Rad Defender Superteam

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Anybody starting a radiation supergroup on Virtue? I'll join in a heartbeat!

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Come over to Freedom! (But don't come over to the Dark side! :-)

We have an established moderately low-level (though rising fast) SG that is always taking members. You'll make level 8 in no time. I'll SK anyone level 2 and up, unless I'm doing a TF or a mission in a hazard zone where you can't go.

If you can't find Buffer Master, look for Sub Atomic or Becoming I. They are the other two leaders of the SG.

> 7 rad / electrics and a dead guy

Best. Movie idea. Ever.

On a side note: as soon as exams are over, I'll roll a rad/? on Freedom. Really too bad nobody's doing this on Protector, where most of my friends play. I'd love to show them this in action!

As a side note: maybe teams of 6rad/1kin/1empath would work? I'm thinking that fortitude and ID would be very nice vs. status effects. Kin's SB comes later at 12, agreed, but PLing to there isn't exactly difficult, esp. with 8-man insanity defender teams, and SB is roughly as effective as AM - more so if siphon power is taken and used properly, though it takes more time to keep the buffs up. The empath could focus on his/her offense for powers, and secondaries for slots, before getting the auras.

Just a thought.

Anyone doing this on Champion?
If so, send me a tell in game (Illusory Wrath), or to Accelerata, or PM me for a RAD SG invite (The Accelerated Metabolists).
I kill stuff, look me up. BS

Joined this team last night.

We did the Synapse TF.

The Clockwork King fell in about 15-20 seconds, Babbage about the same.

Video coming soon.

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As a side note: maybe teams of 6rad/1kin/1empath would work? I'm thinking that fortitude and ID would be very nice vs. status effects. Kin's SB comes later at 12, agreed, but PLing to there isn't exactly difficult, esp. with 8-man insanity defender teams, and SB is roughly as effective as AM - more so if siphon power is taken and used properly, though it takes more time to keep the buffs up. The empath could focus on his/her offense for powers, and secondaries for slots, before getting the auras.

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You need to gain something if you want to give up a Rad. Kinetics comes close to the same abilities as Rad, but you really lose a lot. Increase Density, Siphon Power, and Speed Boost may be nicer than AM (I don't know), but they are higher maintenance (lots of clicking). Kinetics have no AoE mob resistance debuff, which gives Rads a major DPS advantage. You don't get AoE mob damage debuff (Fulcrum Shift) till level 32. By then, the teams attacks will likely be damage capped with AM, Assault, and minor slotting. The heal is targeted. Finally, Rad has 2 Holds (Choking Cloud and more importantly EM Pulse) that dominate at later levels.

Why add an Empath? With the possible exception of Clear Mind, the Rad buffs & debuffs are far superior. I don't think Fortitude protects against status effects, and you can only cover about half the team, even with massive recharge reduction. At high levels, Empaths get Regeneration Aura (mostly unnecessary) and 2 END Recovery powers (completely unnecessary), while Rads get 2 nice AoE Holds and an attack (maybe mostly useless, maybe not).

From my original post...

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Monsters and AVs go down pretty quickly. They probably still hit despite the massive Defense buffs and To-Hit debuffs, but not for much due to Enervating Field.

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What powers do you skip in the Radiation Primary? ... Everything but AVs and Monsters die too fast for Lingering Radiation to be useful, but you still might pick it up just for them.

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Experience has shown that AVs and Monsters go down in 20 seconds or less with 6+ Rads, and can be so debuffed by RI and EF that their few attacks rarely hit or hurt.

Given that, I'm recommending against taking Lingering Radiation for all-Rad teams. Mobs are defeated too quickly and do too little damage to bother wasting a power slot on this and taking the time to cast it in combat.

>You need to gain something if you want to give up a Rad.

I know - I suggested it in response to "only mezzes kill us" (and thinking about my own... discomfort... around Deathcaps etc. ID provides res vs. disorient, imm, hold, and knockback, or can be used to free from the above.

>Why add an Empath?

Same reason - it was in the context of "mezzes might be the only problem later on" - clear mind gives res. vs. imm, sleep, hold, and disorient. I switched fort and cm in my head when I typed, sorry. ;-)

As for rad ?> kin, rad ?> emp... in the context of the 8-rad team, I personally wouldn't want to play the kin, since it'd be buffbotting mostly to keep ID/SB up. Nor would I want to play the emp, since it'd honestly be a lot of attacking with secondaries, which would make the emp less effective then a dedicated blaster. (Time bomb with 7 RAs? Hell, Inferno with 7 RAs? That'd be wicked!)

