Which toon would solo best?

Hi there, everyone. So basically, I have a few characters that I have been playing to get a feel for the game, but I'm really feeling the urge to make one that I will stick with in the long run, rp with, etc. etc. My problem is, while I have a few concepts in mind, I'm having a bit of trouble choosing which one to play. I primarily solo, simply so that I can sit back and read through all the storylines and clues, something that teams don't seem to do much, and for that reason, I turn to you.

I'm debating between an Ill/Rad Controller (with his powers tinted to make them appear to be light magic - trust me, it looks better than it sounds), a Mind/Energy Dominator (rped as a powerful telekinetic, hence the hard-hitting secondary), or an Ice/Storm Corruptor (because weather manipulators are amazing.)

I've noticed people saying great things about all three, and that's what makes my decision difficult. Again, soloing will be my focus, but I do intend to team from time to time, so group efficiency would be good as well. Any help with this decision would be wonderful, and I apologize for how long-winded this post is. =P

Also, if it helps, of the toons I've tried, my Crab Soldier has far and away been my favorite. He'll likely be played rather consistently, but the whole mechalegs thing makes rping a biiiit difficult, imho.

The choices you offer are support/team oreiented. My best solo'er was ice/ice tank (without taunt).

All of those are powerful comboes that solo well. And team well too. The solution of course is to make all three.

Quote:

Originally Posted by afocks The choices you offer are support/team oreiented. My best solo'er was ice/ice tank (without taunt).

I can't stand solo tanks, their damage is way too low for my taste. And I disagree with you about those choices being team oriented, they are all good soloers.

An Illusion/Radiation Controller can *definitely* solo. Mine is currently up to 38 and while I've teamed a bit, easily 95% of my playtime has been running solo.

The early game can be a little rough, but once you get Phantom Army at 18 it becomes a cakewalk. And Superior invisibility let's you run anywhere you please, the only things that can see through it are Rikti Drones and the big Rularu eyes. This gives you a huge tactical advantage, especially with Confuse being completely non-agro.

For example, I solo'ed one of the first elite bosses in the game, Frostfire, with my ill/rad. Keeping invisible and just confusing most of his surrounding mobs made the battle easy.

It's not an incredibly *fast* toon, in fact between your two primaries you only have 2 actual direct attack powers, Flash (your go-to hold power for gaining Containment) and Spectral wounds. All the other skills in the sets are either buffs, debuffs, soft controls (fear), and Pets (Phantom Army and Phantasm).

I think I can count on one hand the number of situations I've been in where I've died repeatedly. You can have trouble with Elite bosses, especially ones that will last longer than your Phantom Army can help keep them occupied (especially if they're resistant to Psychic damage. All of Illusion's damage except the tier 9 Phantasm use Psychic damage). The ones that took me a fair bit of effort to overcome were the first SSA (pre-PA), Nocturne in the Faultline arc, and the double EB fight at the end of the Roy Cooling arc (ESPECIALLY the Titan EB. UGH). Outside of those I've almost never had a problem running solo.

It's just a very solidly built controller and there's a fantastic guide by localman hanging around the forums. You don't need to follow it exactly but it offers a *lot* of good advice.

What kind of budget are you looking at? Ill/Rad is fantastic at soloing if you have the recharge to get Phantom Army permanent, but if you don't have perma-PA you're either looking at downtime while you sit there and wait for PA to recharge or else lowering the difficulty to the point that you can beat a spawn without PA. Plain "ordinary" Ill/Rad is a decent Controller for soloing but nowhere near as good as a Fire/Kin or Plant/Storm.

If you really want to solo well I'd suggest a Scrapper, Brute, Mastermind, or Corruptor. I personally don't care for Doms but some people love them... they hit pretty hard but unless you have perma-Dom seem pretty squishy to me so I generally just make a Blaster instead and skip the controls in favor of far more powerful attacks. Which reminds me... Blasters can actually solo pretty well as long as you aren't set on maxing out the difficulty settings. If you want to solo but also have good group utility I'd go Corruptor... something like Fire/Dark or Fire/Kin would likely be fastest but Ice/Storm should be perfectly decent. The drawback to Ice/Storm is that you won't have a self heal and your main AoE is a long DoT, but once you get Hurricane and have Freezing Rain slotted with plenty of recharge you should be able to toss things into corners, hit Freezing Rain + Ice Storm, and sit back and watch the flood of orange numbers.

