Tsuji

My fire tank does pretty well as long as it isn't a huge group of wisps. Fire/SS/Pyre. You need the fighting pool though.

I think a Dark/Fire tank would be the best. You need some kind of self heal, and Dark's is definitely the best. It also can give you resists for wisps. The storm elementals might be a little harder due to the energy damage, though.

/Fire because a lot of normal mitigation doesn't work as well, e.g. knockdown, slows, etc. Might as well get really high damage if your secondary effects don't help much.

It's fire/mental/ice, the ice is there for a reason. It gives you smashing/lethal defense. It was probably an S/L defense build. I have something like it on my dominator that works pretty well.

It's more like scrapping than tanking though. It's hard to get everything hitting you without taunt etc.

You can also jump backwards, which has the benefit of looking pretty cool too.

That's a lot of purples. Wow. Building for recharge isn't a bad idea since you're only using the one AoE attack.

You talked a bit about survival in the post, have you considered building for ranged defense? I know with a lot of builds you can actually cap it. I did that recently with my blaster and it's pretty fun.

You get stupid sometimes and think you're immortal, though. Then you get punched in the face...

I don't think the numbers have changed much for the patron pools. The only thing that would be different is the damage on the AoE attacks, and they'd all be boosted by the same proportion.

The effect soul would have in I15 would be increased based on how much/how little ice changed in damage. Since its normal damage will now be at a higher level, soul mastery will provide a better boost when you use it in I15

The only place I know of to find a list of how the powers have changed is test server and just going [Icy Assault.Ice Blast] etc. etc. The patch notes had the damage increases in damage scalar form and I don't know how to calculate those, although you might know.

I like the knockup idea. It's really creative.

Can't speak for Fire/Fire, but from watching some Fire/Psi doms in action, hot feet provides a ton of damage. It was doing something like 1/2 the damage over time that PSW did.

You might find it interesting to know that the Freedom TFs channel is full. My friend's been trying to get into it for a couple months now, though that is good to know.

OK, but this is anecdotal stuff. I've never found one in my VGs, you've never been in one without it. Do you play on freedom? Maybe all the bases on Freedom suck?

I don't think it changes the argument too much either way, and don't really think the devs should be trying to restrict what limited dev created content exists to organized SG/VGs, though.

Yes, it exemps you down, that's the point. You no longer gain XP by doing it, and until relatively recently there were no merits, so it was better to run the virgil tarikoss strike force if you were going to be doing a lower level strike force. Now, as has already been pointed out, people do the ITF and LGTF for merits and will usually switch out characters and then run them again.

What's the point of making an arc easily level accessible, then barring access to it by hiding it behind a mission computer? I still think it's a bad idea to do it for high level content, but at least it's more reasonable there since at 50 you're more likely to have associates etc. to do it with.

And to pre-empt anything about architect, I don't think we should be assuming AE farms are the standard around which we should be balancing lower level content.

OK, that's fine and makes some sense, but why Silver mantis, a lower level strike force?

The only thing I can think of is that it encourages lower level players to join VGs, but again, since it was a lower level TF the VGs I was in didn't ever buy one. By the time the leaders could afford that sort of thing they were all farming themselves past Silver Mantis anyway. I'd imagine it's worse with architect now.

It makes balancing a lot less of a headache, at least. It seems like a lot of the sets were just randomly hacked together when they were made.

I couldn't figure out why I couldn't maintain perma dom but my friend could....Till I discovered that jack was occasionally going berserk when he killed my buddy with his ice sword. That slow aura sucks if you get caught in it.

So basically your argument is that you had no problems with it, so it's fine to insult me. Great.

I was in one of the top VGs on freedom before it more or less disbanded, but never had base editing permissions. Our base was kind of crappy even though we had ridiculous amounts of prestige. I joined it for the PvP, not for the PvE.

Why don't we move out of your closed experience and into one where not just I, but a number of people I know, have been playing for a long time and haven't done the strike force? What purpose, exactly, is served by requiring a mission computer? Cause I sure don't see one. Should we make it so that one of the hero TFs require a mission computer? Let's pick Manticore.

What exactly is the point of it? You didn't answer it, you just talked about how awesome you are and how dumb I am.

What if I finished both lady grey and ITF? What if I want to do a TF before I'm level 35? I have nothing else to do except try to get on an LRSF. Heroside I can (and have) gone to do one of the other ones pretty easily.

Why on earth do you need a mission computer to do villain strike forces? I've never actually DONE the silver mantis strike force and I've been playing since before the time redside went live. No VG I've been in has ever had a mission computer, so I've never done them.

Does anyone else agree the requirement is stupid? It makes getting merits villainside a lot harder than it is heroside.

Power sink in Mu is also autohit

They're all pretty good, to be honest.

I personally prefer Mako and Scirocco, at least before perma dom/50.

