Fury Flechette

As you probably figured, you need certain pieces in order to cap. I don't have mids in front of me, but most builds have these pieces:

* Steadfast Res/Def - 3% all positions
* Gaussian's ToHit 6-slotted - 2.5% all positions
* Red Fortune 6-slotted - 2.5% ranged
* Touch of Death 6-slotted - 3.75% melee
* Mako's Bite 6-slotted - 3.75% ranged
* Obliteration 6-slotted - 3.75% melee
* Multi-Strikes 5-slotted - 1.88% AoE, 6-slotted 1.88% melee
* Blessing of the Zephyr - 2-slotted 3.13% ranged, 3-slotted - 3.13% AoE

There's stuff in other sets as well too, but those are the main ones I use.

I've seen bosses get off a heavy damaging attack with as little as 5 endurance. I'm not a fan of end drain, as it is currently implemented.

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From what I understand its rediculasly expensive to cap anything on /Sd

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Actually it's not. I built mine for about 80M, which is cheap compared to billion infamy builds you see posted. And yes, it's soft capped for both melee/ranged and with AoE at 42%.

SS. It doesn't matter if it's all smashing damage. Rage makes all the difference. Plus you won't whiff at those annoying drones.

But then again, any properly build brute can do well against the Rikti. They're honestly not that tough.

I only do this to get initial seed capital, about a 100k or so. Then it's simply faster and more profitable to flip salvage. I usually have well over 30 or 40M by level 20.

Once you hit 38 and grab shocking grasp, bosses won't be an issue for you. That said, you can usually double stack tesla cage before you take too much damage. Using 1 or 2 lucks before a hard boss makes that an almost certainty.

Then after the boss is held, you can blast at your leisure. I think the sapper approach, of draining all the opposition end, while fun is less fast than just simply blasting them after they're held.

As for regular minions, it's pretty easy for a blaster to take one minion out with an alpha, mez a second one and then just dance around the third killing it with blasts while taking a little bit of incoming fire.

* Get your hp accolades - some of these are kind of a pain to get
* Get sets that up your hitpoints and regeneration. Numina, Miracle, Luck of the Gambler (all pretty expensive) all provide plenty of help in this area. However, a number of cheap melee sets and travel power sets provide sizeable hitpoint boosts
* If you can, grab sets that provide smashing/lethal defense. This is mostly a nice to have, because what I found in the LRSF, it's better to have just lots of hitpoints. Aim to get around 2400 or more.

Don't think you have to tank. Some dominator based teams just puts to sleep the entire Freedom Phalanx and brings the heroes down one at a time, allowing just about any character with a large amount of hitpoints + team buffs to "tank" while the team beats it down.

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How are you guys getting your defense all into the 40's? All from set bonus'? Cause my lvl 50's defense numbers are only in the 20's.

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IOs and set bonuses. For example, 6 slotting Red Fortune provides +2.5% ranged defense. 6 slotting Obliteration provides 3ish% melee defense. Stack enough of these and they add up to the base values you get from just using SOs.

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[u]You didn't deny any of what Wendy said,
and said "That's the point."[u]

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Because I don't blatantly deny what she said, you take it as tacit agreement. Word lawyering at its finest.

You've lost any sort of credibility with me because you're one of those types that just makes stuff up to make their case better. Nice try.

Argue the merits of my proposal. Fine. If you dislike it. Say so. But do it on an evaluation of the proposal not word sophistry.

Oh and by the way, the whole underline bold thing makes you look real classy. Next time try all caps.

Forum games for the lose. I'll boil this down for you so even you can understand:

1. I said that the order of empathy encourage bad play.
2. Wendy said that the balance of empathy would be disrupted if the order was changed.
3. I said that the change in order would emphasize that it's primarily a buff set.
4. I however NEVER stated that the I agreed with her assertion that the order in which the powers come are optimal. I only agreed that the order *I* suggested would emphasize it's a buff set.