Just be careful on teams... Storm can provide good support but it can also make every melee character on the team hate your guts if used incorrectly.

Most Tankers are relatively low damage pre-Incarnate, even if slotted for damage output. They can solo (and certainly tend to die less than most ATs) but no slotting will make them do it anywhere near as fast as a Brute or Scrapper with the same budget. The main benefit Tankers have for soloing is that you can make them tough enough to handle large spawns much more cheaply than Scrappers or Brutes and it's cheaper to make the offense-oriented sets like Fiery Aura or Shield survivable. But the only tanks that will even come close to doing Scrapper level damage are things like Fire/Fire, which also has Scrapper level survivability. My Fire/Fire Tank plays a lot like a mid-range Scrapper in terms of damage and toughness... he's tougher than a /Fire Scrapper but not really tougher than a /Willpower or /Invulnerability and does damage similar to a Scrapper with a non-damaging armor set. But most Tanks do a lot less damage and are a lot tougher.

My 2 inf, for the OPs 3 choices, vary based on what finishes the question "What is the best soloer for...?"

For a smooth ride from 1-50, I'd say Ice/Storm. Freeze Ray at level 8, Freezing Rain and Hurricane both by level 20, will provide a LOT of mitigation.

For a nice return on a sizeable investment, Ill/Rad is what others have said in this thread and many many others.

For aoe crowd control, that also benefits from a big investment, the Mind/Energy dom won't disappoint. An epic like Fire would probably make this your best option for soloing bigger spawns, but that's late game.

Also, fwiw, all three of these should finish a mission faster than an ice/ice tank.

Wow, thanks for all of the responses, guys!

@Afocks, I've heard good things about Ice/Ice tanks, and in my eventual goal of getting one fifty of every AT to fifty, it'll probably be my choice for a tank - not for soloing, though. I've tried soloing with one, and it took for-ev-er.

@Obscure Blade, Haha, yes, well. I do intend to make all three eventually, it's just a matter of settling on one for the time being, as I don't have the budget to be playing and io'ing three characters at once.

@Agent White, Hmm, duly noted. Considering how much I solo, and the fact that I rather enjoy playing through solo arcs that tend to end with eb/avs (Mender Silos, the SSAs, Twilight's Son, et al) but when I tried my friend, one thing that I noticed is that it did feel a bit slow. Granted, he didn't have perma-PA yet, and was relying on Blind-SW in the downtime, but I have heard great things about it. I'll be sure to take a look at that guide.

@StrykerX, My budget isn't massive, by any means, but I have a decent amount laying about, and if I do go with an Ill/Rad, I can take advantage of the Black Friday sale and get hold of a few LOTG +rech without having to spend a metric crapton of inf/farm amerits to get them. That alone should ease the cost quite a bit, I believe, and the remaining sets required to get decent recharge bonuses seem to be pretty cheap, from what I've seen.

And while I understand that those other ATs would likely solo best, there are reasons for all of them (aside from corruptor, considering that it was one of my original options) that would stop me from playing them - I'm not a huge fan of being stuck in a mob of people when on TFs and the like, which Scrappers and Brutes tend to end up being. That's just a personal thing, and I want to veer away from the punchypunchy for a while. As for Masterminds, I do enjoy them, having played a Bots/Traps for a little bit, but I just feel a bit meh sitting back and letting my pets do the work. /shrugs

I do enjoy the feedback on the ice/storm though, thank you. ^^

@Deacon_NA, See, that's just the problem. They'd all be worth it in the long run, and I'm one of the most indecisive people out there. I just can't decide on anything, really, without the input of other people.

So let me add some additional criteria: as mentioned above in my response to Agent White, I love the soloable tfs/arcs. I'll play through them time and time again, from the Ouroboros arcs to the SSAs. Would any of these three characters be best for handling the various EBs and AVs that spawn in those? For instance, a friend of mine had a bit of trouble with the redside Silos SF on his Mind/Psi, but would Mind/Energy fare a bit better, as there's an example of non-psi damage right there in the secondary? Would Ice/Storm offer up enough damage and mitigation to take down EBs without having his face meet the floor?

See, questions. XD.

tl;dr, I'm indecisive as heck and I appreciate your patience.

Ill/Rad was a big game hunter before IO's

With them, they can solo just about anything in the game. More so with some incarnate powers. You might not be able to run +4/8 at a decent clip solo, but there are not many bags of hp that an Ill/Rad can't deal with.

