DP- fire, ice, toxic, or lethal?
By
Ben_Arizona,
Posted on: 2010-03-04 20:09 in Archetypes and Powers General Discussion
If you went with just one, it would probably be Fire for increased damage. I also like the -damage on Toxic, but Toxic is actually the most resisted damage type in the game (IIRC).
None of them really. They each have their (minor) uses but in my opinion they don't compensate for the short comings of the set. If you are disenchanted with the switching, skip swap ammo and just use standard rounds. It won't really gimp you in the majority of the situations.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
Swamp ammo is quite attractive in later levels because the ability to switch 30% of damage to a different type makes a noticeable difference when fighting highly lethal-resistant foes. The ability to change suppressive fire's mez effect from a stun to a hold is also quite handy when facing stun-resistant foes.
Even in earlier levels swap ammo may still be worth a power pick; it provides some flexibility and value even at the base slot, just at a point in a character's leveling curve during which many powers are hungry for slots.
When soloing, lethal ammo does just fine. I sometimes switch to incendiary rounds for more damage. On teams, if I'm in a support role then I often switch to toxic ammo for the -damage. If my primary role is damage then I tend to use incendiary rounds.
The ammo is mostly useful as a way to toggle on/off the knockback in lethal rounds. Switching ammo would increase your damage by 6% vs a -20% vulnerable enemy and 7.5% vs a 20% lethal resistant enemy, so it's not significant unless you run into enemies with high vulnerabilities or strong lethal resistance; I think the placebo effect makes it seem more effective than it really is. Fire will do more, but the extra damage comes as a DoT, with all the drawbacks that implies.
Toxic has the advantage of carrying the only DP secondary effect that another blast set doesn't already do better, but I don't know if they made the secondary-effect numbers worthwhile enough (on either defenders or blasters) for this to be worth bothering with. When I tried it during beta it wasn't really, although a lot of people seemed to feel it was great because, well, any debuff being applied by eight people using the same set at once is going to wreck the relevant attribute.
Which is my best bet? I kinda am disenchanted with switching around. I didn't know if anyone had figured out which works best for the typical scenario.
I'm running a DP/Pain Corrupter.