Hero side, easy grouping?

Hello, im fairly new, only had the game a couple of weeks. ive beein playin on the villain side and was wondering what AT is the easiest to find groups with? i love grouping and usually pick healer or buffer or cc. i was lookin at fire/kin or ice/kin controller or maybe kin/psi defender, are any of these good choices? thank you in advance.

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Hello, im fairly new, only had the game a couple of weeks. ive beein playin on the villain side and was wondering what AT is the easiest to find groups with? i love grouping and usually pick healer or buffer or cc. i was lookin at fire/kin or ice/kin controller or maybe kin/psi defender, are any of these good choices? thank you in advance.

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Well, first off: welcome to the game!

Well, when it comes to healing and buffing, there are few sets better than Empathy. However, of your choices, I would think that going Kin/Psi might be up your alley. Fire/Kin controllers are very popular, but some have negative associations with them due to their being used for farming a lot.

A totally out of left field idea may be to roll a Tank. If you are not afraid to play a melee role and lead a team, you should never be short on teammates... folks LOVE to team with a well-played tank.

Oh, and what did you mean when you said "CC"?

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ah, its crowd control, lockin down creatures/etc so you dont have to take on all of em at once, and thank you for the fast response. i did try a tank at first, didnt care for it. i tried the kin/psi its pretty fun so far.

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Well, in the tank's defense (and any AT really) it takes more than the first few levels to really see what the AT is all about.

Healer/Buffer/Crowd Control?

Earth/Thermal controller would fit that description pretty well.

Also, you're not locked into one or two characters. Roll up anything that sounds interesting or fun.

I like scrappers and blasters because I like the frenetic damage dealing types. Even my defenders and controllers tend to follow that theme, focusing more on damage dealing than team support (My controllers are Fire/Trick Arrow and Illusion/Force Field, my defender is Rad/Sonic)

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Welcome to the game!

Personally, I LOVE kinetics. Fun to play and fun to play with. With their heal slotted properly, the melee characters will love you. Same with transference for endurance. Most people, especially tanks, LOVE speed boost. Fulcrum shift is great as well. Wasn't sure about the set until last double XP weekend, I made a fire/kin just for fun with my SG mates, indending to delete him probably after the weekend. He's now level 50 and one of my favorites still to play. The last few weeks trying to level up my Warshade, I gotta say I love what a kinetic can do to my character. Plus the powers in the set can help mitigate travel if you want to try and go for a travel-power-less build.

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Rad or Dark defender. Hands down.

Fire/Kin won't be useful till 22 (SB) 32 (imps) and 38 (FS) for farming teams. They've got mediocre use as controllers before that.

Rads and Darks are useful from level 1 on. I invited a level 6 rad to a farm last night and he left the team a few hours later at level 41... and he was a great asset from minute #1.

Don't go empath. For the love of god, don't go empath.

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Rad or Dark defender. Hands down.

Fire/Kin won't be useful till 22 (SB) 32 (imps) and 38 (FS) for farming teams. They've got mediocre use as controllers before that.

Rads and Darks are useful from level 1 on. I invited a level 6 rad to a farm last night and he left the team a few hours later at level 41... and he was a great asset from minute #1.

Don't go empath. For the love of god, don't go empath.

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Why would someone not recommend an empath? They are pretty darned useful. They offer a huge complement of buffs and some of the best healing in the game (if you are into that).

And who asked about farming? Please keep your PLing away from the newer players to this game.

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Why would someone not recommend an empath? They are pretty darned useful. They offer a huge complement of buffs and some of the best healing in the game (if you are into that).

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A) Because they're pidgeonholed by poor players into "healer" when that's not their main strength,
B) Because they're not a [u]force multiplier[u] like a dark or rad,
C) Because all they do is buff and blast, whereas dark and rad have significant CC-like abilities.

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And who asked about farming? Please keep your PLing away from the newer players to this game.

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So forget farming. I was teaching a friend how to play dark, and I was on a rad. We started a level 8 group with 3 scrappers, 1 troller, 1 dark 1 rad defender. We went into an AE mission full of big spawns of level 9 Council.

Scrapper agro'd early and wiped the team while dark was zoning in and rad was afk. Dark and rad cleaned the spawn, went up a floor and cleaned out 2 more spawns while the rest of the team got lost on floor one and died repeatedly. 2 defenders were shredding full spawns of +1's (sitting safely in a crowd of ~14 council at a time and tearing into them with sands of mu) at level 8 while 3 scrappers and a controller were getting torn up below. That's *hardly* the most amazing example I can give you, but it is a recent one.

Swap both the dark and the rad for empaths and you'd go slower, die more often, etc.

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So forget farming. I was teaching a friend how to play dark, and I was on a rad. We started a level 8 group with 3 scrappers, 1 troller, 1 dark 1 rad defender. We went into an AE mission full of big spawns of level 9 Council.

Scrapper agro'd early and wiped the team while dark was zoning in and rad was afk. Dark and rad cleaned the spawn, went up a floor and cleaned out 2 more spawns while the rest of the team got lost on floor one and died repeatedly. 2 defenders were shredding full spawns of +1's (sitting safely in a crowd of ~14 council at a time and tearing into them with sands of mu) at level 8 while 3 scrappers and a controller were getting torn up below. That's *hardly* the most amazing example I can give you, but it is a recent one.


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So...you left your teammates below dying while you and your buddy went on? Great teamwork!!

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So forget farming. I was teaching a friend how to play dark, and I was on a rad. We started a level 8 group with 3 scrappers, 1 troller, 1 dark 1 rad defender. We went into an AE mission full of big spawns of level 9 Council.

