Silas Plays Support And So Can You!

XI: Fortunata

Fortunatas, doods. They’re great. And given you can now make VEATs at level 20, you should.

You may wonder why I would write a Fortunata guide when Forts isn’t Corrs but they totally are! In spirit, at least >.> They’ve got buffs and they kill stuff with blasts. And if that’s not good enough for you well, I hate you and wish misfortune upon you and those you love.

Keeses :3

You may also wonder, “I mostly play melee, Silas says mean things about me and buffing people is boring, what do I care?“

You are in luck, my friend. Just this once, Silas will cater to your needs. Except for that one. I will not wear the mask. We have been over this, honey. It’s degrading.

Why Fortunatas Totally Rock and You Want One:

• High damage, fast animating, rarely resisted ranged blasty goodness. While everyone else on the team is complaining about the AV going Unstoppable, cackle and keep blasting away for full damage.

• Lots of +def for you to softcap yourself and grant significant defense to a team.

• All of your team buffs require zero effort beyond toggling them on when you log in. The one that requires maintenance buffs you too.

• Mez protection. It’s awesome.

• One of your best blasts is also a hold. A good hold too, not like a Petrifying Gaze hold!

But, more crucially, Fortunatas are awesome for people who don’t normally play support. If you’re (ugh) someone who usually plays melee, Fortunatas are a great character to play.

If you mostly play Scrappers or Brutes because you like being tough and killing stuff real good: You’ll be very sturdy because of the SR-level defenses, you’l have mez protection and all your team buffs require only that you be there. No clicking on allies, no buffing down the list, nothing. Fortunatas have all the tools to be both ferociously independent but an invaluable asset to a team.

If you mostly play Tankers because you like being stupidly tough and holding aggro: YOU ARE A LOST CAUSE PLEASE LEAVE AND DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING ON YOUR WAY OUT

GO ON

GET OUT, I’M SERIOUS

PUT DOMINATE DOWN, YOU CAN’T HAVE IT

SHOO

Much better.

For the purposes of this guide, I’ll be writing it for the way I built my Fortunata. That is to say, for ranged mostly ST damage, team/self buffing with leadership stuff and defense. While you can make a melee Fort, you can make an AoE Fort, you can make a controller Fort, I don’t think it’s the most effective way to build one.

I will be saying why I skipped the powers that I did, but only briefly. I won’t be discussing Night Widow stuff and me making a Night Widow guide is unlikely because I don’t play one. While Night Widows have the advantages of higher ST DPS and a more easily perma-able Mind Link, I prefer Fortunatas for the ranged damage, the crashless nuke and less resisted damage. As a general rule, Night Widows are better for soloing, Fortunatas are better for teaming.

Onwards to the power stuff:

Widow Training:

Honestly, I skipped everything here. It’s almost all melee attacks which are better suited to a Night Widow build. The only thing which is even vaguely tempting is Poison Dart or Dart Burst, for the -regen. I still wouldn’t though, because the -regen is really tiny (half of Twilight Grasps debuff) and it causes redraw. Follow Up would be nice for the damage and tohit buff, but requires you to be in melee and again, redraw. Move on.

Fortunata Training:

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Mental Blast: ranged moderate psy damage, -recharge You’ve gotta take either this or Telekinetic Blast at level 1. They’re both pretty lousy and you’ve got much better ST attacks later on. These powers are basically only for when you malefactor down or a set mule. Slotting Recommendation: An acc/dam from a set or acc/dam HO. I wouldn’t bother giving it anything else. How to Use: To shoot things with mind bullets when you’re malefactored down to an obnoxiously low level. If you’re not at an obnoxiously low level, take it off your bar and bask in Subdue, Dominate and Gloom.

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Telekinetic Blast: ranged moderate smashing/psy, knockback Slotting Recommendation: I stuck 6 Kinetic Crashes in this for the set bonuses. If you don’t have 5 slots to give this for the bonuses, go with Mental Blast instead. How to Use: Same as Mental Blast.

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Subdue: ranged high damage, foe immobilize. Slotting Recommendation: This is more like it. Subdue is one of your bread and butter attacks. Slot it as a key attack, ignore the immobilize. I went with 5 Apocalypses and an end rdx (Forts is end heavy, yo), a cheaper option would be Thunderstrikes or Decimations. How to Use: For killing dudes. The immobilize is a nice bonus, but Dominate does a better job of stopping stuff moving.

