Incarnate Slots! Help me with them!

Playing a tanky brute with middling resistance and high defense, with moderate offense. (KM/EA) Looking for advice on my incarnate slots.

ALPHA: Spiritual, this is a no-brainer, don't need help on this one.
JUDGEMENT: Void Radial is definitely the way to go, though I'm wondering if I should spend the time to get Void Core for doing S/L and Energy farms?
INTERFACE: This is my first tough decision. Do I go with Reactive (and which type of Reactive if so?) or Paralytic for -Dmg to smooth out my spikes? I have no idea how much -Dmg is afforded by Paralytic at all. :\
DESTINY: Barrier, because I am an idiot.
LORE: I don't have a freaking clue what to choose here. I'm interested in Clockwork, IDF, Longbow Cataphract, Polar Lights, Robotic Drones, Warworks, and Storm Elementals, concept-wise. Any recommendations?

You are getting mostly word of mouth info here, so take it with a grain of salt.

General Consensus seems to place Reactive Radial as the preferred choice for more damage.

The pets I'm more uncertain about. It seems as though they are more or less interchangeable, with the only real difference being between if you pick the 'core' version, which is supposed to do better damage, or the radial version, which has a pet who cannot fight or be damaged, and is basically supposed to act as a damage sponge.

I would imagine that the pets themselves have various elemental attacks based on what that pet normally can do. Rikti probably have guns and swords. Phantoms probably do illusion type damage. etc.

I saw a big list of effective DPS of lore pets, and I've seen discussion of some lore pets being easy to die, and the Longbow Cataphract has HUGE -regen but meh damage... So yeah, it seems pretty complex to me - there was like a 90 DPS spread (between 150 to 240 or so) on them.

Do you mean Reactive is preferred over even Paralytic, even for tanks, or was that just 'radial reactive > core'?

Oh, wait, looks like the Wiki has the number. -5% damage, stacks up to 4 times. Looks like I want Paralytic Total Radial for my tanker ASAP. -20% damage is pretty huge for a defense tanker... There's no debuff resistance for damage penalties on AVs, right?

If you're looking at Lore pets, the Cimerorans and the Warworks are the best for DPS

Checking Paragonwiki: It doesn't list damage debuffs as one of the things AV's are resistant too, so I think you've got a good reason to take Paralytic. They do resist defense debuffs however, which naturally makes Paralytic Radial the preferred choice.

I think it would probably be good practice, then, that most people try to keep Reactive Radial, and Paralytic Radial with them as those *look* to be the most effective. Diagmagnetic and Graviwhatever would both be resisted to too great of a degree to likely be very useful.

There's no such thing as "damage debuff resistance" directly, but normal damage resistance resists damage debuffs. So if you put a -50% damage debuff on an AV with 50% lethal resistance, the debuff to its lethal damage will be cut in half by its resistance, to 25%. If the same AV had 0% energy resistance, any energy attacks it used would take the full 50% debuff.

Currently, Reactive Radial is the best Interface without question, because all the other ones are broken and do not function at all. But presumably that will be fixed soon.

You're right that the various Lore pets are good at different things, and some do more DPS than others. I've only personally used 3: IDF, Warworks, and Cimerorans. I was underwhelmed by the IDF compared to the other two: they have a mix of melee and ranged attacks, but they seem to go into 'melee mode' or 'ranged mode' and not use their other attacks, which means a lot of idle time. Warworks and Cimerorans are wrecking machines though.

I dislike that I can't seem to find information on how much -res Reactive Core is supposed to give per proc. One thread states that the cumulative total is -10% which seems... Terrible. So terrible that I'm not sure I believe it actually sucks that bad.

That's correct, Reactive Core gives -2.5% res per application, and stacks 4 times.

Only Diamagnetic is currently on the list of known issues; I would hope that the people in charge have seen the numerous posts about the bug and are aware that it is affecting all of the Interfaces and not just Diamagnetic.

The pets surviving is usually not a problem, but I play mostly melee types, so my taunt auras keep them pretty safe. When they do get hit, I can often save them with Destiny (although I suppose you can't do that if you have Ageless).

What's the recharge time on Destiny Slots?

Somehow I missed Barrier and Barrier suddenly looks like my new best friend - open with Barrier, use Void Judgment when it's getting low, stick with Interface slot.

Destiny recharge is 2 minutes, unmodifiable.

Hmm. That last bit of res - (just found this lovely thread: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=257011) - is really tiny, but yeah, that looks pretty awesome. I'm sure a bajillion other scrappers will have Ageless, so it's not that necessary for me to have.

Speaking on pets:

Core path is a good choice for basically anyone. The pets will do a lot of damage, even if you take one of the lesser damage ones. If you actually want damage though, the top four are Cims, Warworks, Phantoms, and Rularuu.

For surviving, the bosses tend to do okay. They have over 2000 HP and the RES/DEF they get inherently will keep them around. Lieutenants can have issues just because they have less HP. If you can't support them in any way, I might suggest getting a ranged lieutenant over a melee one. Just so he stays out of trouble.

For support/buffing pets, the support isn't that great. Heals are very low. You'll be getting like 10-15% HP heals. They do try to prioritize healing you if you need it, but it's less than a green. Any pets that give +DEF are nice, but the value tends to be around 5%-7.5%. A couple pets have okay buffs/debuffs (Storm Elementals have Hurricane) but none that I really wanted to flock toward.

If all you care about is stats, the best damage pets are Cims assuming you can keep them alive. Warworks do a little less damage for a little better survivability. Rularuu are pretty surviveable and they still debuff and have two holds, for being in the top 4 in damage. If you're going for theme, all the pets are good additions.

Quote:

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Thanks for all the help Dispari (especially with that primer on incarnate stuff! It's me, @SolarDjinn ), Hopeling, and Warkubo. Since I've learned about Void Radial and Core Barrier Destiny I feel much more confident about my character's ability to tank long-term even with Paralytic broken. =) I'll take Reactive for now for farming and switch to Paralytic later.

for interface i refuse to take anything other than reactive radial because of the debuffs being resistable

all interface debuffs are resistable and can only stack up to 4x from all sources, the dmg can stack up to 8 times though and expires faster which drastically increases your dmg output

I'll just comment on two.

INTERFACE: Even when the others work, I've found that the DoT reactive is simply the best one. More damage seems to beat everything, since killing the mobs solves all problems. And the extra damage is very noticeable.

LORE: Of the ones you mentioned, I've tried warworks and storm. WW are right up there in damage. Storm is mostly about debuffs, at least the path I chose with the hurricane one. It looks very cool. Rularuu look pretty awesome too.