Moar Sonics

Mine's getting lonely.

It seems the majority are not familiar with the rings of death, the donuts of doom, the hula hoop of insanity, the magnificent power that is Disruption Field and that's just sad.

<OmegaHertz Remix 40 Sonic/Sonic, Freem>

We're still around. Oddly enough, out of all my support toons, people tend to appreciate my Sonic over my Dark, Kin, Rad or Stormies. I guess we are that awesome.

Sorry, my sonics are evil. Muah-ha-ha!
(Sonic siphon +disruption field +cascading -res from blasts +scourge=love)

I agree with this. I run TFs quite often and Sonic is one of the least common Defender primaries (I literally cannot remeber the last time I teamed with one).

I was going to roll one, and then we got traps as a primary. I may roll one in the future if I get bored.

I teamed with a sonic today. I was on my FF/sonic defender (leader of the group), the combined power of FF and Sonic gave the entire team uncountable power. My ff blocked the incoming attacks, but when they got hit they didnt get very hard due to sonic. I have not been able to get a sonic up very high tho. I have tried but resistance buffs arent my favorite to give out. that is why i love my force fielder so much. I just love to color my bubbles :P

I got around my Force Field prejudices by building a Sonic/Dark with Maneuvers and slotting some -ToHit in the cones. It's not the same, but it'll do. And the 55% team res doesn't HURT.

Sonics are pretty rare for a few reasons.

1. people veered away from the sets due to the physical reaction thing, even with the change, the stigma is still there, even if it just becomes a "i didn't even think about sonic" thing

2. Thermal - While Sonic is a great set, you can get a lot of the same mileage out of thermal, to top it off, you get -regen, -damage, heals and a rez, it just kind of makes the set more popular, sort of a "why should I roll a sonic when I can roll a thermal" thing.

3. Endurance, and this is a biggie, Sonic uses a lot of endurance between Disruption Field and Sonic Dispersion, both of which you run all the time, other sets either don't run all their toggles all the time, or have means of off-setting the consumption (Rad)

4. Bubbles - some people really hate the whole buff-every-four-minute thing, FF, Cold, Therm, and Sonic are less-used sets because of this.

Personally, I love my Sonic/Sonic and I have considered rolling others (a rad/son corr perhaps?) but the end consumption thing is a real big issue (I've always wanted a fire/son controller, but I don't think it's possible without skipping one of the 3 big toggles in the combo)

Mines at 50 and one of my two goto defenders for TFs.

To fill the gap in I have rolled a sonic/sonic corr as my last redside alt

I have 2 sonics and rarely play either, mostly for the reasons mentioned previously. The endurance usage is just extreme, the anti-mezz power is largely redundant with the big bubble, the +resistance doesn't aid with dodging secondary effects of powers, intangibility is intangibility, Liquefy takes too long to recharge, and the donut of death is useless solo. It's not a terrible set but I always feel like it's 3/4ths as good as the others.

I have an Illusion/Sonic controller who's very fun. Not much else to say about it. The active Illusion lifestyle keeps me busy, and having my sonic toggles on means I dont need to keep clicking the set every 5 seconds for something.

Quote:

Originally Posted by BackAlleyBrawler you *******!!!!

I don't have a Sonic Defender (lol Vigilance and Defender damage) but I do have a Sonic/Sonic Corruptor, one of maybe two or three I've ever seen on Justice. I used to use it a lot on ITFs to complement the Cold or FF shields, but IMO Sonic has the same kind of issue FF does - it does one or two things very well, but there are other sets that do the same thing about as well, and offer more at the same time (plus stacking defense buffs is generally preferable to stacking resistance buffs in PvE). These days I usually bring my Night Widow, who offers not only defense and tohit buffs but solid DPS as well. I'd consider rebuilding the Corruptor for PvP, but thanks to the I13 changes Sonic Resonance is probably the most useless PvP buff set.

i deleted my level 44 sonic/sonic defender after 3 issues of being useless in PVP.

i have a fully purpled, io'd, and accoladed fire/sonic corruptor in freedom which i refuse to strip out of a sense of nostalgia for my first real pvp toon.

