Rad Emission

How good of a set is Rad Emission?

I decided to create a support defender to boost any teams "arresting" efficiency. It's early days yet but I'm noticing that Rad might not be as awesome as I thought.

The first main power, radiation infection has a quite low radius and with mobs moving around I find it hard to keep a whole mob debuffed. I assume it's the same with Enervating field.

Does it get better? Am I doing something wrong? Is there a better team support powerset? I figure if im teaming it'll be with with higher level teams so powers that don't require a tohit check are ideal.

Radiation emission is unanimously considered one of the best sets defenders have available to them. Radiation infection and enervating field can be annoying to use on fast moving teams or when the enemies are scattering a lot, but once you get lingering radiation things will get more convenient. Lingering radiation recharges fast enough to be used at the beginning of most every fight, doesn't rely on an anchor to stay on the enemies, and lowers the enemy's movement speed so they're more likely to stay together.

How's Ice Blast as a secondary? I figured it'd be OK since it has the blaster level Blizzard. Alternatively I was considering Rad blast as a secondary.

There's really no secondary that doesn't go with Rad. Well, maybe /Energy if you can't control your KB.

Both ice and rad blast are pretty good secondaries. They both have pretty good AoE for defenders, a mez effect or two, and decent ST damage (albeit the third ST attack comes late in each set). Keep in mind that not only is blizzard on the blaster scales, so is ice storm. Both sets would work just fine, I think I might be tempted to go ice, though, since the slow effects might help with that scattering issue. Just make sure you take your attacks, whichever secondary you pick. Rad has a couple of easily skippable powers in choking cloud and fallout, so you should have the room to take a goodly chunk of your secondary.

Just to second what everyone else has been saying - No, you did not make a mistake choosing Radiation Emission. It's one of the best debuffing primaries out there and a single well-built Raditaion Emission Defender can turn the tide of some of the more difficult battles in the game.

On large mobs of relatively weak foes your debuffs won't often be strictly needed. As you've noticed, it'll be difficult to keep all the foes within the debuffs and often your debuff anchors will die quickly. One tactic which works well is to place your debuff anchors (RI and EF) on different targets so as to keep up some measure of debuff even if one anchor is taken out by your team prematurely.

On hard targets such as Giant Monsters or Archvillains, however, you will really come into your own. You'll also more than earn your keep on teams that are fighting large-scale difficulty mobs which contain many bosses.

Rad isn't the only game in town when it comes to debuffing, but it is easily one of the best. As others have said, don't neglect your secondary either, as attacks will be another valuable part of your contribution to any team. Not only that, a Rad defender can solo more easily than most and you'll want a good attack chain for those instances as well. Any secondary would work, though given the issues you're having I'd concur that Ice might be a good choice.

However, if you're reasonably far along with the Rad you have now, I don't think it's necessary to restart just to get a different secondary - as has been said, any of them should serve you just fine.

I like Rad emission. I have a number of alts using it. It's also a flexible set meaning you don't have just one prime cookie cutter build you must follow. In fact my rads take advantage of the dual build feature where you can level up a second set of powers for your character starting at level 10. It's very handy.

One example: a PuG didn't 'respect' my toggles. I told them to try.

They didn't, and faceplanted a lot, and of course I did too.

I asked them not to kill my anchors, and they complied, I was quite surprised they complied so quickly and efficiently. We began steamrolling, the enemies ere mostly pink so the team was having a hard time with pink bosses and stuff.

I faceplanted once due to my own stupidity in the middle of a hard battle and since my toggles were off, all the team's health was going down quickly, all red. Instead of waiting for the empath to rez me, I used a wakie+breakfree+blue and anchored a hard target again with RI+EF+LR to get them up asap. The empath healed the team and we steamrolled the missions.

Rad is so freaking powerful that if I just used my toggles I'd a major contribution to the team already (I attacked a lot, used EMP Pulse whenever it was up - a great power for mitigation on most occasions, of course AM when it was up, healed some, even nuked when thinks were a bit safer because it's fun, I like playing 'on the edge', but I could just use my toggles and I'd be making the team steamroll just with them).

