Demons/Sonic - The new standard in OP as ****

Wrong you are! I don't take the opposite view, because I am generally the first to respond to Help Channel questions. Unlike most people, who use it as a "Barrens Chat" breeding ground. Kindly avoid spreading misinformation when you're trying to be helpful.

I know I don't have some fans on Virtue, but I also have a lot of fans too. As Issen1 put it, "You either absolutely love Reppu, or absolutely hate her." And I am absolutely happy with this.

That said, if I go against anything? I go against the opinion that "Oh you should play that!". If you ask about a set's merits and faults, I will explain both in detail. My beef with Time Manipulation is that it has poor synergy with MMs. By beef with Sonic is the same.

But, I have changed my opinion on Time a bit recently, but I won't get into it because I don't care?

Sonic, is, a poor Thermal for MMs. That's due to the mechanics of MMs, and nothing more.


PS: But Reppu's a girl Q_Q

Demons seem to be where it's at. I can certainly attest that a layered approach with necro/sonic is very frustrating. Overall, stuff either died super fast, or my pets were utterly destroyed. There was little middle ground.

I had resists up into the low 60's (with both +resistance IOs), 14% ish def (def IOs and maneuvers), T1 cardiac and the lich as the opener to spread around hit debuffs. SO slotting other than the pet specials I stripped for test. It was painful even on the 0/+2 setting. Even with cardiac and slotting for end reduction, necro/sonic was running out of blue super fast. For heals, the pets did not heal enough to keep up with incoming damage, and med pool was insufficient for the task.

I'm going to try a respec or 3 to see if I'm missing something, but I am have little optimism.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville ...[I]t would be more proper to say this game is slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowly dying.

Did you just prove his point?

Rather what I was thinking. She grabbed that bait with both hands.

Perhaps you don't understand defense vs. resistance entirely. It's not so black and white. While it is true that with all things being equal, each point of defense is worth two points of defense, that is not always true. Resistance stacks better with resistance, and defense better with defense.

For example, if you allready have 60% resist and you add 5% resist an enemy with a 100 damage attack will, on average, do 17.5 damage an attack against you, while if you have 60% resist and 5% defense they'll do 18 damage on each attack on average

Furthermore, in the vast majority of cases, resistance powers provide a higher amount of resistance than defense.

Also, while it is true defense has inherent mez protection, most resist sets do provide mez protection, and resist is much more reliable. You're not going to get hit with a lot of damage due to the RNG hateing you, -def is more common than -res(though to be fare def debuff res is fairly common), and a big one, ToHit buffs direct ally oppose defense, while +damage buffs and still mitigated by res.

Def is better for most archtypes because all archtypes can reach that 45% softcap, but their res cap is fairly low. For people who can reach the 90% res hard cap, I'd say res is defiantly better.

Exactly. I'm still holding out hope that, since they're porting the set over, that they'll buff it. At the moment it's limping far behind the other support sets.

Don't the pets heal, teams heal, and first aid?

Assuming you're in a team with a reliable healer, yes, your lack of healing capability will be less of a problem. Your healer will, however, have no convenient way of tracking your pets' health bars to know when they need healing, so it will be your responsibility to keep both your ranged and melee pets in the radius of that healer's AoE heal and pray that it's fired when you need it.

Compare this to the gameplay of a Demon/Thermal, with his/her own AoE heal to spam as well as a single-target heal for that melee pet standing 40 yards away chewing on an add.

Yes, it's true that the Ember Demon has heals of its own, but the AOE heal (which only heals about 100 HP base at level 50) is on a 25-second cooldown and fired immediately when off that cooldown, regardless if any allies are nearby or if any of those allies are injured. The single-target heal, the one that actually has somewhat of a brain, is on a 30-second cooldown, and only heals for just under 200 HP base at level 50.