Why in the heck would I even contradict myself in the first place by proposing a change in order and then later agree that the order as it is now was optimal? If I thought they were optimal now, why would I even propose a change?

Learn to read. Please. And stop using that Bizarro world logic that puts words in people's mouths.

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It's got a target cap of 10 because cones have target caps of 10.

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Which means that full auto is in almost every way inferior to RoA. FA can crit on every tick of damage but it's almost unnoticeable, so infrequently does this happen.

Then again, it's almost the same situation with clear mind and clarity. One has a long animation and the other one animates lightning fast, even though they are the exact same power. RoA and FA aren't exactly the same but they are the only pseudo nukes on a 30 second timer without an end crash, so comparisons are unavoidable.

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* Any MM.
* Fire/Dark Corruptor. Rain of Fire + Tar Patch = everything dead.
* Plant Dom. Seeds of Confusion at level 8.

...../dark Corrs don't need a lot of Endurance?

Okay.

None of the above requires an attack chain or lots of endurance.

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Depends on how you play it. If you're spamming your heal and running darkest night sure. If you're just tar patching stuff around corners and then letting lose with your AoEs...probably not.

* Any MM.
* Fire/Dark Corruptor. Rain of Fire + Tar Patch = everything dead.
* Plant Dom. Seeds of Confusion at level 8.

None of the above requires an attack chain or lots of endurance.

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firstly - ignore the kinetic combat advice. it's good advice, but you wont find any. none.

as a matter of fact on infinity there has been only ONE RECIPE from the entire set sold in this entire month at any level from that set. that's how rare (and expensive and in demand) it is.

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*cough*

It is possible to find them. And they show up as bronze recipe reward rolls for AE tickets.

My brute is all of 3 weeks old, and I'm certain I bought all but one of the pieces off the market. Further, I have another set, level 32 to 35 (all but the knockback proc) crafted and in storage. Again, mostly bought off the market, though I think the dmg/end/rech piece dropped off an Ouro mission.

If you look at the last 5 sold on Acc/Dm recipes, it shows 4 level 35 recipes sold today. So they are available to those that are waiting or putting out standing bids.

They're rare, but not hen's teeth rare.

Also, FYI, the markets are cross server. So it's as "rare" for me on Virtue as it is on Infinity.

I'd sell it and buy 4 pieces of Basilik's Gaze and add in Acc or Rech depending what was missing. I'd bank the rest or use the influence to shore up other parts of the build.

I see a few problems actually.

1) You don't need that many end redx in your toggles. With QR and stamina, 2 end redx IOs on your toggles is overkill. They aren't even that expensive to begin with. You could comfortable go without *any* end redx in your toggles if you have your attacks slotted up with enough end redx.

2) Electric is a underwhelming offensive primary. There's really nothing you can do about it, except how to maximize how fast it cycles and perhaps adding a pool power. Since you don't have your fourth pool chosen yet, consider taking air superiority. It's a decent attack, has mitigation and is fast activating. Jacob's Ladder is underwhelming...I'd respec out of that. Consider the Ghost Widow epic, while ball lighting is nice, Ghost Widow attacks packs more punch.

3) To toughen yourself up, add IO set bonuses that either boosts your S/L defense, defenses to fire/cold/energy/neg energy and add hitpoints. For example, 4 slotting Kinetic Combat in your attacks yields about 3.5% (?) S/L defense that stacks nicely with Heightened Senses. Slotting up Luck of the Gambler and Numina IOs boost hitpoints and can be fitted into many of your powers.

4) Build up, Weave, Fast Healing, RTTC, Mind over Body all seem underslotted or unoptimized.

I don't have Mid's in front of me right now, but there are many relatively cost effective ways you can improve your build.

It depends a lot on the recipe.

Blue side Thunderstrikes recipes for example almost sell for as much as the crafted IO. It's better to sell the recipe than bother with crafting.

