Arch Villain Head Hunter

Of all the things available in CoX the one thing I have never tried was building an character capable of soloing an Arch Villain.

I understand that is now a rather common occurrence these days but when I first heard of the trend it was in the very early days of IOs.

My objective is to kill every (within reason, I assume something like Lord Recluse may be asking a little too much) Arch Villain the game and I thought the best place to start would be asking the scrappers.

I've heard good things about Dark/SR, Dark/Shield (although I'm not sure I want to go the shield route as I have a SS/Shield brute already) and TW/WP, but am a little confused if I should be going with a Brute or a Scrapper?

I would appreciate any feedback advice you all could offer on where I should start.

My budget for this outing would be in the 500 million range with plenty of merit hero merit assistance.

IMO, there's only 2-3 things you need to take into consideration to kill an AV, especially if your taking the "classic scrapper challenge" approach with no temps, insps, etc (relying only on powers sets).

1. DPS (especially toward a single target even if its mostly AOE's)
2. Endurance (for sustainable DPS)
3. Mitigation and repair (you will get hit - how much time b/w hits and can you repair fast enough to take the second hit and not have your DPS suffer)

Melee-wise, these three-ish consepts are easily packaged in DM/SR - easy soft-cap, healing with damage a-la Siphon Life, end tools Dark Consumption, good single target attack chain. Truely, just about any combo will work if you include pools for medicine's self heal (maybe not on tanks, but most scraps, brute and especially with the new Stalker re-vamps, they put out especially good DPS). Stalkers sacrifice HP for their power. The question is always "Is the mitigation I have *enough* mitigation," except on Tanks where the question is "How can I leverage damage - since survival is usually so easy to get." (I dont have much experience soloing AV with tanks, but it's possible).

As far as your DM/SR and TW/WP, get defenses up as high as possible (soft-capped - +45% to melee/range/aoe and SmashLeathal/EnergyDark/FireIce/PsyToxic(hard), respectively on those toons - dont build for both!) and enough recharge to make a high enough attack chain to cut down the AV factoring their regeneration in and your loss of endurance per tic and per attack. I would think that this would be easiest/cheapist on the DM/SR. Pylon soloing is a good heavy-bag way of practicing before your fights.

GOOD LUCK!

I am not sure how many AV's have -def but I am partial to /NRG over /SR these days. It is very easy to softcap, and has its own inbuild powers to recover green and blue.

The AV soloer I am working on is a DB/Nrg, plenty of single target damage and room for 2 -res procs which I think are likely to make a big difference against AV's.

Dark/SR would of course be cheaper and able to start soloing AV's much easier if you are lacking funds.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aggelakis PrincessDarkstar: "RAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH SOMEONE IS *WRONG* ON THE INTERNET!"

Dark melee is great but for a budget build you might want to consider kinetic melee. It gets pretty comparable single target performance with much less recharge required and it looks pretty good doing it. For my money it's also more fun to play when you're not soloing AVs than DM. With dark I often feel outclassed in team environments due to the single target focus and burst helps keep KM from having the same issue.

Shield would be an excellent secondary for this purpose as well. With KM/Shield all you really have to focus on is regular softcapping the positions and that isn't too great a challenge these days. The notable gap in KM/Shield that DM/Shield does not have is of course siphon life, but there are a couple ways to make that up. Aid self is functional and everything but rebirth is really where it's at if you ask me. Sure, it only exemps down to 45, but most people don't seem to exemplar to fight AVs.

Thanks for the replies, guys. Couple of questions...

1) how much recharge would I need in order to get where I need to be with dark melee?

2) are scrappers better for this than brutes? As in does the damage multiplier and critical strike out DPS fury once things get going?

3) does /ENG have enough DDR to stack up to /SR against AVs with -def?

4) does anyone have an argument for TW/? Is /WP the best secondary for my objectives and wouldn't softcapping WP take up so much space/funds that I would struggle to achieve the recharge/recovery needed to put out the required damage?

(1) enough to run perma-hasten...something like 80-100ish% before hasten.

(2) that depends, brutes can add gloom from soul mastery to an attack chain which really adds damage and makes things pretty potent especially for a DM toon.

(3) Energy Aura has very little to no DDR.

(4) TW is great if you can build enough end to fuel it. TW/Fire would be a great damage dealer if you could get enough defense to it. I would think something like...TW/SR would be interesting, however, you would likely need to do a brute and take energy mastery to run enough endurance recovery to fuel the build. I would personally take Superior Conditioning and Physical Perfection, slot them well enough to get +2.0 recovery after toggles. Get all the accolades adding endurance. Then I would take Agility Alpha to boost endurance recovery, defense and recharge. Should be a winner.

Everything above is absolutely true. Dm/Sr would probably be the easiest. Hell, Dm/Wp or Dm/Inv would prob even be better due to the added resistances they have. I was soloing Hero class enemies as a brute at lvl 19 and 20.

