The postmodern TA/DP

In one of my masochist alt moods, I rolled up a TA/DP. Nothing like mixing the weakest Defender set with a lackluster blast set. (Admittedly, being the weakest defender set is like being the shortest center in the NBA). However, my old (two years old) familiarity with TA is completely out of touch, since animation times and power effects seem to have changed. As for DP, I don't know anything.

Which are the primary early (pre-20) choices for each set? I'm assuming that Glue Arrow and the -Res Arrows remain solid choices, as well as the novelty ammo power for DP. Aside from that, I have no idea what performs well at 50, or how many DP attacks I'll need for a decent chain.

While I'm asking questions I should know the answers to, how (in)effective are TA's debuffs against AVs? Are all of them (-acc, -dam, -res, -rec) heavily resisted by default?

Finally, is the combo better off as a corruptor? I'm familiar with the basic differences (Corrs have Scourge, Defenders have a pointless inherent, Defenders get better effects from the debuffs but lower base/cap damage, inverted power progression, etc), but I'm curious about anyone's experiences if they've tried either or both.

Thanks for any and all thoughts.

EDIT: Side note before anybody goes to any effort. I'm not particularly worried about IOs and don't use Mids, so don't spend lots of time designing a build I will never afford, or worse will be unable to read.

Redraw hell is the term that I would coin.

It's not one I can help with as I wouldn't even consider such a low wattage combination.

Why take the time to post to say you can't help?

Glue and Flash arrows will be key. Empty Clips is lackluster but it's the only early AoE option. Whether to take it or not depends on whether your playstyle can live with single target attacks til the 20's. Things should really take off once you can glue a group in place for oil and then jump in for Hail of Bullets using ammo swapped for fire damage to ignite the slick. I skipped Entangling arrow and Ice arrows performance has been underwhelming. As a defender the hold simply does not last very long and the powersets don't really give you much to stack with. Cryo beam from the munitions pool might fix that in higher levels but it's very skippable early on.

The pistol and dual wield powers actually chain pretty well. You can either go with just those two slotted for a little recharge for the early levels if you can get on teams regularly or pick up a third attack. Shouldn't need more than four for a gapless chain.

The redraw actually isn't bad. You generally fire a few arrows to start the fight and don't need to pull the bow out again til the next group. When going from bow to pistol, half the time the redraw animation seems to skip entirely. And for the record, even with redraw animations, the downside is entirely visual.

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Originally Posted by Luminara Weapon redraw has, for years, been considered one of the ultimate banes of players. Entire guides, including my own previous TA guide, dedicated entire diatribes on the vileness of redraw and how critical or worthwhile it was to avoid it whenever possible. The truth was only revealed a short few months ago, though. There is no redraw penalty. Let me repeat that. There is no redraw penalty. Every power has a set animation time, and that animation time is synchronized to the activation time (usually. there are odd cases of asynchronous animation/activation times, but they tend to be either bugs or deliberate timing variations "baked" into powers for specific reasons). In the cases where a power requires a weapon or item to be drawn (both literally, in the sense of animation, and figuratively, in the sense of pulling something out of a holder), the activation time factors in both the standard animation and the drawing animation. What this means is, with or without a weapon or item drawn, when you activate a power like this, the total time it takes before you can activate another power is always exactly the same. If a weapon attack took 2 seconds, you would be incapable of activating any other power for 2 seconds, regardless of whether or not the weapon itself was drawn when you started the attack or already in your hand. Observant players will notice (or have noticed) slight pauses at the end of weapon attack animations (though many have been reduced or removed as of Issue 11, leaving only a few sets and specific powers remaining with the extra draw time added to already drawn weapon animations). Those pauses are there precisely for the purpose of equalizing the activation times for drawn and undrawn states of these powers. So, feel perfectly free to combine TA with any powerset available to you. You are not compromising your ability in doing so.

i have a DP/TA corr at lvl 18 atm, and i find it great fun to play...

i agree with u for empty clips , but u can get Bullet Rain in lvl 16 for ur AoE Damage.... i still haven't decided if i keep EC later on ( i love it in my blaster, but poor in corruptor)....

As for TA... i grabbed every single power till now and i don't regret it....

i have a feeling that DP/TA corrs and TA/DP defs will be great toons in higher lvls (with proper IO sloting), and in the future we will see a lot of those running around

I have a DP/TA Corruptor at level 45 and I have to say it is one of the most fun things to play. It really really shines on teams.

The weakest part of this combo is TA, imo. That's another topic, though. I'd recommend going with a defender unless you're in love with Scourge and faster access to the DP powers.

Redraw is a non-factor if you learn to interrupt animations with the draw animation that plays when you acquire a target by initiating a weapon power. Even if it's impossible to overlay the Archery animation with a Dual Pistols animation (like Acid Arrow), your character will still transition to the DP animation without drawing his pistols.

You also gain the benefit of being able to unroot your character and stay mobile, which is a pretty nifty trick limited to the weapon classes in CoH (abusing temps can net you the same effect, though).

I've done more than two the same missions one after the other with the TA/DP and the DP/TA at 50. It doesn't make me an expert. I will say that at the time the corrupter was easier solo. Sooner dead the better but Defenders have been changed since (buffed for damage when solo).

Anyway moving on, different types of defenders require teams to play differently and excel with different player tactics and different team make ups. TA is no exception. The fact that some debuffs are weaker than what other defenders or corrupters is no excuse for failure. All the powers add flexibility and either you and the team can make use of them or you can't. There are guides that are useful but you can further what you learn, meaning that the guides are good enough. A guide that teaches people everything just gives people no reason to play.

My DP/TA corruptor, SPR Chick, is my Praetorian on Virtue. Glue Arrow is absolutely great for keeping mobs tightly packed for when you Empty Clips or a Bullet Rain.

