrops, damage procs etc)
The aoe knockdown of freezing rain plus unsuppressed movement of a hurricane mm does an excellent job of keeping things in a tight killzone.
seekers+PT is terrific control, but once it expires after a few short seconds you aren't left with much control.
In a 10 sec or less fight i'd give control of the spawn to the trapper... i mean they are aoe held heh. Longer and the storm far surpasses it what with being able to cluster and neutralize the entire spawn indefinitely.
And if we are being honest the main kb culprit is the aoe swarm missle from assault bot (not the burn one). That can be a handful for any secondary to tame. I like electric fences personally to help a bit, but at the very least i can just push them back into the pack with cane.
Both secondaries tend to excel at setting up fairly immobile kill zones. Storms is a bit more flexible at relocating it though.
edit: just wanted to add that i think bots/traps is probably the most powerful toon in the game when examined across the entire leveling process. I mean you can start crushing AV's with just SOs haha. So it exemplars down well to lower level content and only gets stronger in high levels. But it isn't the highest damaging MM combo...though it is no damage slouch. -
not so much. Against groups you drop freezing rain and assault bot lights them up with burn patches and you pretty much move the the next group.
Acid mortar, which i think is a great power, applies aoe -res very slowly. if you drop it at range there is a good chance it will not get the group at all instead electing to simply keep debuffing the same closest foe again and again. If you drop it in the middle it switches targets much better, but still takes a few cycles to get a whole spawn. As opposed to just dropping FR from range and watching your assault bot nuke them all in a matter of seconds.
-regen is virtually meaningless against junk mobs. Heck is barely does anything against EB's. It isn't until you encounter AV's that it starts to make a significant impact. No doubt poison trap is astounding. I love it on my fire/traps and traps/arch, but unless you are fighting multiple AV's at once with the intention of killing them with aoe damage (my fav way of doing all the AV battles in RSF) then you really don't need more than st -regen.
For spawn to spawn action it shouldn't be living long enough to stack mortars or FR really. So FR is better in that environment. Against something that lives long enough to stack these powers then you are now having to contend with stacked storm powers.
*the freezing rain/sleet bug will be fixed one day. I don't advocate making builds around bugs either positive or negative in nature.
each tic of rain does this:
"RES(All Types) -30% for 30s [Ignores Enhancements & Buffs]
Effect does not stack from same caster"
15 sec rain and this is what happens after the last tic, thus working properly FR has a 45 sec -res duration.
AM is better at applying achilies certainly. Is it better than FR and nado at applying it though?... depends most likely.
Triple stacked trops with 2 procs and doubled stacked AM adds ~34dps
For that amount of rech we'd have roughly
2.5x stacked nado with 1 proc + 2x LS with 2 proc + 1.5x FR (basically factoring in the current bug). which adds ~187 dps*
*I was being much more conservative with my rech numbers early, but using what you have suggested...well.
As for scatter, ya things flee from LS, nado, and even your bots. They flee from trops and acid mortar just as badly ime.
Traps has trops to keep them in place.
Storm has the knockdown of freezing rain, snowstorm, and herdicaning to keep them in your killzone. And let me tell you, storming on a mm is awesome cause you rarely use direct attacks (pseudo pets like LS aren't direct) so you are never suppressed in movement. So herdicanning is so easy compared to using storm on other AT's.
At the end of the day, you more or less need taunt to keep hard targets from fleeing from both set ups, so meh. Ya you can webnade many AV's to keep em in spot, but the challenging AV's generally resist immobs as do GM's. I mean i have taunt on my fire/traps so i can big game hunt
I dunno, when I was sitting and discussing it with Frosticus back in the day, he figured his bots/storm would edge up near 500 dps (long before incarnates). He managed 325 with no -regen (almost another 100dps right there if it had been working), freezing rain bugged, and an incomplete build with no personal damage powers and nowhere near the uber rech being talked about now. He of course did not know that assault bot and FR were not working correctly when designing the project and subsequently abandoned it based on those two major bugs (one of which has since been fixed). But that is just st dps...The aoe prowess of bots is well known too for when you face bosses and lower.
That said, i've never looked closely at demons. They have a lot of forcemultiplication going on.
Like you say though, the combo has more damage potential (which is what the OP is asking for). The cost/effort to get there is higher than a bots/traps, but the same can be said for something like an ill/cold vs ill/rad. At the end of the day the ill/cold will cost you a lot more, but it is also better at killing things more quickly than the ill/rad. And if that is what you are seeking then the cost somewhat ceases to be a factor. -
Quote:Of course freezing rain self stacks...well assuming you don't encounter the bug that cuts the duration short...which you probably will. But it can and does self stack.Originally Posted by Arbegla
I also think bot/traps would out perform bot/storm, due to higher -resistance in acid mortar, higher -regen in poison trap, and better all around survival. While freezing rain is amazing, it doesn't stack with itself, where each acid mortar stacks with itself for higher -resistance values. Plus /traps is MUCH easier on your end bar then /storm is..
Traps can get more -res against a single target if your freezing rain is bugging out on you. otherwise FR is easy to double stack, while acid mortar is less easy to have perma double stacked.
Also 30% vs 20%. You don't need to perma double stack FR to outdo acid mortar double stacked.
That said, AM is better at applying Achilles.
And once again on a bot/storm vs bot/traps the -regen is covered by the assault bot. He will frequently layer 1000% which is the same strength as poison trap and will shut down a GM. He's all but guaranteed to apply 500%, which leaves what, a 14? dps difference for storm to make up vs the 1000% of poison trap against an AV...
Trust me, nados and LS do a lot more than 14dps and as a mm you arent attacking much, so applying them isn't cutting into your personal dps like it otherwise would for other storm AT's.
bots/traps is pretty robust though, but it's not like bots/storm is a push over. it is easy to get 40% def on your bots and you have spot heals for when stuff does get through your stormy chaos, which is way better than bodyguard mode for normal spawns. For single targets, ya /traps is quite a bit tougher, but it isn't like bots/storm can't no inspiration virtually every AV out there, so that extra survivability is often wasted.
Don't get me wrong, bots/traps is godly...and for cheap too haha, but it doesn't do near the damage of bots/storm, which was the question.