Rough and opinionated comparison of Supportish tier 8 and 9s

I was thinking about the various support type toons I have the other night, and how the last couple of powers each set provides helps and changes play style for those power sets. After having a think, I came to the conclusion that (shock horror!) some sets just don’t cut it very well. That's not to say I think every set should be buffed/nerfed, or that the devs need to strive to make sets equal in power. This is just my random musings. If I missed any, apologies in advance.

Cold Domination.
Sleet/Heat Loss. Both awesome powers, they really fit (my) idea of the theme in cold dom, as well as being whoopass. Sleet is a total game changer at 35, especially if your toon didn’t have any soft control. Not to mention how easy it is to ‘perma.’ (I define a perma support power as one that is ready basically every mob on a decent paced team)

Dark Miasma
Black Hole/Dark Servant
I want to like black hole. I really do. It just sounds cool. Too bad it’s totally crap. And the recharge on it is totally stupid. As well as the duration of the intangible being way way to long not to induce team mate abuse. As for DS...I really do understand that the poor fluffy dude isn’t too keen about following some person around..but why does he HAVE to vanish after a time, really? Other than that, good power, and nice alpha strike soaker.

Pain Domination
Anguishing Cry/Painbringer
I have never played a pain dom. But I do love the power names, even if the set itself doesn’t appeal to me. However, I am given to understand both powers work fine, and they fit the theme.

Rad Emission
Fallout/EMP
Love both these on my rad, they fit the style and kick some ***. Fallout is one of the best debuffs in the entire game..and you get to make a team mate go bang. What could be better? Using Vengeance first of course. Emp..massive radius, huge hold duration. But, for the love of god, why does it kill your recovery, I don’t get it at all. Also, given that rad can debuff an entire spawn, the usefulness of the hold is reduced, since you don’t need it as often..combined with the loooonng recharge.

Sonic Res
Clarity/Liquefy
I’ll start by saying both these powers DO sound funky, fitting in with the sonic theme. Looking a lil closer however..Clarity..a mez protection power...on a set that already HAS an aoe mez protection? Admittedly not a total one. On a power set that didn’t offer this, clarity would be great. With sonic dispersion..not so much. Liquefy I like..but...the recharge is just way to long. The debuff is great, especially for a set without any other kind of –acc. A great power, but really let down by this. I can’t recall the exact rech on my sonic fender, but it is a far far cry from being anywhere near an every few mob type power.

Storm Summoning
Tornado/Lightning Storm
Very thematic powers, helps with the thunder god type image. Still on the fence about tornado, I love it on my mm for the pet uniques..don’t have it at all on my storm troller. Without some source of –kb (like an immob) it just annoys the hell out of everyone. LS is fuun..and so pretty. And does decent damage and the kb can be handy. Love it to bits. But why..since we can summon said storm..can it not MOVE with us? Maybe it would be a lil too good..and make Voltaic Senty seem more crappy..but still!

Thermal Radiation
Again, I don’t have a thermal toon..but from what I hear and read, they are great powers and really improve playstyle. Only thing I can think of is that Therm gets HE at 35..and cold dom gets benumb at 28..a big difference in very similar powers. Not to mention the –recovery in HE isn’t that great..since npcs seem to cheat when it comes to endurance issues anyway.

Traps
Trip Mine/Time Bomb
Time bomb is crap..theres enough threads about that. Trip Mine I love..but maybe it could use a shorter interrupt time.

Trick Arrow
Oil Slick/Emp Arrow
Emp has the same points as for rad..but the recovery debuff is even more dumb, since you are using the arrow at range. Oil slick is great fun to, but isn’t a perma debuff, maybe would be too good if it was.

Force Field
Repulsion Bomb/Force Bubble
Have not played my bubbler in forever, but I gather the changes to RP were good. However, given the playstyle of FF, I doubt it is going to be a huge change and improvement to take this power. Force bubble also suffers for being very very situational. Can think of about 3 places I used it on my bubbler.

Empathy
Regen Aura/Adren Boost
Not much to say..nice powers, AB is awesome, I love when I get it on any toon.

Kinetics
Transference and Fulcrum Shift.
At last we get there. The king of tier 8 and 9 powers. As good as stuff in other sets can be, nothing really compares to how the final two Kin powers just break open the set and make it all kinds kick ***. FS is pretty much the best power in the game I think. Perma out of the box and even better in a set with lots of rech built in.