I have a claws/sr scrapper that I used at one point for AV soloing. Now though, I prefer my Fm/Inv brute. With the brute fury proc my fury is pegged at 90% and above on things like AV's and Pylons, and fury affects the damage that DoT's do. I didn't take gloom though, as it would interfere with concept.

I am slightly above soft cap for s/l, 43.5% for e/ne, and 40.1 with one foe in range of invincibility. Add in DP and the resistances I have, and I seriously have a hard time dying. So far I have soloed all of the normal AV's with no temps and no inspirations, (Including Mother Hayhem, Malaise, and Psychic CW King) with little to no trouble. I'm on vacation the next 2.5 weeks and thinking of starting to solo the TF's. I'll let you know how it goes.

My Katana/Dark was vastly better at AV soloing than my Dark Melee/Super Reflexes, though those are on unlimited budget builds. Fire/Super Reflexes was considered the budget AV soloer for a long time. And Dark Melee/Shield Defense was the higher-end AV soloer of choice for a long time because it packed enough survivability with huge DPS.

This was all pre-incarnate. The deck may be stacked differently these days. I'm not so much in the loop with all these new-fangled power sets the kids are using.

I have to second katana/dark for unlimited budget builds...but for a not so unlimited budget, I think DM/SR or DM/shield or DM/INV would work well, I have a DM/INV brute and I must say...he is a force to be reckoned with...seriously...PM me if you want to see my build.

Also: Werner. I take all your AV soloing hints with a grain of long, arduous salt. :P

Dark/Shield because there isn't a combination that comes close to have the ratio of damage output to survivability and because I am extremely biased but ignore the second part because the first part is true.

Honestly, it would be difficult to come up with a combination that can't solo an AV. Maybe Spines would have issues, but pretty much everything else should be able to.

The REAL questions are: How much money can you spend on it, and how fast do you want to drop them?

The two questions directly affect each other. You can build an AV soloer on a budget, but it won't be doing it as fast as an uber-expensive monster build.

I'm fond of my BS/DA, but it is mostly due to the opinions of others that just about anything would be a better choice for AV soloing than Broadsword.

My Claws/Regen can do it if I'm having a good day and the RNG is feeling kind.

I have a Street Justice/Shield that should be able to do it with very little difficulty.

DM/SR =Easy AV soloing machine. That is all.

Hmmm, one objective is "to kill every... Arch Villain". If this is to be under Scrapper challenge rules, Dark Melee/Super Reflexes is going to get wasted by Malaise, for instance, and other options may have similar kryptonite. Of course it may not be under Scrapper challenge rules, and we were also told "within reason", so that may be fine.

Also, isn't this easier with a Controller or other heavy-debuffing archetype? If there's no specific desire to hit them in the face repeatedly until they go down, I suspect that debuffs would make it easier to collect the whole set.

Will a Scrapper beat a Brute DPS-wise vs an AV or Pylon?

Bottom line, DM/Shield or perhaps a melee-softcapped Titan/Elec scrapper. I believe, against a single target, Titan can outperform DM by a good little stretch. Now, if you plan on using fuel...

DM/Shield for the lulz.

Werner, I can testify Fury stays pegged about 80-90% the entire time once it gets there, and it doesn't take long to build it up. I don't have the Fury proc either, on my DM/INV which does have the fury proc, or my SS/Fire, both of those hover around 90% constantly...with spikes up to 95-100% on occasion in large mobs.

As far as I know nobody has yet done an analysis of the impact of the scrapper's strike proc. When catalyzed it's a 6% bonus critical chance to all of your attacks. I haven't even bothered with a back-of-an-envelope calculation of that as compared to the fury proc because it seems so bleedingly obviously superior in all cases.

Well, in terms of burst damage yes...you are probably right...and it's only 6% on minions and LTs...it's half that on bosses and up...

However, if the brute's fury proc adds a constant 10% Fury, it's adding 20% damage...do you think that 6% crit chance adds much more or less than 20% over the course of time? I would be willing to bet you the numbers come out very closely either way, especially on bosses and hard targets because you lose half that advantage gained...why? Balance...if one AT was drastically superior to another...then the other would be superfluous...would it not? I am telling you, in my experience...over time the damage evens out...

Thank you all for your very helpful responses!

Now onto the finer details of the matter... at some point I'm sure the amount of influence invested in one of these endeavors reaches a level of diminishing returns. I'm really not that interested in shaving seconds off of kill times, but I am interested in being capable of killing these hard targets. I'm pretty patient, I don't mind putting in another minute of rotation if it saves me a billion influence!

I have access to a pretty extensive collection of HOs, so I don't think one of these DM/SD power builds will be too far out of the question. I did a little research and found one of the millions of builds posted by Santorican over in the DM/SD threads and removed the PvP IOs and altered the Incarnate.

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