Kinetic Defender - Architect Mission Support

Hello -

Having finally leveled my FF Defender and slotting nicely as well as my fire/kin Controller... well to put it bluntly I'm looking to make another alt

I enjoy support (duh) and am very intrigued by the kinetics set. I see it's in high demand around the Architect Mission loading area (so much yelling!)... my fire/kin gets a lot of attention and I enjoy player her on teams. However, I look to the Defender and wonder...

I'd like to make a "sidekick" themed character (fun is important) and am thinking a Kinetics defender for hire (for free really) would fit the bill. Let's face it, I love playing support more than anything...

That said, I ask my experienced experts... would a Kinetics defender:

Fulfill the needs of a fast paced AE team?
If so.. kinetics/ ?? what ??

Thanks!

If you enjoy playing support, how about a Earth/Thermal Controller? It's low damage, especially before you get the pet, but great support, capable of stunning, knocking down, shielding, healing, preventing mezzes, boosting damage, and lots of other great stuff. (I also had a lot of fun as an Ice/Thermal Controller but consider that "hard mode.")

I've tried Kin/Ice and Kin/Elec. Both have the tools to protect yourself if you draw too much aggro (and you will) via the fast recharging holds.

Ice will provide more damage, Elec provides more team safety via endurance drain. Out of the two, I'd recommend Kinetics/Ice.

You'll definitely feel like you're supporting your team. Keeping them safe is difficult, because a lot can go wrong with Transfusion - you main mitigation. You can miss, the enemy can move, they can die, the player you're trying to heal can run away out of range.
But everyone loves the extra Recharge and damage.

I ran a sonic/dark for team support- the two cones with some -ToHit slotted, and Maneuvers, give you a sort of "jack of all trades" feel. You can't put someone to the softcap unless they're most of the way there, and you can't keep them alive with just the Res and the Def/-To Hit, but you can take anyone with a little Res or a little Def and slam em up to bulletproof.

Kin is very tiring for me. Once I stop caring who lives and who dies, I'm sure I'll do better.

Some good feedback here and much appreciated.

Methinks I'll rephrase.

You're a tanky tank type. You're looking to bring "A" support kin with you into an extreme AE so bad the Fateweaver said, "Whatcho' talkin bout, Willis?".

If you had a preference, what "type" of kin would you prefer? (bonus) is it a kin?

Controller
Defender
??
?

Fire/Kin or Ice/Kin Corr.

If you've got the stupidly huge spawns that are part-and-parcel of big teams the weaker Corr FS isn't going to be noticeable, especially with a Brute. With a couple Siphon Speeds you can easily pump out enough FS to easily cap a Brute, the Defender FS would be overkill.

Ice because Ice Storm and Blizzard are insane damage. Ice may lack a good TAoE like Fireball, but a lot of AE missions have mobs that rez and you're probably way over the target caps with your AoEs anyway. In those situations, Rain powers do huge amounts of damage.

Fire because it generally does boatloads of AoE damage. RoF double-Scourges. Nothing compares. Especially if you've got rezzer mobs, since they'll rez at 50% health. It's glorious to behold.

If you were going with a Defender, I'd go Kin/Rad of all things. /Rad because it more AoE than the other sets and Kin brings you and the Brute to the damage cap, so the only ways to increase damage are procs and -res. Armageddon and Achilles Heel in Irradiate are glorious. /Sonic has -res but its incredibly ST based which is a drawback in the kind of situations you're aiming for.

I frequently see conventional wisdom that Sonic Attack is "incredibly ST based" which is simply not true.

Even if you only use Howl (as I do), it has a base recharge of 10 seconds, meaning you can easily get to spamming it every 5 or 6 seconds. The -20% res debuff does stack.

Ice Storm, by the way, has a 60 second recharge, Irradiate is 20 seconds, Fireball 16.

Enough numbers, let me give testimonial from my own in-game experience that, between Kinetic buffs, there's little time to fret "if only I had a 2nd aoe".

