Night Widow vs Fortunata

I know the first is scrapper like, and the second is a ranged control freak, but from the people who have one at 50...which do you find more enjoyable.

Also, anyone have one of these as their favorite villain?

I ask, because I haven't rolled one yet and played it beyond lvl 5 or so. Didn't have time w/ other projects. Now I'm thinking of going with one, but not sure if I wanna start lvl'ing one up to 50. Fear of disappointment I suppose.

TL'DR: Do they solo well? Are they powerful?

Tourettes

Personally I find the fortunata more fun; it is the more versatile of the blood widow options. My fortunata is my favorite character IMO while leveling up they are fairly mediocre. Once some effort and inf is dedicated, we can do most of the crazy things you see scrappers doing.

Powerful? Solo? Most certainly! With SOs I was able to do the RWZ challenge fairly easily. After working on the build for a while, taking down AVs and even pylons in RWZ was possible. However, its is neither easy nor cheap.

If you're trying to decide between NW and fort. Fortunatas are a cross between mind controllers and psi defenders, but with good defenses! Its the safe route as you can spend most of your career out of melee range/kiting. Night Widows are like claw/spines sr scrappers. Night Widows put out significantly more damage against single targets due to the powers having much better damage per activation time. In a team setting it can be argued that Fortunatas are better; they have a PBAE confuse, and a nuke that doesn't drain end, plus can take spin, psynado, dart burst, and psyscream.

I love my Night Widow, can't stand the fort build.

Forts are harder to perma ML, less damage, an imo jus not as fun.

Try them both, with dual builds you have nothing to loose

Thanks for the input. Gonna go roll one now.

Tourettes.

I prefer the Night Widow build, but like others have said, there's no need to choose with dual builds.

Every time I play my Night Widow a little bit of wee comes out.

I tried to like Fortuna, I love confusion (one of my favorite toons is a plant dom), but I just found it too difficult to level, so shelved it for a long time. Eventually I came back and switched over to Nightwidow. The Nightwidow owns. I swear I'm more survivable at 40 than my IOed out SM/WP brute who has about 10 purples. I can't quite keep up damage wise when he's got full fury going, but on the other hand I've got a ton of team buffs, where he's got none, and some nice debuffs in the attacks as well.

I think both Fortuna & Nightwidow are a little weak right after the forced respec at 25, maybe up to 35, but my Nightwidow was much easier than the Fort. I'm definitely going to try out the alt build with Fortuna again after I hit 50, but I just can't see how it could be as effective in any situation besides a farm. If I really want control my plant dom would be far better at doing it, and he's no slouch at putting out the damage after i15 either.

One last thing about it... Nightwidow seems like an extention of Bloodwidow which you've been playing up to 25 to get there, and Fortuna plays like a totally different class, which can really throw you for a loop.

So I'd say try Nightwidow first, and if you don't and don't like the Fortuna, switch first before giving up on it.

I leveled up as a pure psi/control Fort from 1 to 50. I really enjoyed it, but after I had the character's build pretty much done I decided to make a pure claws attacks alt Widow build. The Widow kills a bit faster, they're both soft capped where they need to be without Mind Link, and the Fort has more toys to play with. Really, I don't think either is better or worse than the other, they're just different. If you like melee pick Widow. If you like mind bullets pick Fort. If you like both then there's always dual builds.

You shouldn't need Elude on a decent Night Widow, Even the extra recovery isn't needed.

Fair enough. I was doing the challenge on my Fort playing as a Scrapper, sort of heh. It's pretty hard that way even with my softcapped, perma ML Fort. I guess it was to test out my raw survivability, the only moving around I did was to position my cones.

Don't get me wrong, I usually play my Fort involving lots of kiting. Things don't usually hit as hard from range. And for that ITF challenge, as much as I love Scrappers, the SoA would wipe the floor with them.

The idea of the RWZ Challenge was to be a general stress test from Scrapper builds. Not completing the challenge didn't invalidate a specific build, but it was meant to be a learning experience, to see what one can be done and what can be improved. It was created with the Scrapper AT in mind. Other ATs have decided tried to do it, with mixed results. Some ATs do better on it, while others might need some tweaking for better performance. And some ATs also put in some of their own "AT rules" that are more applicable for that AT (such as allowing kiting or not).

When the VEATs came around, their abilities allowed them to achieve soft-capped defenses easily, which are considered the target damage mitigation strategy for any kind of high-level challenge. I don't think there are any other ATs out there as whole that hit the soft-cap as easily (some individual sets, possibly). With such a high level of survivability, all that is needed is some damage dealing and the toon is set.

Now to throw a challenge like a speed ITF would against scrappers wouldn't actually be fair. Individually, there might be a fair challenge in that, but in groups the victory would most likely be given to VEATs because the archetype is heavily based on teaming. With each VEAT buffing each other, something that most scrappers cannot do easily, the team challenge is definitely stacked in the VEATs' favor.

If you want to PvP on one, then I would recommend the Night Widow because of Elude. You'll at least have a chance not to get three shotted by a Fire/SS Tank with it up.

I just hit 50 with my first character a few nights ago and started a Widow.

In order to get my first toon just right I had to respec and rebuild several times. I'd rather avoid doing this with my Widow.

I plan on having one build for Night Widow and one for Fortunata. Can anyone point me to a link or where I can find good suggested builds for these?

I've played a dual build, switching both off for the other at multiple times during the character's career before some bugs kicked in on the character and I deleted her in fear of losing my account for potentially exploiting them. I'll assess what I gathered from the Widows, bear in mind the Fortunata I built was not a hybrid like a few Forts I've seen.

Oh, and Gryndle, don't worry. You have to respec at 24, but it's free. So don't worry.

Night Widow
Pros:
-Quick attack cycle
-Mental Training and conditioning work well together, faster attack rate with higher base endurance and health regen.
-Comparatively fast movement (with Mental Training)
-Potential to one shot kill most minions, lieutenants and a few bosses
-Single target offensive juggernaut
-Smoke bomb spam when Placate isn't an option
Cons:
-With a quick attack cycle, if not IOed right she'll turn into an Endurance sink.
-Requires massive amounts of Infamy to fine tune to one's liking.
-Uses armor made of paper, comparatively fragile when put against burlier classes.
-Little ranged potential means that in PvP you'll get little respite.

Fortunata
Pros:
-Good Soft Control
-Good Hard Control
-Tons of Buffs
-Vengeance as a class feature
-Slow enemy recharge
-Decent AoE crowd control, their T9 offensive is a mass hold
Cons:
-Slower attack cycle than the widow
-Little melee potential, consider taking air superiority if you take flight to keep enemies on the ground and away from you.
-Expensive to IO out.
-Not very PvP oriented, but if you can build a fort for PvP, there's a bit of a fear factor there, like taking a Kheldian in and kicking much butt.

Universally though, a team of villains is a team of specialists working together in concert for the greater evil. A Widow, and a Soldier of Arachnos both have their place there. Paired with diverse skills and different builds you can use for each, you can utterly destroy the competition, and look damned stylish while you're doing it.