City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Fire / Traps

Adeon Hawkwood

By Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2010-06-15 06:42 in Corruptors

 

Posted

For a fire / traps, which powers can be skipped and which are must?

Just find it hard to pick and choose any powers.


Thanks

 

Posted

Must Haves: Fire Blast, Fireball, Rain of Fire, Blaze, Web Grenade (lol), Acid Mortar, FFG, PGT, Seeker Drones.

Skippable: Flares, Breath, Blazing Bolt, Inferno, Triage, Trip Mine, Caltrops.

Must Skip So Help Me God: Time Bomb

Most of the stuff in Skippable are nice to have and round out a build well, but the core powers are the stuff I've put in Must Have.

Edit: Here's a very rough skeleton for a build. Just what powers I'd take and when on a generic IO/SO build. Seven power picks remaining for whatever you want.

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Posted

I'd definitely recommend Caltrops. Not only are they an awesome area denial power you can use them to make it even harder for enemies to avoid your rain of fire. As Silas says you can manage without them but they are very useful (especially solo).

 

Posted

Thanks

I think I will go with Silas's suggestion but with Caltrops added.

Probably will pick manoeuvre and mace shield too.

 

Posted

From my Experiance with a Fire/Pain Corr.Id say take all the AoEs you can get.Including Fire Breath and Inferno.As for Skippable Trap powers...None.

 

Posted

time bomb is very skippable.
trip mine is optional

 

Posted

Fire Breath and Inferno are fantastic AoEs, they just come with bigger "...but"s to them. Fire Breath is an awesome AoE, but you've gotta line up the cone to make it worth it and the animation is slow.

Inferno is a fantastic AoE but you crash your endurance, so given Fireball, RoF, Caltrops and maybe Trip Mine, you may find you don't need or want it's firepower.

Trip Mine is really good if you can leverage it, kinda poop otherwise. Pros: does great damage and can be stacked for ludicrous damage. Cons: intereuptible, long animation. FFG/Scorp Shield/Maneuvers can give you the defense you need to toe-bomb spawns with it, so you may get a lot of mileage out of it.

Time Bomb is an egregious turd and should be skipped, no ifs ands or buts about it.

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Posted

I prefer firebreath over trip mine on my fire/traps/mace. The combo of ami+RoF+fireball+firebreath will take out +2's and set you up for taking out +3's with the next fireball (so get your recharge up!). I just can't find a good use for trip mine. Though I suppose RoF+tripmine+fireball could do wonders as well.

I cast seekers into the middle of them, which causes them to bunch up as I jump in. I toebomb acid mortar, then PT, hit aim and as I'm jumping out of the spawn I cast rain of fire. Provided I don't lag out I'll land right where I want to be for casting firebreath. So I tap fireball and then give 'em the stink breath. At that point they are in full flee mode and scourging heavily. I target the boss and blaze its face in. Few things ever escape the rain. If you have fairly high recharge you can toss out another fireball shortly before they escape its range.

Hold slotted PT means they are usually dead before it wears off. Non-enhanced PT increases the risk of a few escapees.

 

Posted

Time bomb on a team.....roll into the next spawn....drop the time bomb then fade back to your team. Time it right and it should explode as your team is moving into the spawn....

Being a healbot is not what traps is about. By that i mean, waiting for someone else to pick up agro.... use your tools...dont be a tool like the rest of these posters.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Captain_Freak View Post
Time bomb on a team.....roll into the next spawn....drop the time bomb then fade back to your team. Time it right and it should explode as your team is moving into the spawn....

Being a healbot is not what traps is about. By that i mean, waiting for someone else to pick up agro.... use your tools...dont be a tool like the rest of these posters.
If you were on my team, continually running ahead to use a bad, slow power rather than fighting with the rest of the team and using all the rest of your powers there I'd kick you so fast it'd make your head spin.

No one has even mentioned healing in this thread, so I've got no idea where you're getting this healbot thing for Traps. The only power Traps has that is remotely similar to healing is Triage Beacon, which I've said is a good but skippable power.

No one has said anything about waiting for others to get aggro. Frosticus already mentioned dropping Seekers on a spawn to draw the alpha.

Any other vital information gleaned from your lower intestinal tract to share with the class?

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Captain_Freak View Post
Time bomb on a team.....roll into the next spawn....drop the time bomb then fade back to your team. Time it right and it should explode as your team is moving into the spawn....

Being a healbot is not what traps is about. By that i mean, waiting for someone else to pick up agro.... use your tools...dont be a tool like the rest of these posters.
Hahahahahaha. Oh wait, you were serious... Let me laugh even harder. Hahahahahaha.

I frequently take the aggro on my Traps/AR Defender, normally with seeker drones although if they're on recharge I'll sometimes just go in and rely on my defense (depending to some extent on the enemy).

