Plant/Rad Splattroller Build Guide

Plant/Rad Splattroller Build Guide

I. Intro
II. Build to 34
III. Slotting
IV. Tactics
V. Roots for Damage?

Intro
This is not an in-depth guide to plant control or radiation emission as a controller secondary. Rather, it is a discussion of (the elements of) a particular build that lets you use a particular strategy, "splattrolling."

Splattroller: What and Why
Splattrolling is an approach to controlling, as the name suggests, with added "splat." What's the splat?

1) Focus on Area effects
2) Reliance on incomplete control
3) High damage output
4) Survival Brinkmanship

Why? Partly because, it's just fun. And funny to think that it's possible with the controller AT. But just as much because it's actually pretty effective.

Splattrolling is perhaps the antithesis of old-school controlling. It's possible for a couple reasons: One, controllers do meaningful damage nowadays, especially with containment, and when they do it on an AoE basis, they can magnify their total damage output by the number of mobs present. Which is the ultimate secret damage multiplier. And they can do it relatively safely, because active area controlling is still effective. Also, debt is negligible nowadays, and rest (the basic power that you get at level 2) is actually a pretty good power. ^_^

The tactics of a splattroller are somewhere between those of a tank and a blaster-- you're going to be under heavy fire from many opponents, and live to tell about it. Moreover, you're going to welcome that sort of thing, because the more mobs shooting at you, the more mobs who're going to be defeated and yield XP!

The Build: Plant/Rad to 34

<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
01 Entangle (1,3,17,25)
01 Radiant Aura (1,3,17,31)
02 Rad Infect (2)
04 AM (4,5,5,15,15,25)
06 Roots (6,7,7,11,13,19)
08 Seeds o'Conf (8,9,9,11,13,19)
10 EF (10)
18 Health (18)
20 Stamina (20,21,21)
26 Carrion Creepers (26,27,27,29,29)
28 [Strangler, Lingering Radiation, Vines, or Choking Cloud]
30 [Strangler, Lingering Radiation, Vines, or Choking Cloud]
32 Fly Trap (32,33,33,33,34)
</pre><hr />
Plus Either:
<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
12 Hasten (12,23,23)
14 Superspeed
16 Hurdle
22 Assault
24 [Strangler, Lingering Radiation or Vines]
</pre><hr />
OR
<font class="small">Code:[/color]<hr /><pre>
12 [Combat Jumping/Jumpkick/Air Superiority/Hover/Recall Friend]
14 [Superjump/Fly/Teleport]
16 Swift
22 Hasten (22,23,23)
24 Assault
</pre><hr />
Plus four misc slots: (31,31,34,34)


Slotting
<ul type="square"> [*]Entangle
Frankenslot (slot a mixture of different uncommon IO sets) for damage, endurance reduction, accuracy, and recharge. Damage should be first priority.

I like:
Thunderstrike Dmg/End/Rechg
Thunderstrike Acc/Dmg/Rechg
Maelstrom's Fury Dmg/End/Rechg
Common IO Dmg
(However, this is a little excessive on recharge.)
[*]Roots
For Roots, frankenslot for a maximum of accuracy, damage, and endurance reduction.

I like:
Detonation Acc/Dmg
Detonation Dmg/End
Detonation Acc/Dmg/End
Enfeebled Operation Acc/End
Common IO Dmg
Common IO End
[*]Seeds of Confusion
Frankenslot for confuse, accuracy, recharge, and endurance. Max recharge is the first priority.

I like:
Cacophony Acc/Conf/Rechg
Perplex Acc/Conf/Rechg
Malaise Acc/Conf/Rechg
[Any] Acc/End
[Any] End/Confuse
Common IO Rechg
(However, this is possibly a little excessive on accuracy.)
[*]Carrion Creepers
I slotted this one mostly damage and recharge, with some end, although somebody may come along and have better ideas, I say, frankenslot for recharge first, damage second, and endurance third. I have a couple of Targeted AoE Dmg/Rechg, a common IO Dmg, a common IO Recharge, and a Force Feedback Rechg/End.
[*]Radiant Aura
Frankenslot for a mix of heals, including especially endurance reduction.
[*]Rad Infect
Slot for endurance redux.
[*]AM
Recharge first, then endurance modification. 3x Recharge Common IOs, 3x End Mods (common IOs @30).
[*]EF
Endurance reduction, at least one slot's worth. Common IOs, 1 or 2 @30. Maybe 3 if you have extra slots just lying around.
[*]Stamina
Endurance Modification, 3 slots. 3x End Mod common IOs @30.
[*]Hasten
Reacharge reduction, 3 slots. 3x Recharge Redux common IOs @30.[/list]
Tactics

