Anything /Rad. We put together 3 /Rad corruptors that essentially rolled through everything.
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You are correct, they would. That doesn't take away from it being a pretty nice team of three.
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Originally Posted by Lemur Lad
only if they already have 3 level 20 villains.
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Throwing darts at the board to see if something sticks.....
Come show your resolve and fight my brute!
Tanks: Gauntlet, the streak breaker and you!
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Originally Posted by PapaSlade
Rangle's right....this is fun.
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We don't have level 20s yet - we were super-smart at stopped at level 18 
You peeps are amazing. It's nice to see that the interwebs haven't completely degenerated into what some...other...gaming forums have become.
I've decided to have my bro-in-law over to dinner tonight so we can have a good fun planning session. I see many alts in our future! (and possibly more questions!)
Thanks for being so awesome!! Wish I could cook for all y'all 
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Originally Posted by tiana_arylle
I see many alts in our future! (and possibly more questions!)
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This is probably the best idea. Try all of the suggestions above. They're all right in their own way.
And questions are fine. We loves them, we does.
Ah, people get involved, and it all gets interesting :P
Hubby's decided to go with Illusion/Kinetic Controller, but bro-in-law threw a wrench in things and said he wants to go Dual Pistols Corrupter. That's cool, will be fun, so we convinced him to go Pistols/Radiation.
Neither of them was really comfortable with an all-range group right out of the gate, so I volunteered to go Brute. I was thinking either Fire/Dark or Fire/Fire. Does that compliment those....at all? 
Help would be appreciated before I invest 3 hours in character creation tomorrow 
Thanks all!
~ Tia
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Fire/Dark will deal a lot of damage, and Dark Armor will be pretty strong as a tanking brute for the team. You have two weaknesses that your team mates can easily fill. One: you don't have knockback protection. But your hubby is Kinetics, so he can buff you with Increase Density which will give you more resistance and knock protection (you can also get acrobatics later if you want to be self-sufficient). Your other weakness is a cost of strength: you may end up burning a lot of endurance powering dark regeneration (a mega huge heal) and all your toggles (particularly if you run your damage aura and cloak of fear on top of your defense toggles). But you have a Kinetics on the team that can give you speed boost which boosts both recharge and recovery, and later transference which basically refills your end bar. *And* you have a Radiation-in-law that can buff you with accelerate metabolism which also provides increased recovery.|
Originally Posted by tiana_arylle
Ah, people get involved, and it all gets interesting :P
Hubby's decided to go with Illusion/Kinetic Controller, but bro-in-law threw a wrench in things and said he wants to go Dual Pistols Corrupter. That's cool, will be fun, so we convinced him to go Pistols/Radiation. Neither of them was really comfortable with an all-range group right out of the gate, so I volunteered to go Brute. I was thinking either Fire/Dark or Fire/Fire. Does that compliment those....at all? Help would be appreciated before I invest 3 hours in character creation tomorrow Thanks all! ~ Tia |
So between those two guys, you should have knockback protection, lots of speed, and practically unlimited endurance. Which turns Dark Armor into a monster most of the time.
One more thing: if, perchance, you are all playing together in the 40s one day and you team wipe for some reason, Dark Armor has possibly the best self rez in the game in Soul Transfer: it rezzes you and restores health and endurance by draining all the foes around you *and* hits everything with a mega mag 50 stun. That will basically stun everything except AVs with purple triangle protection up. That will give your team mates time to pop rezzes while everything is walking around dazed. The only rez I hold in higher regard is Howling Twilight.
If instead you go Fire/Fire, you won't have as much defensive protection or Dark's mez toggles. But you will probably (depending on build) have a lot more damage: Fiery Aura has Fiery Embrace which actually adds an additional damage component to your attacks, sort of like a critical hit except it always hits while FE is up. If you have a Kinetics on the team and you're always damage capped with Fulcrum Shift (eventually, at higher levels) then damage buffs won't help above that, but Fiery Embrace will.
So, Fire/Dark makes a good balance between damage and damage mitigation, plus some control (Oppressive Gloom and Cloak of Fear). Fire/Fire will have less control to contribute and less damage mitigation, but between Fire's DoT damage, Burn, and Fiery Embrace you'll be doing a serious amount of damage.
