Doctor_Kumquat

Question - does zoning permanently modify your costume slot to re-add the backpack (assuming you don't respec out of Crab powers on both builds)?

In your example, if you go to the tailor, and load up a costume without the backpack, you can use it and attack without the backpack until you zone. When you zone, does that slot now have the pack again, and you'd need to re-edit it in a tailor to temporarily remove it again? What about if you don't have that costume equipped when you zone?

Yes, pretty much any blaster can stealth up to a spawn, pop Aim + BU + Inferno/Nova/Etc. and fry at least 90% of the baddies before they know you're there. However, I don't know if you could call that "farming" if you're relying exclusively on your Tier 9 that has a base 6 minute recharge.

On the other hand, yes, a well-built blaster can farm by just running up to a bunch of baddies and melting their faces with a standard AoE attack chain. It helps to have some defense if you want to go that route, admittedly.

Grav/Energy would play fairly similar to an energy blaster on steroids. You've got a hold for the nasty stuff, and chain knockback/down for the rest of the riffraff, with a few mostly-random stuns thrown in for good measure. Between Lift, Power Push, and the rest of your attacks, you can keep baddies out of the equation even if you don't slap down a "proper" control power. You'll pack solid ranged and melee damage, and plenty of control for small groups of enemies, but your large AoE control will be lacking compared to many other dom/trollers.

If you crave the extra recharge at the 5-slot bonus, 5x Doctored Wounds and 1x Accuracy would be my default recommendation. If you are paranoid about accuracy and/or don't want to six-slot it, then a mix of accurate healing sets and regular healing sets can be frankenslotted to boost the accuracy more while retaining the expected heal/rech/end levels

Right, the temp powers associated with staying a certain alignment are a modest reward for sticking to your choices and not flipflopping from hero to villain and back every week. They are granted a week after you declare your alignment, and go away if you change it. The badges that grant them stay, so long as you remained a given alignment for a full week.

My main is an Archery blaster, made back around Issue 8. As such, I am intensely biased, but yes, Archery is a wonderful set, and Rain of Arrows is absolutely monstrous. Build Up + Aim + Rain of Arrows + Fistful of Arrows + Explosive Arrow will drop entire spawns, less than two seconds after they notice your existence (so they often drop before they can retaliate at all), and it can do so every 30-40 seconds with solid slotting. Aside from my limited experience in the Dual Pistols beta many moons ago, my highest level pistolier is only 10, so I can't compare the two as directly as I'd like. However, you are accurate in seeing that Archery is generally more efficient at slaughtering things than Pistols.

I believe the main reason that Archery is generally more damaging than Dual Pistols is that Dual Pistols can have very cool side-effects (like -damage debuffs on almost every attack) while Archery's only special effect beyond MOAR DAMAGE is a negligable damage stun attack and a 50% chance for knockdown in Explosive Arrow. (Both sets are also significantly more accurate than standard blast sets.)

That said, Pistols aren't all that weak, and if they seem significantly cooler to you, then stick to your guns. From a pure min/max standpoint the archer will deal more damage, even using incendiary ammo, but not by an overwhelming margin, and chemical rounds will let you make serious threats like AVs far less threatening when teaming.

While this feature of Hami-Os (and set IOs) isn't exactly intended behavior, the devs have never really made an effort to remove it. In fact, when Mind Link was introduced for Widows not so long ago, Castle explicitly made it unslottable for recharge but accept recharge slotting from def/rech IO/HOs, and all-but-encouraged players to do so.

As such, I'd say that if you want to pack some more oomph in your -regen and you've got the cash for Golgis, go for it.

Dominators are likely a solid choice, as they can lock down small groups with great ease and then blast away at range or run up close to safely melee. Something like a Mind/Energy dominator should be a breeze, but the specific powersets are fairly interchangeable depending on character concept/preference.

Many corruptors can solo at a fair clip with their ranged blasts supported by heavy debuffing, but the actual effectiveness will vary wildly depending on your chosen combo.

My favorite option for a safe, reliable, effective soloer using ranged attacks would be a Fortunata. You will need to have a level 20 villain archetype in order to unlock them, if you don't already, but they combine significant self-defenses and control powers with solid ranged damage and team-buffs.

/Devices is an odd duck, in that it has no Build Up; it has caltrops, mines, and loads of stealth options, which is cool, but is more oriented towards proper setup and decisively crushing the enemies you want to fight instead of just run-and-gun slaughterfests. It also offers a ST immobilize which, while not damaging, packs a strong -recharge debuff and makes Ignite into a beast.

