Storms: Defender vs Controller Questions
By
Deep_T,
Posted on: 2009-08-11 08:20 in Archetypes and Powers General Discussion
Well, the info window does not show the pet abilities by default, but there should be a button/bit of text or something that you can click to get it to show the pet's powers. As for differences in summon powers between defender and controller storm...
Freezing rain, in the hands of a defender, has stronger slowing effects and debuffs resistance by 35% instead of 30%. Both defenders and controllers summon identical versions of tornado. Lightning storms summoned by a defender do about 10% more damage, drain slightly more endurance, and have a slightly stronger -recovery effect than those summoned by a controller.
It is true that, if you can get it to consistently stick to one foe over its lifetime, tornado can do a rather large amount of damage. Over its 30s lifetime, tornado will dish about 400 points of damage, unenhanced (by comparison, most defender nukes do less than 200, unenhanced). However, this is only true if it is able to grind on one foe the whole time. Tornado's knockback tends to hurl things out of range of its attack, and it has a rather ADD ai that causes it to switch targets often. This is usually a good thing if you want to use it to cause chaos in the enemy ranks while your team escapes or regroups, but bad when you want to use it to kill a boss.
To get tornado to focus on one target, you must do two things. You must remove all the other possible targets by killing the rest of the boss' spawn, and you must ensure that the boss cannot be knocked back. If it's an EB/AV, usually they are immune to knockback by default (but not always). If the boss is not, you must apply an effect that renders him immune to knock back - many holds and immobilizes carry this property. Specifically, among powers defenders have access to, the powers that have this property are: entangling arrow & ice arrow from trick arrow, freeze ray & bitter freeze ray from ice blast, and electric fence from the electric epic. These powers all prevent the target from being knocked back for 10 or 15 seconds.
In general, one major difference I note for storm on defenders as opposed to controllers is that hurricane becomes a much more important part of your arsenal. Lacking the mass mezzes common to controllers, hurricane combined with freezing rain become your bread and butter mob neutralization tools. Slot up hurricane for tohit debuff and practice shoving mobs into corners. Snow storm is very useful to keep mobs from running around too much while you debuff them with hurricane.
For storm, some common secondary choices are /ice, /dark, /elec, and /sonic.
Ice has two holds that prevent knockback allowing you to leverage tornado, and two extremely strong 'rain' powers that will do massive damage combined with freezing rain. If it had been available at the time I made my storm defender, he would have been storm/ice. If you already are leaning towards ice, you certainly can't go wrong with this secondary.
Dark has a lot of synergy with storm - it has a cone immobilize that does not prevent knockback, allowing you to immobilize things in your freezing rain. It has an AoE stun to stack with thunder clap. It has a minor self heal on a powerset that tends to draw fair amounts of aggro. It also has very good, steady aoe damage from its two quick-recharging cones. This is what my storm defender has as his secondary.
Elec's synergy mostly comes in the areas of endurance drain and thematics. Between lightning storm and your various electric powers, you can be a reasonably effective single target sapper (although not to the extent that a kin/elec can). Elec also has decent amounts of AoE damage, and is very thematically fitting.
Sonic is for those who just want to melt individual targets. With all of the resistance debuffs you can lay out, combined with storm's single target damage, you dish out a *lot* of damage to one target, and storm can also provide the tools to survive. Howl is also an important part of your arsenal, allowing you to lay an extra -20% resistance on an entire spawn for your team.
@MuonNeutrino
Student, Gamer, Altaholic, and future Astronomer.
This is what it means to be a tank!
I have been away from CoH for a long time. I have a level 50 Ice / Storms controller. A friend of mine has gotten me to try this game again and so I might make another character.
I have *never* played a defender. I really like storms though. I do like how they show you the numbers now, however, they do not show you the numbers for summons.
How does a tornado work as a defender opposed to a controller? Or the thunder storm?
I read some post that suggested that Tornado's did decent DPS, especially if a target had good knock-back resistance. Is this true?
In general, can someone give me a good overview of Storms and how it is different as a Defender instead of a controller?
Also what is a good secondary? I was thinking of waiting until they introduced those new secondaries or perhaps picking ICE since it seems to work with storms to some degree.