If you want to be able to switch between helping the Pistols-in-Law deal damage and helping the Significant Controller disable everything while defeating them, I'd go Fire/Dark. If you want to jump into the fight and start incinerating everything in sight and leave it up to your team mates to buff you and deal with control, go Fire/Fire. Either way, which ever you pick as being more fun sounding, I think this triple will do well. You don't find many teams with a kinetics controller, a rad corruptor, and a melee anything doing badly. I would give the slight edge to Fire/Dark. The ally synergies are a little better. Cloak of Fear plus Spectral Terror? Everything's feared. Dark Armor + ID + SB + AM = very happy Dark Brute. Rad debuffs + Phantom Army are a decent combo: you can't buff the Phantom Army but you can debuff the foes. And once you get high enough in level and have relatively mature builds, there are few things you won't be able to take on. That team would have no problem taking out, say, The GMs in Croatoa (Jack in Irons and Eochai): I've done it with less. If you could get someone to fill (so you can launch with less than the minimum) I think that team could easily take on any of the standard task forces. As long as you stick together and support each other, you'll do fine in any content you set your mind to run.
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I would also be a fan of a Dark Armor/Fire tank. You won't be able to do as much dmg as the Brute, but you'll have higher resistance numbers, higher hit points, and Fire for a tank gets one more AoE attack. If you choose to go down the IOing direction it would be easier (less expensive) to get the tank to the defensive soft cap then the Brute.
Throwing darts at the board to see if something sticks.....
Come show your resolve and fight my brute!
Tanks: Gauntlet, the streak breaker and you!
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Originally Posted by PapaSlade
Rangle's right....this is fun.
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Originally Posted by tiana_arylle
I volunteered to go Brute. I was thinking either Fire/Dark or Fire/Fire.
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A small point: don't forget that just because you are a "Brute" that you don't have to pick the big manly body model. Lots of folks like to make small characters or even small girls as a Brute.
This has two advantages. First, a small model will actually fit better in a lot of the instance maps, many of which are space constrained. This can be an issue if you are trying to melee a large number of foes in a small space.
Second, watching a little "girl" beat up people is funny as heck.
I'm picturing a "dead girl," kind of a small Wednessday Adams character who's a vengeful spirit back from the dead. That explains the /Dark powers, and for Fire/, well, many vengeful spirits manifest destructive powers like fire.
Just my 2 nickels....
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I'm kinda at odds with this part - It really depends on the sets and archtypes in question. A scrapper or stalker may have a tougher time reaching caps (soft or otherwise) than a tank, and might benefit from additional protection in the areas they have naturally... but not always - Super Reflexes can get damn near the softcap on all three positions on it's own without elude - in this case much of the buffs will go well over the softcap and not be useful for most content (Granted that for defense, that last 5% effectivly doubles his survival, so...)|
Originally Posted by Lemur Lad
Compatible Protection- If your Brother in Law goes with a Melee and your husband takes something with buffs, then look closely at the Armor set for the melee, and pick a buffing set that would give significant boosts to the kind of Protection your melee already has. For example if he picked Shield Defense, then picking Cold Domination or Force Field both provide buffs to Defense that would make him much tougher. Counter example would be picking a resistance based Electric Armor and trying to use those same buffing sets. He would get a boost since any protection is good protection, but the synergy wouldn't be there, and you wouldnt get as much kick out of it while leveling up.
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Defense - Positional (melee/range/aoe) - Do not pair with a buff set that that is typed defence, as only the highest number will count. Either his abilities will take a sideline to your buffs, or your buffs will be entirely ignored as his superior number take the entire hit. Might be better paired with a buff set that offers regeneration or resistance to soak up what damage he doesn't outright avoid. More positional defense might help if the numbers his set provides aren't that high in the first place.
Defense - Typed (Smashing/lethal, energy, dark, cold, fire, etc) - Same argument here for not going with positional defense buffs. Same argument in favor of resistance/regen buffs. Typed defense, however, tends to mesh better with more typed defence from buffs; but don't go for the same coverage! Generally, typed will excel at avoiding damage from one type (easily reaching the softcap), have poor numbers against another type, and the rest get average numbers. Try to go for the type he does poorly against.
Resistance - Much like typed defence, if you're going to stack more resistance buffs on top of what he gets from his own sets, try going for the area where he's lacking... Fire Armour, for example, can easily max out resistance against fire - buffing him with Thermal radiation means both your set and his are weak against ice. Adding any defense to his resists is good, as is regen.
Regeneration - I don't think you can go wrong with any protective buffs, here (hard to max out regeneration), although I'd go with defence or resist. Regeneration's problem has always been with surviving big spikes of damage, like jumping in and taking an alpha. If you can help him do that, his regen will take care or the rest.
That said, there are three of you, and most melee types can take care of themselves fairly well as-is, so go with whatever interests you. If the third player is a squishy type, he'll be thankful for whatever he gets (or go with a debuff centric set).