I am confused by the poster that said the choices were team-oriented. Illusion/rad has all of two powers that need a team member, /storm knocks that down to one. Dominators are as solo-friendly as any scrapper or melee AT you may find, and will certainly solo with ease. Mind/energy is in the upper echelons of best control capabilities in the game.

To the OP: of the three, you have two qualifiers- budget, and awareness.

With the right budget, Ill/rad is the safest, and needs least awareness. But the biggest budget. Once you have a permanent phantom army, you can let them do the work. Just know that you will be better at boss killing than anything else. You can take down single hard targets fast, but the pace slows against large groups.

Dominators are the middle man here- they have the highest personal damage of the three, but /energy is again single-target focused. You can be safe as all get out, but with active mitigation, you have to lock things down or knock 'em out to stay in good shape. On the plus side, /energy has lots of mitigation, and paired with mind/, you will have MANY options for extending that safety. (That is, almost every power you have.) You will NOT need permanent domination for 99% of the game. Mind/ can one-shot sleep bosses with the ST sleep, and layer confuses before fights....0% danger. In fact, a third of mind/ draws no aggro, so you can lock down foes before they even know what's happening. Combine that with /energy's stuns, KB, and powerboost, you are in good shape. But while you can lock down every enemy in your path, you will take them out one at a time. It actually can go faster in most of the game than illusion, though, as the damage can be focused, rather than bouncing around via uncontrolled pet AI. Permanent domination will turn this combo into a walk in the park. It'll give you so much safety it ain't funny, and you won't have to worry about pre-mezzing control enemies anywhere as much. But that's where the budget comes in.

Ice/storm is the riskiest, and the most AoE focused. Combining your debuffs, knockaround, pseudo pets, and control will make you mostly safe, but you will still be vulnerable to mez. That said, ice storm, blizzard, and freezing rain with scourge will melt faces with their frigid goodness. It might not NEED a huge budget, but you will need to stay on your toes, as getting held/stunned/etc. can mean death.

All three of your options can solo to some degree. The one who will do it the fastest and safest is the Dominator. I won't suggest other options because that's not what you asked.

Alrighty, after hearing all of your advice, opinions, etc etc, I think I'll be going with the Mind/Energy Dominator first. I made my choice because being able to lock down spawns and take them out with bursts of glowy death sounds fun, and really quite safe, telepaths are badass, and it seems that even the goal of eventual permadom wouldn't be too difficult to achieve, money-wise.

Ill/Rad will likely be my next task after this first one, and will almost certainly be the one that I rely on for what I consider to be brag-worthy tasks - soloing AVs and whatnot. I'm sure that the Mind/Energy will be quite capable of doing so as well, but sitting there while a confused AV is beat on by his friends sounds really tedious, so I'm not making that a priority at all.

And Ice/Storm will be last. Why? Because it's a bit riskier, and I'd rather wait until I've accumulated a bit more influence, so as to permit me to purchase better IOs, which will result in better def/res values, which will result in less faceplanting. I'm sure I could manage without having to worry too much about that, but I don't like faceplanting. It makes me sad.

@Rainbow Avenger, I'd actually love to hear what other suggestions you have. The three that I mentioned initially were just the ones that I had in mind, but other suggestions are certainly welcome as well. I'm really open to any and all ideas, so long as they'd make sense conceptually. For instance, everyone raves about a Fire/Kin, but no concepts immediately spring to mind for me. /shrugs.

I would have to say the best soloer of the three in the OP would be the Mind Dom. They have plenty of control for solo, and Dom's do great damage. So they would be able to kill fast enough to be a good soloer. I have an Ill/Rad controller, and as some have said, it's very strong in some ways, but not what I would call a quick soloer. Ice/Storm Corrupter would be ok, but not great. It has some damage, but would suffer a bit from a lack of good defenses.

Leaving aside concept, MECHANICALLY, brutes are by far the best soloers. The reason is simple: Unlike every other AT, brutes are NOT damage gated at the low levels.

A level 1 brute can be buffed to 775 percent base damage just like a level 50 can. This is why TopDoc's CEBR guide works so well.

If you want a truly smooth and fast solo experience, try katana/willpower or claws/willpower on a brute. It's smmmoooth sailin'.

I have big hopes for my TW/? brute but they tend to bore me too much to say they solo best. I actually find my stalkers better than my brutes for stick with it solo play.