Silas can HURRRT ME MOOOOOOORE SNAKE and so can you!

Alright so here is the deal. I was originally going to make my third guide about Thermal but I see so much hate for Pain Dom I had to give the poor lil fella some love. People hate on Pain primarily because its not as good as Empathy.
If you ask me, that’s exactly where the problem lies. Pain is not villain Empathy. Yes, I know the devs said that’s what it’s supposed to be. Tough. It’s not. Unless you think Empathy is about the leet heals and having a rez, in which case Congratulations! You are Doing It Wrong™.

If anything, I think Pain is best described as a lower maintenance Thermal with different buffs (that are either worse or better, depending on team makeup/situation).

What everyone seems to have forgotten with the release of Pain is just how much people shat on Thermal for not being as good as Empathy. Resistance buffs? Har, nowhere near as handy as defense buffs. No Adrenaline Boost? lol. No Regen/Recov Auras? Haha, the devs hate villains. Oh man and the rez KBs enemies, hilarious.

But now people seem to understand Thermal better and judge it on its own merits for what it is, a hybrid support set which sacrifices a lot of the defensive capabilities of Empathy for offensive capabilities. Pain is not villain empathy, its Pain and should be judged according to its own virtues, just like Thermal is.

What Pain Is:

• Not Empathy.

• Seriously.

• Can’t stress this enough.

• An alternative to Thermal in the following ways:

• o Team resistance buffing
• o AoE debuffing
• o Heals/rezzing/keeping people unmezzed

• A support set with a much more interesting playstyle than Emp or Therm, imo.


Why Pain Is Awesome And You Want To Be One:

• Easily perma-able team +res +tohit that also effects you

• AoE –def –res debuff

• The boring stuff (PBAoE Heal, ally heal, rez, CM) from Emp and Therm with an interesting new slant

• Awesome single Ally +regen +recov +damage buff. I want to say more about this, but will save it for the section of the power itself.

• Aesthetics. Not gonna lie, Pain looks awesome as hell.

• A whole slew of self +damage buffs to reward you for doing half your job with the ability to do the other half of your job better.

• Similar capabilities to Thermal but being much lower maintenance. (More on this later)

Powers:

Nullify Pain: PBAoE team +heal

Slotting Recommendation: 5 Doctored Wounds. Skip the recharge, it recharges plenty fast on its own. You do want to max out the healing and end rdx though, and the DW set is good because it offers recharge and healing bonuses.

How to Use: Well uh basically as an AoE heal. Not as strong as Twilight Grasp or Transfusion but respectable nonetheless. Use to heal yourself if you get smacked, use in the middle of several allies who need their health topped off. Put on Auto if you’ve got all these teeth in your mouth, right, and you just really want them kicked in.

Soothe: Ally heal

Slotting Recommendation: Same as Nullify, tbh. For much the same reasons.

How to Use: As well, an ally heal. At base heals for just under twice as much as Nullify (21% vs 11%, bear in mind these values are of the Corruptors base hp, not of the target healed which would be kind of nice but there you go) This is your all-purpose heal because Share Pain is more complicated in its use (more on this later, hee). Use if someone needs more healing than Nullify will provide (>1/4 of a squishies health, roughly)

Share Pain: Ally Strong heal, self Moderate damage +special, +damage. The heal is base 44% of your base hp, the +special is a 15 second -100% (-4.47hp/sec) regen debuff and 100% ResEffect (heal) for 15 seconds. The self moderate damage is about 83 points at 50. The damage buff is 25%. So you hit this, they get a huge heal, you take a minor hp hit, get a damage buff, regen debuff and can’t be healed for 15 seconds.

Slotting Recommendation: I went with 4 Numinas, mainly to get buff healing values, decent recharge as well as the hit points and heal bonus set bonuses.

How to Use: This is where things get fun. While I did not pick this up till 49, I get good use out of it. If you want to be hurf durf teh healer just use this if you need a big heal. And I mean big. Mine heals for over a thousand This means it will generally be overkill on squishies unless they’ve got a lot of +hp and are getting hammered like a [Insert Tasteless Analogy Here] Generally you’ll get better use out of the heal on this on brutes, tankers, WP/Invuln Scrappers, Serum-buffed Crabs and other people who are disgusting blobs of hp.