"My inner mind has become a reality-cracking overgod. He torments me! Help!"
And just FYI - Arcanaville knows the numbers in the game.
I think I've seen ONCE where she was wrong in a large way based on available knowledge. And we've both been around 7+ years.
Not saying you need to bow before her or anything (she'd probably hit me if I did ) but it's worth considering her advice always.
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@Grim Heaper- I wasn't really considering the concept of capping. I was dealing with things from the position of someone coming at this as a new experience looking to get the most bang for their buck in a 3 person grouping.
From that perspective I stand by what I said. Picking compatible buffs is going to be a lot more noticeable to novices and make their leveling experience through the first 40 levels or so a lot smoother and easier, even if they don't go all in for the numbers side of the game.
Think of what I said as the conceptual (not technical) application of designed group combos.
I'm a big believer in helping people get the theory down before diving into the specifics, so that when someone points them to a nitty gritty guide about Defense or Resistance or Buffs, they have a solid foundation that let's them more easily see how that information can be applied beyond just the single character.
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In the middle to lategame, you're correct. However in the first 30 levels or so (before you have SOs and the slots to put them in) that's rarely the case. I was giving her concepts that would smooth out their early leveling experience and help them avoid some common pitfalls that may lead them to say certain sets or buffs or useless. If they'd taken that SR scrapper in your example and paired it with Sonic Buffs, they most assuredly wouldnt have as smooth a time leveling up as they would with more compatible buffs.
| A scrapper or stalker may have a tougher time reaching caps (soft or otherwise) than a tank, and might benefit from additional protection in the areas they have naturally... but not always - Super Reflexes can get damn near the softcap on all three positions on it's own without elude - in this case much of the buffs will go well over the softcap and not be useful for most content (Granted that for defense, that last 5% effectivly doubles his survival, so...) |
"Null is as much an argument "for removing the cottage rule" as the moon being round is for buying tennis shoes." -Memphis Bill
Again my thanks! I'm happy to see that all the help you've been providing at least pointed me in the right direction. Apparently I can be taught!
I think I'm going to try out a dark/fire tanker to help both my radiation-in-law and the significant controller (their official names now, hehe). I like feeling that I'm truly contributing, not just in killing things, but in making the whole experience flow better. Also, this way if rad-in-law stops paying attention to buffs/heals and just wants to shoot things I can help on the self sufficiency bit
So, if anybody sees a lost-looking trio headed by a tiny lil dark flamin' bit of kickbutt, that's probably us
Sounds like you guys came up with a fun trio, good luck with it!
One last bit of advice. If any of you get tired or annoyed with your choice, don't feel like you have to stick with it "for the team" The Sidekick system makes it super easy for one of you to make a new trio member to try out, and still contribute while you're catching up.
Also remember all 3 of you can make other ideas to try. That's what all those slots are for
"Null is as much an argument "for removing the cottage rule" as the moon being round is for buying tennis shoes." -Memphis Bill
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You've got a point - I think I've been concentrating on my 50s for so long that the early game (dealing with TOs and DOs) is starting to feel alien to me. :P
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Originally Posted by Lemur Lad
In the middle to lategame, you're correct. However in the first 30 levels or so (before you have SOs and the slots to put them in) that's rarely the case. I was giving her concepts that would smooth out their early leveling experience and help them avoid some common pitfalls that may lead them to say certain sets or buffs or useless. If they'd taken that SR scrapper in your example and paired it with Sonic Buffs, they most assuredly wouldnt have as smooth a time leveling up as they would with more compatible buffs.
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"My inner mind has become a reality-cracking overgod. He torments me! Help!"
Sounds awesome, Tiana, and if you're all on the Virtue server, maybe we'll run into each other some time.
And I was going to mention what Lemur said.
The Super Sidekick feature in this game allows everyone on the team to play at the level of the Team Leader and/or the level of the currently selected mission.
So, if one of you makes a change, they can team up with you and play at your higher level (they won't suddenly get new power choices, but they'll be sturdy and powerful enough to contribute... and they'll level up pretty quickly and be able to catch up pretty well).
It also works to bring everyone down to a lower level (Exemp'ing), if desired (by selected the mission of a lower level character or by making that lower level character the leader). You still keep your power choices of up to +5 levels too, so if you're level 30, but you drop down to level 25 because your radiation-in-law slacked off and didn't finish those earlier missions, you'll still have whatever power you chose at level 30.
That stuff makes it great for teaming up and not having to worry about how we're all going to play together.
