Dead Calm

I disagree about combat jump. Get it, and swap swift for hurdle. It lets you rush between groups in a mission like a loony, which keeps the fury up. I wouldn't slot either of them though.

However, I agree totally about swaping acrobatics for invincibility, and moving unyielding foward to 16.

Dark is a fairly wierd set to pvp with. One-on-one it is godly, but in a group battle far harder to play with.

I've actually taken to playing in a far more static way even in Sirens, and once I'm in a zone with fluffy (I'm not a fan of Warberg) I'm gessing I'll be even more so, essentially using fluffy as a somewhat fancy set of armour.

Fluffy is very useful in PvP. While aim/buildup will cut through one DN level debuff, two will still render you very hard to hit.

If you can keep your opponent in CotN range, even better.

Lordy malorks. Under no circumstances what so ever miss footstomp. It is when teaming and the fury is flowing.

Every time I exemp down for a SF, and we fight a large spawn, a tear rolls down my cheek at the thought of the missed oppotunity for some STOMP.

It is a thing to behold and treasure.

My chain is Jab (on auto), punch, AS, haymaker, with footstomps, hurls and KO blows thrown in as appropriate.

I only picked up AS fairly late on though, up to that point brawl was on auto.

Slot wise, Jab, Punch, and AS are all three slotted (Acc, end red, recharge), and Haymaker, KO Blow and Footstomp are six slotted (Acc, end red, recharge, 3xDam), and hurl is one slotted for acc, as it is primeraly there for fun.

I only went for one resist, and intend to respec it out for something else at some point.

Oh, and one last thing, put brawl on auto, possibly switching to jab once you recharge SOs.

Builds fury wonderfully and also helps lessen RSI.

Looks pretty solid from an SS point of view. I've not played Fire too much, so I'll leave that alone.

One thing I would do is swap swift for hurdle because hurdle works very well with CJ. It gives you a pseudo-travel power early, and also is fantastic for bouncing around in missions and keeping the fury up between spawns.

If you can find them, a couple of extra slots in health wouldn't go amiss, though by no means essential, as fire's heal is on a fairly fast recharge I think. Anything to avoid downtime though.

Welcome to the wonderful world of SMASH! One thing to remember is that playing a brute does affect how you play other characters. Suddenly you start trying to take all missions at a run, and saying things like, "Rest? Are you mad? We've got at least 20% endurance!".

In order for the Pavlovian punishment/reward training to be effective, I shall allow beer in the camps.

Not the expensive stuff, mind. Tesco's Value Beer, with better types available to those who properly restrain their controlling habits.

By that point 56 blasts would be shooting towards your head with their damage already calculated with a 160% penalty to your resistance.

Also, the server will have started to melt.

Dead is very much a PvE build on live at the mo, although I've got a PvP build on test which was pretty successful on in the Defiant vs Union rumble.

I'm planning to use him more in the 50 zone, as he lacks one of his absoulute core powers (DS) at 30, and Warberg is absolute hell for a defender, due to the multitue of people who can attack you.

I've also heard that another dark pops in and is really rather good, but I've yet to bump into them with either DC or DF.

While I didn't use to think Dark Miasma was a particularly good PvP set, I'm changing my mind about it, as a couple of powers have proven themselves to be far better than I imagined.

I'd go with -accs as your first priority. Fluffy can stick out a lot of debuff. Accuracy is nice if you can afford a slot. You can't actually slot for damage, which is ok, as I don't think I have ever seen a Fluffy actually kill anything by themselves.

One of the best ways to use them is to actually summon them in the middle of a group of enemies. This means everything is in range of Chill of the Night (which is a very good debuff), and increases the chance of fluffy getting slightly damaged, which is good, because he only uses Twilight Grasp when he is hurt.

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Why are those pets called "fluffy" anyway?

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Because if we used thier full name (Sir Fluffington-Darkety-Sparkles III) people would take the mick.

I have on numerous occasions turned up in Sirens having totally forgotten to buy insps.

On the other hand, I have occasionally turned up in Sirens with exactly the insps I need through pure chance, such as the time I was there and a certain Ill/Storm controller who shall remain entierly namless (except to say that his initials are WL) who loves using my brute as an anchor was faffing about in the water. Obviously I jumped straight in, and just as obviously he was running hurricane.

What he didn't bank on was me having five mid level yellows in my tray at that particular time.

That was an especially satisfying KO blow.

