Silas Plays Support And So Can You!

Is there a Poison guide coming?

There is, but it won't be for a while yet. First up is Time Manipulation. Still leveling my Poison Corr.

Hey Silas. I just wanted to let you know I absolutely love your guides. I'm recommending them to a friend of mine who's playing Support for the first time. You've really done a fine job here.

The nice thing about these guides is that they're fun to read. Totally apart from the actual information imparted, too many guides read exactly the same. When you read a Silas guide, not only do you know you're going to get a solid guide to the powerset, you also know you're not going to be bored while doing so.

Eveningstar2 and Muon, thanks for the kind words, I'm not sure how it is you've enjoyed the fevered scribblings of a madman, but I'm glad you did

Any news on time manipulation guide?

Mine time/electric (yes I know electric have less damage, but wanted tech based alt) is great. On level 34-35 I can solo +2 without any problem and can "sort of" tank in teams. My beam rifle/time corruptor is in mid 20's, and still need at least Farsight to show full potential.

Planing to make one with fire, but it is hard to decide between defender and corruptor (get buffs/debuffs earlier, or have extra damage). It was much easier when only corruptors had fire as option .

Oh great and wise Silas~!
Nifty and fabulous Columbus of Archetypes~
... If y'got a minute or two, I gossa question.

With the release of Beam Rifles and what such, would you recommend that primary for any of the Corrupter support(-y) secondaries?
Or is Fire/Ice/Sonic/Radiation still pretty much top dog?

Silas I have to say thank you for all the hard work on the guides I have recently returned from a long absence and the first toon I went to was my ice/dark corruptor which was level 40 ( which was level cap for villains when I stopped playing ) and rolled a new fire/dark corruptor following your guide to run with my wife and a friend . Your guides have been a great help in respecing my old corr and leveling my new one.

Grausigkeit, I've not played Beam Rifle myself but it seems like a pretty good set. What turns me off it personally is the redraw.

The disintegration mechanic is really cool and I can see it synergizing nicely with a couple sets. I don't think I'd rank it above Fire, because pretty much nothing beats Fire even today. That said, looking at the numbers again it looks like a decent all round set.

My one recommendation would be that you pair it with something that won't cause a lot of issues with the redraw. Something that's a little more fire-and-forget if you know what I mean. Not like Kinetics or Time. Something like Traps would work well, (which also fits thematically), where you can enter a fight, lay down your main powers then get to blasting.

It also seems like Beam Rifle is very much a ranged powerset. I know, I know, all Corr primaries are ranged, but some (Rad, Fire, Ice) can be played with all their key powers from melee range so they suit powersets with PBAoE powers a bit better. With Beam Rifle, I think you'd want to get a lot of use out of the cones so you'd be at range most of the time.

Lil Demona, Thanks for the kind words Glad to hear you're enjoying your Fire/Dark Corruptor.

Just to add to Silas' response about Beam:

I deleted a BR/Poison because I had to reapply the debuffs all the time (since they are ST with splash and fast recharging), plus the tier 9 is a 15' aura. I didn't get to the tier 9 but since BR's AoE is a cone (and a good, fast recharging cone, it's like Fire Breath, but with 50 range instead of 40 and 10 secs rech instead of 16, same 30 degree arc, so you'll want to be a bit far from the mobs to make full use of it) I never, ever felt the need to go to melee, it would actually be counterproductive since I'd want to use the cone especially after spreading Disintegration.

Plus the redraw on BR really annoyed me. I have a DP/dark Corr and that doesn't annoy me like BR, don't ask me why. Then again you don't have to redraw so much on /dark and DP has no disintegration gimmick so you won't feel like you could be trying to spread it on a DP toon.

I rerolled him into BR/Traps and it's much better - go to melee, set up stuffz, then hop back and blast.

I think kin, time and storm would also suffer a bit (storm because of hurricane and fast recharging powers like freezing rain, besides all the stuff you can lay down like snow storm and the pets) - pain not so much except in the low levels when you're healing much more often than later and the other buffs/debuffs don't recharge in 10 secs like poison. But pain would be a good pairing imo, you only have to get to melee a few times for the pbaoe debuff.

With the changes to the shields I think even cold and sonic make good pairings unless you absolutely HATE redraw. But time and kin especially are way too busy (like poison) at least for me to be used with Beam. Dark is in the middle I guess, I think BR is fine with any powerset you don't have to use your secondary a lot of times in a single battle (since in dark you'll set up stuff and then use the occasional heal), and if the team doesn't kill your anchors left and right Rad would be quite nice too.

Anyway with BR you want to stay at range as much as possible. The mini nuke is also ranged, and your main AoE is a cone that recharges very fast, so you'll want to maximize it. That's why I chose traps for it, but I can see it working with sets that are more active like pain but not hyper like kinetics or poison.

To add to the comments on beam/, I have a beam/dark moving up the levels right now that works quite well. You want a set where you can just lay down your stuff at the beginning of the fight and go.