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[b]Aim: self +damage +tohit Slotting Recommendation: Get high recharge on this. This stacked with your Leadership Assaults can give you a sizeable damage buff. The tohit will help to punch through defense. Get it, love it. How to Use: Starting a fight? Hit Aim. About to nuke? Hit Aim. Fighting an AV/GM? Hit Aim. In the middle of a fight? Hit Aim. It recharges fast, especially with global recharge. Basically the only time you don’t want to hit Aim is if the fight is almost done, so the buff will be wasted.

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Psychic Scream: cone moderate psy damage, -recharge Slotting Recommendation: Skip it. If you really want it because you enjoy being rooted for mediocre damage, I guess go with 5 Posi Blasts so you’re at least getting good bonuses. How to Use: Seriously, skip it. Sloooow animation, less damage than TK or Mental Blast and you’ve got better AoE options elsewhere.

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Dominate: ranged high psy damage, foe hold Slotting Recommendation: While it has the same name as the Mind Control ST hold, you shouldn’t think of it as a hold that also has some damage, think of it as a blast that has a hold. The hold is an awesome bonus, but the main attraction is the damage. I went with 5 Decimations and an end rdx. Anything worth holding will either be held by the first or second application of this, and since it’s one of your main attacks you’ll be spamming it. How to Use: Like Subdue. For killing faces until they are dead. Unlike Subdue, however, the secondary effect is more useful, so if you see something running rampant that isn’t your main target, do throw out a quick Dominate to stop it in its tracks. Another awesome fact is that Dominate is typed only as Psy damage. Ranged defense does nothing against it. AV Elude, Nemesis Vengeance, anything not explicitly psionic defense Dominate will cut right through.

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Psionic Tornado: ranged AoE moderate psionic DoT, foe knockup Slotting Recommendation: Don’t, see below. How to Use: Don’t. Skip it. While this and Scream aren’t neccessarily awful powers per se, they’re just slow enough to not be worth it. A key strength of a Fortunata is how fast and agile they are. Your main blasts are all about a second, this and Scream are almost three seconds. Not worth it. Update: With Inherent Fitness I have sinced picked this up for a little more AoE damage. My gripes about it remain the same, but I've gained a little more AoE damage. If you're looking for more AoE, I'd pick this up over Scream since they're both slow but Scream is a cone and thus requires positioning. The advantage of Psi Nado is that you can throw it from wherever you are.

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Scramble Thoughts: foe disorient, minor psy damage Slotting Recommendation: I skipped it and recommend you do the same. Since it’s a stun, there are some very good set bonuses available (Stupefys, Absolute Amazements) but I’d still not bother. How to Use: Don’t, skip it. Looking at it, it looks pretty good. It’s mag 4, so it’ll instantly hold a boss. At base values, its got a 13 sec duration and 16 second recharge which is pretty phenomenal. However, it falls down on two facts: firstly, the animation time. I know I keep dumping on the longer animation powers but compared to your other powers, this is really slow. Not a big deal if it was a really useful power, but it’s not. That brings us to the second fact. Utility. It’s a mez power. You’ve already got Dominate which recharges faster, activates faster, does great damage, has a more desireable mez effect AND is part of your attack chain. Sorry Scramble Thoughts, better luck next time.

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Total Domination: AoE foe hold Slotting Recommendation: Don’t. Leave the AoE mezzing to Dominators and Controllers, you’ve got faces to meld using your freakin’ mind, man. It can come in handy but I didn’t have room for it. If you do take it, I’d recommend Basilisks or Unbreakables. How to Use: It’s an AoE mez, which you would normally use for dealing with a big crowd. But you’ve got a much better option for that later on. Which brings us to the glorious…

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Psychic Wail: PBAoE extreme psy damage, foe disorient, -recharge Slotting Recommendation: 5 Obliterations or 5 Armageddons. This baby is awesome and you want to maximise its awesome. Max out the damage and recharge. How to Use: As soon as it recharges and there’s a decently sized spawn to use it on. It’s a ******* crashless nuke. The only penalty for using it is that you can’t again until it’s recharged. It’s a phenomenal power. Anything that survives is going to be stunned for a bit, so you can finish them off at your leisure.

