Deacon_NA

Dark Melee is definitely far from underpowered, nor is it a "support set". You probably won't create a farmer with DM, you can create an AV soloer though.

You get a quick animating (except for one attack), quick recharging attack chain that hits hard.
An exotic control that debuffs to-hit (Touch of Fear).
A potentially massive damage and to-hit buff (Soul Drain)
Blue bar refiller (Dark Consumption)
A heavy hitting attack... that heals you!
On top of all that, the attacks all debuff to-hit.

Full disclosure - my only DM character has just hit level 12, so my hands-on experience is limited. At level 12 though, I'm very satisfied and can see things just getting significantly better.

I do have significantly more experience with Dark Blast (50 Def, 50 Corr) and have no complaints.

Both of these have a good synergy when paired with powersets that
a) have no self-heal (Shield Def, Super Reflexes, Cold Dom, Traps for example)
b) have +Def and/or -ToHit debuffs (see above)

So, again, nothing underpowered to see here.

It's a late-game thing, but at level 47, you can take Power Boost and make a dramatic improvement to your bubbles, keeping those within Dispersion soft capped at all times, with Maneuvers. Sonic, Thermal and Cold shields are not similarly affected, though they all have other powers that benefit from PB.

I've done AV soloing with both Bots/Traps and Bots/Poison and, for the single purpose of AV soloing Poison is definitely better.

Maybe sinking lots of inf into enhancements will even Traps up with Poison.

Traps can get the job done though, and is much, MUCH more flexible for the rest of the game.

I'm going to counter with Energy Melee because it stacks stuns with Screech. Sleeps are the only thing that stacks with Ice and when you attack, that does you no good. Sleep the spawn with Siren's, stun the Lieut and take them out at your leisure. Sure Ice can hold the Lt too. If it's a boss though, that hold does you no good until it recharges but you can stun him quickly with EM.

For my Sonic/EM blaster (a 50, fwiw), I had the same concerns as the OP for a while.

Eventually I reconciled that by spamming Howl, and positioning myself for max effect with its cone and taking out the nastiest single targets in a spawn, one by one.

Later, with the epics, you can grab Static Discharge and chain it with Howl, again using ST attacks as needed.

Eventually the concerns I had about being the "ST blaster" went away. Take out the high prioriy targets and that's a great teammate.

There's only one thing gnawing at me:

I've never completed a Sewers Trial, at least without using the old exploit.

Another thing I'd like to do is to defeat someone in a PvP zone. I'm 0 for about 5, usually I disengage quickly when attacked.

Some of the other things I see listed, like doing all the Kheld arcs aren't on my to-do list.

My cursory search didn't yield any prior info on this, but, as y'all say "my search fu is weak". So I'll just ask...

Now that there are 4 settings for missions, is there any research done on how rewards are granted for each permutation?

There's level (-1 to 4), # of players (1 to 8), bosses (yes or no), AVs (yes or no).

Seemingly there would be 192 different combinations (6 * 8 * 2 * 2). Maybe the last two don't matter, dunno, that's why I'm asking.

Using prestige earned as the comparison basis, it seems like I'm earning less than before i16. That is, if I set to what had been "Invincible" (+2, 1) I'm getting something like 344 prestige and it used to be a smidge over 490. However I have gotten in the 500s + before too.

So, before I do any experimenting on my own, I'm just wondering if the analysis has already been done.

The lack of Howl is a pretty glaring omission. I find times where this attack is my best aoe -Res debuff, sadly, like on a team with no melee so Disruption gets underutilized. Even if you do have melee, 20% res debuff on top of Disruption is very nice.

After slotting Dispersion and Charged Armor, you'll have 67% res to s/l. That's darn good. Tough will only get you another 8% since Defender resistance cap is 75%. I don't think that's worth 2 power picks.

Also, a Sonic/Sonic doesn't get a lot from Hasten. The only powers on a long timer are Dreadfull Wail and Liquefy. Personally, I don't get Hasten for my Son/Son.