Traps works great for that, and would be a better hard target killer to go with beam's good ST damage, but I already have a traps character that I really like. On the other hand psi blast is boring so I feel no qualms in rerolling him into beam rifle, and beam/dark works quite well. Fearsome stare->DN->tar patch or DN pull->tarpatch->fearsome stare, and then commence the killing. You don't need to redraw at all outside of the rare cases when something slips a hit through your debuffs and you need to heal, and dark's heal is so burly I almost never need to use it more than once.

It's not quite as synergistic as traps would be, in that dark is great at neutering crowds while beam is more comfortable mowing down smaller numbers of targets. But dark's stellar mitigation means you can still at least handle crowds, if not as well as something like fire/dark, and the lack of redraw really allows beam's ST damage to shine.

On an amusing tangent, for some reason darkest night doesn't cause redraw of the rifle; rather, the character just does the animation with the rifle in hand and you can go right back to blasting. Pretty sure it's a bug, and not very relevant since you're usually using DN with FS and tarpatch which *do* cause redraw, but still, neat to have.

It is not a bug as Rad users confirm the same with their anchors using BR or AR. Enjoy!

Snow Storm also causes no redraw on BR (on my 3rd BR toon since I bought the set and I feel guilty for not finding a damn combo I liked - traps is synergistic but I have a 50 fire/traps and never did cold).

I disagree about Soothing Aura in the Pain Dom section.

I have it, 1 slotted hami for endurance and heals. I use when soloing and grouping because for me it is a bit less healing to have to do and it helps keeps everyone topped up a bit better. With the rise of Clarion, I dropped enforced moral.

And how much recharge + recharge IOs is needed to perma WoP/Painbringer?

Silas,

just wanted to say thanks, I'm new to corrs and CoH, your guide has been one very detailed, humorous and enjoyable source of information I can recall on, I've actually printed it out so I don't have to keep alt tabbing when in game to get any tips on the corrs I am currently playing.

Trying out a few sets to see which ones I like the most, got a Fire/Dar, Beam/Traps atm, gonna get them both to 20 and see which one I prefer to take to 50 as my first main char.

Hey guidemaster do you have any release date for the timemanipulation guide
i really need some impressions for slotting mine and getting the special things out of it

Here's a question. Have you found your high recharge S/L/E/Ranged capped Fire/Sonic build to be sufficiently survivable? I'm asking because I think I might like that type of build better than the potentially overkill Beam/Sonic build I came up with 75% S/L resists, over 50% energy, and softcapped ranged/AOE but only 53.8% global recharge (and no Hasten). Plus it doesn't have Clarity, Sonic Cage, or Aim, though it does have Assault and Veng. It's very much a hoverblasting oriented build, though that works reasonably well with Beam's ranged preference at least. It doesn't have as much defense against enemies coming up and punching you in the face, even if it does have high resists against the most common melee damages.

But a high recharge S/L/E/Ranged Beam/Sonic build might be overall better in general for the majority of play.

its almost the same build only beamrifle instead of fire (choode the powers and slots as you want to:

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I didn't ask for a C&P translation of that build, especially one that clearly didn't really look at Beam Rifle judging from its power picks (Skipping Disintegrate and Lancer Shot? Taking the snipe instead?). I asked about survivability of softcapped S/L/E/N/Ranged so I could determinate my own build goals. I suspect that kind of defense's quite sufficient, so I'll just make my own build.

Edit: I must've been quite tired. I don't know where I saw the softcapped Energy/Ranged defenses. Silas's build has Smashing/Lethal.

And after some work: I present to you a S/L/E softcapped build with 87.5% global recharge. It's also one purple inspiration away from softcapping against negative and pretty much any ranged type attack out there. I went this route because I was pretty close to capped against energy already and I ran up against the rule of 5 for 6.25% recharge bonuse anyway. To get more recharge, I would've had to use purples, and I decided to keep this a little cheaper. Normally having the Gradiator unique in a 'budget' build would be ridiculous, but prices've dipped recently. I did sacrifice 6.25% recharge to get to softcap instead of ending up 3% short, but I think I'm okay with this.

Clarity was skipped because while nice, it's a little less necessary with people running around with Claion and me providing some mez protection with Sonic Dispersion. I'll probably go with Barrier and/or Rebirth for the most part, though.

The stealth in Fly is to help you quickly get into position unseen since Hover's included in the defense totals.

Pretty much all of the non-snipe attacks are necessary to maxmize Beam Rifle's offensive potential against groups and hard targets. Normally Single Shot would be skippable, but it gets a 75% regen debuff which makes it valuable enough against hard targets.

This build pretty much needs Cardiac, but it's kinda hard to avoid that with Sonic Resonance and the resistance and range bonuses are useful too.

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Hey people.

Since CoH is going under I just wanted to thank everyone who has read my guides for all your support (hee) and feedback.

No other game has made me want to write guides and no game probably ever will. I really enjoyed writing these though and I'm glad they were of some use to people.

So long, and thanks for all the Scourge.

Silas, thanks for all your, well, support.