Teamwork:

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Combat Training: Defensive: auto +defense (melee) Slotting Recommendation: Good place to put Kismet accuracy proc or LotG +recharge. You should be way over softcap for melee with this, Foresight, double Maneuvers and Mind Link. Don’t worry too much about enhancing the defense on this. How to Use: Um, take at level 1 because you have to then…nothing. It’s an auto power. You just have to like, be, man.

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Combat Training: Offensive: auto +acc Slotting Recommendation: Don’t. It’s not worth a power selection, let alone slots. You’ll have plenty of accuracy from set bonuses, enhancements and +tohit to boot from Mind Link and Aim. Skip it. How to Use: See above

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Tactical Training: Maneuvers: team +def (all) Slotting Recommendation: Max out the defense, get high endurance reduction. I went with 5 Red Fortunes and a LotG 7.5 How to Use: Toggle on, profit. It’s a fantastic power and in conjunction with Maneuvers from the Leadership pool and Mind Link you’re granting yourself and the team a significant chunk of defense.

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Indomitable Will: self +protection (disorient, hold, immobilize, sleep, fear, confuse, repel, KB) +res (psy) Slotting Recommendation: 2 end rdx and a Steadfast +3% def IO. How to Use: toggle on, forget that mezzes exist. It’s fantastic. The psy resist is nice too, especially in conjunction with Foresight and Mind Link (comes in at about 50% unenhanced iirc).

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Tactical Training: Assault: team +damage Slotting Recommendation: 2 end rdx How to Use: Same as TT:M, toggle on, profit. Running the double-Assaults is not as amazing as double-Maneuvers, but it will add a lot to your damage. The fact that your team benefits is gravy :3

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Tactical Training: Leadership: team +tohit, res (confuse, fear) +perception Slotting Recommendation: Ehm, I skipped it but if you do take it, get good endurance reduction. How to Use: Same as the stuff above, but I skipped it. The +tohit isn’t worth it given set bonuses, enhancement values and Aim. The confuse/fear res is nice but you’ve got that in Foresight and occurs rarely enough that it’s not a big deal.

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Foresight: auto +protection (hold, immobilize, sleep, fear, confuse, special*) +def (all) *This is scaling damage resistance as your health drops. Slotting Recommendation: Enhance the defense. The psy res isn’t worth enhancing and the scaling resists cannot be enhanced. How to Use: Pick it up, go about your business. It’ll help you get to the softcap as well as provide even more mez protection.

Fortunata Teamwork:

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Mask Presence: toggle self +stealth, +def (melee, ranged, AoE) Slotting Recommendation: I just used this as a LotG mule. The defense is nice but will partially suppress in combat. You’ve also got plenty of other, better ways to reach the softcap. How to Use: For stealth. Running Superspeed + Mask = full invis. I personally have a Celerity stealth proc in Sprint so running Spring+SS I have full invis, making the stealth from this more or less meaningless outside of pvp. If you don’t want to run Superspeed, this becomes a lot more useful. Stick a stealth proc in your travel power of choice and run this for full invis. If you’re fighting heavy defense debuffing stuff you might want to toggle it on for a little more breathing room, otherwise I wouldn’t bother.

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Mind Link: PBAoE team +def (all) +res (psy) +tohit Slotting Recommendation: You want to max out the defense and recharge on this. While you can’t put generic recharge IOs or SOs in it, any recharge from multi-aspect set IOs or HOs will enhance it’s recharge. Depending on your budget, you can go several ways with this. Cheapest option is frankenslotting def/recharges and def/end/recharges. A great option is Membrane Exposure Hamis, which are basically perfect for ML, buffing the defense, recharge and tohit. I went with 5 Red Fortunes and a LotG 7.5 You want this to be perma. It’s trickier for a Fort than for a Night Widow because the recharge is longer and you don’t get Mental Training, but it’s still very doable. How to Use: Hit when it recharges. Try and catch as many people with it as possible. It’s got a huge radius and is a fantastic buff, so do make the tiny bit of extra effort to buff people with it. One thing to note is that the defense is applied late in the animation and it doesn’t stack with itself, (outside of zoning), so if you’re not softcapped without it your defences will drop for a split second when casting it. It’s a very small window, small enough to not be an issue, but worth noting.

