Obitus

Without actually seeing each build, I'd have to say option #2 is better. My Fire/Mental Blaster is one of my favorite characters, and I've spent countless hours fiddling with various builds for her -- and so I know how hard it is to shoe-horn soft-capped AOE DEF into that power-set combo.

I can say with almost complete certainty that you're sacrificing too much to get there. You'll end up with a very survivable Blaster, certainly, but given the amount of effort and influence you're spending on that project, you're gimping your offense unnecessarily. Might as well play a Scrapper, IMO.

Even leaving aside that bit of personal-preference reasoning, AoE DEF just isn't that important. The vast bulk of your survivability is coming from the ranged DEF, and you have the capacity to kill most spawns before they get off a third shot. Beyond that, yeah, you'll occasionally run into a brick wall -- but every build has weaknesses.

One of the things that strikes me about the high-level game is how varied the content is in that level range. Oddly enough, I actually tend to feel the every-build-has-a-weakness thing more often on my Tanker than on my Blaster. The former is used to surviving everything, and so it's a shock when I run into a struggle. On the Blaster, it isn't as much a shock.

(Probably the closest thing you'll get to a build with no weaknesses is a high-end Dominator or certain high-end Controller builds. Damage/attack types and buffs/debuffs are varied enough at the high end that passive mitigation will only get you so far. Proactive mitigation or control is more likely to carry the day when your defenses fail for whatever reason.)

One of the things I love about this game is that there's so much room for different build approaches. Dechs sums up the Tanker situation quite well, but my own response to that situation is different from his.

I tend to go the Scranker route because I figure it makes me a better soloist and a better all-around contributor to teams. Tanker damage really isn't that bad; we're talking basically third place among hero-side ATs. Is it Scrapper-level damage? Usually not (though there are exceptional comparisons that actually favor the Tanker), but if a team is rolling through content anyway that extra bit of damage from a Scrapper ain't gonna matter.

And if a team isn't rolling content, the Tanker is more useful.

So you can either play up your defenses on the theory that teams that need you will really need you, or you could decide not to sweat the defenses because your teammates will likely have some measure of support for them. Either way, you really can't go wrong. Preference and play style will be the deciding factors.

Maybe I'm a little biased because I started out with Scrappers when the game launched, and back then all the we're-useless-on-teams complaints were centered around Scrappers. Now those complaints are pretty well spread out; except for buff/debuff ATs, you can make an argument for just about any build being trivialized on well-run teams. Play what you want; the rest'll take care of itself.

The linked build was short a slot to do what you describe, unless I missed something. Anyway, I plugged in the four slots in Health, and I found that you were way overcapped on HP (something like 3730 out of a possible 3534), so I'm not sure what that third Numina (Heal/Whatever) is doing for you. All it does is lower your potential regeneration rate a bit when compared with a generic Heal IO in its place.

Personally I'd probably drop that slot altogether, or put a Miracle unique in its place. The extra recovery is probably a good idea because your toggle costs are through the roof. Not having Rage crashes will obviously help, but you have less end reduction in every attack than my INV/SS Tanker, and about 160% more toggle cost (1.31 versus 0.5ish EPS). For what it's worth, even with Miracle, that build of mine still occasionally has to watch his end.

The Cardiac Alpha boost may be your goal, of course, as it is mine.

Similar to the above, I'm not sure I see the benefit of the Numina set in Dull Pain. Seems to me you're better off with just pure Doctored Wounds, given that you're already over-capped on HP and given that you're on the low side for global recharge (especially since you didn't take Hasten). In fact, even if I sub in Doctored Wounds for that Numina set in DP, I'm still overcapped on HP by about 130. Maybe mixing some of the LoTG sets around would be beneficial, like that DEF/RECH in Tough Hide, which when swapped to a generic DEF IO gives you another ~0.2 DEF to all (except Psi).

If you want to go pure defensive, it's fine to roll with four-slotted attacks, but as others have pointed out, you're severely underslotted for accuracy given that you skipped Rage. If you can't hit the kinds of mobs that teams are likely to want you to tank, then you're going to have a harder time tanking them.

You might reconsider Rage, or if you're dead-set against it because of the crash (which is at least an understandable view for a team-oriented Tanker), you might consider picking up Tactics. A Kismet unique would help too.