Mako will get you hibernate, which is pretty good if you're getting your butt kicked. You also get water spout, which is cool looking and does knockup and damage, which will combine pretty well with ice slick.

Scirocco can help with any end issues you have due to arctic air, and then you can get a pet that heals you or power surge for fighting/soloing EBs. You can also use power surge as a panic button, but I've never had too much success with that, since I'm always worried about the crash.

I wouldn't take ghost widow until the new issue goes live, but when it does go live, widow will be a pretty good pool too. You'll get soul drain, which'll give you a lot of damage, along with an end management power.

Black scorpion isn't too bad either, but I think it's more specialized. I wouldn't really want to get its defense shield unless I was going to be stacking a lot of def. with IOs.

Just based on the primaries I think Earth would be the best one for that kind of ranged playstyle. Ice and Fire both lose out on their really good PBAoE toggles if you're 100 feet away from the enemies for most of the battle. Ice wouldn't be a total loss due to shiver stacking with psychic scream, but you'd have to get a bit closer to enemies to stack them.

If you have shiver or chilling embrace don't bother with the slow slots. If you don't, you might wanna put one in. But I think the confuse is more important than the slow, since you have ice slick too.

I'll add something to put the mastermind inherent in perspective. Most of the pets are one or two levels below the mastermind, so they actually need the acc/damage from the inherent to deal the damage you'd "expect" the pets to deal. They could have made the pets stay X level or have a natural tohit buff and gotten rid of the inherent power.

Ice slick knocks them out of sleep, but only when it knocks them down. If you sleep them then put the slick under them, the sleep won't break until they've been disabled by the slick.

For arctic air 3/3 is good, you can slot the purple confuse set in it at 50 too.

I don't think mind/ is a bad set, but I do think mind/ has two specific issues. The first is that its "always up" type controls are very sensitive to teammate interference. You have to remember that not everyone has amazing graphics cards etc., making mind's effects very easy to miss on some low end configurations. Making the effects more obvious would go a long way toward remedying it on relatively observant teams. I know that on my Ice dominator I rarely have problems with sleeps being broken even though the animation is so very similar to a hold.

The second is, ironically, what is often touted as mind's strength: its reliance on total lockdown powers. These powers have the weaknesses of very long recharge and diminishing effects on higher level enemies. Most of the other sets have at least one control option that doesn't become less useful against high level enemies, e.g. singularity, earthquake, carrion creepers. Mind does have a similar control option in TK, but the power itself is relies heavily on positioning, regulates your movement, has high endurance requirements, and has a low target cap. At least it's cool.

I don't think mind is fundamentally flawed or anything like that, but I do think that more obvious effects would go a long way toward making mind's always up controls more useful on pickup groups.

The decreased animation time on confuse is going to help quite a bit for dominators, though maybe not controllers. With some decent recharge you'll be able to alternate dominate and confuse and keep a large number of enemies held even without relying on your AE controls, especially given that dominate has such a quick animation.

However, I think that making the animations more obvious in some way would be an easy step that doesn't require too much balance work. The only issue with that solution is if power customization is actually coming. If that's the case, it seems unlikely they'd change the base mind animation if you can customize your holds to be neon green.

Don't listen to the naysayers, dude. I leveled my Ice/Psi to 50 with just drain psyche and domination and never really had end problems while running arctic air and leadership toggles. I only ever ended up taking stamina for PvP. If you're on a big team it's not hard to get enough into the radius if you have hover. Just slot it for a little end mod.


Not having to worry about stamina is fun, I also had three travel powers.

I'll probably just keep playing my ice/psi to be honest. Back when I started doms I DID want to make an /energy something or other, though. I could never decide between mind or ice.

So I guess if i make a new one it'll be a mind/energy.

For what it's worth, I found 30% to be about the most that you'd normally need to build for in terms of defense. When you're facing a situation where you need the defense you can use one small purple and hit the cap pretty easily. It also leaves you a little room to take advantage of the various buffs teammates bring. But that's my experience as an ice dom with some weird power choices, so from the beginning it's harder for me to build both recharge and ranged defense without weave etc.

As for your recharge number, I'd try to push it higher. If you're trying to sleep the freedom phalanx with only one kinetics I would want more than 80% global recharge. I have a mind/ friend who had a lot of trouble sleeping the phalanx until he got about 90+%, but he might just suck.

Defense is definitely a huge help no matter what kind you get since no matter how awesome you are a few things are going to be attacking you, and if a teammate screws up you don't die instantly.

As for the whole smashing/lethal thing, I agree that it's technically better to build for, but I think it's also harder to build for S/L and also get a high recharge AND keep your fav. powers. Ranged def is just way easier to get, particularly for mind/fire, given that you only have one melee attack and can just boost the slots on sleep and confuse to 6 and get a large amount of defense.