Plant/Rad splattrolling involves dropping a bunch of stuff as quickly as you can, in the best sequence, on the tidiest largest spawns you can find. You really don't want to go after giant spread-out spawns-- the sort you get after your teammates have stood by watching the mobs wander about for five minutes. The sequence to use IMO is this:

1. Make sure Hasten is auto'd and assault is toggled up. Have Fly Trap and Superspeed up if you have them.

2. Find a nice juicy spawn and stand outside aggro range. Fire Accelerate Metabolism if it's up.

3. Make sure Seeds of Confusion is up. Apply Radiation infection, and while its animation plays...

4. Queue up Seeds of confusion. As soon as its animation is playing...

5. Queue up roots. As soon as its animation is playing...

6. Queue up Enervating Field. As soon as its animation is playing...

7. Drop Carrion Creepers if it's up. As soon as it's playing or otherwise...

8. Spam Roots, spam entangle on bosses (or lieutenants if no bosses present), until mobs are all dead.

9. Repeat.

Also: Make sure to play on teams, or at least duos, and on either tenacious or unyeilding (the 2nd or 4th difficulty level, which give greater #s of opponents in missions); the ideal is to fight many mobs at once, and have somebody handy who can draw fire from bosses, mezzers, and especially mezzing bosses.

Variant Tactics at Early Levels
Before 8:
Before level 8, you will be a Radiation/Plant Blast defender. Ply your immob/blasts, radiation infection, and healz.

Between 8 and 20:
You're now a full-fledged controller: you have seeds of confusion. Rejoice. But also, suffer endurance-wise. Do still use IR and EF, but ONLY when there're 4+ mobs, and make sure to toggle them OFF as soon as you're down to the last 3 mobs. Consider using roots only as necessary to keep badguys rooted in your debuffs.

Other tactics:
If you take Vines and Strangler, you're going to have the classic control tools available to you that you ought to have. You can hard control second groups tidily when necessary, and when 38 rolls around and you pick up EM Pulse, you'll have a PAIR of (long-recharge) AOE Holds to bring to bear. That's nice.

If you LIKE being really splatty, and in the middle of combats anyhow-- if seeing if you can survive the first 3 seconds of a fight is what you like most, consider choking cloud. But it's an end and slot hog.

Lingering Radiation is a nice soft control/mitigation tool, and you'll want it by late game.

Challenges:
Playing a splattroller is often a nuisance (esp. in a pick-up group) because, basically, you'll have to listen to a lot of people groan about how you need to "lurn 2 play." This is dumb because you'll almost certainly be contributing more than they will. Radiation is powerful, and plant control provides a nice bit of damage output.

Also, there're still people who maintain that confusions cause you to lose XP. The short answer to this is: that it's absolutely wrong. Period. End of story. People have dumb ideas about how you actually earn XP, and whether there's a limited supply, and they don't understand how confusions actually impact XP-per-time. Trust me on this, you are never hurting XP/time using confusions like Seeds, except where your team is taking SO long between fights, that the problem is the team, not Seeds.


Roots for Damage?

But Enantiodromos! Can Roots really be an effective damage tool?

Yes.

Roots does twice the damage of other controller set area Immobs. How much damage is that per application, realistically?

At L30:
13.32 dmg base (over 5 seconds)
x 1.225 for EF
x 2.0 for containment
x 1.82 for Dmg Enhance (IOs at 30 w/ my preferred slotting)

That's 59.4 damage per mob, up to 16 at a time, in the standard humongous 30' radius area. That's 6 applications of roots to take down the group's minions, taking a total of 40 seconds from the first application plus 5 seconds for the DoT to finish up, and costing 43 endurance. Rad infection and Enervating field will be costing you 54 end over that same period of time (with 1 L30 End Redux common IO apiece). And of course you'll recover roughly 2.5 end/second from base + (well-slotted) stamina.