But I digress. I was trying to offer a suggestion w.r.t. the mez problem. I agree that, in well-chosen areas/mishes and with respect to effectiveness, the 8-def group would be superior vs. the kin as far as ease of play goes, and vs. the emp, in almost every way.

A picture is worth a 1000 gigs right?

Here's the video that should end any debate...

www.wbt101.com/CoH/BO/Buffer_Overrun_Freedom_Synapse.wmv (30 meg)

Interested in joining?

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showf...part=1#1926341

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A picture is worth a 1000 gigs right?

Here's the video that should end any debate...

www.wbt101.com/CoH/BO/Buffer_Overrun_Freedom_Synapse.wmv (30 meg)

Interested in joining?

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showf...part=1#1926341

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Holy.......................................
/em defects from Champion to Freedom with Rad.
I already got my Ill/Rad to 10 on Champion... but no critical mass :*C.
I will roll one on Freedom soon... cause... wow.
I kill stuff, look me up. BS

I have a higher level Ill/Rad controller (42nd) level and I 'll give you a few of my observations of the Rad set. I SK with higher level people in my SG (mostly to fight AVs) therefore I have seen alot of the higher level content.

First some numbers:

EF increases the damage by 30% (40% for a defender). This is by lowering the Mob's resistance, high resist Mobs get lowered less. Actual resist is EF x (1-Mob resistance) therefore a Mob with 50% resistance is only going to be debuffed by 1/2 of EFs rati ng.

RI on a controller reduces a Mobs accuracy by 30%. (Defenders are 40% if I remember correctly).

AM gives +.33 End recovery (stamina is only +.25), +.25 damage, and +.3 recharge. AM does not offer any Mag protection against Mez attacks, it only reduces the time they are active on the protected character. This means you will lose your toggles.

Alpha strikes are going to be your downfall, that and AoE Mez attacks (Malta come to mind) as they could crash enough toggles to allow full strength AoE attacks to smash your group. To protect yourself from these sort of attacks I would get some */Rad controllers, they have pets that can take the alpha or Mez the bad guys first. This would keep the Rad theme and make the team safer.

About slotting, I would slot for the ability to solo or play in a small team. Even doing this all of the big Rad abilities will be slotted up enough (or fully) for the synergy of the large group to kick in.

That being said an eight man */rad controller or Rad/* defender group is massive overkill (except vs Hamidon). Arguing what sort of combo of these is best is like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. From my experience two well built */Rad controllers can take any AV (within +2 levels, the debuffs drop off rapidly in effectiveness after that) in the game, adding more Rad anything just reduces the time it would take to vaporize the AV.

Phase Shift, Voltaic Sentinel, EF RI

*Team cast debuffs*

EM Pulse


or Snipe, PS, EF RI

*Team cast debuffs*

EM Pulse


Hows that sound for higher level groups

I joined this weekend. Name's Radikal and I'm really looking forward to this.

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Alpha strikes are going to be your downfall, that and AoE Mez attacks (Malta come to mind) as they could crash enough toggles to allow full strength AoE attacks to smash your group. To protect yourself from these sort of attacks I would get some */Rad controllers, they have pets that can take the alpha or Mez the bad guys first. This would keep the Rad theme and make the team safer.

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Freak Tanks are bad. We had a fair number of defeats from them over the weekend. I'm beginning to think the best place to initiate combat is in melee range. Debuff a group of tanks at range and they're likely to all lob AoE attacks at you. Do it right next to them and they may try melee.

Malta starts at 40. Even SKing, there will be several chars in the high 30s at a minimum. That means every combat opens with multiple (well slotted) EM Pulses and Atomic Blasts (or equivalent). We'll see how that turns out when we get there.

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That being said an eight man */rad controller or Rad/* defender group is massive overkill (except vs Hamidon). Arguing what sort of combo of these is best is like arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. From my experience two well built */Rad controllers can take any AV (within +2 levels, the debuffs drop off rapidly in effectiveness after that) in the game, adding more Rad anything just reduces the time it would take to vaporize the AV.

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I see your point, We did the Sister Psyche TF which has a level range of 20-26. We started with 20,21,22,22,22,23,24 if I remember correctly. We still toasted Clamor in under 20 seconds. Doom Virus may have a video of it, but he complained at the time that she fell off screen.

But it's not complete overkill. With big teams the mobs are sufficiently spread out that it takes several debuffs to cover them all. And unless you take time to find a Boss, your debuff anchor is going to be defeated in a couple of seconds. So it's more the AM bonuses that really make the team.