How to Use Not Like A Crap Empath: Well, I still use it as a huge heal, but its more interesting if you use it tactically as a self damage buff. I like to live dangerously, so I use this a fair amount to buff my own damage. Bear in mind its only a 25% buff and that’s to your base damage, so its hardly going to make you hit like Tyson, but you can stack it twice for an Aim like damage buff. Nothing overwhelming, but nice regardless. Nicer still stacked with the rez buff. You do have to be careful with this though. 15 seconds doesn’t seem like a long time, but it’s a lifetime when you’ve just pissed off a Chief Soldier.

Ways to Avoid Getting Splattered While Under the Debuff:

• Invest in some form of stealth. Superspeed is good, superspeed with a Celerity proc is better. If you’re a flier or superjumper putting stealth procs in these is still worthwhile.

• As tempting as it is, try and refrain from lobbing a fireball into a spawn before anyone else has gotten near it if you’re planning on using Share Pain anytime soon.

• While your regen is nixed and you can’t be healed, your defenses and resistances are still in full working order. So if you want to go a little crazy with Share Pain, eat some purples or make VEAT friends.

• Learn that sometimes discretion is the better part of valour Sometimes you’ll get unwanted aggro. **** happens. Know when to back off for little while. You’re no help to the team dead. I know it can be addictive, but do exercise a little restraint with Share Pain. You’ve gotta judge whether you’re on the kind of team where you can get away with it or not.

Conduit of Pain: Ally Rez, self +damage +recharge +recovery +tohit +special.

Slotting Recommendation: Base slot is fine with and end rdx or recharge. I went with one of each because I had a slot to spare.

How to Use: You know how Share Pain buffs you some and its kindof cool? This is that, but on crack. Oh and I guess it rezzes dead people or something? No, seriously though. Rezzes a dead ally, gives you zomgawesome buffs for 60 seconds. To the order of a 30% damage buff, 175% (2.92end/sec) recovery, 75% recharge and 20% tohit. For 60 seconds. Yes, awesome. Yes, you do get a 30% damage debuff and 20% tohit debuff for 30 seconds afterward, but that’s negligible in my experience. You’ll always be happy getting to use this. I mean, tempting as it is, but try to not let people die on purpose just so you have an excuse. Unless they’re giving you sass somethin’ fierce.

Enforced Morale: Ally +res Stun/Immob/Hold/Sleep/Fear/Confuse +perception +recharge +speed. The protection and movement boosts stack with additional applications, the +recharge and +perception do not. This isn’t a big deal as the recharge buff is 5% which is pathetic and should be ignored and made to feel bad.

Slotting Recommendation: One end rdx, one range enh.

How to Use: Keep on squishies depending on what you’re fighting. Duration is 90 seconds, it’s got a 4 second base recharge, it’s easy (if irritating) to keep on a whole team. Learn what mobs do and do not mez. Depending on what mobs you’re fighting, how much defense the team has, the presence of a ff/sonic dude who doesn’t suck and thusly has taken their mez prot bubble and how good the melee (if there is one/several) are at keeping stuff mad at them are, you can slack a little on keeping this up.

Soothing Aura(Corrs)/Suppress Pain(MMs): Toggle PBAoE +pathetically small heal for Corrs, +regen for MMs

Slotting Recommendation: Skip if you’re a corruptor, it’s pathetic. Fully slotted it’s an 80 point heal every few seconds. You yourself as a corruptor have 1070 hit points base at 50. Its like pissing into the ocean. Sure, it looks kinda cool and will keep you topped off from random shots that stray in your direction, but really, Nullify does this much better. Do pick it up if you’re a MM because it’s a 200% regen buff which while not huge is still pretty nice, almost 400% when slotted.

How to Use: As a Corruptor, don’t. If you must, it better be for set bonuses or aesthetics. As a Mastermind, do. Stand in the middle of the backliners/squishies so they get the regen buff. Think of yourself as a portable Triage Beacon/Regen Aura. Don’t stand in the middle of your pets (unless they’re thugs/bots/mercs and are backliners by virtue of their ranged nature) because their hitpoints are so low as to make the regen buff hardly worth it.

