Elaith

Yeah I default to bosses but I have no problem hitting a lt that has annoying abilities, or even a minion (like oh...sappers?).

Also, while it may not be your strong point, most stalkers have a trick or two that doesn't involve damage they can do to help the team too, although thats dependent on your powerset. (ie. DM has a fear, /Ninja has caltrops, etc)

Tohit debuffs factor straight in to the tohit part of the equation.

likelihood of power hitting you = (final tohit - defense) * accuracy

final tohit = base tohit + buffs - debuffs

Also, your defense numbers don't stack, you just use your highest value. So a ranged lethal attack would be at 55% tohit in the theoretical case.

Hitting them with a -20% tohit debuff is essentially the same as getting 20% defense to all, so would lower that 55% from above to 35%.

I feel I should note that in the vast majority of normal gameplay your enemy's tohit is going to be 50%

[edit]That'll teach me to spend more then a minute typing, there were no replies when I started! :P Some good info above me.

...If you know your icons you can tell when someone has incoming attacks by watching the buff bar, thats the closest I can think of. That being said, particularly with ranged attacks the delay between the icon showing up and damage isn't consistent since the icon seems to first show up when the attack roll declares a hit, the attack still has to go thorugh animation + travel time.

But thats kinda stretching, it's not really preemptive so much as twitch reflexes. Closest thing in game to a preemptive heal is a regen buff.

I've got a DM/EA that I like a lot, one of the big draws for me was the unlimited blue bar. Skipped stamina and never looked back, although I did eventually grab swift for the move speed boost. The lack of psy defense is definately noticeable with how often you fight arachnos, but seeing as arachnos don't have enough perception to see you alpha striking the heaviest psy hitter usually solves the problem.

I have NOT softcapped him, choosing to build for +dmg set bonuses instead and hes still quite survivable, admittedly I have a self heal from DM as well. Just like any other defense set, the RNG will occasionally dictate that you die now, I've been two shooted in a couple seconds through overload before :P

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Ice has better defense, but shield will hit harder.


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I disagree with this statment Shield/ has wonderful defense using melee/ranged/aoe it has very few holes, I spent a meger 15-20 mill on IO's and have over 50% defense to each of these. I think the real difference between the two is the heal.

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I was speaking spefically in terms of out of the box, no IO sets taken into account. Although, I would hazard a guess that ice will keep a defensive edge over shield given similar IO investment. This is not to say that shield cannot attain good defense numbers however. (also factoring in slow, -dmg, and heals when I say higher defense, not just defense %, I probably should have said mitigation :P)

As for the build, couple things:

Energy Absorbtion: I would suggest 3 recharge in this, seeing as it is an end recovery tool and a defense buff getting it back as often as possible is nice. And you can free up the slots from:

Hibernate: Hibernate is good out of the box, it really doesn't need slotting. A single recharge SO will have it recharging shortly before the nophase debuff wears off, seing as you cant activate hibernate again until the debuff is gone theres no point to more recharge. Don't think it needs heals either but I could see the value in it returning you to full health faster. It heals you at a rate comparable to rest for the record.

Those are the only two things that really jumped out at me.

I haven't played a shield tank but the feeling I've gotten is: Ice has better defense, but shield will hit harder.

Ice is actually very friendly with the blue bar once you get and slot energy absorbtion.

As for leaving CE on while herding...thats up to you. It will slow them down as they chase you, but it will also blunt the alpha with it's -dmg effect.

I can give some pointers on ice armor if you have questions but my ice tank is ice/db, the only ice melee experience I have is with the blaster version.

Going to jump on the bandwagon and say doctored wounds. While doctored wounds isn't the only decent heal set, the set bonuses (in my opinion at least) do more for an empath then the bonuses of the other sets. If we were talking about slotting O2 boost instead of healing aura another set may be preferable in the context of the powerset as a whole. Anyway, key reason I say doctored wounds, it has a global recharge boost. As an empath you have fortitude, the 2 auras, and adrenaline boost that you want to get as much recharge as possible for. Thats almost half the set that is hungry for more recharge, and it's not like extra recharge is really going to hurt the rest of the set.

And I'll also second Psyonico, Emp/Dark is a very nice team build, although I may be biased as my main is an emp/dark :P

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And if I recall right, Vahzilok poison darts are typed LETHAL, not Toxic for defense.

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There is no toxic defense type. Attacks that deal ONLY toxic damage will have just a positional type wrt/defense. e.g. Acid Arrow.

