A good support powerset to Energy blast?

Hi all,

With I19 around the corner with Animation Customization, among other awesome stuff, I have got a glimmer of hope about a new animation-style for Energy Blast powers, so I'd like to try again with the set. Though, I can't decide which role/powerset combo to use. Now, as the title more or less implies, I'd like to make a char that is support as well as power, so I'd like your opinion on, which AT Energy Blast is best with, Defender or Corruptor, as well as a good support set to combine it with.

Thanks for any answer!

I can tell you from personal experience Radiation and Dark are not really good pairings with energy blast. In fact anything that involves toggle debuffs or placed pseudo-pets is going to be "challenging" to do it right.

With that in mind, I think Forcefields, Traps and Sonic Resonance all synergize well with Energy Blast. My personal favorite is Forcefield-Energy Blast, but you have to realize that is not a combination that is going to "wow" anyone over damage dealing ability.

Maybe try a few combinations and see what feels like your playstyle

I find energy blast to be really effective when I can concentrate firepower on something and keep it floored. So I like to mix it with a buff powerset. This way I can toss out the buffs, then pick something ugly and use the energy blasts to wreck its day.

I can vouch for Forcefields/Energy Defenders working out, too. But it's by no means a high-damage combo. It can, however, practically softcap your entire team's defense to everything but untyped Psi and unresistable damage. You'll end up with a knockback monster, though, so learn to aim the KB so the enemy lands somewhere unpleasant for him. Like in range of a Scrapper... or in lava. that's always nice.

Of course, if you want to go nuts, there's Storm Summoning. Not for the faint of heart and those who dislike chaos, but Storm is pretty fun to play, too.

Well, this may be the post that sails a thousand angry responses, but IMO none of the support sets pairs particularly well with Energy Blast. The benefit of using a Corruptor or Defender blast set are the heightened debuffs that you receive in compensation for your lower damage. Energy Blast just ends up with higher mag knockback, so you get to knock stuff around more without it dying as fast as your "benefit." The only 2 sets that also have no real debuff to speak of, Archery and Assault Rifle, at least have rather amazing nukes on 60 second recharge to balance them; Energy Blast has a massive knocback nuke that, on a Defender, won't even kill minions, will tank your endurance, and make your teammates want to kill you.

As for Force Field, you will have no trouble knocking stuff back with that set if you want to on its own merits. Adding Energy Blast to it is fairly (not quite entirely) redundant. There is also the matter of combining a team heavy primary with a secondary that has been known to cause teammates to mutiny.

None of that is to say you shouldn't try it anyway. But IMO you could do a lot better with just about any other set on either of those ATs.

The only one that I'd consider sorta synergistic would be kinetics. When soloing you can knock something down then run into melee to heal off of it, and in groups people won't care that you're energy because you're kinetics.

Other than that, just pick the powerset you find most enjoyable. It'll be harder to solo groups of higher level enemies due to knocking enemies out of your own debuffs, but it's not THAT bad.

Energy/Traps might be fun. The knockback will knock things off of Caltrops but since it knocks them away from you they'll have to get back through the Caltrops patch. Acid Mortar has a pretty good range so it would be a lot harder to knock things too far for it to hit them. Most importantly, you get Force Field Generator, which provides significant defense and protects from holds and stuns. That by itself is a good reason to pick Traps... and unlike FF you get debuffs to speed up soloing and assist with hard targets in groups while still providing some extra defense to anyone near you.

FF, Kinetics and Traps would be the best matches, IMO.

FF shares Energy's theme of knocking things around with Force Bolt and Repulsion Bomb and shares a little bit of the visual appearance.

Kinetics fits well because it doesn't require any specific target to stay put (like Rad and Dark do with their toggles) or even remain in a certain spot (like Cold and Trick Arrow do with their location debuffs). The only trouble you might have is getting off a good Transfusion/Transference, but a well timed pick up after using Power Push should solve that. Plus Energy Blast provides a good deal of mitigation that Kinetics needs since it's rather sparse of that on its own.

Traps would also be decent since it can work around EB's knocks. Most of its more important debuffs are "sticky" so it doesn't matter where the foes go after affected.

Still waiting for his Official BackAlleyBrawler No-Prize

Don't forget Storm/Energy for maximum chaos .

Another possible combo is Empathy/Energy. You can use the knockback to get enemies off a squishy character to buy you time to heal them.