World of Pain: PBAoE team +res (all and placate) +tohit

Slotting Recommendation: Max out the recharge and resistance. I went with 3 res/rech IOs and a res/end/rech.

How to Use: Whenever it’s up, position yourself in the middle of as many team mates as you can and hit it. The resistance slotted up is about 17% which might not seem like a lot and well, it’s not. The way I see it, you’re getting about 5% less res than the thermal shields, but you’re getting +tohit and it’s a one-shot buff rather than needing to buff the entire team. Much less effort, slightly less reward is a trade I am totally okay with. The upside is it also buffs you, so with your patron shield you can get some pretty respectable smashing/lethal resistances.

Anguishing Cry: PBAoE foe –res (all) –def (all)

Slotting Recommendation: An Achilles –res proc, decent accuracy and defense debuff, maxed recharge.

How to Use: Run into the middle of a spawn, hit this, run out again (or stay in if there’s Fulcrums a-comin’) It’s a PBAoE Melt Armor with lower recharge and duration, basically. Use this as soon as it’s up on a nice big spawn to keep the team rolling. One thing to note is that it isPBAoE not ranged, so you are at a little risk of getting smooshed when using this. So again, exercise a teeny bit of judgment.

Painbringah: Ally +regen +recov +dam

Slotting Recommendation: Max out heal and recharge. I went with Doctored Wounds, skipping the Heal/End for the Recharge.

How to Use: Now, before anyone gets all up in my grill about this, no, I don’t think it’s better than Adrenaline Boost. Yes, I think it having a +dam component instead of +recharge is a crock. Regardless. It’s still a great buff and should be appreciated for its own merits.

So. Who to use it on? The regen/recovery is often best used on brutes because of their high hp and frequent high endurance consumption, but the damage buff portion is wasted on them because of their low base damage and Fury. Good choices due to high base damage would be Dominators, Blasters, Stalkers and Scrappers. However, many of these don’t make the best use out of the regen buff. So it depends on the makeup of the team. Look at how much damage people are doing, how much damage they’re taking, how much end they’re using and act accordingly.

This is not to say you should always choose one person and keep it on them exclusively. Depending on the team makeup/situation I switch it up a lot. By the way, if you never use this unless someone has crashed their end bar because of a nuke or whatever, well then, we need to have a chat Seriously. Even worse with Adrenaline Boost. You’ve got what is without question the best ST buff in the game, and you use it as a glorified blue inspiration. Roar.
Now for the fun part:

How To Not Be Awful:

• Recognize that you are not an Empath, let alone a “healer”, you are a hybrid support character and act accordingly. You can heal, buff resistance, buff your own damage, turn one person on the team into an unstoppable killing machine and kill stuff. You should be doing all of these things.

• Get the balance right between buffing your own damage with the Share Pain (Conduit too but less so because rezzing people is almost always A Good Thing™) and supporting the team. I’ll generally only focus on buffing my damage up and blasting like crazy when we’re really steamrolling so I only need to use Soothe occasionally.

• Speaking of Soothe, I have it bound to q so its right by my movement keys. What’s also handy is binding a key to follow for the times you can’t immediately see someone is. So if someone is getting pummeled you can target them, queue up Soothe and hit the follow bind and zoom off you go. Granted, sometimes you’ll go flying at a wall, but you now know the direction they’re in and can get to them.

• Keep World of Pain up. Don’t try and make everyone sit still or gather on you, no matter how adorable your “give me cuddles giggle giggle” macro is. Just get in the middle of as many people as you can and fire it off. It’s a nice enough buff that you want to get as many people as you can with it, but not so amazing the entire team needs to grind to a halt for your prima donna ***.

• While hilarious, try to not hit ASing stalkers or people sniping with Enforced Morale. It will interrupt them unless they’re already damaged.

• For fights with stuff that mezzes a lot or has a particularly strong mez (like Romulus rezzing) it is worth keeping an EM on people who have mez protection already so they can keep fighting. For squishies, you can stack it enough to keep them unmezzed but it takes too much time which would be better dedicated to your other powers.

