Dark/Dark Defender. Any recomendations?

Tar patch at lvl 1, gloom at lvl 2, DN at lvl 4.

All the "r u he4lorz?" can go jump. That's all you really need to get by with for a long while. Just add the rest of your powers at your leisure. Dark is a ridiculously early blooming set as far as keeping people alive goes.

I weep when I see D3s that are 20+ who still don't have tar patch and DN. Just those two powers give you SO much control, damage boosting and damage mitigation it's silly and they are perma very quickly, as long as people understand anchors. I'd 6 slot tar patch asap with recharge TO's and switch to 3 recharge 3 slow when you get DO's and SO's and start doing missions that are +2/+3. Beautiful, beautiful power.

Unthing,

I was never good at the number crunching for these games so can you please clarify something for me from your post?

You suggest its not a good idea to slott to hit debuffs in the single target attacks and that anything over a 45% de buff is not needed?

As a Defender my damage output is never going to be that great and anyway its not my role so I figured that the best use of the slots for those blasts (apart from accuracy and recharge stuff) is to slot em heavy for the debuff.

Like I said, numbers are not my game so please forgive me if this is a stupid question?

Any debuff over 45% is pointless because a 45% debuff will floor an enemy to hit. However as someone correctly pointed out earlier on in the thread the debuffed is reduced against higher level enemies. They are about 50% effective against +4s.

I think all the dark blasts debuff by around 9.3% for defenders against even levels, which is pretty respectable.

My reason for suggesting not slotting the single target attacks for debuff is that the only things that survive long enough to be neutralised by the debuff are AVs and bosses. Lts and Minions are usually wiped out by your teammates before the debuff gets up to a respectable level. Slotting Nightfall or TT for to hit debuff is different, as there you can hit the entire spawn. Slotting Fearsome stare is even better as it has double the effect.

So let's say we have unslotted ( for to hit debuff ) Nightfall, Fearsome Stare and TT, 3 slotted Darkest night. We have about 35% debuff from the 3 cones and a 29.25% debuff from Darkest Night. So we have a 65% to hit debuff applied in total to the spawn.
For the nasty enemy in the spawn, say a boss or AV you are also using Twilight Grasp ( 9.3% debuff? ), Dark Blast and Gloom ( 9.3% debuff each ) on him. That's a 93% debuff, which is enough to floor the to hit of even a reasonable high level AV ( +4 is about 50% effectiveness which puts it down to 46.5%, still cappped ) and I've only slotted one power for to hit buffs so far.

For any of these powers other than Fearsome stare a single to hit debuff adds 1.875 to the total, whereas slotting in Fearsome Stare adds 3.75.

So I'd only suggest slotting the AoEs for to hit debuffs. On my newly created D3 I'm only going to slot Darkest Night and Fearsome Stare for to hit debuffs, FS also gets recharges though. The other AoEs I'm going to put recharges in to make sure they are debuffing the whole spawn as well as damage. The single targets attacks I'm going to slot for damage ( debuffing hitpoints protects to team too ).

I think that Nightfall and TT are probably also worth slotting for damage, as any AoEs are good for team play. I would suggest that FS, Nightfall and TT probably should be 6 slotted anyway, whether you are going for damage, debuff or control. You are better off maximising the debuff to the whole group rather than just 1 or 2 enemies.
If you are going to ignore damage and go full on for debuff, you need a mix of acc, to hit debuff and recharge. IIRC the debuff duration on Nightfall is 10 seconds, TT is 8 seconds and Fearsome Stare is 20 seconds. I think this means that Fearsome Stare needs 3 recharges, Nightfall needs 1 and TT needs 2 to keep the debuff perma. The rest can be put in to hit debuffs and acc. with 1 ACC this gives you an 85% AoE debuff with the 3 cones and Darkest night.

Sorry for the long post.

This is all assuming that you can stack all those powers which is really dependant on what sort of chain you can make out of them. I'm not /dark so can't comment but I suspect it will be hard to have them all debuffing at the same time all of the time?

nofuture.org.uk gives activation times of 1, 1.1, 1.67 and 2 for Dark Blast, Gloom , TT and Nightfall respectively. IIRC the debuff durations for Corruptors from the Prima guide are 8-10s for these same powers

This is about 6 seconds worth of animation every 8-10 seconds.

Fearsome stare and Twilight Grasp have durations of about 20 seconds, they have activation times of 2 and 2.6 seconds. So fitting these in may mean that you miss out on one of the other powers for some of the time.

I haven't got TT or Nightfall yet though.

It also ignores fluffy who, in an AV situation where he uses everything on one target, and is standing next to that target because of summoning/tping him there, is quite capable of doing at least as much debuffing as the rest of a D3's powers put together, with his Darkest Night, TG, TT, all of which iirc, according to the figures in the Prima villains download, were defender strength debuffs, and his Chill of the Night, which is a 30% to hit debuff unenhanced.

Basicly, with him up and used well, hitting the cap isn't going to be a problem.

So let me get this straight.

The general feeling is that Unthing is correct, I can happily slot my blast attacks with damage and still have kick butt debuffing going on as well?

Absolutly.