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And then you can throw Twilight Grasp's debuff on top of all that, spammed as necessary.

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And the Fluffies will be spamming it too. Of course, Fearsome Stare has a nice acc debuff component as well.

ears...starting...to...bleed

I remember when I was on an I4 4xdark/* defender team. A mass fluffy charge is truely a sight to behold.

Dead Calm's Defender Manifesto

AKA

Dead Calm Gets A H34LOR Tell Too Far

Dead Calm walks onto a podium. He stands between two huge banners, red, with blue defender shields in the middle. In front of him a huge crowd of heroes of all shapes and sizes waits expectantly

Fellow Defenders!

The time has come! Never again will we be subjected to the foolish and cretinous remarks of inferior archetypes! Never again will we be told to stop blasting and 'HEAL ME'! Never again will a lesser archetype DARE to question our ability by whining 'OMG!!!11 wr r teh heels????'.

The time has come to end this farce forever more. The holy purity and divine might of the Defender only team will take its rightful place above the broken and mangled bodies of those who have the temerity to belive that they are worthy to stand against us.

For we are the chosen ones! The Radiation Wielders who harness the power of the atom to smite our foes! The Kineicists who use our enemies very strength against them! The Force Fielders who form an impenetrable shield around us! The Darks who tap into forbidden magics and arcane tomes in their quest to protect us! The Sonics who let forth a wall of sound, rendering our enemies weapons blunt! The Mighty Storms, who use their mastery of the weather to let slip chaos, flinging our opponents aside like feathers in the face of a typhoon! The Archers, who unleash their arrows of justice! And the sweet, sweet Empaths, who even more than the rest of us, have sufferd as they so selflessly dedicate themselves to looking after ungrateful and unworthy souls who then cruelly cast them aside when they no longer feel they require a kind word and friendly shoulder!

No more shall we support those who are not worthy of our support! No more shall we resurrect those whose stupidity is a greater threat than a thousand praetorians! No more shall we buff those who have not even got the intelligence to even check what powersets we posses!

From now on, Defending shall be for Defenders! Today is the beginning of The New Defender Order!

Let us examine those who have proven themselves so unworthy of our support.

There is the Scrapper. A vile beast, who is unable to resist even the most base of impulses. The most simple concepts of strategy and tactics are above them. If you gave them a copy of Sun Tzu's Art of War they would try to hit someone with it. And yet, when they have decided to charge off on their own to do whatever it is Scrappers do when they are out of sight of their betters, they expect US to rush to their aid the second they decide they have bitten off more than they can chew by trying to solo Hamidon or use a slightly more complex than normal remote control! Within days of the NDO beginning, they shall have rendered themselves extinct through their own stupidity.

Next we come to the Blaster. A creature to be pitied. They come so close to the perfection that is the Defender, but their obsession with numbers renders them incapable of all but the most basic of emotions and behavior. See them jump for joy as they notice a huge orange number! Watch them run about screaming as a nasty red number appears! Pat them on the head as they hug your legs when they see a green number! Once the NDO is in place they shall be classified as house pets, unfit for anything other than amusement.

Then we come to the Tanker. A most ungrateful beast, the Tanker prefers to wallow in perceived past glories, entirely failing to appreciate that these feats were only possible because of Defenders. Muttering phrases such as 'must....herd' and 'burn burn burn', they wander around, occasionally hassling perfectly happy Defenders, in the belief that the Defender finds their interminable anecdotes anything other than pitiful. They cannot accept that any fool could herd Freaks, while it took a Defender to herd something impressive like Psychic Clockwork. Come the NDO, they will be confined to reservations where they can spend the rest of their days herding small harmless animals like guinea pigs and voles.

Finally (for we shall not concern ourselves with the ways of the squid), we come to the most repugnant mockery, nay, perversion of the Defender, the filthy Controller. Twisting and warping the purity of Defender powers into obcene parodies of their original beauty, they insist that they can do anything a Defender can! And they claim they can do more! More than a Defender! They whine on about "locking mobs down" and their "level 32 pet"! Locking Down? Level 32 pet? If they wanted such things, they should have become a Dark Defender, (the one powerset that no Controller scum will ever master), not the obcene offence against Man, Nature and God that is the Controller. When the NDO come into effect, they will be rounded up and shipped to re-education camps where they shall be weaned off their 'control' powers, and taught to use their inferior copies of Defender powers for the good of the NDO.