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Confuse: foe confuse Slotting Recommendation: Set mule, yay! I went with 6 Coercive Confusions, excellent bonuses, cheap set, great enhancement values. How to Use: To confuse something, interestingly enough :3 srsly though, I get very little use out of this. It really is mostly a set mule. That said, the rare times when it is useful it’s great. It doesn’t aggro enemies unless you’re an idiot and put a damage proc in it, so it’s a good way to take care of something you can’t either hold or kill fast. Plus confuses are fun.

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Tactical Training: Vengeance: AoE team +WIN (+dmg, +tohit, +def (all) +res (taunt, placate, fear, stun, sleep, immobilise, hold, confuse) +protection (repel, KB, fear) +heal) Slotting Recommendation: I used it as a LotG 7.5 mule. The defense and tohit it gives are godly at base and you can’t enhance it directly for recharge. People generally won’t be dying enough to warrant more recharge with your team buffs anyway. If memory serves, my TT:Veng is pretty much perma anyhoo from set bonuses and stuff. How to Use: With LIGHTNING FAST REFLEXES. As soon as you see someone die, POW, Vengeance. Don’t give them time to hit an awaken or get rezzed :3 This is a stupidly powerful buff, don’t get it go to waste.

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Aura of Confusion: click PBAoE foe confuse Slotting Recommendation: Don’t. It’s a crowd control button but Wail is much better. It’s a set mule at most, but you’ve got Confuse which is much more useful. And Confuse is not all that useful, so look where that leaves this. How to Use: In the middle of a spawn you want to confuse, if you take it. Which you shouldn’t, because it’s bad. You are granted turds like this in sets so that you may skip them and take more awesome things in their place. Do not squander this gift, my son. Do not squander this turd, bequeathed unto you by the devs. This turd is an oppertunity. Now, this is where I’d normally drop some How to Not be Awful knowledge bombs, but building them can be tricky so I thought I’d provide some build general information before I get into the specific stuff.

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Build Goals: You want high global recharge. Enough recharge to make Mind Link perma is the baseline goal, then ADD MOAR RECH just to bring Wail and your other attacks up faster. You want Hasten. I don’t know if it’s even possible to have perma Mind Link without it, and I don’t want to know. Hasten is great. Get it. Softcapped defenses. Very easily obtainable running double Maneuvers and Mind Link. Softcapping your defenses makes you a team buffing psy/SR Blaster with full mez protection. You Want This™. Melee is laughably easy with CT: D, ranged and AoE are the ones you want to look for bonuses for. A full set of Coercives in Confuse is a big help, giving you 5% ranged defense. You want a lot of endurance reduction. Fortunatas are very end heavy and stacking +recovery can only do so much. It’s important to get good end rdx in your toggles, but the attacks are the main culprits. Not much good to get your end/sec consumption way down and your recovery way up if your attacks are biting big chunks out every time. Even with boatloads of +recovery from sets and Conditioning you can very easily find yourself bottoming out running your attack chain and toggles. You attack very fast on a Fort, which is great, but it also means you burn through end very fast. Avoid it. Power pools. Fitness for Stamina and mobility, Speed for Superspeed and Hasten, Leaping for Combat Jumping for more more mobility and defense, Leadership for Assault and Maneuvers to stack with your Secondary ones. For PPPs, I recommend Soul Mastery. Gloom is fan-frigging-tastic and Dark Obliteration is a much better AoE than Scream or Tornado.

