Fulmens

With Maneuvers on a sonic, your teammates go from (assuming no other Defense available) taking 56% damage to taking 51% damage, roughly. 90% as much as they were taking, vs. 75%.

It is possible to build up respectable amounts of misses with, for instance, a sonic/dark defender. If you nail all the badguys with both cones while keeping your team more or less in the big bubble. But adding 5% Defense, nowhere near the softcap, isn't going to do as much as 5% Defense, quite near the softcap.

IO's, and I have no direct evidence for this either, seem to serve a LOT of purposes. They can provide direct SO replacement. (but without going red, and with slight improvements as you level, and with 20's being clearly better than 15s and worse than 25's and so forth. ) They can provide ultimate power to max level characters. (Except for the things that are "reserved" for HO's, like Dam/Range and so forth.)

... and they can provide several levels of middle ground, from frankenslotting at level 32 to "oh, just one expensive stealth or kb" to "just the cheap and easy 25% Recharge and a little +Acc".

... and they can do it for levels 15 through 49 as well.

I don't play my 50's much and I get a LOT out of the IO system. Please don't gouge me for your perceived "real" purposes.

Just to point out that you can actually build pretty solid 2-attack chains on some characters. So the bot capability is real.

UN is a bunch of shrinkin' violets. Let 'em come.

*gets out the eggbeater and the wildcat crate*

Roughly I think of IO's as having about three "levels" of strength. This is my personal thought process and not something built into the game.

First- Generic IO's. Work like SO's that never go red. Simple and cheap.
Second- "Frankenslotting" aka mixed cheap set IO's. The reason for this is that an Accuracy/Damage set IO gives you more than half an Accuracy and more than half a Damage. You can usually frankenslot for about 20 million inf, but you may want one or two "special" IO's (karma -knockback for me, usually) which can be as expensive as the rest of your build.
Third- Set bonuses. This is where the price can go sky high. This gives roughly the same benefits as the second level ("seven IOs in five slots") but you can get, for instance, five +5% Recharge bonuses and have almost another Recharge slot in every power you have.

I have a guide to frankenslotting in my sig.

Time Bomb is pretty terrible. I don't have anything good to say about it. I've used it on a dark/trap corruptor, who was pretty leisurely in general, and it was slow for HIM. (And it requires freaking pinpoint timing, making it a WORSE investment of time. )

The extra zero is a *******. Occasionally it's a ******* in your favor.

I finish off my bids with ",908" to reduce the fast fingers/slow brain problem. (Local pride.) I still screwed up last week and bought a piece of salvage for, like, 10,009,087 .

There are a couple of things I think you're overlooking, hero2.

1) The best stuff in the game is available in limited quantities. People with a lot of money want the best stuff and bid against each other for it. This is a bad thing if you're buying, but a good thing if you're selling.

2) You can get very good results by "frankenslotting" with cheap stuff; you just can't get good set bonuses. A Ruin Acc/Dam/Rech and a Thunderstrike Acc/Dam/Rech give you the same as a generic acc, generic dam, and generic rech but they do it in two slots instead of three.

3) The IO system is designed to reward multiple styles of play. Run a lot of task forces and you can get merit recipes, with a good chance of things like Numina's +rech/regen dropping. Beat up a lot of level 50 badguys solo and get a good chance (well, relatively good chance) of purple recipes dropping. Beat a lot of level 30s and you can get Regenerative Tissues and Kinetic Combats. About the only thing you don't get rewarded for is dancing under the Atlas statue.

4) The IO system is intentionally designed to produce small amounts of stuff that is worth a WHOLE lot and large amounts of cheap stuff, some of which is useful. Before the IO system, you earned all the money your character would ever need by level 42 or so. After that you just piled up useless, pointless wealth. After the IO system... well, nobody's ever complained of having too much money.

Tarrantm: I'd love to race your "perfect pair" against two Green Machine-style emp/sonic defenders for speed and sheer indestructibility.

Stacked 120% defense debuffs on tough targets, capped defense, 70% damage buff at all times, a true nuke about every 60 seconds with virtually no END drop, something like 2200% Regen... I'm sure there's a heal in there somewhere on that power tray.

If you're talking about a duo, then no- I would not want to take a force fielder on a duo. It's a waste. If you're talking about five blasters, like we had last night... yeah, that's a force fielder situation.

I didn't follow all the versions offered, but I have a mid-level Sonic/Dark built for "miscellaneous support" with the following plan:

1) Full ToHit debuff in the two main cones, plus some range in the Tentacles
2) Capped Maneuvers.

... with these two, you'll give about 5.5% Defense to the team and the people you hit with both cones will have around 32% ToHit debuff if even-con, around 20.5% at +3 to you. So you're stopping around half the incoming damage from landing.

3) Big bubble and little bubbles slotted to cap.

... this stops half the remaining damage from hurting. Unfortunately the big bubble works best if you're staying in a predictable place, and the cones work best if you're jumping around like a maniac.

4) Frankenslotted Life Drain- you want 40+% Acc, 80%+ Heal, as much Recharge and Damage as you can manage and a little EndReduction if you can manage it. This is to save your squishy butt.

At level 35-ish, I ended up setting up my singletarget attacks for damage, sacrificing my cone attacks' damage for debuff (NOTE: HamiOs may avoid this necessity) and taking Heal Other.

