Muon_Neutrino

Do'h! I didn't realize the event ended today.... thought we still had a couple more days. Now my tank won't get her slow resist IO. Sadness.

Is ice bad? I don't think I would necessarily say that. It is definitely *different*, though, and even after 50 levels of ice/ice I still can't make up my mind whether that's a good or a bad thing.

Part of it, I think, is the reputations (or lack thereof) of the particular sets involved. For better or worse, fire and earth control have fairly strong 'name recognition', for lack of a better term. People know (or at least think they know) what the sets do, and they have a reputation for being pretty *good* at what they do. And then, as you note, they each have a naturally thematic secondary, and boom, commonplace sight.

Ice control, on the other hand, while it isn't as well known, does have somewhat of a reputation as an odd set. And that's fairly justified, because it *is* kinda an odd set. Ice/ probably has the lowest amount of *hard* control of any control set, matched only by illusion/. Instead, like illusion, it relies heavily on misdirection and soft control. This doesn't fit with many people's idea of what a control set 'should' do, and it is somewhat counter to what you might expect from the example of the other ice themed sets in the game, which tend to be the *most* controllery set of their type. Icy assault also has a bit of a reputation for being endurance heavy and low damage, which isn't nearly as true, but it still might have something to do with the combo's overall level of popularity.

In terms of actual *effectiveness* rather than reputation, I personally find it a bit hard to actually rank ice/ compared to a more 'traditional' set, simply because they're so different. Overall I'd probably have to say it's *slightly* weaker, mostly because of the difficulty it has dealing with alphas, but not very much so.

Easily the biggest weakness ice/ has is that it just doesn't have a good way to defuse the alpha strike. Casting ice slick under an un-aggroed mob will result in you eating about a half alpha strike from the mobs which aren't knocked down instantly, and if you're solo you'll be eating the rest of that alpha strike over the next 5-10 seconds as individual mobs manage to keep their feet long enough to get a shot off. The way to prevent this is to cast ice slick from around a corner or behind an obstacle so that they can't retaliate, but there isn't always such a handy terrain feature available. Assuming you can handle the alpha, combined with your slows it's good mitigation. But that alpha is still a problem, and it's one that ice's other control powers don't fix. Glacier is PBAoE, and flash freeze has that incredibly annoying trivial tick of damage associated with it. That means that the sleep is delayed by 0.25 of a second so that the power doesn't break its own sleep, and *that* means that the enemies usually have time to get off a shot before they're slept. The only *guaranteed* way the set has to defuse an alpha is to summon jack in the middle of the spawn, and he's not robust enough to survive that sort of treatment.

Now, ice/ does have strengths to offset that weakness. It's bad at alpha control, but it's quite good at sustained control. Arctic air is a toggle so you can keep it going indefinitely, and both shiver and ice slick have very good uptime ratios. It's also good in situations where foes resist some of the more traditional controls, such as ITFs. Where something like earth/ doesn't have as much to fall back on when they're resistant to holds, KD, and stuns, ice/ can still slow and force avoid behavior.

Overall, I'd say that ice/ makes a better team set than a solo one. It is very good at slowing and limiting attacks, but it can't really *stop* them, and solo that means that your HP bar will feel it if you can't eliminate the enemy fast enough. Being solo also amplifies ice's weakness to alphas. On teams, on the other hand, your weaknesses will be covered for, and that lets you put your strengths in sustained and unconventional control to best use.

Icy assault, on the other hand, is a much more conventional set. In many ways, it's actually the 'vanilla' or most standard assault set. It's got 3 average ranged attacks, 2 average melee attacks, an average PBAoE, an average cone, power boost, and a throwaway skippable 'utility' power. It doesn't lean especially hard towards ranged or melee, ST or AoE, and doesn't really have any special focus or trait. In my opinion it is very much a 'jack of all trades, master of none' type set, and I suppose that might throw off some people who are looking to specialize a bit more. It's still a *good* set, in my opinion, but I think it suffers a bit in perception compared to some of the more... flamboyant assault sets.

