FF/Psi/Soul Power Pool Selection Question

Hello, all.

I just started up a new FF/Psi Defender; and I am having some problems deciding exactly what power pools I should take with him. So, I thought I would come to the masters and ask for some help.

I will be taking FLIGHT and MEDICINE for theme reasons, leaving me 2 remaining pools. I am choosing between Leadership, Fighting, and Hasten. My goal for this character is to softcap him (to all 3) on DEF.

Leadership Pros: +15% Damage, Group DEF, Vengence.
Leadership Cons: Less DEF makes it harder to softcap, toggles are more expensive than most.

Fighting Pros: Extra S/L RES, Better DEF on Weave to help softcapping, extra attack.
Fighting Cons: Requires 3 powers.

Hasten Pros: It makes stuff recharge fast. (I was considering building recharge around Soul Drain to help offset the lower damage for Defenders - and yes, I am aware this would require over 300% recharge)
Hasten Cons: Stuff recharges less fast.


Any help and opinions you guys can give would be very much appreciated.


Thanks,


-Star

If softcapping is your goal, take both leadership and fighting and ship hasten (gasp! ). Yes, skip it.

Leadership, for maneuvers, is (in my opinion) utterly mandatory for a FF defender. Maneuvers is the difference between providing 39% defense to your team and providing 44.5% defense. This is the difference between letting 11% of the damage through and letting 5.5% of it through - in other words, thanks to the way defense scales as you get near the cap, taking maneuvers *doubles* the total survivability you offer your team.

If you want to softcap to all three positions yourself, I think you're going to want weave. Maneuvers and dispersion bubble between them provide ~21% defense to all. Softcapping one position from there isn't too tough - I've got ranged softcapped on my FF defender from that starting point, for example. But if you want to softcap all three, it would really be helpful to have weave's extra 5% base to all. Taking weave also means you can slot the steadfast 3% much earlier since you can stick it in tough instead of waiting for an epic armor. That puts you at ~32%, and it's a much easier trip to 45% from there.

Now, yes, this will be a lot of powers, and a lot of toggles. Keep in mind, though, that there's nothing that *requires* you to take the other leadership toggles - they're *nice*, but if softcapping is the primary goal they're not needed. Taking just the powers previously listed, we've got:

2 from flight, 2 from medicine, the 'big 3' from FF, 3 from fighting, 1 from leadership = 11 powers out of the 24 you get. That leaves you 13 powers between the rest of your primary, your secondary, and any epic you might like, which, while tight, should be enough. Grab the recovery procs and a performance shifter proc and you should be able to keep up with the end cost, especially since there's no real need to actually *run* tough. (btw boxing/kick aren't attacks, they're nothings which have the plus side that you don't need to spend slots on them - ignore them).

Also, you might find Dark Mastery preferable to Soul since the version of Soul Drain there has half the recharge time.

I guess the honest answer is that I'm weighing how important that last 5% really is to the team, end game.

I plan on slotting the shields (for others) to allow for max. DEF; and I team quite a bit, so team utility is definitely important to me. But I also solo quite a bit, too.

And I also feel like, with the current trend of slotting characters, most characters are slotted for at least *some* DEF already, endgame. (Most Blasters and Corrs softcap to Range and/or AoE, scrappers and stalkers are usually built on DEF; depending on their sets. Plus most have at least some DEF bonuses from their sets, even if they're not building around it.)

So, that being the case, I guess I'm trying to find a middle ground between what's best for the team and what is still good to solo with.

Are there really people that boot folks for not taking leadership? Yikes.

-------

I am not sold on the epic/patron pool. Is there, perhaps, a better pool choice for solo damage?




-Star

I dunno if there are people who would boot for not having leadership - haven't seen any myself, and I wouldn't, but human nature being what it is I wouldn't be surprised if there are some out there.

I don't think I'd go so far on assuming def slotting, end-game. Melees, yeah a lot of them will have def just because a lot of the popular armor sets are defense based. They're not the ones you're really worried about, though, since a) they presumably have some mitigation of their own already and so likely don't need the shields as much, and b) they're much more likely to stray out of the range of dispersion bubble during the fight anyway.

It's the squishies who will get the benefit of that last 5%, since they don't start with any defense and are more likely to be standing closer to you. And I honestly *don't* see many massively IOed characters, even at 50. Perhaps it varies across different servers, but as I've checked people's /info over the months, my guess is that fewer than a quarter of them have *any* set bonuses listed at all, let alone a big enough list to guess that they might be softcapped. Remember, the forums are *not* representative of the game as a whole. It's certainly possible that you might tend to play with a different crowd than me, but my personal assumption is that any squishy I play with is rocking exactly 0% defense base.

I guess my view is that hasten just isn't very important compared to the possible team benefit. This probably reflects my own personal prejudices, as I've just never been in the 'take hasten whenever possible' camp (of all my characters, exactly 3 even have the power, and on two of them it's because they are superspeeders). Especially on a character like this, though, I would never sacrifice that amount of team benefit for hasten. Recall, just having softcapped defense will make soloing a utter breeze - all hasten would do is speed things up a bit. I personally don't think that losing hasten would really make it difficult to solo - though again, this is my own opinion, and it's coming from someone who is perfectly happy with the soloing speed of a non-hastened no-soul drain FF/nrg defender. Even still, just having soul drain should help a lot - even with just normal slotting, it's already got 50% uptime, and getting into melee to use it will present no problem for a completely softcapped FF.

As for epic, if damage is your concern definitely go dark. The only epics with any damage boosting at all are dark, power, and soul. Dark's version of soul drain recharges twice as fast as soul's version, and power's 'damage boost' is power build up, which has twice the recharge of soul drain and lasts only 12.5 seconds.