• Keep moving. Pain suffers from a similar fate to thermal and cold in that often times you’ll be the squishiest person on the team because everyone else can get Soothe/Share Pain. While you’ll have decent resists with WoP and your APP shield, you’re never going to be the best choice to take alphas. Don’t stand in the middle of spawns, don’t try to melee bosses, generally don’t do things that immensely stupid and Nullify Pain will be all you need to keep you alive.

• Get good at kiting with Anguishing Cry. If you time it right (assuming you’ve got ss/sj/hurdle/cj/sb/whatever buffing your travel speed) you can get into the middle of a spawn, hit Anguishing Cry and jump out a split second later so you do most of the animation in the air. The debuff will still have radiated out from where you were, but now you’re out of harms way.

• Sometimes you’re not on a good team. Sometimes you’re relegated to mostly being a healbot. **** happens. For these times, learn which heals should be used when. If a squishy is at half health and has stuff mad at them, running up to them and hitting Nullify Pain won’t do much good. Conversely, if their health is barely dented you’re wasting (admittedly little) time hitting them with Soothe. Save Share Pain for when its really needed, like for healing an ally with a lot of hp back up from half hp or less. If a squishy is really getting hammered Share Pain can also be good, because most of the heal can go towards negating the incoming damage while leaving enough to top them back up. The average brute is going to have anywhere from 1.5k to 2k health. So, if Share Pain is healing for 900-1k, its still a waste and unnecessary risk if they’ve only taken ¼ damage.

• If someone is really getting hammered kiting can be put to good use. Run at them with Soothe queued and jump as you’re getting to them so you can be right next to them to fire off Nullify right afterwards.

• By virtue of not having to shield an entire team, you’ve got a lot of endurance to spare. Use it. Blast. A bunch. Kill stuff. Dead stuff is stuff not making you have to heal your teammates.

• If you’re going for IOs, you want about 50-70% recharge, this in conjunction with Hasten will give you perma WoP, almost perma Anguishing Cry and very high uptime on Painbringer. Which are all awesome things that you want. So do it, mmkay? Oh and heal bonuses are also nice to make your heals even more end efficient and powerful.

What Goes Well With Pain:

Aspirin. Oh ho ho. No but 4 srs, you want a blast set with good damage to complement your own damage buffing. Good choices are Fire, Sonic and Ice. Radiation would work as Irradiate and Anguishing Cry both with Achilles procs would work as a nice combo, but the rest of Rad is a little lack luster with the exception of Cosmic Burst.

I personally went with Sonic because its great single target damage, stupidly end-efficient and means my blasting makes the rest of the team kill even faster. Great vs AVs because you can reliably keep another -30% res stacked with Anguishing Cry just from your tier 1 and 2 blasts. Good times. A set with Aim is also handy so you can ensure Anguishing Cry hits all the dudes you want it to hit. Which is like, all of them. So yeah.

The last thing you want to be wary of when choosing a blast set is that you don’t choose one with overly long animations. You want to be able to rush off to hit someone with Soothe/Share Pain on very short notice. While Full Auto is totally cool and yay bullets being stuck in a long animation while someone on your team gets beat the hell down = lose.

How Silas Be Doin’ It

Observe:



Notes

• Recall Friend, nuke and combat jumping (not on tray). Gonna respec out of these and pick up Leadership. Maneuvers for team defense, Assault for dmg buff stacking and Vengeance for awesomeness.
• I open most fights by hitting Aim then Anguishing Cry, then cycling my blasts unless someone needs a heal. So I keep that stuff close at hand.
• Nullify Pain and Enforced Morale on 3 and 4. Again, powers used a lot. Nullify is there so I^ve got quick access to it. As for Enforced Morale, when EMing a team up it’s a hassle to click this, so I just click my way down the team and hit 4.

Hope this has helped. First person to say pain sucks empathy is better gets punched in the jeans.

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Once I saw that this was a pain dom guide I skipped all of it.


Pain dom blows, make a thermal. Don't EVER make a pain dom. It blows.

A lot.

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Spoken like someone who has never taken the time to l2p the set, gg

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Leader of Renaissance de la Veritas
Moderator of ChampioNexus
Amygdala's Guide to the Cathedral of Pain Trial

This is good stuff.

