Trip Mine vs. Tornado?

Per summon, I know that Tornado can out-damage Trip Mine and its kind of a set-and-forget type deal.

...but, I can toe-bomb 2-3 times as many Trip Mines in the time I could get out one Tornado (unless cast/interrupt has something to say about it) and set much more in advance...


Which is the better tool for leveraging damage (assuming both are slotted to prevent KB)?

trip mines are great for burst dmg but are hard to use in combat, while tornado can be used then left to its own devices

both however are great powers


now if you were talking about time bomb and tornado, then tornado wins hands down lol

I get what your saying but I have issue with it.

On average I get Trip mine down to 6 seconds. Let just assume we get Tornado down to 15 seconds. Basically we are quartering the recharge for those not wanting to look it up. So Trip mine is usually 20 and Tornado is 60.

What I am reading is Tornado 6 slotted with the kd converter IO, 5 others your doing somewhere in the 800 point range. messing around with frankenslotting I am getting 817 to 874. Similarly I am getting in the 400 range with Trip mine. So for argument sake if we can agree to 800 and 400 respectively it should be fair.

The issue comes that Tornado does this damage over 30 seconds and Trip mine does it instantly. The problem is Tornado jumps around from mob to mob. So not every mob or a single mob is getting 800 points of damage. Unless its a AV left standing after all the other mobs have been cleared out.

In theory you can drop a tornado every 15 seconds and have 2 out for 1600 points of damage. And in the same 30 seconds you can have out 6 trip mines out for 2400 points of damage. Again assuming the clock starts after first placement.

I will agree that you can't place a trip mine all the time because some DOT or hit was able to sneak in. So even if we went with 4 trip mines at 1600 in 30 seconds it would be even. I will even go one less and say 1200 thus putting Tornado ahead.

My issue is how Tornado puts out its damage. Further as you know that summer event KD IO has changed so its no longer 100%. Having a few Storm defenders one rad and one sonic, the sonic build having burnout and being able to put out 3 tornado's in this 15 second period I only see tornado pick one target when nothing else is around. Otherwise it seems to share the punishment across a bunch of mobs. So its not 800 dps per mob its is pretty much how Mids says it is 61 tics over a 30 second period of X amount of smash damage.

Further what is the max target of tornado ? The knockback and disorient from city of data says 5 targets. Again I'm asking because I don't know.

End result my point is I don't think you will or can get the number of hits that trip mine does. I think you will be killing more mobs with Trip mine. Now if your NOT defense capped with Traps then your doing something wrong. Again I concede about the whole DOT issue with laying down a Trip Mine and that stuff does happen, just do a Knives of Artemis mission and you will see the annoyance. I just think you have less control over the dps of tornado which in turn makes it weaker. Plus I believe the max number of targets is less. Even if you had 2 Tornado's out following the same path and hitting 10 mobs equally because of how Tornado works. Your talking 800/10 =80 x 2 = 160 dps per mob. Where as Trip mine can do 400 dps but lets assume the extra proc did not go off so your only getting 300 dps.

Again I'm putting this in favor of Tornado, but I have issues with how Tornado works.

I, too, understand the issue. My additional issue is if you are deciding between a /storm and a /traps secondary based on the damage tornado vs. trip mine, IMHO there are a lot of other factors in the decision more worthy of analyzing.

/storm is at its best when the mastermind is very mobile. Are you good at managing pets while harnessing the chaos of the storm? Do you like the idea of waltzing in with impunity to hard targets and say "Eat it!" when you drop poison gas trap? Do you maximize the acid mortars by placing near two groups?

What primary are you pairing with storm and/or traps? Ninjas need love. Robots can weather a lot without intervention - Demons as well.

Originally, I had a Demon/Storm in mind: Good mitigation tools and great -res tools; Storm added to the mitigation, gave me a few more pets to leverage damage with and another source of -res. Plus I really like Tornado (2 Troller/Storms)

Then I started looking at /Traps (not only for MM but for pairing with Sonic/ on Blasters (Devices) and Corrs as well).

Traps gave me most of my mitigation and -res tools earlier as well as some extra damage; so I was more proactive earlier in the game.

But I was still looking at Tornado as my ace-in-the hole; my crashless, stacking nuke power... until I started tweaking around with Trip Mine numbers "another crashless, stacking nuke power!"

The numbers looked good but the casting time and interrupt time were throwing me so I figured I would ask here to see if that was a deal killer for people who actually utilize them.

The sexyness of Tornado on top of a group of mobs sitting under your Freezing Rain patch can not be overstated. That is an enormous amount of control, debuffing and damage out of just two powers, which you can cast from range, and will work 100% of the time.

You can even take Heat Mastery (if you don't mind taking that as your APP) and throw Fireball into the mix along with all of your Demon's AoEs. Though even without that, FR + Tornado looks amazing.

My experience is with bots. Trip mine is only good for my opener. Once the bots catch up, there is really not much point in trying to drop any more, cause the spawn is spread the f out, and frankly, I toe bomb, I don't set up and pull.

Tornado is good all the time, every time, even if it is just for lols.

Thanks for all the input; keep it coming.

From my experience with demons, traps would play with demons nicely with the defense. The mastermind can use his skills, his single target whip attacks or veteran staves to bring additional foes into a trappy killzone. Traps are very effective, but they don't move.

Storm is a completely different playstyle. The numbers are not better purely comparing powers from storm to traps. Storm has NO -regen, but there are those that would offer that a continual chewing by the tornado offsets most regen for tough foes. Tornado also leaves a nice swath of stunned minions behind it. Demons don't have burn patches, they have auras and play nicely with an aura buff/debuff set like storm. Freezing rain you cannot move nor lightning storm. With enough recharge you can have freezing rain up every fight, and two and briefly three lightning storms out, especially with -recharge buffs from teammates: time, kinetic, radiation.

If you have experience with other pets, demons/storm would play more like necro/storm rather than bots/storm. Demons are also less squishy, so the extra heal from a stationary triage beacon or additional heal from a pain/thermal/dark set is not as paramount as it is in other pet sets.

I plan to have the Overwhelming Force proc IO installed in all my stormies

Traps vs. Storm is very much a playstyle thing. Traps is a very passive set. You just drop your traps and let your pets go to town (depends on your primary, actually, I'm Bots/Traps. I no longer even play the guy because he's just too good and I haven't even totally IO'ed him out) whereas Storm forces you to be more active. And the amount of control in Storm cannot be overstated.

Hurricane lets you push mobs into groups for your pets to munch on.

Freezing Rain not only slips them up but debuffs them by quite a bit.

Tornado provides more control and a heft amount of damage on hard targets.

Gust is another great tool for control.

Lightning Storm gives you free damage, combine with Hurricane/Freezing Rain/Tornado for additional giggles.

All that control helps out too. One of my issues with Traps is, when my pets start dropping, mobs don't always give me the breathing room to pop them back up, even with Seeker Drones/Acid Mortar/Poison Trap. Storm's control gives you that breathing room in spades.