Also, I'm pretty shocked how inexpensive melee recipes are blue side where they fetch premiums red side, probably due to the mixture of ATs.

I've made a point however to craft defense and resistance recipes blue side. Even the stuff I thought were junk (Serendity, Reactive Armor, etc.) have sold for surprising amounts.

I just sell everything cheap. Sometimes at steep discounts where I only make maybe 10% - 15% profit. I consider getting the going rate a bonus.

With AE, I have more recipes than I know what do with anyway, so I'd rather have high turnover rather than trying to eke out the maximum price for each item. That goes for LoTGs, Miracles and anything else. It bothers me not one bit that someone will flip something I sell. I figure they earned the profit for sitting on that item until it sells.

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Conserve Power will be useful, even after Stamina, unless you slot your attacks for Endurance Reduction or get IO sets slotted (which, if you're 4- or 5-slotting a set, you should have), and it's still situationally useful after that. Remember that AR is one of the two Blaster nukes that don't have a crash associated with them, so if you position yourself to make best use of your attacks you can have an almost continuous cycle of AoE attacks, using Slug or Burst to fill in the chain.

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I think conserve power is very skippable. With typical IO slotting, you'll have much more than the 33% end reduction than your standard SO slotting. Even if you just go with straight SOs, it's more than manageable. Plus there are blue inspirations for long battles, which hopefully, as a blaster are few. I think the argument for CP was stronger back in the days before IOs. Nowadays, you can get the Miracle proc or even just slot up your powers with lots of tiny recovery bonuses, which of course, add up when there are multiple of them.

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My AR/En/Mun will run out of End with Hasten up -- ca. +137% recharge bonus from Hasten and set bonuses -- when operating in full-bore maximum-damage attackspam. It does require that the mobs' aggro be fairly securely held, but it chews up a pile of Minotaurs and Cyclopes nicely; she'll spam attacks until she's down to about 25% End, hit Conserve Power, and be back up to full End by the time it runs out. The same situation applies on a Rikti Mothership raid; being able to stand in the middle of the bowl and hit the rim of the bowl with half your attacks is a lot of fun, and once we're down in the bowl, she's firing almost continually until the shields come back up.

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You're talking about an extreme situation where you have a build with +137% recharge. And even then, you still have blues, team buffs, Geas of the Kind Ones (since you're pulling out Accolade examples below), etc. And you're also using an extreme case where you have a large number of targets with many hitpoints. In typical encounters, the mobs would be dead by your third AoE, if not second.

Obviously, it works for your build; however, for the vast majority of blasters that don't have +137% recharge, CP isn't needed.

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Power Boost is, in my opinion, nowhere near as useful for an AR Blaster; it will boost the stun of Total Focus, Beanbag, Bone Smasher, and Stun -- four attacks, three of which are melee. I would recommend against it unless you plan on going the route of the blapper. The Defense reduction that is in most of the AR attacks is pretty minimal; I've never seen any real difference in my accuracy from it; I had it and respecced out of it.

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As Dragonkat said above, power boost increases the duration of your stuns, boosts the heal in aid self if you take it, boosts the strength of defensive epic shields and if you go munitions, boosts the length of the sleep power and cryo freeze ray. It also boosts the tohit of build up, allowing you to say hit Captain Mako in the Statesman TF or a Vengeance powered Nemesis minion. IMO, that's way more valuable than something like conserve power, which can be bypassed by smart slotting and/or blue chicklets.

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For the times I want the boost, I have the Vanguard Medallion accolade power; it's got a much longer recharge, but with most of your stunning attacks melee, a 'kill them way over there' build won't have a lot of use for it.

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Beanbag is useful at the lower levels, but if you're focusing on exploiting your AoE attacks -- buckshot, M30, Full Auto, Flamethrower, and LRM from Munitions Mastery -- then you may want to respec it out in favor of Cryo Freeze Ray, which is a Hold, letting you tie someone down in an Ignite patch.