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How to Not Be Awful: • Try and position yourself so you’re buffing as much as the team as possible. Your attacks are all ranged so it’s not like you’ve gotta be right in the mobs faces and the team gets buffed from you just being there. Quite literally, the only thing you have to do is stand vaguely central to the team. A Fort running off and playing Scrapper while the team gets their heads punched in is a Failfort. Plus if you’re by the team and someone dies, ker-Vengeance :3 • Psychic Wail kiting. While being softcapped generally means you don’t have too much to fear in melee range, don’t forget that Forts are still on the squishy side. No non-psy resists to speak of unless you’re already half dead and low hp (hp cap is delightfully high, but base hp is the same as a Corr). Wail checks for targets at its activation. Run in, click Wail at the same time as you hop back. You’ll hit the whole spawn and out of melee-retaliation range, plus back with the team. • Vengeance stacking. Yes, normally Vengeance cannot stack, either with another Widows Veng or power pool Veng but there is a tiny window wherein you can stack it. While I did say hit it as soon as someone dies, if you’re on a team with someone else who has Veng and you’re both on voicechat it’s worth calling it so you both fire it off at the same time. Not really for the defense part, as the team will be softcapped with just Veng and your normal defense stuff, but more for the +tohit and +damage. +70% tohit and +damage for a whole team (minus the dead guy, haha, sucks to be you) is naaaasty. • When engaging a spawn, you generally want to be targetting the nastiest thing in there. Your high ST damage and the hold from Dominate means it won’t be a threat for long because it’ll either die or be held. • Stay mobile. One of the greatest strengths of a Fort is that everything they do, they do quickly, so they’re never rooted for long. Subdue, Dominate, Gloom all animate fast. Mind Link animates fast and your toggles once turned on provide animation-free benefit all the time. Dark Obliteration and Psychic Wail animate fast. Being able to move fast means you can react fast to the flow of combat. This is why you want to avoid Psychic Scream and Tornado. • While Dominate is a cornerstone in your ST damage chain, it lasts a while and you can still kill something plenty fast with Subdue and Gloom. So if you see a team mate about to get cut in half by something, toss out Dominate and hold it. • Which brings me to: Be aggressive. While you are a squishy, you’re softcapped to all positions which puts you in a much better position (har!) than most squishies who will be softcapped to one position or type at most. Open fights with Dark Obliteration. Get a bunch of aggro. You’re much more able to handle it with your defenses and how laughably easy it is to kite with a Fort thanks to the fast animations. • So: kite kite kite. It’s a good habit to get into anyway for squishies. Stay mobile. Enemies usually have much weaker ranged attacks than melee. This is especially true for stuff like the Freedom Phalanx in the RSF. Aggro them all, stand still. See how long you last. If you kite even a little, it dramatically lengthens how long you can stay alive. Attack, jump, attack, jump. Attack while jumping if you’re good at jump cancelling. AVs like them can kill you more than quickly enough without you helping, keep moving • Inspiration use. Since you’ve got mez protection, softcapped defenses, high damage and should very rarely die, you basically only need to carry orange and green inspirations. I generally go with 3 lines of greens and 2 of oranges. While orange inspirations do totally suck compared to purples, once you’re at the softcap only oranges provide any benefit. • I’ve never really noticed the scaling resistances that much myself, but I’ll eat greens as soon as my health drops significantly. I’d recommend you do the same. If your health is low it doesn’t matter that much if you’ve got high resists, because a high damage hit won’t have to hit that hard to defeat you. • When Confuse is worth using: on mobs that buff or summon stuff (Rikti Guardians, Comm Officers, Sky Raider Engineers, Cimeroran Surgeons, several Longbow Wardens). Confuse them, aggro the spawn, enjoy the buffs/summoned help. For normal stuff, it’s rarely worth it since you can just kill/hold the threat.

How Silas Be Doin’ It:

My Setup

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Notes: • Accolades. Get them. Both for +hp because Forts have low hp and because the +end helps a lot combined with Conditioning and +recovery. Demonic unfortunately doesn’t grant positional defences but is still worth getting for the resists so you can bumrush the Freedom Phalanx. • Looking at my bars you can see how straightforward a Fort is to play. I log in, toggle up the stuff on bar 3 and then off I go, then just using the attacks on bar 1, maintaining ML and then Aim/Wail whenever I can. • Stuff I monitor: current hp, regen and recovery as standard, my positional defences and tohit so I know if/when I get debuffed.

Update for i19:

I've revamped my Fort for Inherent Fitness and the Alpha slot. I picked up Psychic Tornado (see updated power section) Darkest Night and Soul Tentacles. Soul Tentacles I basically never use, its a slot mule for more recovery. Darkest Night has some use for toggle pulling and more defensive leeway. Honestly, it was tough to decide on my last couple powers. I was looking at several options and they would all provide relatively little benefit. The other things I looked at were going the Aid Self route, picking up the Tactics powers or some of the AoE mezzes. I decided to go with DN because it has more utility, my tohit was fine and I could get more recharge and recovery.