Thanks to your advice, and double XP weekend, my TA/DP is now lvl 27.

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Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight Redraw hell is the term that I would coin. It's not one I can help with as I wouldn't even consider such a low wattage combination.

I've been pleasantly surprised with it, actually. The potency of TA's -res debuffs is quite noticeable, and even has been noticed and mentioned by others on my teams. How effective chemical ammo's -dmg debuff is I'm not sure, but PGA's -33% is handy. As pointed out, redraw is mostly imaginary, and having multiple stackable holds on a defender is pretty nice.

A bit team-dependant? Yes, but most defenders are.

i have a mid 40s Dp/ta corr and its fun laying down oil slick and ur debuffs and dancing amongst the burning mobs . It would shine once u get some def to let you survive doing that. Trick Arrow doesnt really keep you alive more it lets you die slower. As others said low levels you'll need to team and even then your damage will make you despair. I think traps or dark(which isnt saying much cause dark goes with anything) would go well with dual pistols.

I just started a TA/DP character yesterday. I'm up to level 18, and soloing hasn't been very bad. So far the only enemy that has given me pause are the Lost Anathema. It would probably help if I had Ice Arrow (which I do plan to get and stack with Suppression Fire), but I still think they're ridiculous with their Dominate and Sleep chain. You either have a have break-free handy, Ice Arrow, or you GTFO. Redraw hasn't been a problem - I found that if I queue a pistol attack during a TA animation, the pistol attack will go off almost immediately without having to redraw.

My thoughts on TA:

I like this better as a Defender. Maybe I'm just allergic to Corruptors, but I when it comes to debuff sets, I strongly prefer the higher Defender values over Corruptors. And since the changes to Vigilance, the damage advantage of Corruptors just isn't as enticing as it once was.

Also, I found the weak offerings at start of TA are much more problematic on a Corruptor. TA doesn't bring a lot to the table in the early game, and TA Corruptors will be bringing a whole lot of nothing for quite some time compared to Defenders. That is the main reason that I started as a Corruptor, but around level 12 I re-rolled as a Defender. It's not fun when the only thing you can offer a team is a single target immobilize, a targeted AoE slow, and a silly, ineffective light-show. At least not when other Corruptors are throwing around things like Radiation Infection.

I think TA could still take some developer love, but for me only real problems with the set are Flash Arrow and the order of power progression. TA just needs some solid low-level AoE mitigation. I'd go for swapping Flash Arrow and Oil Slick, then buffing Flash Arrow to make it less laughable and worthy of a higher-tier power (actually it needs a buff just to make it less laughable as a low-tier power). Having Oil Slick early on would make TA pretty desirable for lower-level teams, offering good AoE mitigation and damage.

On the brighter side, I -really- like not being chained down with toggles. I'm a long-time vet of the original debuff sets (Rad, Dark, Storm), and it's feels pretty liberating to not worry about anchors and detoggling. It also feels pretty light on the blue bar which is a welcome change of pace.

"There's villainy ... and then there's supervillainy. The difference is performance."
-Doc_Reverend

Look at how many tankers take weave, its good for extra damage mitigation. Flash Arrow is pretty much the same it will offer other players a sort of weave for free. Often its about not pulling the nearby group. Allowing a team to concentrate on one group at a time or not be overwhelmed.

Flash Arrow gets a lot of flak, but IMO it's one of the cooler tricks in TA. It's almost 10% of effective defense (slotted) in a huge, aggroless AoE that cannot be resisted. Radiation Infection may boast much mightier numbers, but it has a smaller radius, higher endurance value, can be detoggled, and gets resisted to nearly nothing when used against AVs. For a fire and forget power to start every encounter with, and as a tool to prevent unwanted aggro, Flash Arrow gets the job done. It's significantly more valuable than Entangling Arrow at early levels when teaming, and stays useful to 50.

The question is, how much defense do you consider it to be giving?

Defender's Flash Arrow gives 9.75% effective defense with 3 SOs.... to everything. This is somewhat less than half the defense provided by FF's single-target shields... but that's two powers to get that defense to all positions, and leaves a hole for non-positional psi.

Traps' FFG provides more defense out of the box, but is subject to being blown up, as well as possible positioning issues.

Super Reflexes toggles give around 21% with enhancement, but to a single position. So Flash Arrow is worth about one and a half SR toggles?

For that matter, MM's get much less debuff from Flash Arrow, but it's still at least as much as the pet defense IOs, which people seem to like.

On the other side, it's got quite a bit less debuff than toggles like Radiation Infection or Darkest Night. Well, the hard part there is keeping everything in the AoE.

So, 9.75% may not be overwhelming, but it's not exactly chopped liver either.

A couple incorrect facts are flying around here. I'll address them both.

"Flash arrow doesn't cause aggro"- this is technically true depending on your definition of aggro, but doesn't properly describe how flash arrow interacts with the aggro system. Enemies have an "aggro list" that keeps track of entities that have used powers on them and how much threat they have. It is possible to be on this list without any enemies attacking you. One way is by using powers that are marked to not alert enemies, such as flash arrow. This means that once the enemies ARE aggroed, the person who used flash arrow will get more of a share of the enemy aggro than they otherwise would have.

"Flash arrow's debuff is unresistable and will always debuff the amount it says"- Unresistable means that it ignores to-hit debuff resistance, which all enemies ranked above minion have in small (5-10%) amounts. It is still affected by level differences, just like all powers except for oddities like the achilles heel proc. The only time that this is any kind of advantage is during AV fights, and even then flash arrow is so weak that it's only a couple percentage points stronger than the debuffs found in other sets.

slotted flash arrow against an even level AV- 9.75%
slotted radiation infection against an even level AV- 7.31%