I've got a thugs/pain MM that I enjoy playing every once in a while and your guide will help me come up with my final build/slotting.

Thanks.

-Llew.

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@Llewthor, @Llewthor2

Yeah, I get that a lot of people don't enjoy it but I think that a lot of it stems from wanting the wrong things out of Pain. Granted, I made my Thermal months before my Pain, but I enjoy playing them both and I like that they bring different things to a team.

Although I guess what's worth noting is I can't stand playing Empathy. But hell, if you've read it and just don't like playing the set thats 100% okay, I just think people shouldn't dismiss it outright without trying to understand how it works. The way people did with Thermal when villains was launched >.>

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.. I like the animations.

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"I do it better than anybody you've ever seen do it.
The screams from the haters, it's got a nice ring to it.
I guess every super hero needs his theme music .."

If it's really closer to Therm than it is to Empathy, I might give it a try. I hate playing Emps, but have loved my therm so far (only lvl 30 atm).

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***** like Jesus, awesome.

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[U][URL="http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=251594"][/URL][/U]

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I disagree. I don't think Pain is better or worse than Therm, just an alternative. I think defensively it brings less than Therm, but offensively it brings more. It's also a very different playstyle and many people understand Thermal Radiation, very few understand Pain Dom, hence me making this guide.

Although, you'll be happy to know the Therm guide is half done and should be going up sometime this weekend or Monday at the latest. BURN IN HEALTH!

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Sadly I have to agree with oz & amy. They really should have given pain something other than soothing aura.

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Baddo sets are bad. But mainly just cause Empathy and Themal are just so good. I had a fire/pain corr at 50 for a while, and a bots/pain MM who I promptly deleted about 5 minutes after dinging 50 (yes, really). The fire/pain was pretty fun, and it solo'd pretty well. Buttttt if I ever brought it on a RSF or ITF or whatever, it meant the team was getting inferior buffing compared to what the team would get if I brought my Emp or Therm.

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For nostalgic reasons, I'm going to appreciate my thermal over my pain domination corruptor. For everything else, my pain domination corruptor wins. Now, I can understand why thermal's good. It's great for hanging back and buffing/debuffing from range. However, I like Pain Domination more for what it offers *me*. With Thermal, it's all about debuffing and buffing *everyone* else. With Pain Domination, I at least see some of that returned back to me.

Pain Domination isn't bad. Not really. It depends on playing styles and what you're comfortable with. I like what it offers. Does it mean that it's better than anything else? No. But it doesn't exactly mean everything's better than it, either.

Thanks for the guide, Silas

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I'm not undermining Dark Miasma and Storm Summoning. They are powerful sets but I NEVER see anyone ask for them, especially not Storm. It knocks thing nilly willy unless there's a Dominator or Controller on the team with anti-knockback immobilize. Dark is just not that idealized for teams. You think I have little idea what I'm talking about? I played an Illusion/Storm. I soloed 95% of the time because people are afraid of Storm Summoners. The other 5% was me helping my friend level her empathy defender.

As for people attacking the thread, NOT the person, you weren't the only who I was aiming that at. You could have easily just not replied at all if you don't like the set. The point of the guide was to help those who like the set or may be interested in it, not so you could come in here and tell them to reroll.

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For the record, I don't have any issue with people just not liking Pain Dom. That is 100% everyones perogative to dislike a set and not want to play it.

Oz, I'm glad you're now elaborating on your opinion in that you think it lags behind other sets. You think it brings less to the table than other sets of a similar nature. That's fine. I do wish you could have said that to begin with though.

Ecnat, thanks for the feedback and I'll try to be more sarcastic in future As for what you're saying it is true, pretty much the only set you see people calling for for teams is kinetics. For stuff like RSFs you'll probably get some people looking for rads, therms or colds, but I don't think I've ever seen someone say we need a dark or storm. This isn't to say they're bad sets, just that their popularity suffers a little because of the subtlety of what they bring.

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Darks are often called for on Hami Raids and mothership raids.

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Haha yeah that's true, I remember my D3 getting one of the top tier heal badges from mass rezzing with HT on early hami raids

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