For a wizard concept, what goes well with Illusion?

Hi guys I have been playing CoX on and for very casually, now I wanna get more into it, and seeing as I haven't played controller at all before I thought I'd give it a go.

I'm looking to make a wizard type character, which is perfect since trollers can chose Ill as prim power, however I can't really make up my mind as to which secondary I should pick. My initial thoughts would be Storm or Cold, then Fire as ancillery (no way a wizard who can't cast fireballs would ever be taken serious by me). That said the build should also be useful in a team. In regards to "what I want to do with this build" I can only say that I never played troller, but I have a def with empathy, so I feel no great need to get another toon with a heavy healing set, such as emp or TR, but open for suggestions all the same

I see that a lot of ppl pretty much worship Thermal Rad and Rad Emish on these forums, but they don't really seem to fit the wizard concept too well. Regardless I'm very interested to hear what people think a wizard should be getting for secondaries and why, and how this pwr set may or may not be useful in a group.

Oh and also for travel teleportation seems to fit, but I don't think I ever heard anyone discuss it as an actual travel power, so if anyone has any ideas about that, they're most welcome too.

- Thanks in advance

Thermal... how does summoning FIRE not work for your concept?

Thermal... skip the heal, take the shields and buffs. You can color customize the shield and illusion to look gnarly awesome together. My toon "Street Magician" looks pretty solid IMO, and Thermal makes the pets that more effective in combat. I'd do thermal for those reasons above any other.

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Originally Posted by Deus_Otiosus This entire post should receive some kind of award for being both hysterical and fantastic. Well done.

My namesake is a magical Illusion/Storm with Teleport. It's hellafun. The Chaos Controller.

TP and Hurricane go together very nicely indeed.

Freezing Rain helps your Phantom Army out greatly (since they can't be buffed at all, but the enemies they are focused on can be debuffed).

I guess it all comes down to what kind of wizard character you want.

From the sounds of it yours is an all rounder as you have illusions, mind control and fireballs.

So you could easily go for another elementalist such as Thermal like Red has suggested, Storm which is viable and is described as chaos bringer or Cold which (from what Ive read) is a good alternative to Radiation Emission.

Another alternative is Force Field - magical shields - but having leveled a Illusion/FF to 50 myself it was EXTREMELY boring both solo and in teams as they are both drop it and leave it sets.

Empathy could work as you could be using your spells to heal. Kinetics as you would be using your powers to sap the enemies.

Radiation would work as well and I see it is a Death Cloud type spell you see in fantasy RPGs.

To be honest they could all work depending on your concept except for maybe Trick Arrow.

I would recommend (from a personal opinion) either Thermal, Cold, Radiation, Storm

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Originally Posted by Zwillinger Quote: 16. Has Paragon Studios redefined "player" to require your mouse to subscribe separately from your keyboard? If your mouse has greater processing power than your gfx card, the answer is yes.

I think anything works for a Wizard except /Trick Arrow. If you can ignore the tech look of the various arrows, you could still go with /Trick Arrow, especially if you are a High Elf wizard with a Long Bow.

I think Illusion/Storm has the most Wizard-like feel, followed closely by Illusion/Cold and Illusion/Thermal. But again, all of them work well except perhaps /TA, just because the "Wizard Hat" is a very big hat.

Lewis

Thermal is an extremely useful Jack-of-all-Trades set, but it is VERY busy.

Illusion/Storm can be VERY fun. It's sorta like driving on ice. You're not getting much control. Fight it, and you will hate it. Surrender to the chaos, and it can be fun on a bun.

Like Local said, with customization, there really isn't anything in the troller secondaries that doesn't look like magic.

Considering your... domestic needs, what sort of support are you looking to provide?

My main was the same concept, and Illusion / Rad was an easy choice for me.

Especially now, with power customization, you can choose a lot of different auras for your Rad powers, but the main thing is that Rad's effects are very much like Curses / Enchantments. While Fire is clearly fire-based, which works for a fire-based mage, if you want a general Merlin-style "casts all types of spells" wizard, then Rad is clearly the most generic type of powers/magic that you can get.

First and for all I want to thank you all for your input, you all came with valuable advice. And sure bows would be great for a trickster sort of magician, but I was going for a less martial character to relies more on magic than... Well anything else really. As for thermal radiation many of the skills seem useful for a healer, and I already have an empath def, so I wanted a powerset which is not really healing at all.

The description of the "Merlin" archetype was good. Think at this point I will go for either Radiation Emission or Storm Summoning. Though I heard Storm can be hard to use without getting verbally abused in a team :P

At the end I just wanna say that while I greatly appreciate all of you guys input, I am particularly happy to see Local Man giving his opinion on the matter. Even being undecided on a secondary I have been using Local's guide on the Ill/Rad troller to learn more about Illusion, so another thanks for that.