All in all I like the approach. It's certainly different. If Tankers are your least favorite AT, though, I can't imagine why you'd want to double down on what most people seem to hate about it (that is, the feeling that you're a low-damage taunt bot). With the kind of money you're throwing at this build, you could easily go in the opposite direction and have a very sturdy character with Scrapper-competitive offense (double-stacked Rage).

Still, an interesting thread and an interesting build idea.

Yeah, all characters start off with nearly the same (if not exactly the same) AT damage modifier. It gradually levels off as you progress up into the low twenties.

Controllers are the big winners in the lowest level range, because they still get Containment even when their AT damage modifier is artificially inflated.

Yeah, in general, any set with a consistent damage buff is better on a Scrapper. That goes double for KM, because (AFAIK) Scrappers not only get a higher damage bonus, but they also get it more often.

Personally, the only Brute I'd play is SS at this point. Then again, I'm mostly a solo player. If you plan to team a lot, the higher caps on Brutes (combined with the inherent pseudo-Gauntlet effect on Brute attacks) might make them better overall.

At the risk of a minor derail, I don't think it's quite fair to say that such a build breaks the game. Cold/Sonic is probably the best (or at least among the best) single-AV-soloing builds in the game, and one of the better teaming builds too -- but it's not by any stretch generally the best soloer.

Cold/Sonic's AoE capability is at best mediocre, and even its single-target damage isn't particularly good unless the debuffs have time to ramp up. (Bosses or higher, in other words.)

And as you pointed out, the rewards for soloing AVs/GMs are pathetic.

I only recommend S/L DEF if you're planning to play a hybrid melee/ranged build, like a blapper or (most) Dominators. For a ranged build, you're better off with ranged DEF and Hover. The downside is that ranged DEF is generally a little harder to fit into a build (because S/L builds can rely on patron/APP powers to do the heavy lifting). The upside is that ranged DEF has fewer holes, allows for the selection of a resistance shield to stack with your defense, and is more exemplar-friendly.

Cold is likely the best singular buff/debuff set for dealing with hard, single targets, in part because of Benumb's -regen, but also because Cold has tools to lower the target's damage output and damage resistance, and to diminish the target's situational tricks (like controls or heals; self-healing AVs are the bane of many AV-soloing builds).

On top of that, Cold has enough -recharge available that you can put a serious dent into an AV's attack rate, even accounting for the 85% debuff resistance.

Personally, I'd lean towards the Electric APP. The extra energy resistance stacks well with Arctic Fog, and Electric Fence is a relatively high-DPA immobilize power. Having access to immobilize is key for a ranged-DEF AV soloist, because immobilize is the one mez effect that AVs are consistently weak against.

In theory, Snow Storm will be enough to keep most AVs out of your face if you Hover (because it will prevent flying AVs from lifting off to chase you), but I would rather use the immobilize because it comes as a natural consequence of attacking (which you're going to be doing anyway), and because it can't be detoggled.

(Edit: Electric Fences also has a longer range than Shout. There are some AVs that have strong ~40' attacks, so it can be useful to hang far away from them.)

Right, but across the full spectrum of available builds in the game, there's a better than even chance that Malta will annoy you more than usual. Sappers are only part of that, though admittedly a very large part.

I wasn't interested in the bit about Dark Armor.

Any character that doesn't have stun protection is going to have an annoying time with Malta, even if we ignore Sappers completely. Those ~30 second stuns are outrageous.

The truth is that for all of our potential power (via high-end IO builds, via the upcoming Incarnate system), level 50 mob factions are more often annoying in some way than not. Every build will have a weakness to at least one or two of them, and probably more.

Council is likely the closest thing we have to a vanilla late-game faction, and even they can present situational difficulties. As someone else mentioned, the Wolves are endlessly frustrating to deal with if you're used to relying on slows/immobilizes. For instance, my Ice/Storm Controller is one of the more consistent performers I can conceive, but those wolves give her heartburn.

Even if you can theoretically handle +4/x8 missions, which probably isn't an unusual capability at least among forum posters, you probably can't handle it efficiently and consistently across all factions. If you're just trying to farm one mission then great, but if you're relying on the game to assign missions to you, then you're going to spend an awful lot of time running to the Difficulty-Slider NPC.

I mean, seriously, even if you're immune to end drain and psi damage, does anyone really want to fight multiple +4 Carnie Illusionists every spawn?