What I have right now is something that helps any defensive teammates significantly. Got some Defense? Enemies are going to be at the to-hit floor against you. Got some Resist? Lemme cap that for you. Got neither? Well, we can still cut incoming damage by about a factor of three or four (if everything works out) and heal some of the remainder.

It took kind of an extreme situation (everyone else in the SG building damage, basically) for me to go "pure support" but I did it. And it works pretty well.

Now the curse of the setup is that everyone else is at 55% Res and you are at 25%. I recommend the following to keep the Defender defended:

Several sets of Aegis (4%-ish AOE defense)
Steadfast 3% Def to all (unique, sadly)
If you can manage it: Kick/Tough/Weave (Kick for style, Boxing if you're going to use it)
With Tough and an Epic defense, you should be over the 75% cap in S/L and around 60% to one other type; with Weave, Maneuvers and the Steadfast you should be around 16.5% Def to All, around 30% (!) to AOE. Some Thunderstrikes if you have the slots and you should be very very tough to hit, except in melee.

None of the sets I've picked here are insanely expensive by my standards. If you have more money you can get more Defense (Blessings of the Zephyr, for instance, for ranged/aoe) and a few other things as needed.

This is probably around 150 million inf as described, but I haven't checked the prices on Hami-Os lately.

Gritting my teeth and being constructive here:

From the Defender version, here's what I know about Rad:
You need 95% or close to it Endurance Reduction in both main toggles. You will also want as close as possible to 60% ToHit Debuff in Rad Infection. The Defender version drops even-con enemies to the to-hit floor. Defense Debuff in Rad Infection is unnecessary.

Soloing pre-SO's on any support character is miserable- and almost every character is miserable in the 16-19 range anyway, as people get all their big end draining powers and nothing to mitigate yet. (Level 21 is known among our SG as "level suck." I won't powerlevel ANYONE EVER... with one exception. I'll change servers, log in a new character, quit something in the middle to powerlevel some complete stranger if they're level 21.)

I'd invest in some level 20 IO's. Four L20's is as good as three L25's, so it's worth "overdriving" Rad Infection even if you're only going to use them for four more levels or so.

Once you have RI, EF and an immobilize, you should be pretty damn safe.

I don't know how the controller half works, so I recommend listening to the nice people who do.

Most of what I haven't done, I don't want to do. (I may yet play a Controller past level 14... but villainside.)

I haven't collected the set of villainside GM's.
I haven't purpled out any characters.
I haven't made a spectacularly tough tank. (I might try Stone now that it can be colored.)

I think you're going to have severe problems with knockback, mez and scatter.

And if it goes bad it will go REALLY BAD REALLY FAST.

If it doesn't go bad this might be one of the fastest KHTFs on record, though.

EDIT: If there really is a "all level 34" bug - which would make sense as an accidental consequence of the no-TF-difficulty temporary workaround- this just got a lot easier.

I'm a little late to the conversation...

as mentioned, the spawn isn't over until ALL the enemies are down. Bosses too.

Oh, another point in favor of "different play styles" is that a lot of different teams WORK. You can tank and spank, or whatever the kids are calling it these days. You can run one Force Fielder, one Empath, and six Blasters and see everything melt as it hits the 80' range marker. You can run eight Controllers. It all works differently and it all works well.

... as far as I know, two Emp/Sonic defenders are the best duo in the game. Who saw THAT coming?

Several points:

1) At level 36, your level 35 SO will enhance your power by 30% insted of the current 36.something percent. At level 38 it will enhance your power by 0%. Your level 35 IO's will enhance by 36.something percent until you decide to replace with something better.

2) If you put in bids a week before you need them, and carry the ones you get early, you can sometimes get serious bargains at Wentworth's on generics.

3) If you want a slightly more complex approach, a set IO that does two things (Acc/Dam, or Defense/End, or whatever) does each of them about 2/3 as well as a generic; one that does three things does each of them about half as well.

Which means if you slot a Ruin Acc/Dam/Rech and a Thunderstrike Acc/Dam/Rech, both level 35, in a ranged damage power (they won't go into anything else- one of the many harsh learning experiences some people have) you get about 36% Acc, 36% Dam, and 36% Recharge. In two slots. Those are fairly cheap IO's- it'll cost you maybe six SO's each for them.

4) If you want to spend more and have more potential mistakes, you can get into the expensive, fancy set IO's that have actual good set bonuses. Putting five Devastation into that power will get you, in addition to a lot of accuracy, damage, endurance reduction and recharge, the following:

12% Regeneration (about equal to one SO in Health )
2.25% more Hit Points (about half an Accolade's worth)
3% more damage on all powers (not much... but on all powers)
3.3% hold resistance (ok, that one's useless.)

Slot that in four singletarget powers, and you get 12% damage (about Assault level), 9% HP (almost the Atlas medallion) and 48% Regen (more than unslotted Health.)

... it will cost you hundreds of millions of influence, and you have to be careful that you're not losing damage or whatever in the power itself, but it's definitely nice to have.

Err, looks like everyone beat me to it.

Hope you're liking the game!

QuiJon said

Slightly related question: If you are set "equal to six heroes" and you bring five other heroes anyway... do you get drops for 6? for 8? for 11?