Just a thought - isn't the zone cap normally 50 people? If most of EE will be in the zone to coordinate the event, will there actually be room for anyone else? I was hoping to be there (if my internet cooperates), and I'd hate to think that the zone cap would prevent people from taking part.

Would it be a good idea to move some of the activities to, say, galaxy city? I imagine it'd be hard to coordinate if activities were split up between multiple instances of AP since people would likely have a hard time getting into the instance they wanted, but 'costume contest in galaxy, X activity in atlas, etc' sounds much easier to keep track of.

/time to go work on my costumes....

Personally, I didn't have a bit of trouble with trapdoor on any of the three characters I've fought him with so far. My dom just popped domination, summoned jack next to him to distract him, and held him in two shots. He stood there frozen until he died, didn't summon a thing. My tank just ran straight up to him, beat on him until he bifurcated, jumped away and two-shot the clone, and then went back to beating on him. I even stopped attacking him when the moron jumped into the lava trying to chase me, just to make sure his defeat was all my doing. My FF defender did the same thing my tank did, except I hovered over his head the whole time. None of them had any significant trouble with his clones/regen, none of them were ever in any real danger.

Honestly, I personally think the honoree encounter is by far the more difficult one. A lot of characters just don't have the mitigation to deal with 2 EBs (especially when one of them seems to be completely immune to control) and a ridiculous number of replenishing rikti all at the same time. My tank was fine, but I didn't have nearly as easy of a time with the other two.

In general, the answer to the question "I just made a */* scrapper, will this be decent?" is almost always yes. There are certainly combos which are especially synergistic and combos which lack any real synergy, combos that focus especially strongly in certain areas and combos that don't, but overall it's actually pretty difficult to make a completely gimp scrapper. As long as you are intelligent in choosing and slotting powers from your chosen sets, you'll almost always turn out at least decent.

I don't know too much about kinetic melee, but what I do know suggests that you'll definitely want as much recharge as you can swing - KM benefits a lot from having power siphon up as much as possible, and of course regen wants lots of recharge as well for its clicks. Aside from that, I would probably take the fighting pool and try to get some basic defense and resistance to layer with your healing and regen. With resilience, tough, weave, combat jumping, and the steadfast 3% you're sitting at around 20-25% S/L res and about 11-12% def - add some more S/L def from stuff like reactive armors and smashing haymakers (also try a pair of rectified reticle in power siphon) and you'll have a nice layer of additional mitigation on top of your healing/regen.

/Energy is a very good secondary early on, thanks to getting 4 very nice attacks by level 10. /Fire, by comparison, starts a bit slower, since one of your early powers is an AoE (and it doesn't get the hax that is power push). They're pretty similar overall at these levels, though.

Later on is when they diverge significantly in overall focus. /Fire will have much more overall AoE potential - combustion is much better than whirling hands, and /energy has no equivalent of fire breath at all. Fire also has an endurance recovery tool in consume, and embrace of fire is a massive buff to your overall damage. It will massively out-damage energy assault in AoE (*especially* once you get the /fire epic and pick up fireball and rain of fire, since fiery embrace works on these as well), and will probably do so in ST as well (though not as much, and depending on your overall recharge levels).

/Energy, on the other hand, has more of a single target focus than /fire. Nothing it has can match blaze, but it's still got a good bit of ST damage, and the higher number of attacks makes it easier to get a complete chain at lower levels of recharge. Instead of fiery embrace it has power boost, which is sorta like buildup for mez durations. Between the KBs, stuns, and power boost, it brings much, much more mitigation to the table than /fire does, but at the sacrifice of having much worse AoE and no better ST damage.

Both are very good secondaries these days, but I would probably go /fire if you're going to pair it with earth/. The much better AoE of the */fire/fire combo meshes quite well with earth/'s superb AoE control, and you don't need to worry about knocking things out of your control patches with your attacks. Earth also doesn't need the extra mitigation that /energy provides, and since it uses so many pseudopet controls it doesn't get very much out of power boost. Both combos will definitely work well, of course, but I just think that earth/fire has more overall synergy than earth/energy.

