What do you think is the best 8 man team for PvE
By
Battlebabe,
Posted on: 2009-05-20 09:18 in Player Questions
The team that has skilled players that know how to act as team in order to get the most out of each players powers - regardless of archetype, side, or power sets.
Here is the reasoning behind the choices as I have seen them played.
1. Stone/ SS Tank
Great aggro control and the ability to handle multiple groups at once with little problem.
2. Willpower/ Dual Blades Tank
Good aggro control and the ability to handle AV's very easily. (Thanks to Falca for this build)
3. Empathy/ Archery Defender
Empathy for the awesome heals and buffs, Archery for the AoE's and inherent accuracy bonus.
4. Fire/ Kinetic Controller
Kinetic, as stated before, it's an I Win button. Fire for being the best control + Damage option.
5. Archery/ Mental Blaster
Arc/ Mind = AoE Beast + inherent accuracy bonus and recharge reduction.
6. Spines/ Fire Scrapper
Melee AoE Beast, What the Arc/ Mind does for range, the Spines/ Fire does for melee.
7. Fire/ Energy Blaster
The classic blapper build. Good at filling holes in other parts of the group and providing great damage.
8. Radiation/ Radiation Defender
Rad/ rad is another I Win button. with all of the buffs and debuffs it's the cap stone to the team.
As I said I have run with this team several times and we just walk through any thing. Statesman's TF was a cake walk.
I haven't had a lot of experience making a red side team.
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8 people that get along with eachother. If they can't work together they are doomed to fail. AT's are irrelevant.
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This.
For steady PvE steamrolling, I would build with a base of a Sonic/sonic, an FF/ preferrably sonic or rad, and 2 Kinetics (Electric, Sonic, or Rad secondaries) so no one misses on the speed boost. My fifth defender would be something with freezing rain or sleet. Now that cold primary is in the game that would bring a steady snowstorm/sleet combo to the all defender team. 3 Defenders left to choose and I would say it's a crap shoot: Empath, another Sonic, Dark, Rad all good juice to enjoy. In the later game the defenders would move as one carving a swath through their foes, maximum recharge on nuking, 8 nukes being used in quick succession. No one is hurt by being bottomed out on end because all have cap defense and uber resistance. The rotation of two kinetics dishing out transference makes it an easy game. When the cold defender gets heat loss going, it's even more gravy.
Triumphant Defenders Forever
Psylenz FF/Psi, ArticQuark Storm/Rad, Symon BarSisyphus Bots/psn, Max VanSydow Thugs/Dk, Cyclone Symon Bots/stm, Blue Loki Ice/Cd, Widow 46526
HelinCarnate:OMG it is so terrible. I have the option to take 3 more powers but no additional slots. Boo F'ing hoo.
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Here is the reasoning behind the choices as I have seen them played.
1. Stone/ SS Tank
Great aggro control and the ability to handle multiple groups at once with little problem.
2. Willpower/ Dual Blades Tank
Good aggro control and the ability to handle AV's very easily. (Thanks to Falca for this build)
3. Empathy/ Archery Defender
Empathy for the awesome heals and buffs, Archery for the AoE's and inherent accuracy bonus.
4. Fire/ Kinetic Controller
Kinetic, as stated before, it's an I Win button. Fire for being the best control + Damage option.
5. Archery/ Mental Blaster
Arc/ Mind = AoE Beast + inherent accuracy bonus and recharge reduction.
6. Spines/ Fire Scrapper
Melee AoE Beast, What the Arc/ Mind does for range, the Spines/ Fire does for melee.
7. Fire/ Energy Blaster
The classic blapper build. Good at filling holes in other parts of the group and providing great damage.
8. Radiation/ Radiation Defender
Rad/ rad is another I Win button. with all of the buffs and debuffs it's the cap stone to the team.
As I said I have run with this team several times and we just walk through any thing. Statesman's TF was a cake walk.
I haven't had a lot of experience making a red side team.
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I think you need to experience one of the other countless teams suggested in this thread. There's difference between completing a Task Force easily and completing a Task Force on Invicible/Relentless Enemies Buffed, Players debuffed and the team not even knowing those are all set until the end -- yes, that has happened many times 
The team you have is good. It's simply not outright astounding nor close to the potential teams can reach in City of Heroes. There isn't really a need for Tanks nor heals when buffs/debuffs can easily put every player on the team miles beyond the capabilities of any Tank.