So yes, I could move ahead and use time bomb on the next spawn (assuming of course I took leave of my senses and respecced into it) or I could do something useful for my team such as staying with them, filling the enemies full of lead and shielding them with my FFG rather than running off setting up a questionable power and possibly aggroing a group before the team is ready. There are times when it makes sense to charge off and start prepping the next group (heck, I do it a lot on my Tank) but it rarely makes sense for a Traps character, especially not if you're only doing it to use Time Bomb. The damage from Time Bomb is about the same as the T9 nukes in your blast set (excluding AR, Arch and DP of course) so if you want a big boom take that instead, at least you can use it at a time that's convienient for the rest of the team (and if you are AR, Arch or DP what are you wasting time with Time Bombs for? You could be pew-pewing things).

EDIT: Actually, Time Bomb and Nuke damage aren't actually similar for Corruptors now that I think about it. For Blasters and Defenders they are but the Corruptor version of the Time Bomb pseudo-pet is actually the same as the blaster version so it does Blaster level damage but doesn't scourge. So for a corruptor Time Bomb is generally higher damage than your nuke.

 

Posted

How about Triage Beacon?

Do you guys get much use of it? How skippable is it?

 

Posted

It's a decent power, but not a must-have.

It's a pretty solid regen buff. The problem is, for most content/teams, you won't be getting much use out of it. You've really got to be around it for most of its duration for it to be worth it, which just doesn't happen for most fights.

Basically any fight where you're going to be there for 30+ seconds, it's worth throwing down. With good global recharge and enhancement in the power, you can even stack them at which point they're pretty awesome.

I guess the tl;dr version is: if you solo a lot or do a lot of TFs, get it. Otherwise it's of pretty limited benefit.

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Posted

My response to "should I skip Triage?" is "what are you taking that you think is better?"

I personally think of Traps as the big game hunter in this game (not looking for a debate on "who's the best debuffer"). Triage fits very well into that, especially when a build with decent recharge can have 2 out for a bit. I'd never skip it.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Deacon_NA View Post
My response to "should I skip Triage?" is "what are you taking that you think is better?"

I personally think of Traps as the big game hunter in this game (not looking for a debate on "who's the best debuffer"). Triage fits very well into that, especially when a build with decent recharge can have 2 out for a bit. I'd never skip it.
There is nothing to debate, you are absolutely right. I consider triage pretty important for what traps excels in - taking out difficult content. Whether it is +3's (or higher) or the Freedom Phalanx I find triage to be of decent value.

If you are building your traps for aoe spawn melting (which fire/traps can also do very well) then it is of less value.

 

Posted

I dropped trip mine for Fire/Traps as well. I much prefer the Defender version of traps, but I had an old Corruptor I needed to revamp to at least playable levels.

The more stealth you can get, the earlier, the better. Stealth (SS+Stealth Proc) combined with seekers is one key point to breaking spawns. You can do it without the stealth, but the stealth makes it childs play. I really don't have enough stealth for Keilyn or Delain, but can't figure out how to work in Super Speed for either, and I'm not that interested in this build anymore. Alleyne does have enough stealth, and it's a noticeable difference.

Triage or Aid self as early as possible as well.


Click this DataLink to open the build! - Fire Tramp Revamp - 2b [i16]

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Linea_Alba View Post
The more stealth you can get, the earlier, the better. Stealth (SS+Stealth Proc) combined with seekers is one key point to breaking spawns. You can do it without the stealth, but the stealth makes it childs play. I really don't have enough stealth but can't figure out how to work in Super Speed, and I'm not that interested in this build anymore.
I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at here. If the stealth is just to allow you better positioning of your drones, then wouldn't just throwing in a range IO also work?

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Posted

Stealth makes life a whole lot easier. Sometimes you can't always be out of aggro distance to place seekers, depending on the map and situation.

Also, on fast-moving teams with a good pointman, the seekers can be unneeded mitigation that eats up time you could better spend placing other traps, and blasting. Full pve stealth, however you get it, makes it much easier for me to run in tandem with the pointman, and place something without any initial aggro.

That being said, you don't *need* stealth to play that way. But it generally is noticably safer, solo or teamed.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tangler View Post
I'm not exactly sure what you're getting at here. If the stealth is just to allow you better positioning of your drones, then wouldn't just throwing in a range IO also work?
Not much in the traps set drops your stealth and by not much I mean webnade only. Stealth (ideally invis level) makes playing traps almost unfair it is so easy.

edit: if and when controllers finally get traps then illusion/traps will be silly as the invis powers found in illusion don't suppress when you attack or get attacked and you can lower your threat modifier. Meaning you'll have plenty of things that foes find more interesting than yourself even with you pew pew'ing away.