So..to sum it all up..some sets have great final tier powers, some not so, some just crap or making no sense at all. Not to cry nerf, but if you look at kinetics in comparison to every other set, it is very very powerful. Maybe too much. The ability to cap your damage pretty much constantly, blows everything else out of the water. Combined with siphon speed and an end transfer power..
Not sure where I was going with this..just thinking about the sets and maybe that the others could use some kind of tweaks

Capped damage is still zero once you faceplant, and Kin does absolutely nothing to prevent that from happening. It's a great set but I'm not at all sure I'd call it "better" than Rad or Cold... it all depends on what you need, more offense or more survivability.

Also, some sets do get game changing tier 8 and 9 powers, but others get really good lower level powers and less awesome tier 8 and 9s. Traps for instance... Acid Mortar, Poison Trap, and Force Field Generator are good enough that you can skip everything else and still rock. Storm also tends to get its best stuff fairly early, though Tornado and Lightning storm are certainly fun.

Thats true..but I was (trying) not to talk about lower tier powers..just what the later ones add to your game. And nothing trumps the last 2 kin powers, making a 'normal' set into a beast. And yes..it does have nothing to keep you alive (sorta) but capped damage on a team, beats ANY debuffs. Especially if there is lots of aoe around.

The ones I have experience with:

Kinetics: About as epic as you'll get for final power picks.

Trick Arrow: OSA is jawdropping awesome. EMP is great, but OSA is that awesome Christmas present that's so awesome it makes you feel bad about ignoring everything else.

Sonic: Well, at least it's not Time Bomb.

Thermal: Awesome powers on top of a thoroughly awesome set, although I wish they recharged a little faster.

Everyone forgets the green-headed stepchild of buff/debuff sets.

Poison
Poison Trap/Noxious Gas. One is like Mass Hypnosis, except with an interruptible sandwich break animation time, aggro, no range, and not much duration. One is an unenhanceable debuff aura that requires you to maneuver a pet into melee, a very long recharge time, a high endurance cost, and again, not much duration. Now, to be fair and balanced, I'll say something nice about these powers. They're better than Intimidate, and almost as good as Group Fly. Yay.

Trick Arrow is just an awesome debuff set overall, and I absolutely love its Tier 8 and 9 powers. Oil Slick might not be an "every mob" power, but with some slotting it's certainly an "every other mob" power, with excellent def debuff, knockdown chance without any scattering from knockback, and even an opportunity for some free damage with the right accompanying power. And EMP Arrow is just one of the best AoE Holds in the game with some very lovely debuffs to regen and recovery and even some endurance drain to boot. As far as the self recovery debuff, yeah, it doesn't make any sense... other than for play balance. That's the real reason for it, I believe.

I'm with everyone who doesn't get why Clarity is a tier 8. It'd make more sense if it was an PBAoE buff and/or had a much longer duration.

Force Field's Tier 8 and 9 I've found to be not particularly useful. Now, that may be my playstyle, which finds my DP/FF defender a bit more offense-heavy than most. But the main reason I'll use either Repulsion Bomb or Force Bubble is to get some breathing room when a mass of enemies is swarming the team. I generally do not use either as standard operating procedure.

Thermal's debuffs I actually find extremely useful. Melt Armor is flat-out a wicked debuff, cutting both defense and damage resistance to a large degree. Oh, and it also happens to be Targeted AoE! Slot it for recharge reduction and it's a powerful weapon against anything. Heat exhaustion isn't quite as amazing, but it's still a really nice debuff that significantly reduces the damage output of your target while also debuffing regen and recovery. Requiring a hit is probably its biggest weakness, but even with that it's a very nice debuff.

K

Time Bomb takes the crown for the worst tier 9 power but luckily Trap has other great powers to make it up.

Force Field is just very limited. Sure, it has some soft controls but knockback is almost completely ignored against an AV and knockbacks can disturb offense.


I would rank Force Field as the worst support set in the game because it can easily replaced by Cold Domination and a SoA with double Maneuver who also brings so much more offense to the team. Force Field is good early on when people don't have set bonuses for defense.

It's kinda dumb to judge an entire powerset by looking at just the last two powers. Some sets are late bloomers like Kinetics. Other sets get their useful powers earlier. For example, compare the first five Kinetic powers to the first five powers of Traps or Sonic Resonance.