As mentioned, the medicine pool lets you use a little tricorder-style gadget. I know they don't necessarily have to be useful, but if you don't object to a bit of usefulness to go with your concept I would pick stimulant as the representative of that pool - mez protection is the only thing medicine does that you don't already do with your /dark stuff.

Mace mastery can give you two different mace powers plus a big robot, if that's your style. Web envelope can immob stuff in rain of fire, and web cocoon will stack with petrifying gaze to hold bosses. Round it out with scorpion shield for some S/L defense goodness.

It may have poor DPA, but it's also got a big area and a nice mitigation effect. Hit 8 targets and you're still out-DPAing seismic smash, which is one of the top DPA attacks in the game (if not *the* top, too lazy to go looking at the moment). It's not footstomp, but that's more a testament to how absurdly good footstomp is than anything else (like psi shockwave, footstomp breaks the dam/rech/area balance rules for AoE attacks - it's supposed to either do significantly less damage than it does, or only have a 10 foot radius).

It's true that tremor is at best an average PBAoE, but it's still servicable. Toss in an epic/patron AoE and, while you're no fire blast or spines, you've still got ok AoE. And frankly, given how good of a ST and mitigation set stone melee already is, I would be *extremely* hesitant to ask any dev to look anywhere near the set. At a minimum, I'm sure we'd lose seismic's boss hold, given what they did to TF, and fault is scary good.

Well, alpha/omega/etc are part of the new Incarnate 'endgame' system; since you're not level 50 yet, you don't have to worry about that.

IOs are... well, less complicated than you might expect, but still pretty complicated. In a nutshell, to create an IO enhancement, you need 2 things - a recipe, and some salvage. Salvage drops from enemies, and comes in three types - common (white), uncommon (yellow), and rare (orange). Recipes, depending on the type, either drop from enemies, can be gotten after completing missions, or are purchased with 'merits' that you get from completing story arcs/task forces. Once you have the recipe and the required salvage, you take them to the university (there's one in steel canyon) and use the crafting table to combine them into an enhancement.

IO enhancements themselves have some differences from standard DO/SO/etc type enhancements. First, they never expire. They still follow the rule that you can't slot more than 3 levels above your current level, but you can have a level 10 IO slotted when you're level 50 and not only will it still work, it'll still have the same enhancement value it did when you were level 10. The total enhancement value provided does varies based on the level of the IO - a level 50 IO will provide more enhancement than a level 15 IO.

Second, IOs come in two varieties - 'set' IOs and 'common' IOs. Common IOs are like SOs - they just provide a single type of enhancement like an SO, although they don't expire. Set IOs are different - you don't just have a 'generic' damage set IO - instead, you have set IOs from, say, the 'crushing impact' melee damage set. Set IOs tend to enhance more than one type of aspect at once - say, acc/dam or acc/dam/end instead of just acc, dam, or end. They don't enhance the individual aspects as much as an SO or common IO, but the *total* enhancement value is usually greater (i.e 2 acc/dam IOs give more total enhancement than one acc and one dam). Finally, set IOs come in, well, sets. If you slot multiple IOs from the same set into a single power, you will get small extra bonuses which vary depending on which set you slot - for example, if you slot three IOs from the 'crushing impact' set into a melee damage power, you will gain a small boost to your maximum HP. Slot a 4th from that set, and you will add a 7% accuracy bonus to all of your powers. Add a 5th and you'll gain 5% bonus recharge on all your powers.