Here's my Sonic Resonance CV:

Sonic/Sonic Def lvl 50
AR/Sonic Corr lvl 43
Sonic/Sonic Corr lvl 33 (mostly PLd)
Fire/Sonic Cont lvl 50

With that out of the way, on to responses:

Yes, there is a dearth of the set, which is too bad. I think it's a great complement to most other buff/debuff sets. However, like TA, it may not be the best at being the sole support for a team.

Endurance usage is an issue the Sonic player has to address. You have to use End Reductions where you may ordinarily want to slot for damage or recharge.

It is possible to run all 3 toggles on a Fire/Sonic controller. I do with mine. No, it ain't easy, but it's possible.

To the notion that, what Sonic does well, others do almost as well, I simultaneously agree (for -Res) and strongly disagree (for +Res). A Sonic Def boosts team Res by 54 percent. Your best alternative for +Res, Thermal, can only go up to 23 percent. Nothing in this game boosts team Resistance like a Sonic Def, nothing's even close. Sadly, for debuffing Resistance, Sonic does not stand out. TA, Cold and Traps are all capable of coming close to, or surpassing, Sonic's -Res debuffs.

Clarity and Dispersion are not reduntant. Dispersion does allow you to not worry about using a single ally buff much, but I've found Clarity to be very useful when
* Fighting enemies with lots of sleep effects (Rikti)
* Stacking anti-mez effects on a tank taunting Ghost Widow
* Buffing squishy types who are stealthing to end objectives, most specifically in the LGTF where you can't stealth by drones without taking a pot-shot that may mez you.

It may just be the few Sonics/ I've run with, but the problem may be, that unlike alot of the other Defender Primaries, on some of the tougher AVs/missions, I've seen the need for additional support.

Example...I've run the ITF with just a thermal, just a dark, just a kin, just a cold, just a rad, as the only support, and been able to fly through it.

Just a force field helps survival on the tough missions, but without a good damage team, then I've seen some problems.

Haven't run it with just a TA or Traps yet, so I don't know how those go over (I would think with Traps, the problem maybe traps being destroyed...don't know).

Sonic however, adds just resistance to protect the team, and while alot of +Resist...well, you know how some melee types have complained about the pure resist sets, it's the same thing.

This isn't me saying Sonic is bad. Just saying, I haven't run an ITF yet with just a Sonic and sailed through it (though on the last mission, Id find Sonic more useful than Force Field with all the autohit nictus going on).

If you look at sonic by itself, it's not too bad on its own merits. When I was leveling up my sonic it was a heckuva lot of fun to play and made a solid contribution to teams. How it compared to other sets was irrelevant because it was my current project and I was having fun with it and didn't have trouble finding/forming teams.

On the other hand... nowadays when I reach into my bag of 50s to pull something out for a TF, I end up judging it in comparison to the other sets and pick something else every time for reasons others have mentioned already. It's too one-dimensional, liquefy recharges too slow, etc. All the other sets seem to bring more to the table to ensure a smooth, quick TF. As a result, my sonic only gets out of the garage every couple months, if that.

It's not entirely about the ability of sonic itself, but also the game content needs to present the challenge that requires resistance buff. A lot of the game contents are either a little too easy for IO-ed characters, or players are just rushing to the end to grab the final reward regardless of defeats.

What sonic does probably better than any other set with cold/ a very close second is to make all the new elec/shield scrapper and tanks completely invunerable to normal game play. and allows a shield tank to effectively tank on task forces because it rounds out their holes completely. If i had to build a team and had 2 spots for defenders I would beg for a cold/ and a sonic/ especially if they both have leadership then even the blasters can tank

Weird idea. What if Sonic Siphon were changed so that it compressed the energy siphoned into a tiny node floating nearby you? The node would be an immoveable pet with a small +Endurance Recovery aura power. The node would last 2 minutes or however long before fading. You could have up to, say, five nodes summoned at a time.

The clincher, though, is that because its a pet you could hang Disruption Field off the node. Or run to a location, siphon, and set up a Sonic Repulsion spot there. Suddenly Sonic has a fix for both its endurance issues and its solo woes.

What do you guys think? Would that change Sonic Resonance for the better?

I would like -dmg debuffs added in siphon and hula hoops. If thats not possible, lower the end cost. I played a sonic/rad to 50 and it wasnt very fun as i like to attack and use my secondary.