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Here is the reasoning behind the choices as I have seen them played.
1. Stone/ SS Tank
Great aggro control and the ability to handle multiple groups at once with little problem.
2. Willpower/ Dual Blades Tank
Good aggro control and the ability to handle AV's very easily. (Thanks to Falca for this build)
3. Empathy/ Archery Defender
Empathy for the awesome heals and buffs, Archery for the AoE's and inherent accuracy bonus.
4. Fire/ Kinetic Controller
Kinetic, as stated before, it's an I Win button. Fire for being the best control + Damage option.
5. Archery/ Mental Blaster
Arc/ Mind = AoE Beast + inherent accuracy bonus and recharge reduction.
6. Spines/ Fire Scrapper
Melee AoE Beast, What the Arc/ Mind does for range, the Spines/ Fire does for melee.
7. Fire/ Energy Blaster
The classic blapper build. Good at filling holes in other parts of the group and providing great damage.
8. Radiation/ Radiation Defender
Rad/ rad is another I Win button. with all of the buffs and debuffs it's the cap stone to the team.
As I said I have run with this team several times and we just walk through any thing. Statesman's TF was a cake walk.
I haven't had a lot of experience making a red side team.
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My sig for a while was "What this team needs is more blasters."
Having as I do 130-something levels of force field defenders, I can confidently state that there is such a thing as overkill on defense. Once you have that, all you need is more offense.
So I'm going to take this somewhat seriously and assume you want a REALLY POWERFUL team.
Ideally you want one of two teams. Either you spend 2-4 seconds throwing down debuffs before every fight, or you go straight to massive violence. I like the massive violence. With enough firepower, pretty much the only thing that lasts ten seconds is a boss or higher, so you want some sonics on there so the -res keeps going up the longer something lives.
If you're going to spend 2-4 seconds on debuffs, you want a chunk ton of things like Rad and Dark on the team. You're probably not going to beat TopDoc's Fire/Rad superteam with the group teleport, but I'm not the expert on the toggle team.
If you're starting with damage, you want something like this:
FF/Sonic (extremely high defense, full team, plus -Res for enemies)
Kin/* (Faster AOEs, faster everything, more damage, etc.)
Someone to go up front- I suggest a Dark Armor tank for FF'd indestructibility, maybe Dark/Axe or Dark/SS
Two Fire blasters- Fire/En + Fire/Mental
Three Sonic blasters, secondary of choice (Mental?)
Every group starts out with two fireballs, two fire breaths, and three or four Howls backed up by single-target sonic blasts. Given that one FB/FB drops even-con minions, this combo (depending on how the -Res timing goes) will drop all minions and probably lieuts. If it's a tough group you might want to wait for the tank to make contact and take the alpha. Five seconds in, Blazes and more singletarget attacks go off and I conservatively estimate that bosses and any tough lieuts will last another five seconds at most.
By this time the tank should be looking for the next group.
It is possible that an enemy group will last only five seconds; fortunately the fireball/firebreath combo is on about a six second recharge timer.
No matter what the team is, everyone should be running a lot of the Leadership pool. It works.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
To reiterate the sentiment that any team is a good team. I was on one of the 10 million bullet ITFs. 7 Assault Rifle blasters and one Assault Rifle corruptor. The corruptor's secondary was dark miasma. Now it was pretty chaotic with people generally shooting at multiple groups in different directions, but I don't remember the cor using his debuffs, though I'm sure he did against the AVs.
Granted the ITF is not the most difficult TF, but many consider AR to be weak, or at best mediocre, and we tore the Romans up. The only deaths were the AR/energy blapper, who kept trying to melee the cyclops and minotaurs. Requiem lasted less than a minute, and we had no trouble with the bot control console.
Heh, as one person put it, while we fought our way up the valley of lag, "Ambush, meet 8 Full Autos".
So yeah, any team with 8 decent players is good no matter what the ATs or power sets.
Ever see an 8 man team of high level controllers?
Total pwnville.
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I'm a big Kin fan, but I believe TopDoc once posted numbers to show how game-breaking a team of 8 Fire/Rad controllers are when he was putting together one of his super teams. Taking away one of them and putting in a Kin only dropped the numbers. Basically you cap damage, ToHit, and recharge with 8 stacked AMs. The team runs Hotfeet and Choking Cloud. You team teleport into spawns and everything is held in a couple of seconds and then melts. The process gets a little faster once you add 24 Fire Imps but it's brutal even before then.