I can't quite agree with your assessment of Storm's last two powers, especially from the point of view of a controller. Controllers often need more damage, and Storm is the only secondary that provides two powers that can produce significant damage.

Lightning Storm is pretty obvious . . . a cool-looking immobile pet that does decent damage, and you can get more than one out at a time. The Pet Recharge nerf hit LS hard, but it is still a great power.

Tornado is a pet that deals significant damage over time. It has knockback and stun. And very important -- it is AUTOHIT. So all those tough-to-hit targets like Fake Nemesis who hit their PFF or Paragon Protectors who hit MOG can be wiped out with Tornado. Tornado on an AV does a lot of damage . . . by doing damage over time to counter an AV's Regen, it is Storm's version of -Regen. With foes who can't be knocked back or with the use of -knockback powers, Tornado is a great damage tool. Without -knockback, Tornado becomes a source of Chaos, which can be a great panic button power for when too many foes get out of hand.

Not only that, but trapping foes in a closed room or cul-de-sac with Hurricane, then unleashing Tornado and Lightning Storm, becomes a great way to deal with foes when you have a low-damage primary.

Slight note about the autohit thing on Fakes, their PFF doesn't just give them high res and defense like the player version, it phases them. So while Tornado is an autohit power that debuffs defense (!), it won't kill a bubbled Fake.

the last powers of the sets don't always have to be a game changer... you wrote eveyrthing for nothing really.

Trap's best powers for Force Field Generator, Acid Mortar and Seeker Drones.
Sonic's best powers are Disruption Field and Sonic Dispersion.

I don't understand the whole point of this post but just because you get a power later in your career doesn't mean it has to be the best or even good. Especially in powersets that already have great powers in them.

Lighting storm would be even better if it followed. I wish they would. Dark servant used to just stand in place.... long ago. In beta a force fielder could shoot through pff with reduced accuracy... which likely made up for the situational/suckage of the final power.... too bad the set was never given something truely neat to make up for loosing that factor when they changed their minds about pff.

Truely it could use a debuff effect applied to it's various knockbacks... or at least a continous stacking of the KockBack that lingered so that a force fielder applying his/her full force vs the same target/targets could actualy knockdown/back some ususualy not knockdown/knockbackable critters.

I think Repulsion Bomb may have one of the sadder histories of powers in the game. The current version is actually buffed from what it was previously--a mind bogglingly awful power which required you to target a teammate. The power would sloooowly travel to the ally and when it finally arrived, knock enemies back from around them. Basically like a one shot version of Sonic Repulsion with a 3 second root time each time you used it in addition to travel time. When it was converted to basically an (incredibly mediocre) AoE blast, it kept this excruciating cast time because its not one of the things considered in calculating damage. What's more concerning though is that when the possibility of change was brought up, there were people fighting Castle about the loss of knockback in this piece of cracker jacks power.

Really, if Force Field has any consistent flaw, its that it became ground zero for maintaining the science fiction that knockback and repel are competive with controls and debuffs. Force Field actually has exactly as many enemy affecting powers as Cold Domination. It's just that Cold gets powers that can bring down giant monsters and Force Field gets stuff like Force Bolt.

Regarding Kin's mitigation or lack thereof, I actually find it to be one of the strongest sets for AVs. Sure, it's only 20% (25% on Defenders I think?) for an application of Fulcrum Shift, but it stacks with itself, and also with Siphon Power. With a bit of +recharge (some of which Kin provides itself) it's not too difficult to get to the -damage cap of 90%, and the way -damage is resisted means AVs usually resist it a lot less than other debuffs (though there are a handful of exceptions). So long as you can survive the initial 20-30 seconds of setup, most AVs are declawed nicely by Kin (especially when pairing the debuffs with one of the strongest AoE heals in the game).

It's actually the big spawns of minions and such that I find Kin's mitigation to be weak against (though not non-existent as one poster suggested). It's kinda like Poison in that the aoe mitigation it brings is great if layering with other things, but not so much on its own, and Kin's only going to be layering it on one or two targets in the spawn. I guess enthusiastic applications of Repel would help there, though that's still risky and can be tricky to do without also affecting kill speed (which is half the appeal of Kin, after all).