So what to get with these newly open slots? I like Assault with this combo, because of the way the damage buff multiplies by the resistance debuffs. To a lesser degree I like Maneuvers too. Power Sink could be very helpful too for this endurance intensive combo.

There are discussions going on in other threads about a /Sonic attack chain. I suggest you read those posts. It may cause you to rethink some things.

For a better QOL, I'd move a slot from Sonic Siphon to Fly. Siphon's really something you want to mainly use on hard targets and it doesn't stack.

The Sonic power that doesn't self-stack that a poster above may be thinking of is Sonic Siphon from Sonic Resonance.

As for a /Sonic Attack attack chain - I didn't see any specification of whether this was solo or team. If team oriented, then Howl must be incorporated.

Screech is great. As mentioned above, it's great for hard targets and also for annoying Lieuts and below that you need to take out of a fight NOW (Sappers, Comm Officers, etc).

Since this is the Defender forum, I'll say that my ST attack chain is Shriek and Scream. On a Sonic/ Blaster I do take Shout but not my Defs.

/Sonic is full of goodies. I wouldn't call anything a dog, or "must skip". Shockwave is very good at what it does, AOE kb. If you don't like AOE (cone) kb, then don't take it but if you know when to use it, it does what it's supposed to do quite well. Also you can get the sweet bonuses from Kinetic Crash.

Siren's Song is another that folks may advise to skip but again, it can sleep mobs a LONG time, 1 minute 30 seconds enhanced. The Purple sleep is cheap when you get to 50 and, along the way, the sleep set with the 6.25% recharge bonus (I forgot the name) is trivially cheap.

Sadly it's hard for a Def to take all the powers in a blast set. I would from /Sonic if I could, but invariably there's something else I need more.

I suppose it's possible to miss Nightstar too, though few do since she's in the first spawn. However, the mission objective is to defeat Seige and guards and click a glowy so a team in a hurry to finish the mission could miss her.

RedTomax's mission info is up to date as far as I can tell, having the done about 2-3 weeks ago.

A stealth IO is considered unique, regardless of travel power, so no, you can not stack them.

I have two, related tips for "Bots tricks of the trade"

1) Micromanage where your bots are. Look for the supremacy buff icon, or a leadership buff. You'll need something to give you a quick indication of who is not nearby
2) Take Recall Friend. When you see a bot away from you, using 1) above, your choice is to either teleport him or dismiss/resummon. Occasionally, even TPing them won't help, they either run back where they were or they just can't be ported.

This doesn't appear to be a "stuck behind seeker drones" issue. Sometimes a bot just gets stuck at an elevator door. This is actually what I see the most and it's infuriating.

I decided to do some AV hunting, Praetorian style, recently. In ye olden days, you had to set to invincible, which made regular mobs +2/+3. So out of habit I set for +3. Got to the AV... lvl 53. That's a whole different beast than even con. My hat's off to +3 AV soloers (if they exist), I had to drop down to 50. I'm sure they exist, it just must take at least twice as long to defeat them.

Just so you know, there's no such thing as Invincible at the moment. This tf will be +0, period.

Also, STF is absolutely not impossible without a tank. My fastest runs have been on tank-less teams.

3 Traps MMs + whatevah. More specifically I'd go

3 Robot/Traps
1 Ice (Maybe Dark)/Kin

I chose Kin for recharge convenience. Ice to slow down (even hold) runners. Really the only challenge 3+ /Traps would face is chasing down all the fraidy cats.

Now that you mention it, yeah. I brought my ill/rad out to play the other day and observed what you're talking about. Didn't think much of it, except to say "hmmm, that seems new".

As a veteran of Thugs/FF (my highest prestige earner among all of my characters), I don't think the "bang for the buck" is there from a 500M to a 4B build.

The Thugs are soft-capped with Maneuvers and throwing in some Def enhanements into the Enforcers and using the 2 Def uniques and the 2 Res uniques are icing on the cake.