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Beanbag > cryo freeze ray for the simple fact that the magnitude stacks with your other stun powers to enable you to stun bosses.

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Look at the first word in the description of "your other stun powers" -- 'Melee'. Let a mob get into melee range, and their attack on you will go off even if your melee attack stuns them. This is a suboptimal solution, particularly if you're building for engagement at range; it would be different if you were building a blapper around AR/En.

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It is laughably easy to beanbag a boss, run to it and then activate total focus or bonesmasher and land far enough away from it to avoid melee. You don't have to have a blapper build to keep and use the useful utility attacks in EM.

Blasters don't have to stay ranged and the melee attacks, as you should know, does a considerable amount of damage.

Vanguard while it enhances your mez duration doesn't enhance tohit buffs, heals, defense. It's not the same.

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Sniper Rifle is still quite useful on teams, although not as much as it would be without Range Boost. With the two together, though, it makes for a wonderfully long-range pull attack, and with Build Up you can generally one-shot a white minion (and some yellow minions, as well).


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People still sniper pull? Now there's a myth that needs to die. Pull with a low damaging attack. High damaging attacks bring buddies. And from a damage per activation standpoint, sniper attacks are one of the most inefficient things that a blaster can use. Snipes are cool but they are very skippable and are awful on teams.

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It varies; I still laugh when I remember the team I was on when we had a Vahzilok mission in an office building. It was an eight-man team in the low teens (the Abominations were all white to me), and the spawn sizes were big enough that it wasn't uncommon for two spawns to wind up with members close enough to cross-aggro. We had already had some near-complete team wipes, then we found a long corridor with a group of Abominations at the other end. The one character with Stealth had run up to check, and had verified that there was a second spawn just around the corner that would aggro if we ran in. So I volunteered to pull the group with my Snipe, which would string them out coming after me. I set up, fire... my target goes down. The remaining Abominations, devoid of any Mortificators or Reapers, just stood there. "Do that again," someone said. Picked one, shot... Abomination goes down. Still no reaction. Third snipe, same thing. One of the Tankers on the team announces "This is boring!" and runs into the spawn, followed by the rest of the melee characters. This, of course, aggros the next spawn over, and all the melee characters wipe; my Blaster dumps ranged fire into the melee until the falling melee characters no longer maintain aggro, then all of us squishies ran for the elevator.

Leaving aside the situations where you want to pull the whole spawn simply because you need it to be farther away from a nearby spawn before you start fighting, since I got Range Boost, I've found that when shooting at a group from a truly extreme range draws less collateral aggro; in the same way that the piddly Perception radius of the Vahz zombies kept them from noticing me sniping out their group ("Say, wasn't Fred standing just a moment ago?" "I wasn't watching." "Okay."), shooting from extreme range has a similar effect. In an ITF, my AR/En/Mun Blaster has about a 75% success rate at pulling just Requiem or Romulus, and rarely gets more than four to six other mobs in the pull. It varies with the villain group; mobs with +Perception make trying to pull an exercise in futility.

However -- and it's antithetical to the way people build their characters -- the best attack to use to pull with isn't your highest-damage attack, or your weakest attack, or your longest-range attack, but your most inaccurate single-target attack. When you do damage to your target, other mobs have a chance to notice the effect of the attack and aggro on the attacker, but if you miss your target, you will almost invariably aggro only your target.

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Bad example. Vahzilok can be sniped pretty easily and their AI is dumb. Without Morts or Reapers, often times you can kill one and his friends right next to him will never attack.

And yes, I do agree that pulling is best done with attacks that do little or no damage. One old school strategy is to pull with temp powers, since they are only modified by tohits and global accuracy bonuses. However, I don't agree that pulling with a snipe is ever a good idea. Using boost range on something like burst extends the range over 100'...that's more than enough.

