Is this really dumb?

*sigh*

The criticism isn't because you don't like to buff. Noone said you have to like buffing to be a controller. You can just not play buffing sets, as you stated. That is a personal choice and understandable.

The criticism is thinking the only thing important for a controller is the primary. Debuffs are just (if not more) as important as buffs. The point many of us are making is that you need both primary and secondary (whatever it is) to be an all around controller. TA and Storm are incredible sets and aren't buff sets...but you need to use them.

Don't take it now and when i16 is up and running respec into it and change the colors of it to red or orange that way it will look like fire?

Well, I should speak only for myself then.

And that is fine, I've said that's fine. But you are not invited to a team to only control. That's my one and only point. My mind/sonic controller is a total workout in the clickiness category and I don't play her in very long sessions as she can be tiring. Totally get that. The only point I'll even argue here is what a controller is asked to do on a team: that's be a controller....not just control.

I agree with Local here. You're not invited just to Control. There's the whole problem of what you do if and when you team with any sort of really good Tank backed with some good support. A decent tank can easily make your Control fairly unnecessary (as can any team with a couple more controllers on it). At that point your secondary can often be more important to the team than your primary.

Not an attack on you or anything, but I know from experience (especially with my Grav/TA) that on really good, well balanced Steamrolling teams more control can basically be unneeded (what I do then is get bored and start Wormholing extra spawns on top of the Tank too).

Fire/Rad is a great aggressive combo and might lend itself to your concept better.

wait for i16 so you can recolor freezing rain to be fire.

So, I say that I DO agree that the secondary is important and that it should be utilized, and that I do utilize it, and people are still arguing as if I don't??

If I didn't care about my secondary I wouldn't have made this thread in the first place since I'm asking about a secondary power.

How many times am I going to have to say it?

Freezing Rain is arguably my favorite power in the whole game. Like others have said you could play without it, but it's contribution, especially at early levels, and most especially on teams is something you probably couldn't overestimate.

I had a friend who made an Illusion/Storm character once that was a concept build, and he left out some of the most recommended powers. That character basically caused team wipe after team wipe because it couldn't do it's job properly. This from a combination that in my hands is stronger and more capable than anything else I've played. Leaving out Freezing Rain on a Fire/Storm probably won't be that bad, but you will be much less useful to your team than if you had taken it. You would need to take all three leadership toggles to sort of make up for what it does for you, except that Maneuvers, Assault, and Tactics all together won't actually do as much as FR does on it's own. It's that good.

I take it you aren't planning on taking Snowstorm either based on what you said in the original post. Honestly you could leave out one or the other, but /Storm without both really will pretty much completely gimp you. Your ability to mitigate damage will be severely impacted with out one or the other, and O2 boost was never meant to heal through the kind of damage you won't be mitigating.

I wouldn't recommend taking /storm and not taking either Freezing Rain or Snowstorm. But, I'm biased, I love Freezing Rain to death (and to a lesser extent, Snowstorm). I'd look into recoloring Freezing Rain, like suggested earlier. It's just that good of a power.

That being said...it is a possible build, but you'll get more bang for your buck if you're skipping those to focus on micromanaging the other powers to make up for lack of mitigation and debuff from them. For example, learn how to brush badguys with Hurricane, and then switch it off and use the 'run away!' in Hot Feet to keep you relatively safe. Basically, it'd make your life harder.

Not impossible, say, but harder.

'Course I also love bizarre builds (I've been known to take Jump Kick and use it in my attack chain, a completely 'natural' scrapper with no travels and only Fitness as a pool power, and I have Provoke on a corr), so...take my advice with a grain of salt.

Your other option? Therm with none of the buffs. Except for maybe Thaw or Forge. I understand not liking to buff, though most of my characters are buff heavy...but sometimes, I just want to shoot/control/smash things in the face. And before people get cranky, I actually will occasionally duo with someone with a therm corr with nothing but Forge and the heals. He actually works well, and can keep himself and others alive. It's just different than normal.

And I have a high fire/rad cont. I refuse to bother giving people warning for AM. Either they're close or they're not. Tough beans, they should be ok without my buffs. If I'm feeling nice, I'll try to get next to someone with end issues. ...maybe. Buffs are nice, but not vital to playing, and are certainly not what my fire controller is about. I made her to burn things up, not wait for people to gather around me while I fire off my AoE heal or buff.

OP you should play a fire/kin, I hear they are pretty hot.

And it's not like most of them use speedboost so no biggy if you skip it right?

As for fire/storm, you could easily skip snowstorm, I did on mine and never missed it. It is a defensively geared power on an offensively oriented build. However skipping freezing rain is putting a lot of gimp into your build.

Heh, I actually got a PM saying not to bother debating with you Enantiodromos because you pretty much thrive on debate and have inflated opinions on certain things and enjoy poking people with a caddle prod to get them to argue with you.

Really, all you're doing is basing everything on semantics and twisting my posts around to make me look like some sort of fool, and I don't see any point to it except to make other people feel like fools.

And as I've said TIME AND TIME AGAIN, I DO utilize my secondary. I DO feel it is an important part of your hero. I never said it wasn't. I only emphasized focus on the primary because you were so adamant in your position, but thanks for taking that and further assuming I don't use my secondary at all. That assumption is 100% false btw.

Anyway, I'm not going to respond to you anymore, because quite frankly in my eyes you're nothing more than a forum bully. Sure, you might think you're trying to "educate" me, but if such were the case there are much more polite and civil methods to educate people instead of being condescending and making them feel stupid.

Apologies if my OP was a bit hostile, but I figured I'd get my dislike of individual buffing powers out in the open right away because I knew eventually the cat would be let out of the bag and I would receive criticism anyway.

And just to clarify: I don't mind AoE buffs like AM or Empathy's auras. I just don't like the buffs like FF's or Thermals shields were I have to click, buff, click, buff, click, buff, etc. etc.

Anyway, I'm done explaining myself. You'll probably just twist this post around to further benefit whatever argument you're still clinging on to anyway.