There are two major uses for set IOs. The first is to ignore the set bonuses and just slot lots of double and triple aspect set IOs to get more total enhancement bonus in a power than you could do with SOs, or to get equal to SO performance while saving slots - this practice is referred to as 'frankenslotting', since it usually involves slotting individual IOs from a variety of different sets in a single power. To do this, you generally buy set IOs from the cheap 'junk' sets. These sets are usually less expensive since they don't have good set bonuses, but the actual IOs still provide just as much enhancement. Using this, it's pretty easy to get slotting superior to SO slotting, for pretty cheap. For example, my 'standard' frankenslotting for ranged attacks (Maelstrom's Fury acc/dam, dam/end/rech, Ruin acc/dam, dam/end, acc/dam/rech) at level 30 provides roughly the same enhancement as 2 acc SOs, 3 damage SOs, one end SO, and one rech SO, along with a couple of minor set bonuses.

The second major use for set IOs is for the actual set bonuses themselves. This offers a whole nother level of performance beyond even frankenslotting - you still usually get enhancement values beyond what you could do with SOs, plus you can stack up huge amounts of stuff like accuracy, HP, recharge, regeneration, recovery, defense, etc from the set bonuses. This tends to be much more expensive, as the demand for the 'good' sets almost always vastly outstrips the supply.

Finally, there are certain 'special' IOs that have bonus effects above and beyond set bonuses - these work even if you only have the one special IO from the set. For example, there is the +recovery special from the 'Miracle' healing set, which, when slotted into a power like health, gives you a bonus 15% to your endurance recovery. Most of these are 'unique' so that you can't slot more than one of them on a character.

This page gives a general overview of the IO system, as well as linking to more detailed subpages on various IO topics: http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Invent...n_Enhancements

For a lot of melee characters now, the new hot thing is to use IOs to 'softcap' your defenses. This refers to the way the tohit formula works - enemies have a base 50% chance to hit, and your defense is subtracted from this. They have a 5% minimum they can't be reduced below, so that means that 45% defense is the practical maximum useful amount of defense - this is the 'softcap'. Melee sets usually can't get that much defense by themselves (for example, fully enhanced SR hits about 30.5% defense to melee/ranged/aoe), but with the addition of extra defense from set bonuses, most sets can be pushed to the softcap and become a *lot* more durable.

If you want to trick out your MA/SR, this is probably the most direct way. Essentially, you'll want to take all of SR except elude (since extra defense doesn't do anything if you're already at the cap), along with combat jumping and weave, fully slotted for defense. That will put you at about 39% defense - add in the steadfast protection special 3% defense IO in tough, and you're at 42%. A few set bonuses from melee and other sets will put you at 45% and into a whole new level of survivability.

When it comes to planning out builds, the best tool out there is Mids' hero designer. This lets you plot out entire builds, all the set IOs and everything, and calculates and displays all the relevant totals for you. You can also export prettily formatted builds to post here on the forums for critique. It's an invaluable tool if you want to make any serious use of IOs. You can get mids here: http://www.cohplanner.com/

I'm not at my usual computer, so I can't post a build right now, but I'm sure someone can help you with a specific build for MA/SR that hits the softcap.

It's sad to see Castle go, but at least we were lucky enough to have him for as long as we did. I've never seen another dev so dedicated to his game and players, and with such sensitivity and understanding of both what we think we need, and what we actually need.

Castle, thanks for everything you've done for our beloved game. Thanks for all the new and revamped power sets, for being so communicative and responsive, and (possibly most of all) for keeping your cool and professionalism in the face of so much grief from us over the years. May you have luck wherever you go.

For sonic, even though you're just finishing one I might go elec/. It seems like a quite synergistic pairing - elec would bring extra endurance to feed sonic's hungry toggles, while sonic offers mez protection to keep conductive aura going and a generally less busy style so you have plenty of time to spam chain fences and jolting chain to lock stuff down. I don't know how well this'd work out in practice yet, but it's my next planned controller.

I would go earth/fire/fire. Earth is already practically god for control, it doesn't need any help from a secondary. Therefore, the secondary is for damage, and fire has plenty of that. As a bonus, combining the fire secondary and the fire epic lets you use embrace of fire on fireball and RoF, further boosting your AoE output.