FF isn't something that needs a lot of recharge. Throwing out more Repulsion Bomb would be better, but not game changing. Gang War is purely a distraction. An easily ripped apart and destroyed distraction. I don't see a lot of value in getting it recharged much faster since your basic 6 pets are very survivable, after you bubble them.

A meta game I have to play is "where do I spend my inf on uber builds?" I've got a lot of 50s and, even though I also have a lot of inf, it's not enough to outfit all of them to the max. So I have to figure out what chars I like to play and what kind of incremental gain will they get for the inf spend. Even though I really like playing my Thugs/FF, I can't justify an expensive build because I just don't think the extra spend will create a more effective PVE performance.

Just fyi, I ran this on my ill farm - a lvl 40 mission I saved on a lvl 50 character. This was my old farm that I'd use and it was a means to get it done (relatively) quickly. Now it's crazy fast, took 10 minutes for a character to go from 0 to badge.

I know soft-capping is all the rage these days. Personally, I don't "get it" for a Dark/Dark Def. You get to initiate (due to Shadow Fall) so Fearsome Stare, slotted for -ToHit, will cause fear and debuff by ~30% (before adjustments to mob level). Then, you get to do other debuffy things, most of which further lower -ToHit.

So when I see the pursuit of the soft-cap over-riding making effective use of key powers, it's a little disconcerting. Yes, Numina's offers a sweet 3.75% ranged def bonus. It also provides no accuracy to a power you really, really want to hit. Another example is slotting Fluffy for immob/hold. He's (she's?) a -ToHit debuff machine. Between you and Fluffy, by max slotting -ToHit in 3 powers (FS, DN and DS), enemies are at 5% ToHit up to +3 levels (back of the napkin calculation). AVs, of course, are a different story, but I don't think AV soloing is on the to-do list for the builds posted above.

I won't even get into not slotting damage in the AOEs.

When I get around to IOing out my Dark/Dark, I'm going to prioritize recharge. Several key powers have long-ish timers (Tar Patch, Howling Twilight) that I'd like to use more frequently. These are the things that make a D3 most effective on a team, not the ability have attacks miss them without taking any action of their own. I will get some Defense in there, for sure, 25%-ish is the goal, especially for Range and AOE, but there won't be compromises made for the sake of personal defense.

Yeah, I pretty much get that Invul is typed defense not positional, having played the set for about 1000 hours across other characters as well.

Let me give a reminder that Zephyrs give typed defense bonuses in addition to positional. With the current build there is 42.8% cold/fire def. Without the 2 -kb Zephyrs, it's 39.7. At the risk of sounding boorish, I don't really care about "economic value", given the inf at my disposal. Still, I will evaluate some of the suggestions above to see if I'm confortable with the changes. I thank you both for your time.

My very first char in this game is an Inv/SS tank that I had put into semi-retirement, but lately I'm feeling that my namesake needs to get some IO loving.

I had used him, on occasion, for farming, but I have better choices for that now, so I'm ready to take him down a new path - hard core, heavy tank. I'm talking about a legit choice to go toe-to-toe with Recluse.

Before posting the build a few thoughts:

Soft-capped to s/l with 1 foe in range. I'm not convinced I need to do this, especially with 87.4% s/l resistance. I'm thinking I should rework some to move some s/l bonuses to get more energy/neg def. Right now that's 40% def (with 1 foe in range). I do get capped to that type with 4 foes. With only 30% resists, Energy's gonna hurt and Recluse certainly has that. Also, I do a fair number of LGTFs so energy and psi are types I can't just avoid.

