Making a Def and need advice...

I haven't played a Defender in many issues and wanted to know opinions towards the ranking of primaries and damage. Thanks in advance.

This is a hugely open-ended question and cannot really be answered without some idea of what you are looking for. The various Defender primary powersets are arguably the most diverse in the game from one another and they each have pros and cons to them.

You want buffs? FF, Traps and Cold can give you Defense, Sonic can give you Resistance, Empathy can give you a little of everything and is wonderful for recovery, regeneration and healing. Kinetics is the king for damage buffs and for recharge reduction, though Empathy's Adrenalin Boost works well too.

You want debuffs? Radiation can give you a little of everything, with an emphasis on regen debuffs. Dark Miasma can give you a ton of -tohit, and a smattering of -dam, -res and tons of control, not to mention an autohit cone stun power that doubles as the best rez in the game and the only mass rez. Trick Arrow can throw out just about everything and do some serious damage at the same time with OSA. Cold can neuter special abilities and turn the fearsome Ghost Widow into a kitty cat.

You want control? Storm can manipulate the field like few others can, though it can be irksome in the hands of a novice. Dark also ranks highly here, as does Trick Arrow.


The above is oversimplified, of course, since the Defender powersets almost all cover more than one of the roles above. If you have more questions, it may be possible to help you in a more specific way.


If you are asking about damage only, then it will to some measure depend on your secondary powerset, but ultimately nothing is going to rival Kinetics. Most likely the debuffing sets such as Sonic, Rad and Dark would be runners-up, with the buffing sets last as they have no way to increase their own damage (though some, like Empathy, can increase the damage done by teammates).

If you want to do damage on a defender you'd be better off with a corr. Best corr is fire/cold for what it brings and can do. Fire/Kin is fine if you like hearing "SB Meh"

Thanks for all the solid responses so far. A little more background...

1) working new hours and weird times, so my ability to team is going to be non existent for awhile
2) this is working towards my concept of playing a cpl of powersets in every AT; I currently have 2x Blasters, 3x Corrs and 1x Crab (Huntsman actually) etc etc at lv50
3) not sure if I want to play another /Sonic...put a lot of effort into a Son/Pain Corr awhile ago and really enjoyed it

So basically without considering primaries, I wanted to get your opinons on secondaries with high ST damage. It looks like Rad/Son gets a lot of mileage and for good reason, but looking for advice outside of that secondary even though I may go that route finally...just not sure yet.

Thanks again guys.

One of my later alts that leveled quickly is a Dark Miasma/Ice blast defender. There are three games within the game that this defender was able to leverage. First, you can build the defender to be hold happy. Freeze Ray, Petrifying Gaze, fluffy's Petrifying Gaze, even Bitter Freeze Ray, and a patron power hold can bring you more holds than you would need. This can be very good soloing since held, pesky foes are soon to be dead foes.

Second, Ice blast has a slow component. Slow stacks nicely with tar patch. It's another layer of preemptive damage mitigation.

Third, ice blast has two wonder target AoE rain powers. The devs for some reason did not modify the damage of these powers from blaster magnitude when they ported them over to defenders. The combination of tar patch, ice storm, and blizzard is one of the mightiest available to defenders. With practice, you can drop the rain on foes without them even having line of sight for immediate retaliation.

A few other observations. Ice blast recharges fast and animates fast, especially the first two tier powers. For all the reasons given for synergy, ice blast does work with Rads, storms, and colds since they have slow powers to leverage and to debuff resistance for the AoE rain attacks.

Psi Blast's single target beatdown, which rivals Ice's, also deserves a mention. Except, of course, against psi damage resistant critters, /psi's ST attack chain is huge.

So huge, in fact, that there was a full scale invasion from the PvP forums onto the Blaster forum to spread DOOOOM 3 years ago when /psi was being proliferated to Blasters. Man, what a headache that was.

Anyway, /Psi is easy to build with a recharge-happy primary like Kin or Rad, or a recharge-needy primary like Storm, TA, Traps, and Empathy, where you're stuffing your build full of recharge buffs and bonuses anyway. It's nice to have heavy hitters with fast animation times, but you need lots of recharge to take full advantage.

As an added bonus, although /Psi's two AoEs aren't the greatest for damage, they do bring a heavy dose of -recharge debuffing over large areas of effect.

Radiation/Sonic is one of the most powerful defender combos in the game, hands down.

I'd suggest, if you don't want /Sonic, that you go for Dual Pistols. Swap Ammo does the most for defenders, and that will give you access to versatile methods of crowd control/debuff/damage that looks good together with Radiation.

Another strong combo would be Traps/Sonic or Traps/Pistols.

For soloing, I recommend Traps as the primary. With it, you get mez protection, debuffs, damage, control, and defense to build on toward the softcap. For a second option, consider FF. Your teammate bubbles won't do anything for you solo, but everything else is nice. The lack of debuffs makes it a lot slower than Traps, though.

Assuming you're sticking with a Defender and aren't sold on Sonic for the secondary, then I would recommend Archery or Dual Pistols for their crashless nukes. Archery has Aim and a more-damaging nuke that's up twice as often, so I would recommend it first.

Ice is a nice mitigation option for Defender secondary, but I would say that it trades damage for safety. That might be a good trade for a solo character.

Dark/Dark gets pretty safe once you get your controlling tools (Fearsome Stare, Fluffy). Mine solos stuff without any problems, since the enemy's tohit is pretty much floored after fearsome stare, my two cones, and dark servant's stuff.

Not to mention Dark Miasma has one of the most powerful heals in the game, and the most powerful res, which also functions as a huge AoE debuff. Need more damage? Tar Patch. Enemys hitting you too much? Darkest Night. You could even add in the dark mastery APP for soul drain and oppressive gloom for even more hilarity.

Thanks a lot everyone. I'm still doing research on a cpl of primaries and as for secondaries:
-there are a few votes for /ice
-1 for psi
-1 for /arch
-1 for /dark
-2 for /dp

I need to look em up in Mids I suppose and see which I prefer to run with.

My Traps / Dark defender is, hands down, my favourite (de)buffer. Mez protection; def; -damage; -ToHit; -Resistance; a couple powers that (currently) beat the snot of Reactive.

I've taken kin, FF, Dark Miasma and Traps to 50, and Traps hits my sweet spot.

I like Dark Blast since it has some decent utility (AoE immob, great for making mobs stand in place while Caltrops kills them, sometimes useful stun, self heal), and has -ToHit which complements Traps +def nicely. The two main AoEs, which can be an attack chain with a decent +recharge build, are, however cones -- something not everyone's taste.

Rad/Psi, Rad/Sonic, Storm/Psi, Kin/Psi, Kin/Sonic, Cold/Psi, Cold/Sonic, Cold/Dark, FF/Sonic...all good choices.

Traps/Ice makes a pretty nice Defender IMO. I have a hard time with the idea of playing a defender, simply because thier damage is so low. Traps/Ice is one of the few builds I would be willing to play. Traps/ because you get status protection, it's actually really easy to make a build that is soft capped to all positions, and you get some nice enough debuffing. Plus Caltops works pretty nice with Ice Storm.

Edit: Only reason I haven't started a Traps/Ice Defender already is I'm having trouble deciding between that and a Fire/Traps Corr, Corrupter definitely has more damage, with the way scourge works with Rain of Fire, but it's harder to softcap, and debuffs aren't quite as good.