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Holy.......................................
/em defects from Champion to Freedom with Rad.
I already got my Ill/Rad to 10 on Champion... but no critical mass :*C.
I will roll one on Freedom soon... cause... wow.


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Did it take your breath away? :-)

Speaking of critical mass, we've reached it. The SG hit 75 members. I've removed members who signed up for the 8 Rads @ level 1 experiment and have since been inactive, but we're still near 75 with all of the new members from the boards who watched Doom's video. Maybe time to break up the SG into 2 SGs.

If anyone has any advice on how to handle multiple SGs, or pointers to threads on it, please PM me. Looking forward to global chat in Update 3 to manage this.

I just rolled "Conduction Bond" last night. Hopefully I'll meet up w/ you soon.

Dang it, i just read this from a link in the Defender forum. I hope I'm not too late. Just rolled a Rad/Rad named Litmus Test. He's only level 2 since I'm doing this from work < looks over shoulder hoping boss isn't watching >. Hope you guys still have room for one more that will be active.

Freedom Server
Mandri - lvl 35 Emp/Rad
Captain Rivera - lvl 20 AR/Dev

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We still toasted Clamor in under 20 seconds. Doom Virus may have a video of it, but he complained at the time that she fell off screen.

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Yea I have that on video too. She did try to escape but you can cleary see in my targeting window that she goes down at 19 seconds.

I have some MASSIVE indoor Freak battles on video, at least 30 of those guys on us at some points, all purples (to me) no less. Only after I leveled twice did I start seeing some reds.

The problem is... what if the next AV takes 20 seconds? That has me worried.

Right Top AM makes it, but it is cool when someone gets to half health and SIX people do an AoE heal, lol

Split SG, I like your idea of having two SGs, one level 20 and lower and the other level 21+

I've been thinking about Hamidon Raids, for when the SG gets high enough level.

NOTE: I make a lot of assumptions about numbers. Some of them are correct, but some may not be. Feel free to correct me, but also look at the underlying idea.

A Blaster decides to take on Hamidon. He snipes 4.6 times per minute with perma-Hasten. He's 6-slotted for range, so no Damage SOs. But we'll give him Build UP and Aim on every shot (slightly generous) for +166% damage. Hamidon has 90% resistance, so he does 1.2 base Snipe damage per minute. Undaunted, he gets another blaster, and together they do 2.4 base Snipe damage, exactly double. That's a linear increase. With 15 total blasters, they do about 18 times base Snipe damage per minute, or 15 times what 1 blaster does alone.

A Rad/Rad Defender tries the same thing. He uses Phase Shift to cast Enervating Field on Hammi, then gets out of range before unphasing to snipe. Supposedly this works. Hammi resists 90% of the EF (40%?), so he drops to 86% resistance. The Defender activates Accelerate Metabolism (AM) for +25% damage and +30% Recharge Reduction. The Defender snipes 3.9 times per minute for a total of .69 base (Defender) Snipe damage (which is less than base Blaster Snipe damage). He gets a friend. Hammi resistance drops a little more, the AM Damage buff goes up a bit, the Recharge Reduction buff goes up a bit, and they do 2.4 base Snipe damage per minute. Double the people, but more than three times the damage. Very interesting. That's a geometric increase.

A group of 15 Rad/Rad Defenders shows up to take on Hammi. They debuff his resistance to 30%. They hit the +300% damage cap with AM. They hit the +400% Recharge Reduction cap with AM. They each shoot 7.14 times per second for 4 times base Snipe damage, for a total of 300 base Snipe damage per minute. That's 435 times the damage of a single Defender.

2 questions

1) What's wrong with this scenario?
2) How long does it take for Hammi to fall?

TopDoc, the only thing wrong with the strategy that I can see is that you cannot have EF up while outside of Hamidon's range. The Devs have changed the range of our toggles to 300 feet, which just happens to be Hammy's range.

This is only from what I've read here on the forums, as I unfortunately am an alt-o-holic and have no characters remotely high enough to tackle a Hamidon raid.

Even so, if you can also develop some sort of strategy to deal with the Mitochondria, the tactic is sound - you still recieve a geometric increase to your power when you add an additional rad/* player.

It may even be possible to do it with an all rad/* team. From what I understand, the Mitochondria Hamidon spawns are Archvillain level enemies, and one is spawned for each player. If you could keep them in a small group (and they likely would be concentrated anyway - they will be attacking the players, who will be clustered for AM) then you could use Radiation Infection to make them a non-issue while you take out Hamidon himself. Lord knows with that many AMs stacked you'll have the Endurance to do it.