PS. I don't mind buffing, just the healing aspect I would rather leave to my def.
PSS. I thought of force field, but after reading a bit everyone pretty much seems to agree it's good, but boring :P

I will take to heart what all of you guys have said and make the coolest character ever. Thanks a bunch!

I must agree with most of the posts here. To me, the most "wizardly" would be /Kinetics. What it does to your enemies is awesome, although it has synergy problems with Illusion. Radiation Emission (NOT Thermal Radiation) has the best synergy with Illusion, and the effects do look somewhat magical (even without power customization), although you just have to ignore the name (Radiation).

Personally, I like /Kinetics. And with /Kin you will always be welcome on a team, especially with a Stone/ Tank.

While I agree that Trick Arrow may not appear very 'wizardly', I do like it for Illusion. The main reason being that Illusion is a bit weak on controls, but TA gets some good ones - and they do set up Containment, making those Controller powers more effective.

As others have said, secondaries with good Defense and Resistance debuffing are excellent for leveraging Phantom Army's damage.

Be Well!
Fireheart

/necro!

Rad, Time and Kin are pretty versatile - they're just glowy lights and particle effects that could be anything, really. It helps that all of them are top-tier secondaries.

Storm, Therm, Cold and Dark (when it does get released) are a bit more concept specific but might work for elementalist ideas.

FF and Sonic don't quite look the part, and are specialized enough that they don't bring the sort of versatile effects that most comic book wizard characters have traditionally been able to do.

TA probably isn't a good fit.

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Originally Posted by Fireheart The main reason being that Illusion is a bit weak on controls.

Illusion is far above even Earth in terms of control power. It just isn't obvious.

I personally use ill/cold for my mage character. While you can make anything but trick arrow work, Anything with Fire, Cold, or Arcane (yay Warcraft) works the best. Thermal is 'meh' if you wanna solo GMs, so that was out for me. And I didn't like how busy /Rad was, not to mention the end problems it has.

So I went /cold. No end problems once you get heat loss for you or anyone in the mob. (SS/Fire/soul brutes love me.) Sleet gives you another layer of control along with drastically increasing everyone's damage and making the mobs easier to hit, and benumb which debuffs EVERYTHING besides resistance. Its scary that once you benumb a GM, those mezzes don't hurt anymore, their damage falls to almost nothing, and other fun stuff like cutting their regen to 35% of what it normally was. Not to mention it gives a ton more -res to a single target and comparatively the same as a /rad for groups. 110-130% -res on a GM makes it die so much faster. You just need more purple sets to get perma PA is all.

Oh, and the def shields. Nice giving 12% def to all to all your killable pets like Tarantula and Phanty and the party.

Basically as I see it. /rad if you wanna have an easier time with groups but have a harder time fighting a GM/AV, or /cold to lose a bit of group debuffing for more GM/AV debuffing. And Arctic Fog is nice, 60% slow resistance on top of winter's gift's 20% is very very nice.

Downside to /cold is that it gets sleet and heat loss at 35/38, so its a late bloomer.

Ignoring the fact that this thread is over a year old, two of the newer sets, Time and Dark, match up well with Illusion as well.

I've played for years and have never once had the desire to solo an AV, so Illusion's capacity for that has never been a decision factor. Illusion is good enough that you should be able to combine with any secondary and have a character that is good at something. The ability to solo AVs is dime a dozen these days anyway in the wake or Lore pets, and the importance of teaming at high levels and under strange/quirky circumstances has increased dramatically, so I'm not sure why the ability to solo old world AVs continues to be used as a benchmark of character success. It's certainly a capability but IMO not what it once was.

I'd vote for a illusion/storm/fire with Teleport for a wizard type character... a variety of elemental and illusory powers seems thematically appropriate

Dark Affinity is coming. I can see that meshing well.

I have an ill/storm/ice whose character concept is a bound air elemental and its a blast. I wouldn't get too worked up about ppl complaining about the storm secondary, really you can be very effective just utilizing a few of the storm powers most of the time. For me I tend not to use hurricane or tornado unless I need to go into bastion mode, and that does come up. And an ill/storm controller can really provide a bastion of defense when they let loose. I completely shut down two rear ambush spawns in a TF while the rest of the crew were clearing up the front.

The only caveat is that Ill/Storm is really expensive IO wise if you want perma PA (and I would recommend it highly) and almost requires the T4 Cardiac Alpha Incarnate slot to really shine. And even then you can still come up against AVs that you just cant shut down with the damage output. On the bright side, you really never have to worry about your defense values as the vast majority of the time you never draw aggro.

Ill/Rad is much cheaper to get perma PA and with some hefty -regen it can really shut down AVs and GMs much easier, but I just don't think it has the ability to completely wall out a group of enemies like Ill/Storm.

BTW: As long as you are doing VP and incarnate stuff you could always roll Ill/Storm/Cold and pick up the Pyro Judgement for the massive fireball, I only say this because freezing rain + (forgot the name) storm from the cold app is a really nice blanket of damage to lay out while your army is tearing stuff up.