It's easy to get caught up in on-paper analysis and declare that the game is laughably easy. In some ways, it is laughably easy. But I think the devs don't get enough credit for varying the threats among high-level mobs.

Best. Response. Ever.

Yeah, I think you should drop either Flares or Blast and pick up Breath. I'm not sure why you'd need three slots in Health; three (or even four, if you want to include the Performance Shifter proc) in Stamina is good, though honestly I'm not sure you'll need even that much recovery depending on how often you plan to use Consume.

Force Feedback is generally an excellent proc to have in AoE powers. My SS Tanker loves it in Footstomp; if I'm facing a decent amount of enemies, the proc will fire more often than not. I'm not sure Beam Volley is worth it at all in your build, though, honestly, certainly not for the sake of a +recharge proc in a build that already has a lot of global recharge. An extra AoE isn't a bad thing, of course, but if you have to choose between Breath and Volley, I think most people would choose Breath every time.

IIRC, you keep half your DEF from Stealth in combat. On your build, that'd be about 2% DEF (with another 2% out of combat). If you don't mind the movement penalty and the relative large end cost for running Stealth full time, then go for it. Personally, I don't like to rely on it on my soft-capped builds; if I take it at all it's usually almost purely as a set mule.

The movement penalty bugs me too much to commit to using Stealth full-time. And the end cost is only a little lower than Maneuvers'. If I want is a way to sneak past enemies, I'll use Superspeed (because hey, I'm taking Hasten anyway) and/or a +stealth IO in one of the Sprint powers.

YMMV.

There is no right answer. Even if you prefer one or the other, the situation will dictate which is more effective. Personally, on an Earth/Rad, I'd probably go for the mez protection and the damage resistance (Indomitable Will also comes with a hefty psionic +DEF perk).

You have enough control that you shouldn't be all that worried about passive damage mitigation; far more disruptive is the possibility that you'll have your toggles dropped. Depending on your play style, a build mixing ranged DEF with the Psi Mastery pool would probably be more survivable than either of the choices you offer, but cramming ranged DEF in with enough recharge to feed Indomitable Will is potentially difficult and expensive.

I went ranged + psi mastery on my Ice/Storm, but Ice Control has fewer hard-control options than Earth, and Storm likewise has less consistent mitigation than Rad. Storm's also better at keeping foes at range, if that's what you want to do.

Thematic justifications can be altered almost at whim to address game-mechanical needs. Now that side switching is available, there's an obvious mechanical gap between APPs and Patron Pools.

Any hero who wants to use a Patron power and wants to remain a hero has to spend a minimum of eight days switching his alignment, running a story arc, and switching back. Any villain who wants to use APPs just has to select them upon leveling up.

If the hero happens to have a few Hero Merits banked, then he has to spend several days spending those Merits before he switches alignment, or else he'll lose them. (The A-Merit stores gate spending to once per day, so if you were saving up for something big and you're halfway there, then you could be a long time spending those merits.)

Seems like a lot of extra time and effort for something that villains get for free, no?

You can't tint APP/pool powers right now, unfortunately -- unless I missed something truly huge.

If you're planning on more of a range/melee hybrid, then your best (mechanical) option is probably going to be S/L DEF combined with as much recharge as you can possibly get. The upside is that that's fairly easy (and comparatively cheap) to do on a Blaster. The downside is that an APP armor toggle does a lot of the heavy lifting -- which limits your choices to the Ice APP (Frozen Armor) or Mace Mastery (Scorpion Shield).

Of the two, I prefer Mace Mastery. Scorpion Shield has a fairly unobtrusive visual effect (it's like a purple-tinted blur around your character), and the Mace-Mastery AoE Immobilize is probably the best one availabe (though it does have a longish activation time). Rain of Fire just begs for an AoE Immobilize. The only problem is that Hero-side characters have to switch alignments to run the Patron story arc before they're allowed to select Patron Pools. That's at least a four day task. (Eight if you want to switch back afterwards.)

All of that said, it's hard to post specific build suggestions without a clearer idea of your preferences -- which powers you like and why. You may well find that you're willing to forego soft-cap DEF in favor of more damage/recharge bonuses and a more thematically appropriate APP selection.

Much as you did in the Market forum, you've spent the majority of your time in this thread dismissing the good-faith and on-topic responses you've received -- and then complaining when the discussion inevitably moved on from there.