Enjoy!!
@Zethustra
"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
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Dark Armor/Fire Melee tanker will be plenty mighty. Your primary weakness is you will run low on endurance if you use everything you have in Dark Armor - every toggle, and the mega heal - and you have no knockback protection. Getting Increase Density from your hubby and endurance buffs from everybody will close both weaknesses completely. If you want a little self-sufficiency some things you can do are go Leaping for your travel power and take acrobatics when it becomes available - that will make you basically immune to most knockback powers in the game. You will want to slot Stamina (we all now have inherent fitness if you were not aware, so everyone gets Stamina, Health, Sprint, and Hurdle now). And you will want to aggressively slot Dark Regeneration for endurance reduction. Its a very big heal and it heals a big amount for *each* target it hits, so you usually do not have to slot it very much for healing. You want some accuracy so it hits often, and then lots of endurance reduction so you can use it a lot.|
Originally Posted by tiana_arylle
I think I'm going to try out a dark/fire tanker to help both my radiation-in-law and the significant controller (their official names now, hehe). I like feeling that I'm truly contributing, not just in killing things, but in making the whole experience flow better. Also, this way if rad-in-law stops paying attention to buffs/heals and just wants to shoot things I can help on the self sufficiency bit
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If you have advanced questions about building a strong Dark tanker, just ask around: there are lots of tricks to make that build smooth. But in your team, as long as everyone is buffing each other, you won't have problems while you are all playing together. I'll toss out one little piece of advice to get you started. Most heals people want to use as soon as possible to keep themselves at high health. Dark Regen you will want to manage a little better. Because it gets stronger the more enemies that are around you (and it can't work at all if nothing is around you) you may find yourself in situations where, lets say you have most of a spawn defeated and there's just one guy left. And you are at half health. You might think about using dark regen and get a little health back. But if you believe you can survive that fight with the health you have left and still have plenty left, your best bet might actually be to finish him off, dive into the next spawn and use Dark Regen first: actually hit all the targets with Dark Regen as your first "attack." Chances are you'll hit many of them, and with just a few hits you will go all the way up to full health. Its a way to try to maximize the strength of that heal while spending the least amount of endurance on it.
Beyond that, the tanker forums (and really all the melee archetype forums that have a comparable version of the set: Scrapper, Brute, and Tanker) should be able to give you good advice on playing the set. But I would recommend go charge out there and start hitting things first. Play it a while and get a feel for the character first, then start asking questions. The first fifteen or twenty levels are pretty forgiving for a team like yours, so there's very little you can do that's really wrong.
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Report on the first day of newbiekin groupage:
Ouch, big groups of red mobs in missions hurt when you don't know what you're doing yet! (We turned down the difficulty). Other than buying lots of rez scrolls it was fun :P
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I will highly recommend finding a way to purchase the Theft of Essence: Chance for +endurance IO and dropping into Dark Regeneration. It's cheaper to get the recipe and craft it, usually. The nice thing about the IO is you have a chance of getting +10 endurance for every target you heal off of. In a large enough crowd it's not unusual to get more endurance back then you've used for the heal. I get it asap on all my dark armor toons.
Throwing darts at the board to see if something sticks.....
Come show your resolve and fight my brute!
Tanks: Gauntlet, the streak breaker and you!
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Originally Posted by PapaSlade
Rangle's right....this is fun.
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Yes, the difficulty settings are not to be trifled with lightly.|
Originally Posted by tiana_arylle
Report on the first day of newbiekin groupage:
Ouch, big groups of red mobs in missions hurt when you don't know what you're doing yet! (We turned down the difficulty). Other than buying lots of rez scrolls it was fun :P |
Here are some general tips I use to work my way to higher and higher settings.
Virtual Team size before added levels- Add more foes to the mix before you consider bumping up the level of those foes. In fact, consider lowering their relative level to -1 and bumping up the numbers even more. At least once your team has some solid Area effect powers. When you bump the levels of enemies higher than your own, their damage goes up, and so does their chance to hit you. Additionally your damage goes down, and your chance to hit them does too.
Warm up missions are your friend- Don't be afraid to start slow. Keep your settings easy for a mission and then increase gradually. Once you're comfortable stay with that a while.
Beware different enemy groups- There are a lot of factors at work to determine how tough things are. Not the least of which are some inconsistencies in the power levels of different enemy groups. For example Council are easy at almost any level. However Vahzilok of the same level tend to give players fits until they have powers that help mitigate toxic damage or nullify the ongoing aggro. So basically be prepared to adjust your settings up or down until you have a solid working knowledge of what the different enemy groups mean for your Trio.