Oh and falllout is the bestest power evarz, I loved when a Blaster (they never seem to mind dying lol) offered to be my fallout bait when it was recharged. Besides the lovely damage, it has a hefty debuff. insps (acc+dmg) then Fallout+EM Pulse+Psychic Wail (my rad/psy's nuke) and then a blue just to be able to use my anchor toggles right away is just awesome.

And I don't like defenders that much, this is my only one higher than 40.

I don't like Rad much. Mitigation is rather low if you fight, say, +4s (against those cons slotted RI is only -22% tohit and LR -30% recharge), not to mention AVs with their 85%+ resistance to such effects. AM is a great buff but PBAoE (not as convenient and efficient as targeted ally buffs for fast moving teams). CC is meh. Fallout is fun but meaningless overall unless your team is doing something seriously wrong. EMP is ok but then again is a long-recharging AoE hold that useful in this day and age ? The -regen effect can be great against AVs though. One nice thing unique to Rad is EF being a fast-activating toggle can be used on pretty much every spawn.

That is all thinking about fast moving teams who have a reasonable idea of what they're doing, which seems to be most of the PuGs I end up on nowadays. YMMV. Even then, on slow and/or weak PuGs, I don't find Rad to be a fantastic set if there's someone who insists on killing your anchors (which is more and more common as the graphics aren't as obvious as they used to be). If you can communicate efficiently and your teammates listen, it can definitely turn a trainwreck of a PuG into a good one, but that applies to pretty much every AT (not just defenders).

There's nothing inherently wrong about the set, it's just not Cold nor Traps (both offer superior debuffs *and* survivability, with the downside of lacking a heal and rez... Stuff I don't care all that much about myself, again YMMV). Rad is more of a "do everything good" kind of set rather than be awesome at something specific.

I don't really see anything of interest in the cold domination set. Infrigidate is a single target weaker version of radiation infection, snow storm is just a slowing debuff which creates a lot of visual interference. Sleet is a static version of enervating field that's on a long cooldown that you don't get until level 26. Seems to me cold doesn't offer that much. I might be wrong.

I love dark as a secondary the negetive to hit debuff stacks nicly with RI and when you get TT at level 15 (I think) it becomes a lot easier to lock down the mobs around your anchor. Oh as for being not as good versus AVs? Lingering Rad. gets rid of that pesky thing called Regen. ask a lot of the folks around here how handy that is.

It is something like that, yes. EF -dam doesn't get nerfed against AVs though unless the AV has got damage resistance.

What I like about Cold :

- Sleet

Recharges in about 15-20s and awesome mitigation between slow and KD (not saying Sleet's slow by itself is so hot, but combined with Snow Storm it is*). Not only that but unless I recall poorly you can also have two Sleet effects at once (debuff lasts 30s), so against static targets that's close to perma -60% res.

On fast moving teams EF is up more often, but Sleet has a bigger radius and the KD/slow makes a bigger difference than EF's -dam in my experience.

- Shields + FW + Arctic Fog

Shields give +24% def to all to your teammates, against +4s that's basically better than RI and on all the time (as opposed to only after you're anchored something and only 15' around the anchor).

Arctic Fog adds another +8% def to that on a wide radius, bringing your teammates to an impressive 32% def (and some nice cold/fire/energy res as well). It's already pretty damn close to the softcap. That's defense that is always there and works against everything that isn't autohit, as opposed to tohitdebuffs.

Then there's Frostwork capping HP for a few teammates. Max HP is one of the most undervalued things in this game, or it could be that I just play completely differently than most people, but I know what kills me is damage spikes and having more HP prevents a lot of deaths for me. I've read the argument that squishies accoladed out, IOed out are close to the HP cap, but fact is on PuGs this is the exception and not the norm.

- Heat Loss

Infinite endurance for your whole team, and all it takes is one click every two minutes. That it also has a massive slow and an additional res debuff is just icing on the cake.

- Benumb

Much higher -dam than EF ; being ST on a long recharge I don't find it so great against anything but AVs, and the recharge is worse than LR for -regen purposes, but it's still going to be up most of the time.