Now is our time! Now the age of the Defender must begin!

HEALING IS BUFFING!
BUFFING IS DEBUFFING!
DEBUFFING IS VICTORY!

This is humour. I do not actually belive any of this.
Well, except the bit about Controllers

I don't think I exaggerate when I say that this would be the greatest and most important thing in the history of humanity since the descovery of fire.

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Or, alternatively, a /Dark MM team - stacking 8 Darkest Nights (one for each 'troller) and 8 tar patches - and you have 8 Fearsome Stares/Petrifying Gazes as well, hypothetically speaking.

Ouch, that's not even nice to think about.

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I'd assume they'd all be using Fluffy, so we are talking about 16 Darkest Nights and Petrifying Gazes. If the Fluffies are used at point blank range, that is also 8 Chill of the Night Auras, which actually has a slightly higher Acc debuff than DN.

Ye gods.

Expanding upon my two chosen tactics, and why I think they would be effective.

Mixed Corruptor team:- All with assault and tactics. Buff to the max, just in case. Fulcrum shift in a group of mobs to hit the damage cap. Engage only at snipe range. All on single target. Fire once and scarper.

Robot Mastermind plan:- All pets buffed. All pets initially targeting the same controller, with a plan of the order to take them down. Masterminds stay as far back as possble, ideally Phased/PFFed. Pets engage in a very close formation. MM don't engage until pets have recharged, so they can follow with an immediate second wave.

Number of pets in each wave: 56
Maximum number of targets affected by a single power = 16. Chance of all the controllers managing to debuff all the pets, including the nasty big robots = unlikely at best.

As I said, the Somme with robots.

The way I'd tackle such a team would be a bunch of corruptors playing with stacked leadership toggles and extreme long range snipe tactics.

I might also give an eight man robot mastermind long range wave attack plan a go, in a sort of robotic equivilent of the Battle of the Somme. No idea whether it would work or not, but would certainly be entertaining.

Given as I have no masterminds, and my only corruptor is currently very much a PvE build I shall not obviously be able to give either plan a go.

Posting with the advantage of being more than 10% awake, I now realise that Red Oktober is actually a Dark/* Defender.

Here are a few of The Usual Suspects that aren't currently on the list, with the powersets that I can remember:

Embers: Fire/Kin Controller
Fried Gold: Empathy/* Defender
Red Oktober: Empathy/* Defender

Dead Calm's Ancillery pool is Dark, because a D3 is just not dark enough, oh no.

It really comes down to whether you want the extra safty + control of dark blast or the massive damage of fire.

Dark blast has the advantage of having two god-awful powers in it (dark pit and life drain) which will give you more space when picking powerpools.

Any of the combos you listed will be easily able to solo.

I slot 1 acc, 1 recharge, 1 end reduction on all attacks, and when I've got some spare slots, stick some damage in the bigger attacks (KO blow, haymaker and footstomp).

The recharge alowed me to remove brawl from my attack chain (I use air superiority instead of boxing, but the idea is the same) and put jab on auto instead (except in pvp), and the extra acc is invaluable both in pvp and fighting stuff with either high defence like rikti drones or acc debuffs like CoT.

I was playing around with oppressive gloom on the test server the other night during the Defiant vs Union rumble for pretty much the same reasons you give.

I didn't notice the health drain at all (my test build had health 1 slotted with heal), presumably it was less than my regen rate. I can't say I noticed it doing anything in a pvp environment, but this may be because

a) we were fighting a team with a lot of tanks/scrappers.
b) it was a deeply chaotic battle
c) there were no stlakers to see if it interupted AS or negated hide.

I'm currently working on the impression (gained partly from interview, partly from stuff on these/the us boards and partly from me guessing) that the following epics are in the works:

Avillons: Wingy, flying thing
Incarnates: States/Recluses AT
Corallax: Coral based AT
Blood of the Black Stream: Unknown, link with Egypt, possibly oil based.

Given various hints within CoV, I'd guess Corallax and BotBS will be the CoV epics, and the other two may be cross over.

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Once my Break Frees were used up I was terrorised almost all the time.

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That's Dead Calm. He told us he would at the start of the match, too!

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We had a spectral terror up too, which spams out a load of fear.

I have no idea how I managed to get 7 kills in the first game. I genuinly thought that I had not managed a single one. Probably a result of /dark's large amount of DoT powers I guess.

All things being equal, it was tremendous fun, and something we should do again.