AR/Dev DUal Build help

My AR/Dev Blaster is on his way to 50 at this point, and along the way I managed to mess up not one but BOTH of his builds. With the consideration that I enjoy team play, while finding them often on the scarce side, one build was for Group/AoE damage, and one was for maximum Stealth and Single target burst damage. Since there are two builds, rather than put the full export from Mids, here are just the links:

Group build: Primary focus of AoE damage, with some team support (the leadership powers) Personal safety is a lower concern, because of higher probability of melee/support characters.

Solo build Primary focus, Stealth mobility and Single target burst damage. Defensive capability in greater demand

A couple of notes:

1) The levels of the slots are very likely NOT ACCURATE. Those two builds were reverse engineered from the current appearance at level 45. I DO NOT remember when I actually put them in, just that that is how they look currently.

2) I have already become aware of Stealth/Cloak being mutually exclusive. This is the first thing I plan to respec out of.

3) Flight is the preferred travel power in both cases.

A few quick thoughts after looking over your builds:

1. I recommend taking both buckshot and flamethrower in your solo build. Buckshot is great as an emergency power for keeping enemies away from you and flame thrower does very good damage. AR is light on single target damage so you really want all of your cones to make up for it (M30 Grenade is also useful but less so than the cones).

2. Neither Gun Drone nor Full Auto are up anywhere near often enough to make endurance a concern, replace the endurance redux SO with a second recharge SO. In your solo build you should give FA two recharge redux SOs as well.

3. Web grenade doesn't really need 3 imobilization enhancers. Against minions and lietenants they'll be dead before that and against bosses I find that slotting for snare is more useful since it gives almost the same effect without requiring it to be spammed as much.

4. I wouldn't bother 6-slotting Targeting drone. It's potentially useful if you're going to put in a Gaussian for the defense but in general you can get better usage of those slots elsewhere (especially since you seem to be doing an SO only build). Give it 2 To Hit SOs and an End Redux.

5. Trip mine is not that useful on most teams since it generally slows you down for little benefit

6. Time bomb is (IMHO) completely useless in any build

7. Maneuvers has no use for recharge reduction unless you plan to toggle it on and off during the middle of a fight or something wierd like that.

8. Consider switching tactics for Targeting Drone in your team build. In my experience Tactics is of limited utility on a team simply because most people will tune their character to give themselves sufficient accuracy without the assistance of teammates.

9. Take Caltrops in your solo build. Trust me, it's a wonderful power.

10. Remember you can put a stealth IO in sprint so you don't have to tie up a slot in Hover which could be put to better use.

-Adeon

Actually, this is still an SO build mainly because I've yet to get around to buying the IOs. Most of the powers that are siz slotted are done for set purposes.

I actually picked Time Bomb over trip mine because I'm unlickly to plant more than one explosive at any one time, either toe bombing on a team with Trip Mine, or setting Time Bomb solo because I can set it, pull back, and use a cone attack timed for the blast.

Actually, the recharge in Maneuvers ARE End Redux, I goofed in putting the Mids together.

Putting the Stealth IO in Sprint instead is an interesting idea, usually I take Sprint off my trays as soon as I hit 14, so I never thought of that.

Ah I see. Well for the AoE power you can probably get away with 5 slots. I have 5-slotted Positron's blasts in them and that provides a nice selction of set bonuses as well as a decent array of enhancment values.

Another thing: I'll admit I don't know a lot about IO sets, which ones are good for a Blaster, aside from apparently Positron's Blast?

It depends a lot on what you're looking for really. I mostly look for Recovery, Recharge and Ranged Defense. Accuracy can be useful although with an AR/Dev it's not truely needed. Health and Regeneration are useful as well but harder to get in really noticeable quantities. Other bonuses are hard to get in sufficient quantities to really matter.

For specific sets:
5-slot Positrons (or a Ragnarok if you have the cash) are great in your AoEs
6-slot Thunderstrikes are a good choice for you single target attacks (and Gun Drone), Sniper rifle is iffy depending on if you want Interrupt reduction or not.
Blessing of the Zephyr has some powerful bonuses for only two slots, plus it's one of the places you can get a KB resistance IO
4-slotted Dark Watchers Dispair is a good choice for Smoke Grenade.

There are some other good ones but that's what I recall off the top of my head. I recently posted my AR/Dev build in another thread, you might want to take a look (scroll down to the last post which has the final version). I'm taking a different tack from you but a lot of the slotting would work anyway.
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=185266

As with everything it's a trade off. I chose to increase Recovery, Recharge and Defense in place of Regeneration and Health. For a while I had several Devastations in my build for the Health and Regeneration but I ended up swapping them for Thunderstrikes since I decided I liked Recovery and defense more. That being said slotting single target attacks with three Devastations and 2 Entropic Chaos IOs would give a decent amount of Regen and Health. Similarly for my travel powers I prefer Blessing of the Zephyr for the defense bonuses.

I did want to increase the number of slots in Health but in the end I decided those slots were more useful elsewhere.

When it comes to set bonuses I think the best advice is pick a couple of different ones and focus on those. The benefits from each bonus are pretty small so you really want them to be nitcieable you need to stack different instances of the same bonus.

Positron's blast actually has Recovery not Regen by the way.

Very nice. I'm running about 26% on mine + another 6% or so if I remember to throw a smoke grenade. I could get it higher but I confess to sacrificing some slots in the name of what I want rather than what I need.

Hm. Looking at the Ranged Defense sets, those are all in the sixth slot, However, the biggest bonuses come from powers the Solo build already has six slotted, save for Caltrops.

It looks like I might not need to bother slotting Body Armor, since I only loose 3.2% resist to S/L. May drop a -KB Enh in there instead.

So, now I'm thinking build toward Ranged Defense in my Solo, and Recovery/Recharge in my group build. That sound Viable?

Pretty much although it's worth building a bit of Recovery/Recharge into your Solo build as well. You definetly want a -KB IO, but for your solo build the one in Blessing of the Zephyr might be more useful since the set has some defense bonuses so putting it in helps anyway. For Body Armor the Steadfast Protection +3% defense IO is always useful.

Alright, new solo build:

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Damn it, I've seen Mids work on the new board. What am I missing?