IOW, 45 seconds to take down up to 16 even-con minions solo with roots alone, with 15.5 end MORE than a full end bar at fight's end.

Beyond that, 11 end covers your use of Seeds of Confusion, which not only pretty much guarantees survival, but actually relaxes the damage you have to do quite a bit, since damage from confused mobs will be debuffing the HP per XP of of the spawn.

With a use of entangle, you can add 93 single-target damage (to deal with lieutenants and bosses) for 5 end = 2 seconds end "downtime" after the fight. (You have enough endurance left to get the first one free.)

The point that's easy to miss here is the hidden damage multiplier inherent in Area Effect attacks. To demonstrate: suppose we had 16 mobs on hand. One application of roots (as here) does 950 damage, 119 damage per second, 133 damage per end. That, friends, is a lot of damage, for an AT that routinely piddles around with the single target damage on a hold or knock*.

I'm not saying it's game-breaking or comparable to blasting. But it's healthy damage output for an AT that does so much else. Perpetually rooting stuff will annoy those who rely on knockback for mitigation, but everybody hates THEM (I kid, I kid. [Not realy.]) Nor will you get infinite ubar damage in, while playing with teams that are already steamrolling. But without sacrificing much in terms of big-team play, solo and small-team play will be very rewarding too. It's a fun build.

I had actually forgotten all about Splattrollers, thanks for the reminder. Nice guide, you've sold me. Time to roll another alt.

Yay Enantiodromos!

Carrion creepers, not Carrion Crawlers.

Carrion crawlers are those level 2 D&amp;D monsters that look like giant cthulhu caterpillars that like to eat newbies.

I just returned to the game after a 2 year break..and I have ALOT to learn!

But, I levelled an illusion/storm controller to 50 and a dark/dark defender to 50 previously. I will go full out on this build, which I love.

My only question is it seems you are forgoing on a MAJOR ability....the single target hold. Do you find you miss it in this build?

When I played, I took strangler at 30, I believe, and didn't feel like I was missing anything-- that's because RI and seeds are soo-oo-ooo effective with mitigation, it's not funny.

If that drives you crazy, it's not a huge difference to take strangle at 1 and entangle at 28/30. But yeah, I really didn't miss it much. Plus plant/storm isn't nearly as hard on end as fire/storm, from the feel of it (though I've not run the numbers).

Incidentally, a small update on CC: damage and recharge is the correct slotting for this power. I've not thought about procs or how they would function. You can add accuracy to it, but mainly all you're doing with that is getting the rinky-dink end-of-fight entangles that the patch throws, to hit more often. Sure, they're 8' AoE immobs with damage, but they don't amount to much. The main thing is the vines themselves, which are on a flat % chance w/o a hit check.

I missed your reply to my reply about CC in the other thread because it largely degenerated into a pile of epic failure and I stopped paying attention; I'll respond here since the last thing I want to do is bump it back to the front page

[ QUOTE ]

I don't know how to work with damage scale figures as CoD lists them, but no, the numbers I provided are from the actual damage listing, not the damage scale. Vine Smash @L50 lists:

0.2 Smashing damage
4 * 0.1 Toxic damage over 4.00 seconds (after 0.5 second delay) (90% chance)

The figure I summed up to was: .2 + (4 * 0.1 * 0.9) = 0.56

As for the other business, yes, vine smash and thorns are not listed as auto-hit despite the %chance on the toxic component, and I assume what you mean by cancel-on-miss is that it doesn't go off anyway 90% of the time despite missing.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah, that's not an actual damage listing, though. CoD doesn't handle modifiers for pets. Take another look at the listing for Vine Smash: under power effects, note that the only option in the archetype selector is "Unspecified." "Unspecified" values are always, always, always raw scalar values. You can verify this by looking at the Unspecified values for pretty much any non-pet power: they're going to be far too low to be actual numbers, and more importantly if you change the level you'll note they are identical from 1-50.

Plus in the detail column it says "PvE damage scale 0.56000."