In earth control, you can definitely skip salt crystals, totally not needed. Stone cages is also not mandatory, since you can use quicksand instead (which you'll have anyway, since it is awesome) to limit wander after stalagmites. I would take everything else - stone prison is lower priority but still useful to immob EBs, and every other power is a core power of some sort.

The math for calculating final cage magnitude is (I believe) fairly straightforward. It just ends up as initial magnitude * (1+enhancement value) * purple patch reduction. Where the question comes in is, what is the mag required to cage various entities?

From Twilight_Snow's tests and my own experience (unslotted defender cage doesn't work on even level EBs), my guess is that you need mag 6+ to get an EB and mag 4+ to get an AV (It's somewhere in the range 5.96-6.34 for EBs, and in the range 3.8-4.75 for AVs). I wouldn't trust that for the really important nasties like towers, LR, nicti, etc, though, since I wouldn't be surprised if they had special protection.

Also, remember that defender and controller cages have different magnitudes. It's easy to forget that, but it would be very important for actually figuring out what you can and can't cage.

The thing I'm worried about with the prevalence of +def isn't the impact of any potential nerf on squishies/res based sets/etc that are softcapping with IOs, but the impact on *regular* defense based characters. They're already starting down a very bad path, in my opinion, with the way they're handling this.

Buffing base tohit, autohit damage powers, and providing powers that grant tohit buffs are bad ways to counter the IO defense builds, because they penalize true defense builds even more than they do the ones who don't have any defense by default. If you add enough of the above elements to challenge, say, a dark tank who softcapped his defenses, you're going to absolutely *slaughter* any super reflexes/shield/ice/energy aura/etc character, since they have very little else to fall back on. If those sort of defense counters become widespread, especially in the endgame, it'll actually push people even *more* toward the non-defense based sets that can be IO softcapped, because your defense will still serve as a buffer against the enemy buffs and you still have the entire rest of your primary and secondary to fall back on. Meanwhile, people with SR, ice, EA, etc are all playing with one powerset tied behind their backs. I have a MA/SR that's been sitting around as a lowbie for more than a year in search of a build I like. With inherent fitness freeing up so many power choices I've finally found a satisfactory build and have been planning to level her, but now I'm not sure I want to bother if I'm going to get to the end game and find that I essentially have no secondary again.

In my opinion the way to handle this is *not* with tohit buffs or autohit damage, but with a combination of carefully tuned defense debuffs and tweaks to the actual defense based sets. For starters, we need more defense debuffs that are keyed to odd positions/types that most non defense-based characters don't cap. Edana mentioned that praetorian clocks have a debuff typed energy/AoE, which is a good example of what I was thinking of.

Secondly, the disparity between defense debuff resistance in defense sets and the inherent nature of resist debuff resistance in res sets needs to be fixed. Every single defense based armor set should have at least as much debuff resistance as the mitigation its armors provide, like resistance sets do - in other words, unless the set already lives over this line, every single armorset power that provides defense should also provide twice as much (enhanceable) defense debuff resistance.

Finally, with that adjustment in place, the 'generic' counter to IO defense builds should be autohit but relatively small in magnitude defense debuffs, preferably as toggles so that they can be made to follow the 'one active at a time' AI rule. If high level enemies that are designed to counter defense have a (say) 5-10% autohit AoE defense debuff, actual softcapped defense characters would barely notice - their DDR would reduce it down to a couple percent at most, which they ought to have enough of a cushion to absorb. Soft-capped squishies/res based characters, on the other hand, would have their softcap stripped away, opening them to cascading defense failure from more mundane debuffs (which should also be present).

Not every high level encounter should have this sort of setup, of course, but if they want to counter IO defense builds *this* is how they should do it rather than by dropping in tohit shenanigans/autohit damage that also splatters all of the characters who actually are *supposed* to get mitigation from defense.

A possible request - with the new plethora of inherent powers listed, the window is becoming a bit cluttered. There's got to be some way to simplify things, because as it stands the inherents go off the bottom of the window, and I keep forgetting to put slots into stamina when building because it's not on-screen without scrolling.

