Fastest and safest controller sets....

Is Ill/Kin the fastest and safest combo?

I currently have a lvl 29 Ill/Kin, a lvl 31 mind/FF, a level 32 ice/storm, a lvl 23 plant/thermal and a level 20 fire/rad.

I know some of these are lower level and don't have their level 32 pets, but to me it just seems like when you look at the speed and safeness of leveling the Ill/Kin is the best and I don't even have my phantasm yet....I can't imagine killing any faster then I am now.


What does everyone else think is the fastest and safest combos and why.

I am currently also leveling an earth/sonic (level 6) and a plant/TA (level 3).

Safest? Probably. Fastest? No. Fire/Kin is probably the fastest, most-damaging controller unless you've got a rather large team of F/Rads going all at once.

Safest... I would think ill/rad or ill/FF or something.

IMO

Ill/Rad is the safest.

Fastest is Fire/Kin ,FS'd imps are a nightmare.

ILL/Rad is soooo safe.
That's it.

Ill/Rad
Earth/Rad
Its safe to say anything rad at this point.

The controller AT is pretty much a "safe" bet if you don't aggro everything before the tank. By that I mean spamming soft aoe holds on every mob before the tank. Rad is pretty strong when all the debuffs line up even then I would tell you to be careful as many have died, trying to be the "tank".

Are you looking at solo, in a group or both? For solo I would say mind is probably the safest - with 3 single target lockdowns by L6 (mesmerize, dominate and confuse), two of which are long duration, and an AE lockdown that can be up nearly every spawn available by level 8 (mass hypnosis) its pretty hard to beat for safe soloing.

For groups I would tend to echo the previous posts - anything /rad is fairly safe, just take radiation infection and use it all the time. Illuison is a good primary for soaking up alpha's but only once you get phantom army - prior to that you have to lean on decieve a lot.

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Illuison is a good primary for soaking up alpha's but only once you get phantom army - prior to that you have to lean on decieve a lot

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QFT.

To mess up on an Ill/rad once it's built means you either brain farted something, or you were pushing the envelope and that's not really messing up.

Fire/Rad is pretty darned easy once you get your recovery under controls

Across most areas of the game:
Ill/rad is probably the safest
Fire/kin is generally the fastest

However, plant is getting my vote for it being the best all round package - very safe and very fast and it is that way from lvl 8 on.

I've solo'ed Rikti Pylons on my Ill/Rad (Course no Inspirs), This thread got me wondering about the other ATs survivability in doing it. Mind? Jack? Stoney?

Plant/rad is safe as heck. Purple bubbles (Seeds of Confusion) on bad guys heads, and it's up every spawn (big spawns twice). Murdery Viney Death (Creepers) coming from the ground killin' Knockdowning, Immobing everything, and it follows you around MUHAHA!!! I don't even really use my Rad powers all that much other than AM.... You know Plant/Rad maybe to dang easy......

Great feedback.....I was thinking (based on my limited experience) that Ill/Kin was almost a perfect blend of safe and fast....but I will have to try out some of the other combos as well.

I am now wondering how a fire/ice troller will work.

Illusion/FF is so safe you'll almost fall asleep.

Seriously, it's a good combination, and very powerful; I just kind of got tired of it around level 38 and haven't managed to get back into since. It's a great combo for early leveling when soloing, as you get some really nice powers early.

The bad part about /FF is that you can make a team almost invincible just with your secondary. You'll feel like you don't even need your primary most of the time. It can get very boring.

I found Illusion/Storm to be the safest thing I've played, followed by Earth/Storm and maybe Plant/Storm. Ill/Kin ( she's at 47 ) actually plays a lot closer to the edge of survivability because she has to be right there in the middle of things without the hard controls to stand it easily. Maybe it's just that I've had a lot of practice with the Storm set, but it seems that even though it grabs a LOT of agro it manages to handle that agro better than anything else I've played. Freezing Rain + any other AoE control, followed by a Lightning Storm from above and maybe Hurricane or Snowstorm if things get hot pretty well neuters any mob out there.

For Illusion/Storm since you don't really have much in the way of other AoE( I find Spectral Terror makes things flee often enough to make me save it for special occasions ), I get a lot of millage out of Blind, spectral wounds, deceive something else, spectral wounds the blinded target, then blind again to restart the cycle. PA is pretty amazing, but isn't always up so you need to work at getting other effective control strategies for the times it's not.

When you say 'fastest' to you mean fastest at clearing a given map as a lvl 50, or fastest leveling up from 1 to 50?

Fire/Kin seemed to be painfully slow leveling up until you get your imps at lvl 32. Charring mobs to death is painfully slow.

Often this kinda question leads either to people arguing over hidden assumptions, or pretending it's possible for more than one person to be right when two disagree (it's not.)

But whether you're soloing or big-teaming is a big factor.

Related is the question of whether you're really talking about kills/hour (some people think this matters) or XP/hour. It's related for this reason: teaming, especially when built and played for as a preferred approach, is vastly, vastly much faster than soloing. Which shouldn't be surprising-- the game, regardless of reassuring meaningless remarks from devs from time to time, is overwhelmingly oriented to team play.

A third factor is whether you're talking about pre- or post-32. Illusion and especially Fire gain a huge uptick in damage output (= speed either way) at 32. Others don't-- e.g., Mind, which doesn't even keep up with the norm, but is very fast early on.

Finally, in a lot of ways "safest" doesn't mean much. Debt itself is negligable. Solo every controller should be safe on invincible after 22 or so. Teaming is a different question, of course, but on a team, you have teammates to help you recover if you die.

Here's my short answer:

Fastest primary solo is between Illusion and Fire, though pre-32, Mind, probably Plant, heck maybe even Grav, belong in that mix. Fastest primary on 3+man teams is Plant.

Safest primary solo at any level is Mind. Safest primary on 3+ man teams is a tie between Ice and Earth.

Fastest secondary, regardless of team size is almost certainly Kin.

Safest secondary solo is probably FF, thanks to PFF alone. Sonic, and probably Thermal and maybe even TA (I don't know as much about those sets), join FF on bigger teams.

If you were looking for product of fastest and safest... the thing is, almost any controller primary makes solo completely safe-- that is, though Mind's the best, you don't need the best.

So solo [fastest x safest] is the same as solo fastest: Illusion/kin and Fire/kin, with others prior to 32, esp. Mind/kin. Big team [fastest x safest], is more arguable. I would put forward Plant/Rad & Plant/Storm.

Should get a Mod to sticky this for people.