Beware the leveling curve- As you level up, so do the enemies. Not only does this mean more damage and more hit points, it means new variants and additional abilities. Council are easy when they're just guys with guns. In the early 20s though you can be in for a rude awakening when they start throwing melee unfriendly warwolves at you. Longbow can be the same sort of deal, but they get a very nasty jump around about level 41. The Nullifiers get their final power, a Sonic Grenade, 2-3 of those and I've seen single groups wipe out entire teams. Best way to deal with this kind of thing is keep your eyes open when the NPCs pass the 10s, i.e. every 10 levels or so is roughly when you can expect to see jumps in NPC powers.
The difficulty settings are a fantastic tool. Don't be afraid to use it. But don't feel like you have to continually hammer yourself against a brick wall if things aren't going well.
Edit- one last tip: Purple (Defence) inspirations are your friend. Sometimes buying a tray full of those and popping 3 at a time is enough to get you through some tough spots without changing your setting. It's a cheap easy way to mitigate incoming attacks.
"Null is as much an argument "for removing the cottage rule" as the moon being round is for buying tennis shoes." -Memphis Bill
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The Theft of Essence proc is a wonder with Dark Regeneration. On occasion i actually gain back more endurance than i used.|
Originally Posted by Rangle M. Down
I will highly recommend finding a way to purchase the Theft of Essence: Chance for +endurance IO and dropping into Dark Regeneration. It's cheaper to get the recipe and craft it, usually. The nice thing about the IO is you have a chance of getting +10 endurance for every target you heal off of. In a large enough crowd it's not unusual to get more endurance back then you've used for the heal. I get it asap on all my dark armor toons.
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tiana_arylle, as far as playing lowbie teams i also suggest not cranking the difficulty levels early on until everyone gets a bit of practice and is fully up to speed. Once a group is familiar with each others' playstyle and general gameplay it's possible to crank difficulty settings up stupidly high even at the lowest levels, but it can slow progress down quite a bit. The team combo you have sounds very good, but there is one thing you need to remember: the penalties for defeat in this game are minimal, so feel free to try anything you want, no matter how foolhardy, as long as everyone is having fun.
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With SB and AM, is endurance really going to be an issue? I wouldn't think so if SB is slotted with end mods.
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Controllers don't get Speed Boost until level 20. Stamina and Accelerate Metabolism may be enough to cover the gap until then, you're correct, but then again maybe not, as Dark Armor can get expensive.|
Originally Posted by eryq2
With SB and AM, is endurance really going to be an issue? I wouldn't think so if SB is slotted with end mods.
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Personally I'd rate a Knockback Protection IO as a much higher priority buy than the +END proc, but they're both good things to keep an eye out for.
"Null is as much an argument "for removing the cottage rule" as the moon being round is for buying tennis shoes." -Memphis Bill
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Heck, until you reach level 10 there's no penalty for death at all: after that its just very small. So cranking up the difficulty just to see what happens is not a big deal. But I echo what other people are saying: the missions scale upward with the number of people you have on the team, so your missions are already scaled for 3 and probably include bosses in many of the spawns. So you're probably engaging something like 5-8 targets per spawn most of the time. That's a decent amount of threat to get started with while you're still learning. I would wait until you get at least to level 15 before you start tampering at all with increasing difficulty. If anything, as mentioned above by other posters, if things get too hard in the early going you can actually drop difficulty to -1 level.|
Originally Posted by Schismatrix
The Theft of Essence proc is a wonder with Dark Regeneration. On occasion i actually gain back more endurance than i used.
tiana_arylle, as far as playing lowbie teams i also suggest not cranking the difficulty levels early on until everyone gets a bit of practice and is fully up to speed. Once a group is familiar with each others' playstyle and general gameplay it's possible to crank difficulty settings up stupidly high even at the lowest levels, but it can slow progress down quite a bit. The team combo you have sounds very good, but there is one thing you need to remember: the penalties for defeat in this game are minimal, so feel free to try anything you want, no matter how foolhardy, as long as everyone is having fun. |
You're going to be leveling pretty fast if you team together a lot compared to most MMOs. You'll probably be in your twenties on a time scale of a couple dozen hours of combat if not less. But don't be afraid to stop and smell the roses either: there's no rush; the rest of the game will be waiting for you when you get there. Racing to level 50 is like racing to the end of your vacation.
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Hubby> Dark/Dark def.
Bro in law> Kat/Dark scrap
You> Dark/Fire tank.
All dark theme could be very fun.