There are two ways I would think of addressing this. The first is simply to make the window's size default to something big enough to fit everything. As it stands when you open the program it sets the window height to be large enough to go down to the bottom edge of the box where power information is displayed. You can, of course, drag the window bigger, but it doesn't remember the setting. Having it default instead to be tall enough to show all of the inherent powers would be nice.

Alternately, would it be possible to implement some user controls for the display and positioning of these powers? I personally never use the vet sprints for anything, so I don't care about displaying them. Similarly, I couldn't care less what sprint, brawl, and rest are doing, since I never slot them for anything. Is there any way a user could simply turn off the display of these powers so that the remaining inherents like stamina and kheld forms fit better in the space provided?

I dunno if there are people who would boot for not having leadership - haven't seen any myself, and I wouldn't, but human nature being what it is I wouldn't be surprised if there are some out there.

I don't think I'd go so far on assuming def slotting, end-game. Melees, yeah a lot of them will have def just because a lot of the popular armor sets are defense based. They're not the ones you're really worried about, though, since a) they presumably have some mitigation of their own already and so likely don't need the shields as much, and b) they're much more likely to stray out of the range of dispersion bubble during the fight anyway.

It's the squishies who will get the benefit of that last 5%, since they don't start with any defense and are more likely to be standing closer to you. And I honestly *don't* see many massively IOed characters, even at 50. Perhaps it varies across different servers, but as I've checked people's /info over the months, my guess is that fewer than a quarter of them have *any* set bonuses listed at all, let alone a big enough list to guess that they might be softcapped. Remember, the forums are *not* representative of the game as a whole. It's certainly possible that you might tend to play with a different crowd than me, but my personal assumption is that any squishy I play with is rocking exactly 0% defense base.

I guess my view is that hasten just isn't very important compared to the possible team benefit. This probably reflects my own personal prejudices, as I've just never been in the 'take hasten whenever possible' camp (of all my characters, exactly 3 even have the power, and on two of them it's because they are superspeeders). Especially on a character like this, though, I would never sacrifice that amount of team benefit for hasten. Recall, just having softcapped defense will make soloing a utter breeze - all hasten would do is speed things up a bit. I personally don't think that losing hasten would really make it difficult to solo - though again, this is my own opinion, and it's coming from someone who is perfectly happy with the soloing speed of a non-hastened no-soul drain FF/nrg defender. Even still, just having soul drain should help a lot - even with just normal slotting, it's already got 50% uptime, and getting into melee to use it will present no problem for a completely softcapped FF.

As for epic, if damage is your concern definitely go dark. The only epics with any damage boosting at all are dark, power, and soul. Dark's version of soul drain recharges twice as fast as soul's version, and power's 'damage boost' is power build up, which has twice the recharge of soul drain and lasts only 12.5 seconds.

Elec is definitely an interesting set, but I don't think I'd recommend it for a dom newbie. For a first introduction to doms, I'd pick one of the more traditional control sets, probably earth/, and pair it with something straightforward like /fire. With those, take all of earth except the sleep and AoE immob and take all of fire except the snipe and you're golden.

The excepted text above is a very good starting point for how dominators play. If you've played a controller, forget about anything you learned there, as doms really don't play the same at all. It is very much like 'blapper with controls' - you're squishy, but only if something actually has a chance to take a swing at you. If you're liking the planning and thought that your blaster requires, you'll probably like doms, as there's a lot of the same stuff there.

One other thing to note, is that doms are *not* a ranged AT. The melee damage modifier is actually higher than the ranged one, and we generally get some good melee attacks in our assault sets. Melee on a squishy may seem risky, but if your targets are controlled there's no more danger there than at range, and going into melee lets you unleash your full arsenal. Don't be afraid to melee things.

Another good resource is Liliaceae's dominator powers guide:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=236428
Not much on playstyles or general dom info, but a comprehensive discussion of every single primary and secondary set we get. I disagree with some of the conclusions reached, but it's still a useful reference.

