Viable Corruptor choices for four man teams?

Hello,

I currently am (well, not currently, but will be) running on a four man team for the entirety of my leveling experience. Before I get any kind of character up I would just like to ask a few questions:

What are the best Corruptor sets that can both function effectively as a source of a healing for a team while also not being near-useless for solo play? The only set I really do not wish to go is Fire/Kinetics. Not so much the Fire part, I'm not completely opposed to that, but more the Kinetic part. When I hit 50 I don't plan on only playing with them, so being able to do missions and things on my own without too much trouble would be a great asset.

So far I've been looking at Sonic/Pain. It seems like a really solid set for teaming, but I'm unsure as to how great it will be while playing solo.

I've also been looking at something like Fire/Dark, but am concerned as to the heal needing to 'hit'. Is that normally a huge issue or a just once in a while but as long as you're paying attention and keeping the healing going you should be fine situation?

One last question - is the healing portion of O2 boost in Storm any good?

Thanks in advance!

You'd do best to not build a healer.

Focus on a set that uses buffs or debuffs, such as dark miasma. Superior to healing in every way. And if someone tells you otherwise or tries to tell me otherwise, they don't know a thing about teaming in CoH.

Enemies that can't hit you/hit you hard/die too fast to hit you > having to heal damage.

^ Seconding this. Healing isn't as important in this game as it is in others. Sure, it's helpful but other sources of mitigation/prevention should come first. All of the sets known for 'healing' also have substantial ways to prevent that damage in the first place. Empathy has Fortitude, Thermal has the res shields and Pain has WoP.

Buffing/debuffing/blasting > healing

Dark or Rad are both very powerful all-round sets. Good AoE debuffs for normal spawns but very capable of handling the AVs/EBs you'll face with a team. They also both have the advantage of getting their core powers early, unlike /Pain which is very, very team-focused until much later on. Pain also is a fairly weak soloer, unlike Dark or Rad.

If you're only ever going to be teaming with the character going a more support heavy set like Pain or Thermal isn't a big deal, but for such a small team I think you'd be better off with a more well-rounded support set.

The tohit check on the Dark heal really isn't a big deal, more than made up for by how powerful of a heal it is, the fact it's a great debuff and is AoE. Slot for decent acc like you would any attack, rest for heal/end/rech.

O2 boosts heal is...well, fairly small. It's a nice addition to the rest of the power that Storm brings to the table, but if someone is taking a lot of damage or in the red its going to take quite a few O2s to get them back up.

I've got guides for all the Corr secondaries (notably Rad and Dark as I've talked about above) in my sig if you want to take a look.

fire/dark is always a good choice. The set will be very useful on teams and is one of the best choices for solo corruptors. The heal needing to hit isn't too bid of a deal. For one, slotted it'll have a 95% chance to hit so it'll hit most of the time, but really, you won't even need to use it that much. Once dark gets going (in the 20's when fearsome stare is slotted out), virtually nothing is even gonna hit at all. They'll all be stuck in a tar patch getting aoe'd down with a 5% chance to hit your team.

The old adage is true: A pinch of prevention (mitigation) is worth a pound of cure (healing). Corrs should try to bring both, 'cause you never know. All of the above advice is great.

Also, /kin is fairly soloable when combined with just about anything, so don't knock it.

/cold is good for solo once you get sleet....its a long long road to sleet though.

I think, judging by the massive support for it, I'll give Fire/Dark a shot. It seems like it could be really fun.

Thanks for the advice and suggestions guys, I really appreciate it!

A while back I wanted to make a "Hamster Ball" team -- one half force fields the other half sonic, with whatever control or blast set the player wanted to take. You could have a whole team with capped defense and capped resistance going around demolishing things.

One forcefield and three sonics plus dipping into the leadership pool will have everyone but the forcefielder at the soft cap for defense and everyone at the resistance cap. You'll also all have multiple sources of mez resistance.

Additionally, anyone else you invite to the team will also get that level of protection. Invite a blaster or two and see what kind of mayhem you can cause.