/Ice offers Shiver, which is a stupidly large and potent AoE slowing power that does amazing things for both your survivability and keeping enemies clustered for optimum AoE punishment. Furthermore, it has Ice Patch, which synergizes perfectly with Ignite as long as you can get over the inherent silliness of burning to death on ice. Drop a Patch by a corner, drag baddies around it who will then do nothing save slip and fall while staying in your Ignite patches for their full duration, making it an INCREDIBLY powerful attack when you can use it reliably not only against a single immobilized target but as an AoE.

The main draw of /EM is Boost Range, which turns AR/ from a close-range cone specialist into a long-range cone nightmare; imagine Flamethrower with a 70+ foot radius. It also has energy/smashing melee attacks to provide alternative damage types against things that resist your typical blend, and a couple quick punches can dismantle robots that would laugh as you plink away at them with guns. It lacks an immobilize to synergize with Ignite though, so you'd need to rely on Burst, Slug, and your punches for ST damage unless you get an immobilize through a patron pool or something.

Ice and EM both will provide Build Up to ramp up your burst damage significantly, letting your initial volley of cones finish off most baddies instead of making them very angry and only mostly dead. Devices instead relies on mines for bursty damage (either planted as a minefield in front of enemies or toe-bombing thanks to your stealth capacities).

/Mental and /Fire can be options for adding EVEN MORE AOE to your repetoire, but AR blasters can usually squeeze out enough from their primary that it gets a little redundant after a while. If you want a completely seamless chain of non-stop AoE attacks without investing in any recharge bonuses though, they're there for you.

Everything about this combo seems to be made of win.

Yes, I am probably quite biased towards the SMASH of Earth Assault.

Aim and Build Up together are probably the most defining reasons why Blasters are the damage kings of CoH. Your long-term DPS is solid, yes, but you have the power to start a fight with a 10 second window of outrageously high burst damage. Aim + BU + (insert AoE chain) can devastate a whole herd of enemies in almost no time at all, and you are doing yourself a disservice to put them on auto and not use them to their fullest tactical potential.

The rest is a rambling evaluation of power options: feel free to ignore it.

/Fire Manipulation is one of the most melee-centric secondaries around for a blaster. Of note, it offers Fire Sword Circle, Burn (which will be significantly buffed on Tuesday), and Fire Sword, which deal somewhat higher damage than their ranged counterparts because of the increased risk in using them. If you want to leverage its potent AoE powers, you will need to get in close to the baddies, which is harder to do when using a hover build. If you want to try a more melee-centric approach, swapping the flight pool out for Combat Jumping / Superjump would be your best option (imo). Combat Jumping stacked with Hurdle (which you'd want to grab on your way to Stamina) provides movement speeds on par with Flight, but which are unsuppressable even in combat; with a little practice, this will let you bounce in and out of melee range before they can respond, and 'joust' your attacks. Example: you can queue up Fire sword, jump just past a Freakshow boss (so you pass into melee range on your way by), and your melee attack will finish activating while you soar several feet past him. He still takes full damage, but you don't stay in melee long enough for him to be able to smack you across the room.

That being said, as a Fire/Fire blaster, you don't really need to rely on your secondary for damage since Fire Blast is already insanely powerful. As mentioned previously, BU + Aim + Fire Ball + Fire Breath is normally enough to wipe the floor with a horde of +2 minions on its own, and leave the rest of the LTs/Bosses in a world of hurt. As such, Hoverblasting lets you avoid hard-hitting melee attacks entirely, and a unique perspective on the battle. If you choose to splash in some ranged defense through IOs, it gets even better. Stick with the option you feel comfortable with - keeping at a safe distance definitely won't cripple your damage output or anything like that, especially since a dead blaster deals 0 damage (Rise of the Phoenix excluded).

On that topic, RotP is my favorite power from any blaster epic, since it lets you fight more aggressively than most blasters - since you know that if you DO bite off more than you can chew, you have a second lease on life, you can take a few more risks. You should still play sensibly and not go charging head-first into certain death, but death is no longer something to really worry about. To get there, I'd grab Bonfire and Fire Shield - Bonfire is a handy knockback patch to completely wall off a corner or hallway, pin baddies into a corner, or just provide some breathing room, and doesn't need any slotting at all. Fire Shield is a cheap resistance toggle that cuts down incoming damage by almost a third - there's very little reason not to take it. Char is one of the best single-target holds around, but it does require heavy slotting to make it useful, and you have no other hard-controls to stack it with - probably skippable.