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I was on a Fire/Rad superteam for a while and I was always amazed at our potential. Even before the Imps we rolled through full spawns in less than 10 seconds. We devoured Monsters, AVs, everything with little trouble. AM plus Hasten requires 5 teammates to hit perma everything after that was gravy.
It was also boring as dirt after a few weeks truth be told. Every superteam I've ever been on where you had 8 identical or nearly identical builds eventually got so boring after a few weeks that I would quit. It's too much like an 'I Win' button to me...no contest at all.
My idea of a 'perfect' team has a few requirements and a lot of room for different stuff:
1) 8 good players who get along. This is key.
2) We like using Skype or some other team chat channel. This makes coordinating things SO much easier.
3) One of each AT because I like the old Avengers and FF comics where there was a mix and everyone seemed to have something to do. Powersets are not as important.
4) Everyone has fun.
All else is of secondary importance to me. I've seen team with mostly Blasters (lots of carnage), mostly Controllers (controlled carnage), Defenders (very safe carnage), Tanks (slow carnage) and Scrappers (Scrapperlock x 8 is wild to see!). All of them had good and bad days.
I would go for a theme team if I could. Everyone taking Fire or Ice Powers or Earth/Stone or all Mind/Illusion or something. Easier to make a coordinated team if everyone has a clue what everyone else can do.
"Comics, you're not a Mastermind...you're an Overlord!"
Here is video of what my friends and I do for fun.
This video is an Imperious Task Force on Invincible/Relentless with enemies buffed and players debuffed. There are 4 Radiation, 1 Dark, 1 Pain, 1 Cold and 1 Kinetics Corruptor on the team. People are trying to die to get more Fallout because Fallout and death are fun.
Take some of your dream teams and try to do the mission like we do
The "best" would probably be 8 fire/rad controllers or rad/sonic defenders. Stacked AM plus rad debuffs, plus perma-held everything but AVs is incredibly potent.
For the rare times I'm looking for specific ATs and powersets for something in came (STF for example) I usually go for something like this.
1 stone/* tank
1 empathy controller or defender
1 radiation emission controller or defender
1 kin controller or defender
2 competent blasters of any flavor
2 miscellaneous, if I have my choice it's usually another blaster and another buffer/debuffer.
Good mix, I would still crave a Sonic for the mez protection, the ample resistance debuff and the additional resistance buff. I can see this is what I call an "I Dream of Jeannie" team; blink and they are gone.
Triumphant Defenders Forever
Psylenz FF/Psi, ArticQuark Storm/Rad, Symon BarSisyphus Bots/psn, Max VanSydow Thugs/Dk, Cyclone Symon Bots/stm, Blue Loki Ice/Cd, Widow 46526
HelinCarnate:OMG it is so terrible. I have the option to take 3 more powers but no additional slots. Boo F'ing hoo.
Sonics are nice to have, but I was mostly basing my choices off of STF runs. That being the case, I don't really consider a sonic to be necessary. By the time characters are close to level 50, I expect them to be able to take care of themselves. Barring stupidity, or a rare accident, people don't die very much.
It's also a matter of playstyle. I like the carnage of a damage heavy team.
Instead of making another thread, I'll ask it here:
Does a team setup exist that can only fail? Perhaps not in every situation, but specifically in the harder end game content (STF, LRSF, for instance)? I was thinking of a team of nothing but empathy defenders, simply for low DPS, but they do have damage buffs so they might still have 'uber pwnage skilz'.
My Virtue Projects
AE: 38959 - Invasion of the Dark Realm
Any good mix of players that know what they are doing, know the weakness of their and other sets, can work well togther and blast through all content. The differing teams may not always do so in the fastest way possible through all the content but they might do it in the safest way possible. For example:
My SG has 3 "super" teams.
We have a group of Rad/ Ice defenders, actually about 12 of us I think, all about the same level. We required certain powers choices, namely Leadership pool, AM, and Ice Breathe. Capped damage, perma AM, insane amount of +to hit, -def, slow and -resist.
Then we also have a group of 6 (I think) ___/ electric defenders. Primary was up to the individual and no certain power was required. Its great to see mobs w/o endurance just after we jump in. We also did not have a requirement that we only play together so have have drifted apart in lvls. Electric has long been tooted as the worst offensive (meaning damaging) ranged attack set, but when no one has any endurance to attack you, it doesn't matter how long it takes to defeat your foes.