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I believe hydra spit is typed fire and ranged. Another trend i've noticed is that powers that don't do damage (ie: debuffs) tend to oinly have positional tags (there are of course, exceptions). This makes sense as there is no damage type but it feels like my typed defense characters eat a lot more debuffs as a result.

Just to add another set of numbers to the mix, do you have how often/average strength of weakness too or just resistance? Or was that already factored in to the tables?

At 50 my emp pretty much cycles fort onto 3 people and attacks. AB and the auras get thrown in as needed, and as such there isn't a set "X gets AB," although its usually blasters after they have nuked. Of course for that to work, you do need to take enough attacks to get a resonable attack chain.

Specifically for emp/elec, I would say take and slot out tesla cage if you haven't already and use it to lock down potential problem enemies. There is no hard and fast rule for who gets fortitude, I tend to default to blasters but whoever needs the defense the most gets it. If no one needs the defense I give it to the most AoE happy damage dealer, which often overlaps with the blasters that need the defense. :P

I'd go with either power or elec for your ancillary for the same reason that elec blasters prefer energy or elec for their secondary. PBU and power sink can both combo with short circuit to flatline enemy blue bars. Power sink will let you do it more often (120 sec rech vs 240) but PBU will let you do it a bit faster, you can hit PBU while running in and only SC has to animate in the fight itself. I honestly like the elec pool more as a whole, but its hard to turn down the power of PBU + Fort so I'll just say pick the pool you want :P

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I think wormhole works as is, the only thing I wuold change is to have the stun apply at the beginning of the animation rather then after the port. As it is if you try to open with it you eat the alpha unless you can do so from out of LoS. That said, if it meant giving up one of it's aspects to get that, I'll keep the delay :P

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Wow. Really?

I'm a new player (and pretty new to crowd control in general) who picked grav/therm.

If this is weak, I need to try another controller! *cackle*

Disclaimer: I'm only level 14 as of yet, and I'm not sure I grok Dimension Shift.

But I don't feel like a weakling at all; I feel pretty durn cool!

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The game is not going to shoot you in the face becaus eyou are running a gravity controller. This isn't the first time this topic has come up and it won't be the last, and gravity has gotten some improvements in the past. Remember when wormhole was single target? Anyway, if you like the character go ahead and stick with it, gravity is still (in my opinion at least) a fun set.

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Team toggle buffs (Arctic Fog, Shadow Fall, Dispersion Bubble, Sonic Dispersion, and Steamy Mist) suppress on teammates when the teammate is mezzed, not when the user is mezzed.

The way it works under Issue 13 is unintuitive, but can we call it a balance issue?

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I believe it was stated that this is a game engine limitation. It was pretty much either this or keep the "toggles drop when mezzed." I don't remember the exact language used but that was the gist of it.

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I haven't read the whole thread, so I'm sorry if I missed someone else saying this, but the defender melee modifier is currently smaller than its ranged modifier. This causes an issue with power pools as well as the epic melee attacks, though those would probably be poor damage even after the change because of their animation time.

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I'm pretty sure this is working as intended. The various AT modifiers are supposed to be what defines what the ATs are good at. Being as defenders are advertised as buff/debuff and ranged damage, I can see the lower melee damage modifier being there. Blasters, as damage specialists, have high modifiers for both ranged and melee damage but low buff/debuff modifiers.

Although, melee ATs using ranged attacks seem to have gotten a special waiver. Strictly by the modifers defender ranged attacks should (slightly) outdamage scrapper ranged attacks. It's been a while but I believe my scrapper friend's dark blast significantly outdamaged mine.

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Heres a few to make empathy less perfect:

Balance: Recovery Aura, Regeneration Aura, and Adrenaline Boost all function at the same values for controllers as they do for defenders. (I don't think this has been changed anyway)

On the vigilance end cost increase, I'm not sure if it actually makes the powers cost more or if it just displays that, going to try to test that soon. (Along with a different theory on the cause of the negative buffs)

I remember waaaaaay back a DM/Regen friend took me along while he killed stuff on monster island. I was warned to not shoot because of the aggro I would draw, and naturally had to test it. Took one shot with dark blast after he'd knocked maybe probably around a fourth of its life off, the monster instantly turned and started taking shots at me. Main reason I'm mentioning this is because it seems to be something they've fixed before so they might have records of how they fixed it last time. I have no idea how the whole process works to know if this is true or not though.