Okay, so I was a little off.

The 300 foot range limit is part of Issue 3, so it's not live yet. As of right now, your strategy is fine, and it IS how a few other servers have done it.

The strategy in all its detail, along with a possible way to do the same thing after Issue 3, is posted in this forum, under the heading Hamidon: The Deleted Strategy *SPOILER*

They use 24 Rad/* defenders.

I'm a bit woried though - the Rad primary is so powerful when it's stacked to the caps that other ATs are worse than irrelivant, they are a liability. The Devs may soon be trying decide how best to fix that, and whatever they do may severely hinder the power of individual Rad defenders. The only weakness we have when we are together is status effects, and while that's a big deal, it may not be viewed as a large enough balance to the uber-power that is AM, RI, and EF when stacked.

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Split SG, I like your idea of having two SGs, one level 20 and lower and the other level 21+

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The main problem with this idea is that when the level 21+ fills up, the people who are reach 20 will be stuck in the lower level bracket.
I would suggest you merely make two sgs and spread the people out evenly, then alternate recruiting for those wishing to join.

The Buffer Overrun SG now has a web site! It isn't much yet. In fact, we don't even have all of the links to Doom Virus' videos or much of anything else. But I'm telling people about it so they can start registering. A lot of people have joined the SG by reading about it here, so it seemed appropriate to announce it here.

I want to keep it mostly public, so people don't have to register if they don't want. We'll be posting events (TFs and such), strategies, builds, news, and whatever else is appropriate. Again, there's pretty much NOTHING there yet.

The site is hosted by Guild Portal, which hosts guilds for lots of different games. They make money with ads and by charging to remove the ads from a guild. I expect I'll be paying them to get rid of the ads for our site shortly.

Buffer Overrun web site

Hello everybody! This is my first posting on the forums, only been playing the game for a month tomorrow. A few friends and I (4 of us to be exact) all got on at roughly the same time and looking for something to do on the game together, ran with this idea. In the four or five hours we played these characters, we got to lvl ten. So, we started a supergroup up on Champion, called the RADicals. If anybody from Champion wants to try out a Rad Defender (or Controller) and wants to join the SG, just send Adam Baum a tell or look for somebody in the supergroup.

Champion:
Cyberswat, Lvl. 18 Blaster
Lord Blackwell, Lvl. 13 Scrapper
Adam Baum, Lvl. 10 Defender

We had mixed results with the Respec trial with 3 tries over the last two nights. In all cases we just did the required parts. We skipped over all of the mobs in the door mission to get to the boss at the end. In the first big reactor room we just defeated the mobs necessary to get the key, and we skipped most of the mobs in the long corridor (except when Invis wore off unexpectedly). After the first wipe in the core, we just went back to the reactor to try again.

The first night we failed twice. There were 6 of us, mostly 25 or exem'd, but one 26 I think. Between RI, Maneuvers, and Invis, we weren't being hit much. There were a few defeats at various points, usually due to AoEs from Sky Skiffs and/or explosions from defeated Sky Skiffs and Jump Bots. But at or near the last wave in the reactor core, we had a whole team wipe. Twice.

You'd think we'd learn after the first time, but we didn't. Usually the Sky Skiffs and Jump Bots would stay at range and attack, while the masses would charge right up to the reactor. We would charge right up to the reactor too in order to AoE the masses with Irradiate and maybe Electron Haze. Then a couple of Sky Skiffs would sync up their AoEs and drop several of us. Maybe the explosion from defeated Jump Bots hidden in the masses helped; the screen was just too busy to know when it was safe to rush in and cast Irradiate.

Last night we had a team of 8. Most everyone had gone up a level, so we had 25s and 26s with one Exemplar. Out of that, 3 were Ill/Rads. Doom and I kept telling the team to go after the Sky Skiffs first, and we did. Some Phantom Armies kept the masses at the reactor core busy, while some kept the Sky Skiffs busy. There were a few defeats, but nothing like the wipes from the night before.

There is one important lesson we all learned. Now if only we remember it.

AoE attacks against you are bad. Defense doesn't appear to do anything. Debuff and defeat anything throwing AoE attacks at you before worrying about anything else.

Yea, we stopped camping AT the reactor and let the mobs gather there FIRST before engaging, that way our RI and EFs REALLY had them covered.

After that we went in clockwise circle taking out Sky Skiffs in seconds flat.

The Phantom Army absolutely OWNS with all RADs, they hold mad aggro and do good damage.

*edit*

note on our first attempts we had only one ILL controller, on our second attempt we had THREE ILL controllers