As to your power pools, Leadership can indeed be a useful option on a team-oriented Blaster. The numbers on the powers are low individually; for example, Maneuvers offers a piddly 2.28% defense (unslotted) for a relatively high cost (.4 endurance per second, or eps). However, it offers that to the whole team, and stacks - if 5 people on the team slot it up and run it, that's now more like 20% defense, which is on par with a scrapper's main defensive toggles. Assault offers +10.5% damage, but if a couple people run it, that can be more like +50% or even +80% damage, for everyone on the team, all the time. I rarely manage to fit Vengeance in on a blaster, but when you get into a tight spot and teammates are starting to fall, Vengeance is pretty much the strongest party buff in the game. Slotted for +defense, it can stop a teamwipe in its tracks much more often than not - as long as you aren't the first person to go down. It's a power you hope not to need, much like Rise of the Phoenix, but when it's useful, darn is it ever useful. I wouldn't take all three of the Leadership toggles to get there, since the end drain is pretty steep for running the full set, but 2 of the 3 is a welcome addition.

I'd count leadership as much more useful than the Fighting pool for a blaster, since the Fighting toggles (Tough and Weave) provide .

Inferno does indeed have an oppressively long recharge time. However, that's because when you use it, everything in range will die except for maybe a lucky boss or two that will cling desperately to their last pixel of health. If a battle starts turning sour, or there are two groups of enemies that spawned too closely together to safely approach, or you just feel like showing off, popping Aim + BU + Inferno is basically your "I Win" button. It's nowhere near as important as your bread-and-butter attacks like Fireball; it's strictly your ace in the hole, for you to pull out at most every 3 minutes or so, but it's not as useless as you might think. Regarding the endurance crash, as a Fire/Fire, you have more use from your Nuke than most combos. After you pop Inferno, if there ARE still survivors, you can chew a small blue inspiration and then run in to use Consume. You still won't start regenerating endurance as normal for a while, but you should have enough instant endurance to finish off the survivors. If there weren't any survivors, then there's nothing to worry about anyway.

Actually, OneWhoBinds, RotP should make you literally invincible for 10 seconds in addition to an auto-hit mag 4 stun on everything within a chunky radius. The only exceptions I've noticed are on the very rare occasion when some lightning-fast strike re-kills me a split second after I activate RotP, when there's a slight gap/glitch and the untouchability doesn't kick in yet. While a MM would still have to go through the rather lengthy process of re-summoning and re-buffing their henchmen, they have at least 10 seconds of untouchability to make a clean get-away and set up from behind cover to return fully charged. You still have to go through the setup timesink, but in many/most cases that time delay would still be far less than running from the hospital back to that point in the mission. Probably not a power you would want, but it could serve useful purposes.

Also, God Mode powers seem pretty awesome on a lot of Masterminds. They may not fit with your standard playstyle, but two of my masterminds have and use Provoke regularly, relying on their debuffs and Bodyguard mode to survive and tank quite well while their pets are standing back out of AoE range so that they only take their 1/8th splash damage from Bodyguard mode. On such a Tankermind, having capped resistances on top of Bodyguard mode would result in frighteningly massive durability, making it incredibly easy to stand up against outrageous hordes with ease. Alternatively, they could provide a massive safety blanket if things are turning sour and your pets/teammates are fading fast. Still don't know what epic pool my MMs will decide on, but these sound intriguing.

Proc chances activate simultaneously with the first tick of damage, such that a -res effect like Achilles' Heel gives will improve all but the first damage tick in a DoT, but not the initial shot for things like Broadswords. For a very simple illustration, look at Scream from Sonic Blast, which has this effect naturally - a quick DoT with -res such that the first tick does less than the rest of the attack.

If you can afford a couple slot investment in it, Hot Feet really enjoys IO set slotting, so you can get enough end redux, accuracy, damage, AND slowing in for your tastes. If you like getting in melee for FSC and such, it lets you stay safer by making things run away very slowly while getting melted. If you hate melee and want something to discourage the enemies that do try and run towards you, Hot Feet will likely just waste your endurance.

The Mag 500 protection to Intangibility is fairly unique to Romulus' Nictus allies. Most AVs have no special intangibility protection, so it should work fine against them. I forget exactly how protected STF-Recluse (or LRSF-Statesman) is against it though; I suppose I could ask the resident cage-guru.