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.401
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Hedgefund: Level 50 Mutation Tanker
Primary Power Set: Invulnerability
Secondary Power Set: Super Strength
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Fighting
Power Pool: Leadership
Ancillary Pool: Energy Mastery

Hero Profile:
------------
Level 1: Temp Invulnerability ImpArm-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(A), ImpArm-ResDam(3), ImpArm-ResDam/EndRdx(3), S'fstPrt-ResDam/Def+(33), ImpArm-ResPsi(43)
Level 1: Jab KntkC'bat-Acc/Dmg(A), KntkC'bat-Knock%(31), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx(33), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(33), HO:Nucle(50)
Level 2: Dull Pain Dct'dW-Rchg(A), Dct'dW-EndRdx/Rchg(5), Dct'dW-Heal/Rchg(5), Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg(15), Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx(15)
Level 4: Haymaker KntkC'bat-Acc/Dmg(A), KntkC'bat-Knock%(31), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(34), KntkC'bat-Dmg/Rchg(34), HO:Nucle(50)
Level 6: Resist Physical Damage ImpArm-ResPsi(A), ImpArm-ResDam/EndRdx(7), ImpArm-ResDam(7), ImpArm-ResDam/Rchg(43)
Level 8: Unyielding ImpArm-ResPsi(A), ImpArm-ResDam/EndRdx(9), ImpArm-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(9), ImpArm-ResDam(45)
Level 10: Taunt Mocking-Taunt(A), Mocking-Taunt/Rchg(11), Mocking-Taunt/Rchg/Rng(11), Mocking-Taunt/Rng(36), Mocking-Rchg(37)
Level 12: Resist Energies ImpArm-ResPsi(A), ImpArm-ResDam(13), ImpArm-ResDam/EndRdx(13), ImpArm-ResDam/Rchg(46)
Level 14: Hurdle Jump-I(A)
Level 16: Health Numna-Heal(A), Numna-Regen/Rcvry+(17), Mrcl-Rcvry+(17), Mrcl-Heal(25), RgnTis-Regen+(25)
Level 18: Invincibility HO:Cyto(A), HO:Cyto(19), HO:Cyto(19)
Level 20: Stamina EndMod-I(A), P'Shift-EndMod(21), P'Shift-End%(21)
Level 22: Knockout Blow Mako-Acc/Dmg(A), Mako-Dmg/EndRdx(23), Mako-Dmg/Rchg(23), Mako-Acc/EndRdx/Rchg(31), Mako-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(46), Mako-Dam%(48)
Level 24: Combat Jumping Zephyr-Travel(A), Zephyr-Travel/EndRdx(34), Zephyr-ResKB(36)
Level 26: Tough Hide LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(A), LkGmblr-Def(27), LkGmblr-Rchg+(27)
Level 28: Rage GSFC-ToHit(A), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg(29), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg/EndRdx(29), GSFC-Rchg/EndRdx(37), GSFC-ToHit/EndRdx(37), GSFC-Build%(40)
Level 30: Super Jump Zephyr-Travel(A), Zephyr-Travel/EndRdx(36), Zephyr-ResKB(43)
Level 32: Boxing HO:Nucle(A)
Level 35: Tough HO:Ribo(A)
Level 38: Foot Stomp Sciroc-Acc/Dmg(A), Sciroc-Dmg/EndRdx(39), Sciroc-Dmg/Rchg(39), Sciroc-Acc/Rchg(39), Sciroc-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(40), Sciroc-Dam%(40)
Level 41: Weave LkGmblr-Rchg+(A), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx/Rchg(42), LkGmblr-Def(42), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(42)
Level 44: Resist Elements ImpArm-ResDam(A), ImpArm-ResPsi(45), ImpArm-ResDam/EndRdx(45), ImpArm-ResDam/Rchg(46)
Level 47: Maneuvers LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(A), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx/Rchg(48), LkGmblr-Rchg+(48)
Level 49: Conserve Power RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(50)
------------
Level 1: Brawl Empty(A)
Level 1: Sprint Empty(A)
Level 2: Rest Empty(A)
Level 1: Gauntlet



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So, whatcha think?

I'm going to miss my Laser Beam Eyes, terribly, but it looks like Maneuvers is pretty critical.

I've still got a Plant/Earth Dom I made for this and I haven't hooked up with you guys yet. He's just level 8 now, I'll look for y'all next session.