And if you're still not convinced, just type [Creeper Vine.Vine Smash] in game, set level to 50, set archetype to Blaster, Stalker, or SoA; pets share a 1.0 melee modifier with them.

As for cancel-on-miss, that's a DoT property that says "if a tick misses, cancel the rest of the DoT." That means 4 ticks, 90% chance, cancel-on-miss, means a 10% chance of no bonus damage, a 65.61% chance of four ticks of damage, and an average of 3.1 ticks per application. CoD doesn't handle cancel-on-miss correctly; it treats the whole thing as all or nothing.

In other words, you're seriously underestimating the damage output of the vines. The spreadsheet in my sig handles damage scale conversion and cancel-on-miss averaging automatically, which was why I pointed to it originally.

TY for reminding me to get back to that-- yeah I went and tested to get actual values to rescale. So I should be able to post that.

I follow how one would calc what you're calling cancel-on-miss, but I've never heard anybody say DoT ticks are individually hit checked. Yay, more to test. Outta curiosity, is this a property you see on ALL DoTs? As I think about it, I do use the assumption everything hits. I vaguely loathe the idea of going back through and recrunching everything for expected damage where P[miss] &gt;0. Oy.

It's not all DoT, no, just the ones listed as "x% chance." The most common is 80%, which covers most relevant fire, spines, and thorn attacks, followed by 90%, and there's at least one 75% (the Jounin's poison dart, I think) and one 99% (Inferno). It's limited to situations where the DoT is "bonus" damage, and I can't think of any examples that are not either fire or toxic. It looks like Plant Control is the only controller set that has to worry about it at all, and all in pet powers: the two vine attacks, plus Bite, Fling Thorns, and Thorny Darts from the Fly Trap.

(Tomax just fixed the selection menu at CoD, by the way.)

Question,
can carrion creepers be buffed?

What is their damage like?

NS

Vines themselves, which the Creeper Patch summons, can be buffed-- at least in principle. But they have 15 second lifespans, so anything that's a click buff will be irritatingly limited, as vines constantly expire. Speedboost would almost be completely pointless, for example, and even Fulcrum Shift is very limited in its effect on vines. Don't hesitate to make a plant/kin, by all means-- even if they had zero synergy, CC and FS are both great powers you'd want to use all the time. But effectively, you'll never have fulcrum-shifted vines up more than 33% of the time.

I'll see if I can get numbers on damage up in this thread soon. Or maybe make an updated splattroller guide. But for whatever reason lately I've not exactly had time to kill.


Also, as a general UPDATE:

<ul type="square">[*]I'm now *reasonably* sure that there's little to no point in slotting anything besides recharge (well, and end redux) in Carrion Creepers.[*]Plant/Storm turns out to be an even nicer splattroller build than Plant/Rad, now that I've played both. (They're both good.) I trust that if you read the fire/storm splattroller build guide, you can piece a plant/storm together.[/list]

First, Enantiodromos, let me say that this is a fantastic guide and that I am having a blast with my Plant/Rad splatroller (just like I did with my Fire/Storm splatroller).

I just had a few questions:

(1) I notice that you said that Recharge and End Redux are the only things that make sense for creepers at this point. Should I consider the slots at 29 to be "free slots" now?

(2) You suggested taking Swift if the player goes with any travel power other than Super Speed. I took Hurdle because I find that Hurdle + Combat Jumping is great for moving around in the middle of a battle.

Do you think Swift would be a better choice, and if so why?

(3) I intend to take Strangler at 28 (I respecced into splatrolling at 27 to go along with buying IOs) because of teleporting enemies. The first two missions I did after the respec were against Sky Raiders and Tsoo, and even a confused Porter/Sorcerer is annoying when it runs away by teleporting.

I was thinking of taking the slots at 29 and putting them into Strangler, and slotting it with Acc/Hold, Hold, Hold. I know the power has high accuracy to start, and Hasten/AM will probably boost recharge enough to not worry about that. Do you think this would be good slotting to leave the power at?

(4) This isn't really a question so much as a note/suggestion. Players that take Combat Jumping/Super Jump can slot a +Stealth IO into Combat Jumping. This basically gives you the advantage of taking Super Speed without having to use a travel power that has no vertical movement.