Sir Hextor

i24 Bonfire will not be the 100% control that it currently is. It should still be pretty awesome, but not broken like it currently is. And while you'll put out damage like WHOA, there isn't a whole lot of mitigation, so yeah, three slot RoTP with Dam/Rech, Dam/Rech and Heal/Rech

Earth/Cold has SO many tools that help prop a team up. I'd second it for sure. I also wouldn't want to solo it without some threat being placed on my life. But as long as you're on a moderately active server, you should be able to get through just about anything with your tools boosting a teams abilities.

/Thermal would be another good one and I guess /Sonic if you wanted to have Mez pro yourself.

Crash management would be sexy as all get out. I'd be ok with the crashes if we could make it happen whenever. I could also get behind crashless t9s too. But man managing the crash would be so sexy (I'm looking at you Electric Armor).

WM criticals are also some really dang impressive orange numbers.

Man I love CoH: Freedom. New stuff just keeps on rolling out!

Well my altitis rages on and I'd really like to make a blaster with Fire Manipulation. In order to temper my alts, I've made a rule that I will not repeat powersets until I've played most of them to 50. So far, I've mostly kept to this rule (I ran out of armor sets and had to repeat Dark Armor for a stalker) but there's still enough blast sets out there that I haven't really used: Electrical, Energy, Ice and Psychic. Which of those would be best for a /Fire blaster? I'd probably blap a good bit. I'm kind of thinking Electrical since /Fire would help the lackluster damage of the set and the sapping could mitigate some attacking. I'm attracted to Psy for ease of concept and with the new nuke changes. Energy seems at first blush the anti blapping set plus KB and I are not on the best of terms. Ice I'm just kind of :shrug: about. So thoughts?

Makes sense. I was pretty sure I was just crazy. Thanks for certifying that

Corralary question; are teh two animation times identical? It's likely my imagination, but I use the ground punch one and it 'feels' slower than the foot stomp one, but I couldn't say for sure.

Ice storm is a great attack and 18sec downtime doesn't change that. As for the slotting swap, until the finalized proc changes come out, I hesitate to suggest where 'best' is but currently the Decimation proc is best placed into a faster recharging power. This is likely to change once i24 finalizes.

If you're using Sonic Blast, not going Defender is going to hurt you. Defs enjoy better -res numbers and without those the set is lowish damage. Play the Def to 15ish and run a Posi 2 (if you had said this a week earlier, I would've said a Summer BB). That first encounter with an AV will make you a believer in how great those sets are together on a Def.

Also, one of the reasons I really like Cold Dom with Sonic Blast is because you can throw out your shields, lay out your debuffs then go to town blasting hard targets. Your focus on a /Sonic Defender is not so much supporting as it is attacking because your stacking -res will support the team best in a lot of situations.

I've found I like having a cone to follow up Seeds with, since I've already lined up my seeds cone so I would say Dark, though my dom is Plant/Electric so I couldn't say how much of a loss of damage you'd see from the -to hit.

I 3 slotted the Brute ATIO catalyzed in two powers on my ElM/Invuln brute for a tasty +10% S/L. Other than that, what _j said.

The change of pace that you seek is a MFing Warshade. Just ask Dechs

A click every ~2 mins isn't too bad for me. I already do it on my Fire/Shield Scrapper because Mez prot on auto is more important. OF course, I would love if we could auto multiple powers, but it is what it is. You're of course right about the end usage vs. recovery. I'm not super thrilled with it as it is, but I'm holding out to see what happens with Energize before I make any changes to the build.

I don't like the fighting pool on defenders (even though the numbers are really nice) unless I'm just a weave away from softcap, but being able to skip tough in the upcoming issue may make a stronger case for it (if only I could skip Boxing or Kick instead ). I pretty much always get some of the Leadership pool on Defenders and since you're going to want to team as much as possible, seems a strong reason to me. If you get your recharge to a good level, maybe look at building for Ranged Def, since you don't have a compelling reason to enter into melee like you would for Kinetics primary. Enough recharge to me is perma-Hasten.

Empathy thrives on Recharge, blast sets blast better when they have their blasts up more often. Also, Empathy is a buff set. Yes you have 3 healing powers and self healing attack in WB. The key with Empathy is having something to buff. For a defender that means soloing is about the worst thing you can do to yourself, since over half your powers require a seperate target (and to be fair, even on a Controller, Empathy soloing is painful). So build for Recharge and focus on making your teammates unkillable so that they can be the targets instead of you.

You could Bing it.

Power Boost doesn't accept set IOs, only common IOs. So 2 or 3 recharge and that's it.

I've got a 50 Kin/Dark/Lev. I strongly reccomend Leviathan Mastery. Not necessarily because it is UBER but because you summon a swarm of sharks to double up immobilize cones and you get a single target hold where you get a GIANT FRACKIN SHARK to swallow them whole. He is super busy though and I have a hard enough time keeping my Kinetic thing going to interupt it with pew pewing sharks at people. But damn if I don't giggle every time I see some poor schmuck get swallowed up

Oh, you also had a question about sets, my bad. Yes, get a little bit of recharge so you can have as many stacks of siphon speed and FS as possible. I'm still building mine, but I plan on using a good bit of -to hit sets and have a decent range defense to benefit more from that -to hit. I find I stay hovered and back to fully leverage my three Cones and get in close when there's only one hard target. I went intuition alpha to enhance range, damage (since I gimped it in slotting for -to hit) and -to hit. The Hold is gravy (I don't have any powers that do -def).