Scrapper agro'd early and wiped the team while dark was zoning in and rad was afk. Dark and rad cleaned the spawn, went up a floor and cleaned out 2 more spawns while the rest of the team got lost on floor one and died repeatedly. 2 defenders were shredding full spawns of +1's (sitting safely in a crowd of ~14 council at a time and tearing into them with sands of mu) at level 8 while 3 scrappers and a controller were getting torn up below. That's *hardly* the most amazing example I can give you, but it is a recent one.


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So...you left your teammates below dying while you and your buddy went on? Great teamwork!!

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It looks to me like it the teamates left them.... perhaps a glass empty/full thing... but my rule is the people who are still standing after the wipe are the people who everyone should have been following.

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I gotta make pain. I gotta make things right. I gotta stop what's comin'. 'Least I gotta try.

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So...you left your teammates below dying while you and your buddy went on? Great teamwork!!

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I think you're confusing teamwork and leadership; we'd cleared a path to the elevator and the defenders (including the team leader) went up. If the scrappers want to get lost on the first floor and tackle other spawns, I'm completely fine with that - I have many scrappers, and scrapperlock is good times.

I'm big on personal responsibility; getting in over their heads is their own problem at that point, and is part of the learning curve. It's not my responsibility to run around enabling people who are going the wrong direction when the team lead is pushing toward the objective. They did benefit from the exp we were generating on the floor above... and on the plus side it gave my friend the opportunity to work on toggle pulling without any banzai scrappers around! Eventually they figured out where the 'm' key was (after dying twice each trying to handle one spawn in a different hallways), found the elevator, and no more deaths the rest of the mission. Running the opposite way from your debuffers is not really wise at level 8. At level 40+, I would have done the same thing, except they would have actually been wiping spawns out without my help

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To the OP:

Welcome to City of * !
This game doesn't work quite like other games. If healing can double "how survivable the team is", buffing can quintuple it. At the low levels, healing is "the answer" but, by level 22, buffing becomes much more valuable. [If you look at an Empathy Defender, they have a lot of healing powers at low levels, and a lot of buffing powers at higher levels. This is not an accident.]

Additionally, a "support character" is expected [by the l33t kids on the forums anyway] to contribute to both defense and offense. People who build "pure support" or "pure healing" or whatever tend to be... underemployed and unhappy.

For the specifics you asked about:

Kinetics is the least-defensive, most-offensive Defender primary [or Controller secondary if you prefer] there is. You can make enemies do 20% less damage, roughly... and you've got a big heal that sometimes goes off near the people who need it, when they need it, and hits. Those are your defensive tools. Of course, your team doesn't need as much defending because their big hitters are up much more often, they don't run out of endurance, and they are doing tremendously more damage when they hit.

I don't play controller primaries. Rumors have it that Fire is extra-damagey and Ice is extra-controlly but you'd have to ask someone who knows what they're talking about for more details.

/Psi for defenders is interesting- it's decent damage and it has a couple of very dramatic slows, one as a nice big cone. So you can get good protection out of your blasts. Psi damage is very effective on some otherwise tough badguys [people in power armor, for instance] but very ineffective on some other badguys [like robots.] If you're OK with flipping between "twice the damage of everyone else" and "half the damage of everyone else" then go for it.

My personal recommendation for a "support" character, if the field is open to anything, would be a Rad/Sonic Blast defender. There's a reason Jock Tamson's guide for it is called "Best at Everything."

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Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.

So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.

I think Earth/Thermal is the way to go. Massive Control. Heals. Buffs. Debuffs.

Lewis

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Random AT Generation!
"I remember... the Alamo." -- Pee-wee Herman
"Oh don't worry. I always leave things to the last moment." -- The Doctor
"Telescopes are time machines." -- Carl Sagan

Radiation is definitely a nice set. It has some of everything in it.

I wouldn't dismiss Empathy as strongly as others though. You have a very nice damage/to-hit-defense buff in Fortitude, which can be slotted so that four of your teammates are buffed and deal an additional 30% damage, along with being more accurate and have more defense. Radiation and Dark lets you multiply damage, like someone else said, but it does have its drawbacks. When steamrolling through spawns, you'll find plenty of times where your damage-multiplying powers aren't ready. It can be a bit frustrating when you're applying Enervating Field to a mob, and just as it's taking effect, the mob dies and you have to wait several seconds for the power to recharge. Likewise with Tar Patch, you'll find you can lay one down and, if you're on a good team, blaze through the spawn and be at the next one before your tar patch is ready. They're absolutely great sets, but like all sets, they do have their minor drawbacks.

If you really like healing and want to play someone who does a lot of physical healing, then Empathy will give you a lot of it. I'd just recommend supplementing that healing with other buffs like Fortitude (to increase damage, accuracy, and defense), and the leadership line for yet even more buffs. That's if you have an affinity towards healing. If you're just looking for a buffing/debuffing support character in general, then the other powersets will offer more to the teams.

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Arc ID#30821, A Clean Break

The only problem with defeating the Tsoo is that an hour later, you want to defeat them again!
"Life is just better boosted!" -- LadyMage
"I'm a big believer in Personal Force Field on a blaster. ... It's your happy place." -- Fulmens

thank you all for the replies, being new just wasnt sure what works well and what doesnt.

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One warning: There's a difference between "A lot of people will invite you to their team" sets and "people you enjoy playing with will invite you to their team" sets.

Many people come to this game, start collecting what "they need" ('healers' and tanks) and play very badly and refuse to listen to any advice. If you play Empathy you may come to lose any actual empathy for these people, very rapidly.

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Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.

So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.