And then there's the 1 blaster/ 7 defenders.
Blaster is fire/fire for Hot feet goodness and aggro magnet.
Defender primaries are 1 Kin, 1 Rad, 1 Sonic, 1 Emp, 1 FF, and the last 2 spots: Cold Dom, Dark, Storm, or another Rad for flavor or whomever is available at the time. We are having another go at this team this Sunday, ITF I think.
I like 2 brutes and 6 corruptors on my teams. (all above 32)
The powers are a bit irrelevant. You need 8 people that get along, and know how to play the game. In other words: No Leeroy Blasters, no Scrapperlock Scrappers, no n00b Defenders and Tank that actually puts enhancements in their powers.
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Instead of making another thread, I'll ask it here:
Does a team setup exist that can only fail? Perhaps not in every situation, but specifically in the harder end game content (STF, LRSF, for instance)? I was thinking of a team of nothing but empathy defenders, simply for low DPS, but they do have damage buffs so they might still have 'uber pwnage skilz'.
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All empathy teams are some of the strongest in the game. All empathy teams are vastly stronger than most of the mixed select STF teams in this thread.
All Empathy Defenders will have:
1) More defense than an Super Reflexes Scrapper in Elude
2) More Regeneration than a Regeration Scrapper in Instant Healing
3) Adrenaline Boost giving them each 2 Speed Boosts worth of recharge
4) Adrenaline Boost giving them 16 Speed Boosts worth of endurance... not including Recovery Aura
5) Throw in a pile of Assault and the Damage bonus from Fortitude puts everyone close to or at the damage cap
6) Add /Sonic attacks and each attack does successfully more damage
There is so much +Recovery on the team it can be a "Rolling Nuke" where Emps can fire their tier 9 attack without bottoming out in Endurance and recovering Endurance instantly,
Repeat Offenders
Green Machine
All Empathy Super Group - Freedom
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Instead of making another thread, I'll ask it here:
Does a team setup exist that can only fail? Perhaps not in every situation, but specifically in the harder end game content (STF, LRSF, for instance)? I was thinking of a team of nothing but empathy defenders, simply for low DPS, but they do have damage buffs so they might still have 'uber pwnage skilz'.
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I don't know if this is the case with a full 8 man team, but about 5 of us failed the Lady Grey Task Force simply because most of us dealt lethal damage instead of something exotic. The Honoree's tier 9 and his ridiculous immunity to lethal damage forced us to a stalemate.
This involved the use of two Shivans and a few other potent temporary powers as well.
The Paladin
Steel Canyon, Virtue
Exalted
@Paladin
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Instead of making another thread, I'll ask it here:
Does a team setup exist that can only fail? Perhaps not in every situation, but specifically in the harder end game content (STF, LRSF, for instance)? I was thinking of a team of nothing but empathy defenders, simply for low DPS, but they do have damage buffs so they might still have 'uber pwnage skilz'.
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Yep, Smurphy is right as usual. 8 empathy defenders are beastly, almost as good as 8 rads. In fact, most buff/debuff sets are great stacked. The only exceptions I can think of to this would be stacking forcefield or sonic, since 2 of them is enough to get you to the (soft)cap.
In terms of teams that would be very difficult to finish a STF on, I can think of a couple.
All tanks would be very, very difficult. Mostly for ghost widow. Low damage, combined with everyone needing to be in melee so she can heal off of all 8 of you would make her ridiculously hard to beat.
An all blaster team would be really tough too. No-one to tank the AVs would be a bad scenario.
I'm not specifically saying it would be impossible for these teams to complete an STF, but it would be very, very difficult.
8 rad/sonic or 8 emp/sonic defenders would get my vote.
To the OP.
As others have stated, you can 8-person teams work quite well, so long as you adapt your strategy according to the skill sets that the team has available.
Your proposed team with two tankers, two defenders, two blasters, a scrapper and controller looks good. When in doubt, a tanker for aggro management is a safe decision, and two tankers is *fantastic* aggro management when facing swarms of enemies like Nemesis army.
If a team doesn't have 1-2 blasters for AoE, then that can sometimes slow things down. Mind you, having a team of 4-5 scrappers makes for a team that mows through enemies. So it all depends on recognizing a good strategy for the given team, and then wash-rinse-repeat.
-Johnny