Discussion threads evolve. If you hadn't explicitly invited everyone in the Market forum to come here and talk about your build -- if you hadn't annoyed so many people over there -- your thread would be long dead by now. In a way, it's a gift that anyone's still talking at all.

Your problem isn't, and never was, that people refused to stay on topic. Your problem is that you haven't gotten the answers you wanted -- answers, presumably, confirming each and every one of your own personal biases. Unfortunately for you, and fortunately for the wider world, free discourse doesn't work that way.

You have every right to report me if you like. I may even get censored as a result. Having the dude who feels so oppressed call down a higher authority to silence disagreement would be the capper to an immensely entertaining thread.

And I was explaining why his build has been so heavily criticized. It ain't just because it's sub-optimal. It ain't just because it's expensive. It's because his build is willfully extravagant, even to its own detriment, and even in the face of Blue's loudly proclaimed financial victimhood. All of those things are inter-related. All of those things are pertinent. Why? Because Blue's playing a build that's causing him obvious pain, albeit indirectly. His specific question in this thread has been answered. The side issue of SL's slotting was addressed and summarily discarded on the first page, in fact.

You don't think I've tried offering helpful alternatives to this lost cause? I have, several times. So have countless others. If you think you're automagically different, then more power to you. It's just barely possible that he might listen to you because you've defended him here. I'm sure your air of moral superiority will appeal.

But the implication that anyone's trying to dictate to Blue, or mocking his build on its own merits, is unfair and unfounded. Personally, I'm a big fan of concept builds. I'm a big fan of purposely sub-optimal theme or just-for-kicks power picks or slotting options. I thought it was worth explaining why the view is different here.

Go ahead and make nice if you want to do that. Me? I'll treat this thread like the mindless entertainment it's proven itself to be. Welcome to the sideshow.

If it were just a matter of his wanting to play a sub-optimal build, then no one would care. Blue can play whatever he wants, and there really is no wrong answer when it comes to having fun in a game.

The problem is that Blue wants to complain about the price of enhancements -- even going so far as to pose several insulting conspiracy theories about the evil capitalist pigs on the market. His build and those complaints are inter-related. He's basically gone out of his way to waste influence just so he can play the victim card.

It's as if you bought a Lamborghini just for scrap metal, and then tried to put the dealership out of business because you feel ripped off. Better yet, it's like excoriating every rich person for not spending all of their money to feed starving children in the third world, and then spending all of your income on caviar and champagne while your own children starve. I don't even think you can call Blue's peculiar brand of self-oblivious paranoia hypocritical, at this point. He's moved so far beyond ridiculous that it's almost sublime.

It's no wonder that Blue feels like he's oppressed if he truly believes that his build is reasonable. It's not reasonable, not in terms of cost, and certainly not in terms of cost efficiency. You suggest slotting Touch of the Nictus and Mako's Bite in Siphon Life, but that's crazy talk. Those sets aren't anywhere near expensive enough. Blue will jam six Panacea in there come hell or high water. And he will continue to insist that Panacea is the best set for him, no matter what anyone says, all the while no doubt cursing about how he's been oppressed by the Man.

This isn't, and never was, a discussion about attack chains, or even builds or the market Notice that even when Blue thanks people for information, he dismisses that information as irrelevant to him. Blue doesn't converse; he lectures. This thread is -- these threads are-- only valuable as an unintentionally hilarious sideshow.

And in that sense, it's an enormous success.

That was my thought too, at first. I have several Mind-using characters, and a couple of RoF-using characters, but I don't have any characters thus far with both Mind and a avoid-inducing Rain.

Mechanically, Rains aren't as bad with fears as they might at first look. The constant damage from the rain only gives a feared target one chance to act every ten seconds (the same rate as procs in rain powers). What I'm not sure about -- and I should probably do more research here -- is how often other damage sources will give the mobs a chance to move.

In other words, if the targets are being rained on, and Firebreathed, and Fireballed, and whatever else, how many chances per ten second period will they have to move away? The AI is pretty insistent about getting out of RoF in my experience. Losing some of RoF's potential damage output is a secondary concern; the main concern is causing scatter that will reduce the potency of your other AoEs.

Tentatively, I'm planning to take RoF right now on my I-19 build, mostly for thematic purposes. Positron's Blast is pretty cheap so I figure it's no biggie if I have to ditch it later. By the same token, I'm sorta on the fence about slotting Terrify with Posi's Blast or Glimpse of the Abyss. Doesn't seem like the extra Fear duration will be that important in normal play, but then again an extra ~60 damage every 15 or so seconds doesn't seem like that big a deal either.