So, as far as I"m concerned, if you're looking to "play support", Kin/Sonic is extraordinary. It takes a team from the damage cap to beyond. You'll hear "I just hit for 1000 with Brawl" (hyperbole, before someone calls me out on it). Fire/Kin Corruptor is amazing too. Personally, and this is absolutely a "my personal perspective" thing, I lose my identity as support on the Fire/Kin corr. To use a (dated) sports metaphor, with the F/K Corr, I'm Michael Jordan, not Michaeal Jordan's supporting cast. So I lose track of passing out the Kin buffs with the Corr and I'm more diligent with the Def.

To the OP's question if Kinetics would "Fulfill the needs of a fast paced AE team?"

Absolutely. With a Kin you're a fast-paced team whether you want it or not.

Sonic is very single target based. The 'standard' blast set template is tier 1 blast, tier 2 blast, a cone, Aim, some kind of utility power, short range tier 3 attack, targeted AoE, snipe and a nuke.

Sonic's utility power is a ST stun. It may not have a snipe but it's still a very ST-geared set. The TAoE is replaced with an AoE KB cone with minimal damage. That is a significant loss to your AoE damage output.

Yes, you can spam Howl every 5-6 seconds. You've also got to back up to use it effectively since its a cone.

It's misleading to point out how often you can use Howl using recharge enhanced numbers, but then post just the unenhanced recharge numbers of Ice Storm, Irradiate and Fireball. Granted, Ice Storm and RoF will still take 30 seconds or so to recharge, but they do a lot more damage and over a much larger area.

I find myself in melee almost all the time on my Kins. Even if you've got unsuppressed fast movement due to Siphon Speed, it's a hassle to move in and out every time you want to use your AoE.

Fireball and the Rains do not have this limitation. Irradiate is melee range anyway though to be fair, the radius on it is huge enough that you don't have to be right in mobs faces.

I provide base numbers for Howl and base numbers for the others. There is nothing whatsoever misleading about how this was presented.

Back up to use Howl? Sure, if it's advanced gameplay to reposition yourself, perhaps it's not for everyone. It's a hassle to you, so be it. It's not a hassle to me, to anyone else, ymmv.

I can see why they were cautious about giving out AOE -Res powers when they built that set. But, yeah, the AOE is pretty poor. I've tried using the Sleep as an AOE and the damage is not impressive even when you kick it up by 20%.

EDIT: As a Kin I _have_ to not care who lives and who dies. Kinetics provides, like, six times less protection than Rad or Dark or Force Fields. In return it makes your entire team into ravening monsters of damage. Kin isn't ABOUT saving your teammates. If you do, occasionally, heal one of them or slightly debuff enemy damage that's an unexpected bonus.

Some contributors to this thread seem to be missing out on a little concept called "force multiplication".

Nowhere am I suggesting that Sonic Attack will let the player see their own orange numbers be bigger than some other blast set would.

I'm not suggesting, but flat-out unequivocally stating, that your teammates' numbers will be substantially higher.

Does Irradiate do more damage than Howl? Yup. I won't even consider that Howl stacking on Howl makes them almost equivalent, I'll just grant that Irradiate (and all those other aoe attacks, hopefully I don't really have to list them without being called out for excluding any, like a prior poster did) is harder hitting than Howl.

So, damage capped Irradiate would do 145 damage, Howl 117. Let's add say, a Spines Scrapper to the team. Let's damage cap him so that Spine Burst does 405 damage. With the /Sonic, that goes up to 486 (just with 1 -20 res debuff). That's a difference of 80. That pretty much trivializes the 28 point difference in blasts. That's just for one teammate (and 1 attack). The discrepancy grows substantially wider with each additional teammate and each stacking of either another Howl or any of the ST blasts.

Let me be clear, this Kin/Sonic I have is not anyone I would solo with, it can be ponderous at times because yes, its ability to pump out its own damage is not that great. On a team though, it's a whole different ball game. My Kin/Sonic does more to improve team DPS than any other character I have. Oh yeah, that includes a Kin/Rad 50. My Fire/Kin Corruptor may compete, I'll crunch the numbers on that another time.

Well, I do confess the "contributers" bit was laziness on my part, since I was including Amy_Amp with you and simply didn't want to type out names.

The point I was really trying to make is, you can spam enough Howls, due to base recharge and your own +recharge buffs, to contribute aoes. You're right, Silas, that I did venture off from that in my prior post. Could one say Sonic is last in aoes? Sure. Could one say it has a dearth of aoes? I, for one, wouldn't.