Try something that i have never seen but will prolly look kewl
Enrgy /Sonic corruptor
I have no idea on how it would work out.. but hey u will look fab

I haven't seen Sonic Resonance mentioned yet, and honestly I think it has a relatively strong synergy with Energy Blast out of the available sets.

Energy Blast is a set with high damage-per-blast (with appropriate recharge and animation times) split between two damage types. Sonic Resonance offers a single-target resistance debuff to start, good for picking one nasty target to burn down with your high-damage alpha strike. Sonic also has some thematically matching (and controllable) knockback components in Sonic Repulsion and Liquefy, without becoming as madcap as Storm + Energy do. Finally, and this will sound silly, dropping Disruption Field on your main melee'r gives you a handy graphic to aim for when trying to "putt" stray enemies back into PBAoE range of them (and your own selfish motivation for tossing them there, for the Corrupters in the crowd ).

Other sets that benefit from a choice of Energy Blast are those with placed debuff areas: Dark (Tar Patch), Storm (Freezing Rain), and Traps (several). Knocking stray runners or missed groups back into the patch is a very useful back-pocket ability to have.

Storm has its own measure of control through knockback, and while I'd consider this a point of extra synergy it also adds a large measure of extra trickiness, so I couldn't recommend without caution (i.e., "are you *sure* you want to do this?". Rest assured, though, it can be great).

Otherwise, while Energy doesn't have a strong affinity for any particular set it likewise doesn't pair badly with any set either, letting each shine quite strongly without getting in its way either thematically or mechanically.

FF/Energy is a good thematic pairing, although it lacks the ability to debuff. Still, FF/Energy isn't all that compared other power sets 1-30, but levels 30-50 the survivability of FF, along with the knockback of Energy is extremely valuable. When fights last longer in the 40-50 range, you can't blast a target down as quickly with debuffs, which is where a buff set like FF shines.

Ok, first off I'd like to thank for all the responses, I'm not used to so fast reaction, you see, so thanks ^^

Now, with the kind words done, I've taken a few mental notes: As I can understand, it might be optimal of me to aviud using a set with toggle debuffs, which doesn't really seem like a problem to me.
And then, I'd like to ask you about a set that you haven't mentioned, namely PD (Pain Domination). I myself have been thinking about that set, as it might not have so much synergical difficulty with EB's infamous KB-madness. Other than that, I might like the idea about Sonic Resonance, but can you tell me why you haven't mentioned PD??

I think the reason nobody mentioned Pain Dom is twofold:

1) It's rather new (compared to all the others at least) and gets lost in the mix.

2) On the only AT that it can be paired with Energy Blast it's a bit lackluster.


I'm sure it could work, especially when combined with EB's inherent mitigation, but there are other sets that could provide more for the user. YMMV, of course.

Still waiting for his Official BackAlleyBrawler No-Prize

energy/therm

I've got a 50 Sonic/Energy Defender and a Pain/Energy duo in the 30's, and both work really quite well.

Neither Sonic or Pain give you a whole heap of personal survivability, so the knockback helps a lot when there's a Freak tank bearing down on you.

Sonic is very low maintenenace, giving you the time required to use Energy Blasts well. The only downside is that you have to move around a lot to do so, and some temamates may prefer you to stay still so they can shelter in your Dispersion bubble. It also allows you to keep enemies in Liquefy if they run out.

I'd really recommend Sonic/Energy. Its not a fantastic solo-er, but its passable for a Sonic, and it works well on teams if you know what you're doing.

I find FF/Energy overkill on both knockback and safety in general.

Of the energy Corruptors I've tried, the Energy/Storm combination seemed to work the best, with Energy/Traps the runner up.

Energy Blast is pretty much the average for blast sets. It isn't great at anything but it isn't terrible at anything. For Blasters, it's right in the middle for ST damage, AoE damage, and pretty much everything else.

However, Corruptors and Defenders have something Blasters don't: decent debuff strength. Blast sets with debuffs as their secondary effect, like Sonic's -resist, Ice's slows, or or Rad's -def are more attractive on Corruptors (and especially Defenders) because those secondary effects are stronger. Energy's secondary effect is knockback though, and stronger knockback is rarely considered a good thing... which is why people say Corruptors (and Defenders) get less out of Energy Blast than sets with useful debuffs.

Eng/Storm is the way to go.

Gale gives you the hammer, Power Push gives you the scalpel.