Max HP levels and damage/buff/debuff scalars vary by archetype; this is why a completely untoggled tanker is still much sturdier than a controller, and why defenders will do less damage than a blaster even using the exact same attack that wasn't specially modified for one AT or the other. Beyond that, there aren't any special +defense passives or anything like that, beyond what is available from that characters' chosen powers (and the slightly higher base regen/recovery rate for Arachnos troops).

Dr. Mike is spot on - between the Gladiator dayjob accolade's shield and the ones that you can now craft, you can now amass a good-sized S/L defense boost from fairly low-endurance temp powers. Even if you don't totally max it out with IOs, you can use somewhat cheaper (not-kinetic-combat) IO sets with +S/L def bonuses alongside one of the toggles to really toughen you up against probably 80-90% of the attacks you'll face.

You don't need to burn through them all that fast though - if you manage your S/L defense temps carefully, by only turning them on when you're about to charge into heavy fire and promptly detoggling once all/most of the dangerous baddies are down, you can squeeze 2 hours of on-time into many hours of play-time, even with high-efficiency soloing.

Everyone on a team (and in the same zone) gets kill credit towards defeat badges, regardless if they were near the fight or got any xp for it. Explorations and history badges, however, do require individually visiting the sites. Taxibot-style tours exist for these for a reason; you can't just have an 8-man team split up, so each person visits one explore badge, and have the entire team earn the new exploration accolade for the zone.

The power picks look solid, no major complaints... EXCEPT THAT YOU SKIPPED WORMHOLE, which is easily one of the three most important Gravity powers. It's your only fast-recharging AoE control power, which also doubles as a unique group-teleport ability. Take it, slot it, live it, love it. Wormhole is more important than Gravity Distortion Field - faster recharging, more accurate, longer lasting, and generally cooler. I'd also take Hasten for sure, since Dominators generally benefit more from high recharge than any other archetype. With both mallets and Seismic Smash for jawdropping melee SMASH, and a handful of ranged attacks as well, I would say one of your ranged attacks (probably Propel) could be skipped unless you just really love killing things with furniture and statues. Alternatively, you can drop Boxing/Tough and take Hasten and Wormhole in their place - I'm not sure how much you really need the extra +resist on top of your patron shield when you are hopefully locking everything down.

Slotting-wise, I'd replace the KB enhancement in Tremor with Damage (or 2 Dam/1 End since it's pricy to use often). KB enhancement will only serve to turn its 50% chance for knockdown into a 50% chance for knockback, and low-damage powers that scatter all the enemies tend to do more harm than good. Similarly, I would replace the disorient slotting in Fissure with Dam and End, since it only has a 33% chance to stun in the first place, and slotting only increases the stun duration not the chance for stunning. I would put more slots in Grav. Distortion, since it is your main hold, and Seismic Smash, since it is both your best melee attack AND a solid hold. To get those slots, you can take a slot from Health, Mud Pots (1 or 2 end red should be fine, the third would only save you .07 end per second anyway), and Soul Drain (the +tohit doesn't make that much of a difference, and you should slot to be able to hit most things without it).

On that note, you may want to skip Mud Pots outright. While a combination slowing/damage aura sounds sweet, it's not a particularly good one. It only has a 8 foot radius, which means they'll only slow down while they are already in melee range, and it only hinders movement, not recharge, so they can still wail on you. As a damage aura, you are paying around .5-.75 endurance per second to deal an extra 11 dps to the few things that are already in melee range. It works, but it's not all that impressive - if you're expecting Hotfeet, you'll be disappointed.

Toxic DoT is nice, but a lot of things that resist Lethal (anything robotic, etc.) will also resist Toxic.

In any case, yes, your -def all stacks. Once you start laying out Quicksand and Earthquake and start hitting them with a couple thorn bursts, your teammates should be able to hit them almost no matter what.

Another note - while you only have to be level 5 to reach the hollows, you need to have trained up to level 5 at Ms. Liberty or an equivalent - if you were out streetsweeping by the gate and just hit 5, they won't let you in until you've trained.

Fortunately for the controller in question, Nightstar is among the easiest Praetorians to catch on the side - there's a one-off badge mission in Ouroboros that lets you fight her up on the rooftops.

An interesting thing for Thermal is that if you do a dual build for the rare occasion you are without a team, almost the entire set is skippable, and you have a ton of room to pick up any/all pool powers you might want. For a team build you will want to pick most if not all of the set, and while it's a bit of an oddball, it's very versatile and useful. +Res shields, Forge, heals and debuffs will make you a popular hero no matter what your team is lacking.