I also went ahead and upgraded some of the sets from my old build for even more recharge. Posi Blasts -> Ragnaroks, Obliterations-> Armageddons.

Anyway, here's the updated build. I went with the Musculature Alpha slot.

Build Chunk:

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Acknowledgements:

Kahlan. For making me want to respec and l2p my Fort, helping me to do so and continuing to inspire through excellence. Cheers to you, my droog

Really good Fort guide Silas.

I hear the Unbreakable Constraint proc in Dominate is great fun (and damage!). I guess pairing it with the Apoc proc would yield stupid omgwhatjusthitthat times aswell

I'm a lurker (in case my post count didn't make it obvious), but I figured I should come out of my cave for once to say thank you for the Fort guide. I never tried one before I17 because I don't have any 50s, but I just hit 30 with mine and I'm enjoying myself so much I can actually see myself getting to 50 for once. I probably would have grabbed all the AoEs without a thought if not for this, and I'm having way too much fun bouncing over enemies' heads while melting their brains to imagine what it would have been like if I were sitting still and waiting for animations to finish all the time. So, thanks a bunch! Although you might want to check that link to your setup picture; it doesn't seem to load for me or the friend I got to double check it.

Why do people who write guides think they're so funny and witty? They never are. Don't quit your day job. Stick to being informative; the humor angle isn't your strong suit.

I always enjoy reading your guides, Silas.

I'm especially glad to see a fortunata guide up here as well.

Keep up the good work.

Removeablesleeves, Glad you found it helpful. Thanks for the heads-up about the setup link, I'll take a look later and fix it

SpACatta, Sorry you didn't like them. Did the bit about not receiving enough hugs as a child strike a little too close to home? Or maybe the bit about the father who wished things had turned out differently?

Let me know

Edit: IT IS DONE

And by IT IS DONE I mean Traps guide has been posted.

Am now taking suggestions for other guides to write.

Ready?

Go.

Well, since it worked so well last time, write another traps guide.

BUT SRSLY FOLKS. I was actually thinking that divvying up each power into a quotebox might make it easier to read. You mind sending me the raw text of one guide so I can see how it looks?

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

I've actually been meaning to go back and give it some neater formatting. Either using different colours/sizes or whatever so it's less WALL OF TEXT-y.

That's what I had in mind. Putting each power entry in a quote box might help that, make it easier on the eyes.

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

Control sets? They're kind of support, aren't they?

I already tried a Crab I'm afraid. While I loved the AoE and really liked the idea of the pets, it didn't really work out in practice.

The pets are too slow for my tastes, which took away a lot of the reason to play a Crab.

Cold and Kin guides have been reformatted to make them easier on the eyes. Will be updating the rest of them over the next couple days.

Cheers again for the input, Talen.

Pain, Therm and Rad guides have also now been reformatted.

Nice guide, dood.

Your's are always good...






-Star

Nice guides, informative and fun to read.

One thing I do disagree with you on though, is the Fortunata's AoE attacks. Yes, they're not massively powerful and have long activations, but I still recommend taking both Psi Scream and Tornado for two reasons:

1) Even weaker AoE attacks can still put out a hell of a lot of damage on a team. They're balanced around hitting 3-4 mobs. You can easily get 8-10 in Scream and more in Tornado. And while you're not gonna put a Fire Blaster out of business, it's still damn helpful. Plus it's fun to see all those numbers go flying up.

2) Combined, they give -80% recharge. Which can easily be made nearly perma (and with IOs, better than perma). Not the best debuff sure, but it can still certainly knock off a chunk of the damage you would've otherwise taken.

If you like Psy Scream and Tornado, great. They're decent AoEs. You can build a Fortunata to do pretty respectable AoE damage, but I don't think it's the most effective way to build and play one.

You can also build a Crab Spider for ST melee and do some decent damage. But you won't be playing anywhere near to the strengths of the character.

Yeah, exactly the problem I'm having. With that huge defence, soloing and fighting 2-3 guys at a time seems a waste, so the AOEs are easy to leverage. I dial up the team size to 3 or 5 (seems to get more bosses that way), and then the AOEs are fine.

I wish I hadn't read that part of the guide, to be honest, it makes me really notice the long animation times. :P

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