Infrigidate never struck me as really worth it, YMMV.

*I also agree on Snow Storm creating a lot of visual interference, and I don't actually use it much. On paper it's a good power especially stacked with Sleet, ingame I find it more detrimental than anything else ; but all other 7 cold powers are fantastic in my opinion.

The only real downside I see with this powerset is it's tough (at least for me) to find time to use anything but cold powers on full teams.

Having played Rad a bit more on some more teams, I've decided that I don't like it. I find it's downsides to be too overwhelming.

On a quick moving team I found the debuffs to make little to no difference, the mobs were dying before RI even finished animating. If I jumped the gun and got the debuff in first before the team attacked, I'd end up dead from taking the alpha, regardless of the debuffs and then the team would just steamroll over the spawn. The radius on the toggle powers RI / EF are too low to be effective on big spawn that likes to run around a lot. Slowing them down with LR only helps so much before they scatter or someone scatters them with a KB power.

I tend to play on fast moving, somewhat competent teams as well, so that's where I'm coming from. I have 3 level 50 rads and a level 50 cold defender. I haven't played a rad since I found cold.

For me, cold allows me to keep up and support the fast moving team better than rad. The shields and aura are proactive, so I don't waste time during battle to provide the team with mitigation vs. spending 3+ seconds to cast RI.

For me, -dam res keeps teams moving fast as well. With Sleet, I get 1 click -dam res and bonus slow and -recharge I want to keep stuff dying fast. The rest of the time I can blast my brains out.

An when it comes to hard targets, I can stack sleet 2 or 3 times (depending on what buffs I have) as well as add in Heat Loss pushing my -dam res anywhere from 60 to 120 (plus the dump truck of +recovery for my team needed for that hard target). And once I have that -dam res set up, I can also benumb that hard target for more giggles.

Is rad bad, hell no. But Cold fits my playstyle better, and for me, makes the game seem easier and flow better than my rad(s).

The only place I differ in opinion with Nihilii is on frostworks. I don't find the benefit to be worth the amount of time I'd need to spend keeping it on folks. Actually, I did use it a bit leveling, but I don't use it now at 50.

All IMO of course.

I've played a lot of levels of Radiation Emission.

The debuff toggles can be extremely useful, but to be useful in a large team:
a) the bad guys need to be hard enough
b) the rad must outsmart the damage dealers, i.e. quickly determine what is likely to die last or next to last. I find Lts are often a good bet since minions are pushovers and blasters tend to focus fire on bosses.

If the the toggles are not needed, just lean on LR, blast, and toss heals as needed.

I personally can't relate to those who complain about either not being able to anchor something that doesn't die immediatley (see above), or having their anchors killed--the powers recharge really quick, either everything is dead/near dead or you just reapply.

I would also never play a cold either as I get bored of buffing very quickly. To each their own, that's what pretendy fun time games is all about. As has been pointed out plenty of places, play whatever you want as long as it is with competence.

I am a rad fan, either rad/ or /rad. I have a rad/rad def but she isn't my fav. My rad/sonic def is a GM soloer.

EMPulse is an awesome hold. On my rad/rad a boosted EMPulse either before or after a Nuke pretty much shuts everything down. Its great to watch the whole square of remaining Robots go all shaky in the ITF.

I am surprised /sonic wasnt mentioned as a secondary in this thread. A rad/sonic is a game changer. -res -def -regen from the rad and -res to the max from the sonic face plant just about any AV/GM.

My fire/rad controller is the only toon of mine that can out pace the Rad/Sonic on AVs and GMs solo.

That being said I have to click to the back of mobs to get a baddie that won't die in 2.2 seconds in fast moving teams or I just don't bother until we meet something that is actually worthy.

I am currently working up a mind/rad controller. He is AWSOME - just not a solo'er of GMs and perhaps not AVs but as a team controller he is freaking the best controller I have had. I can get a second EMPulse off before the first one wears off if I use Power Boost. SWEET!

Can a cold solo GMs?

If a cold has ever soloed a GM I've never heard of it. I know for sure they can solo most AVs though.