Holdy McHolderson, the AV Holding Defender?

I build a lot of characters with */Ice/Psi as a defender. Hey, three holds are pretty nice for extra controls on a team. They also allow for a good chunk of Recharge!

Then, playing my D3 Defender, I realized, I've never thought about putting Dark with Ice/Psi. You'd have four holds! Maybe, with these Alpha slots, one could stack holds long and fast enough to hold an AV through triangles up, by themselves?

That's the goal here, and I put together a build, but I'm not entirely sure on doing the math. You have to stack enough to beat 53 mag of protection.

Here are the numbers I have with the current build below (these are in order of recharge, duration, animation). These were obtained using Nerve:

Freeze Ray: 2.789 / 26.11 / 1.188
Paralyzing Gaze: 4.463 / 26.11 / 1.848
B. Freeze Ray: 5.578 / 26.1 / 2.64
Dominate: 4.463 / 39.17 / 1.32

I also did a version with a few powers changed and with Spiritual. To acquire the second numbers, add Spiritual Core Paragon, remove 2 slots from Hasten to DN, add 4 DarkWatcher's.

Freeze Ray: 2.46 / 23.29
Paralyzing Gaze: 3.94 / 23.29
B. Freeze Ray: 4.92 / 23.3
Dominate: 3.94 / 34.94

Posting a chunk only since the focus is on the holds.

The questions to be asked are:

Can one stack enough Holds, long and fast enough, to hold through triangles up? If not, how close are you? Can you do it with one teammate providing an extra hold or so?

Is it more effective to lose a hold in favor of PBU?

Would this be better done on another AT, aside from dominators? I believe they can do this with PB and spamming their ST hold during Dom.

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Sorry, I meant to exclude dominators. I'm fairly sure they can do it with PB and spamming their ST hold. I lost that bit when I retyped this after the thing logged me out.

This was intended as an academic exercise to see if someone else can straight hold an AV through triangles up.

If Doms are out of the question, then a /ta controller, or Dark/ice/psy are the only ones I think that would have a chance, but I think it's rather low. You would need to abuse the +2 mag hold proc and hope for the best.

I remember reading in another thread that Cold's Benumb can weaken PToD somehow.

Dominators can hold through purple triangles pretty easily without using power boost type effects. As far as I know, it's just not possible for a non-dominator to do it. You have to stack 54 points of holds to do it, and that's just not possible solo.

A controller is definitely a better option than a defender. At high levels of recharge, the defender's four holds will stop being an advantage and they'll run into the problem of their durations being half as long as the controllers. Mind/trick arrow/earth is probably the best.

Assuming 170% recharge (100% from bonuses and 70% from hasten) and a very rare nerve...

Dominate- 50.83 duration, 2.223 recharge, 1.32 activation time, mag 3
Ice Arrow- 33.91 duration, 5 recharge, 1.848 activation time, mag 3
Total Domination- 33.91 duration, 66.68 recharge, 2.244 activation time, mag 3
Seismic Smash- 33.91 duration, 7.779 recharge, 1.716 activation time, mag 4


Hold on a second...this might be possible. Ignoring critical hold chance and chance to miss, and only spamming dominate, you can get up to mag 42. Throwing out ice arrow and seismic smash inbetween dominates, this could happen.

http://www.cohplanner.com/mids/downl...A8443F8FAA10AC

This is the kind of forward thinking I was looking for!

Thanks for the insight.

Also, regarding the ptod vs benumb thing, that's right, it was an AV with weak ptod.