I've even toyed with the idea of slotting Cloud Senses in Terrify, if the game will let me. Sets that carry both ranged DEF and +recharge are fairly rare (not so much on a Mind Control character, but in general); the only problem is that Terrify doesn't actually have a ToHit debuff component to enhance.

Anyway, I've rambled enough.

No. You're reading the wrong numbers, as usual -- to conform to your bullheaded biases.

Here, I'll bold the relevant numbers for you:

160.24 / 153.66 = 1.042, or 4.2% difference.

But wait, it gets better. Once you add the ~150% damage bonus from Fury, that 4.2% difference drops to somewhere in the 2-3% range. The pure-damage Hecatomb IO wouldn't be worth it even if it didn't cost any influence. It is simply a matter of saving slots for other, more worthwhile tasks -- like, say, enhancing Hasten.

Oh, that's right. You didn't take Hasten. You didn't even know the recharge-reduction formula until I explained it to you a few minutes ago in another thread. But that didn't stop you from loading your build with purples and PvPIOs for the sake of recharge -- and then starting a whine fest in the market forum about how those enhancements are too expensive.

Panacea in Siphon Life is hilariously bad on two levels: You're spending massive amounts of influence for a PvP set (influence that the so-called capitalist pigs on the market forum are extorting from you), and then gimping one of your best attack powers to slot it. Likewise, your slotting of Midnight Grasp is terrible; it would be LOL-worthy enough if you'd slotted MG with five Gravitational Anchors, but you went with six, I guess because you were just jonesing for an excuse to buy another purple.

That's two of your best attacks gimped in the name of your bitterness-laced spending spree. Not just Siphon Life.

But I think my favorite wrinkle in your build as posted -- after all of your class-warfare rantings and all your pontification about how your personal experiences validate your build decisions -- is that you wrote a whole rationale for extra recharge in Dark Consumption, because presumably you have end issues, but you don't even have the comparatively cheap Miracle and Performance Shifter procs slotted. (Cheap as compared with purple and PvP sets, that is.)

In fact, you seem to place an undue emphasis on regeneration based on your slotting of Health -- which isn't a terrible idea on an Invuln build generally -- but just from using Siphon Life slotted as a normal attack, you'd get more healing over time than you'll get from those extra slots in Health. Including the Regenerative Tissue proc.

Those are just a few observations. Enjoy your super-expensive gimpiness. By the way, as one of the criminally minded capitalist pigs from the Market forum, I only have a handful of purples slotted across all of my builds. All of them are singular proc enhancements. I don't have any PvPIOs. All of my builds are better than yours, for a tiny fraction of the cost.

There is no broad segment of the game's population -- marketeer or otherwise -- that slots or even expects to slot as much expensive crap as they can on any one build purely for the sake of slotting it. The key is not how much influence you have, beyond a certain point. The key is how sensibly you use it.

Base Recharge / (1 + Recharge bonuses) = modified recharge time. For simplicity's sake, we'll call your slotting 100%

So 360 / (1 + 1.25 + 07 + 1) = 91.139 seconds.

How much recharge would you need to approach 60 seconds? 360/60 = 6, or 600%. So once we subtract Hasten and slotting and the base recharge, we're looking at 330% in recharge bonuses from IOs. That ain't gonna happen.

As you said in the other thread, you're chasing the dragon here, and you're spiting your own build (and your own wallet) to do it. And then you whine that the market is rigged because you have a hard time affording all of the absurdly expensive IOs that aren't even really an improvement to your build.

I'm glad to see that you're at least willing to pick up Hasten when I19 hits, because that one power will allow you to get rid of some of the hilaribad slotting choices you've made in your quest for purples. But I am scratching my head on one thing: I thought the reason you didn't want to take Hasten was because this is a concept character -- and presumably Hasten is against theme.

So what is your theme? Is it that you wanted to spend as much influence as inefficiently as possible so you could whine about the market, or is your theme simply that you wanted to maximize recharge? If the latter, then please do consider running some numbers using the above methodology to figure out what you're actually getting for your monumental effort to wring every last drop of recharge out of the build.

After you've done that, maybe consider opening your mind to some supplemental build goals that are cheaper to reach and more beneficial to performance.

Nice avatar!