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I could care less. Slot for IO sets for global recharge, global damage and global accuracy, take RiseofthePhoenix and never seem to have a problem.

Yeah, I got a stealth IO and a -KB IO in hover, but I never seem to need defense. I have a buildout for it and when I switch to it, I die about as much.

Sure, if I wanna solo that AV, it's not optimal... at all. But with most combos having decent built in mitigation, why go running around trying to get global defenses capped?

Naw naw naw. I know the response. And it's very valid if you like to avoid some hot strikes, but does anyone feel like me and not consider death and damage even a speed bump?

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Smart play or overwhelming offense > defense. It's how blasters used to play before IOs. Ranged defense is the new black only because it allows blasters to go into unheralded areas previously reserved for scrappers/brutes. It's not new; it's actually old school.

With that said, there are some builds that work very well with a lot of ranged defense. My AR/Dev devices blaster will be spec'ing into that largely because AR's damage output without build up is laughably poor compared to what blasters are typically capable of. My ice/ice on the other hand won't need it. Everything is frozen or slowed to a crawl even before I start firing. And she's still on SOs/HOs.

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Might make up for the fact that the full auto and rain of arrows are on the same recharge cycle except rain of arrows can hit 16 targets and full auto is only limited to 10.

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All for widening full auto's cone and increasing its target cap, but ROAs big advantage is that it gets aim and FA doesnt. OTOH FA starts doing damage from the second you click

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That's not an advantage of RoA, but an advantage of the Archery set. A minor quibble yes, but aim is an "advantage" to the entire range of archery powers not just RoA.

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You admit that you understand that The order as it is, gives Emps the powers they need, at the points in their level-span, at the levels those powers are most useful

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Just want to point out that's not what I said. With that said, you're free to disagree. Just don't put words in my mouth.

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Lastly, there any updates planned to change the written descriptions of powers, always misleading to see something like "Flamethrower, recharge: Slow" (20s) "Ignite, recharge: Fast"(20s) I know it's an artifact, but is there a listing of those problems so I don't get mislead about ones I don't expect?

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I would /bug that. They really do try to change the descriptions and the change to ignite was somewhat recent. Personally, I wish they'd get rid of the superior versus extreme, slow versus long type of descriptions in all the powers...it's not that they are purposely misleading as they aren't useful.

As for the possibly of a crit in the tics of damage from full auto, it's so insignificant that you don't often realize it. It would be a nice buff to full auto if the crits happened a little more often. Might make up for the fact that the full auto and rain of arrows are on the same recharge cycle except rain of arrows can hit 16 targets and full auto is only limited to 10.

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Frankly by the 30s and 40s I am using Fort and CM a LOT more and occasionally using Heal Other to manage that one one two team mates that are taking damage.

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That's actually the whole point as to why I'm suggesting the change. It's a buff set and the order change makes that obvious. However with the plethora of healing powers early on, newer players think that it's CoH's version of the cleric/priest. And with the new retail box in stores, I have been seeing more new players, a lot of them with preconceived notions from other games.

As to your point about balance, I was worried more that having fort too early would make the set too powerful versus other comparable sets, rather than the heals being overly useful.

Mezzes are actually common even in low levels. Vahzilok bosses can be encountered at level 1 and they throw out stuns and immobilization with regularity. The Hollows contain Outcast Shockers at Bricks at level 5; the boss level ones will mez often. Other mezzing foes include Clockwork, Council and even Trolls.

My thought process is that with this power order, it wouldn't be odd to see less experienced players skip heal other entirely, after figuring out that the buffs in the set do more to counteract damage than playing whack-a-mole with the green bar with heal other.

Then again, the power order probably doesn't counteract the ever so popular healing aura on auto empath, but not having some sort of self heal at low levels seems too mean.

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skip Grant Cover

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I would agree to everything except this. It's your only form of protection against defense debuffs. Even if you're a soloist, I wouldn't skip this.