Blah, just 3/4 days too early for me to get in. Why must you taunt me, oh internet installation people, why?

There were several changes made in the transition from defender to blaster psi blast, and, as mentioned, many think that these changes left the set worse off.

First, the power swaps. From the original set, subdue and psi scream were pulled to go into mental manipulation - psi scream unchanged, subdue turned into the obligatory immob. This, of course, left two holes in the original set.

For subdue, mental blast was bumped up to be the tier 2 and psi dart was tapped to fill mental blast's spot. Unless you considered the potential immob of subdue as important, this was actually a net positive for blasters - they got better DPA on their tier 2 and a shorter cast/better DPA on their tier 1 out of it. Psi scream's hole was simply filled by aim. Whether this is a plus or a minus is iffy - aim is nice, to be sure, but this also leaves the set *very* light on AoE - only sonic really competes with it on that front, and the -res on howl probably still puts sonic ahead.

The real annoyance, though, is the change to will domination. For no apparent reason, blaster will dom was heavily nerfed in the transition - it went from being a damage scale 1.96, 14 second recharge attack to a damage scale 1.24, 20 second recharge attack, without gaining a thing to offset it. Thanks to the damage difference, defenders do almost as much absolute damage with the power as blasters do, despite blasters having a ranged damage modifier almost twice that of defenders.

Basically, the problem is that there's nothing psi blast does that another set doesn't do better. It's probably the worst blaster set for AoE, and thanks to the will dom nerf its single target damage isn't good enough to compensate. The set is no great shakes on overall mitigation, either, especially with the removal of the biggest source of AoE -rech in psi scream, and since scramble thoughts sucks so much.

If you want mitigation and single target damage, sonic beats psi and has better AoE to boot. Fire massively shreds it on both ST and AoE, and ice likewise has psi beat on ST damage, AoE damage, and mitigation. Both of the latter sets also have far fewer issues with enemy resistances. The set just has too many weaknesses and no real strengths to offset. Amusingly enough, the defender version of the set would have had better st *and* aoe damage, and better mitigation to boot - the only thing missing would have been aim.

That's not to say that you can't make the set work. It's one of the worse blaster primaries, but it'll still kill stuff fairly well. It's just that there are several sets that do everything it does, only better.

If softcapping is your goal, take both leadership and fighting and ship hasten (gasp! ). Yes, skip it.

Leadership, for maneuvers, is (in my opinion) utterly mandatory for a FF defender. Maneuvers is the difference between providing 39% defense to your team and providing 44.5% defense. This is the difference between letting 11% of the damage through and letting 5.5% of it through - in other words, thanks to the way defense scales as you get near the cap, taking maneuvers *doubles* the total survivability you offer your team.

If you want to softcap to all three positions yourself, I think you're going to want weave. Maneuvers and dispersion bubble between them provide ~21% defense to all. Softcapping one position from there isn't too tough - I've got ranged softcapped on my FF defender from that starting point, for example. But if you want to softcap all three, it would really be helpful to have weave's extra 5% base to all. Taking weave also means you can slot the steadfast 3% much earlier since you can stick it in tough instead of waiting for an epic armor. That puts you at ~32%, and it's a much easier trip to 45% from there.

Now, yes, this will be a lot of powers, and a lot of toggles. Keep in mind, though, that there's nothing that *requires* you to take the other leadership toggles - they're *nice*, but if softcapping is the primary goal they're not needed. Taking just the powers previously listed, we've got:

2 from flight, 2 from medicine, the 'big 3' from FF, 3 from fighting, 1 from leadership = 11 powers out of the 24 you get. That leaves you 13 powers between the rest of your primary, your secondary, and any epic you might like, which, while tight, should be enough. Grab the recovery procs and a performance shifter proc and you should be able to keep up with the end cost, especially since there's no real need to actually *run* tough. (btw boxing/kick aren't attacks, they're nothings which have the plus side that you don't need to spend slots on them - ignore them).