UberGuy

When you do the export, choose the "phpBB / Zetaboards" formatting code type.

Ultimo, here's the problem.

It really doesn't matter how much you claim this, because we know what we've seen. There are multiple people in here with thousands of hours of individual play time using certain power sets, and here you come along, usually with explicitly admitted limited experience with those same sets, telling those people things they know aren't true. They correct you and in response you argue with them about it.

You're the one in here with a thesis, Ultimo. You've got a bottom line to defend, and these bits of information you're arguing about are part of your logical foundation. When you tell those of us you're basing your thesis on a pile of these extremely shaky claims, it undercuts the whole thing. If you did it on one or two details it could probably be forgiven, but you do it on a truly epic scale, stating wholly untrue things nearly every time you post.

Like others in this thread have already mentioned, at least some of us aren't interested in convincing you of the things you're wrong about. It'd be nice, but given how impermeable to the truth you appear to be, I know that my main goal in continuing to post here is summed up in a quote attributed to Dag Hammarskjold. "The madman shouted in the market place. No one stopped to answer him. Thus it was confirmed that his thesis was incontrovertible."

Imagine how it feels to use Dull Pain on a /Regen Stalker.

As an intensive player of Dark Miasma, I'm not on board with this. I like having it last a long time, and I'll sacrifice it being able to be stacked faster for being able to keep foes in it longer without having to to recast it. Recasting it takes time, which is time not spent using attacks or other powers. Dark Miasma already has to spend plenty of time recasting things like Fearsome Stare and Twilight Grasp. I'm not complaining, but I don't want to increase it, either.

Probably more significant, though is that non-IO builds can't get much stacking out of Tar Patch now without help from external buffs. Making it a mainstream solo capability sounds like something that would come with collateral changes. As matters stand, stacking Tar Patches it is something I wonder whether devs really think is that good even currently. I'm certainly not clear they'd be for improving the ability to do it.

Not automatically. It depends on the foes and the team. The reality is that teams who can push their peak XP/hour out to level 54 are probably not that common. I know some pretty good PLers/farmers, and they tended to use level 51 bosses.

A small team or even a large team with no buffs or debuffs is probably going to do better facing lower-level foes. A large team with significant mitigation and damage multiplication is probably going to do best with high level foes.

For "mythical average players," if you plotted XP rate versus foe level, you'd probably get something vaguely like a bell curve propped up on the left side - a graph that starts at some non-zero baseline, rises a bit, and then collapses rapidly, especially above +4. Foes get increased resistances to effects and increased damage output as levels increase over yours. These combine to give a very nonlinear fall off on the progress rate as levels increase. Eventually you're doing worse even though each foe may be worth more.

"Superteams" can widen the hump in that curve, and/or shift it to higher levels. With enough mitigation going on, you can largely ignore the increased foe damage output. This leaves the increased foe resistances reducing your damage delivery, but this can be at least partially countered with damage multipliers. Even such teams though can only push the curve out so far - the "purple patch" accelerates rapidly above +4, and eventually no amount of buff we can achieve is going to be practically useful.

The examples of teams given in this thread sound like people who heard about well-honed teams getting great XP on level 54 bosses and concluding that the level 54 mobs were the silver bullet. It's really nothing new, people have been making the same kinds of claims about 8-man teams and Invincible/Relentless missions as long as I can remember, citing that other people do it while sometimes failing to see that it's hammering their own reward rates.

A question was asked (admittedly probably rhetorical) and an answer was given. There was little subjective content in that response, except possibly for the assertion about how much this game is soloable. I'd be interested in seeing that factually refuted.

So what is it, then, that he's "telling himself"?

Yes, they did.

Ultimo, for heaven's sake, if you don't know how something works, either look it up before you comment on it, or just don't talk about it. I'm not arguing on your side here, but it still pains me to see you undercut yourself so thoroughly. Even if you think you know what you're talking about, try to bear in mind how often you're corrected on factual information, and either ask or go check an in-game or on-line reference.

Transfusion is one of the two largest AoE heals in the game, the other being Dark Miasma's Twilight Grasp. While it's centered on the foe, the fact that it's an AoE means it's still usable in a way that affects the "caster". Every good Kinetic I've ever seen uses it that way. They have to be up in things' grilles to use Fulcrum Shift on themselves anyway, so it's natural to use Transfusion to heal off those same foes when they get uppity about it.

Just to give you some reference, Transfusion is 178% as much heal as Healing Aura (Empathy) or Radiant Aura (Rad Emish). That's not a "small heal" or just a "little" help.

What?

Nightfall is one of the best damage scale cone attacks in the game. I would never recommend dropping it, and I solo the vast majority of the time. I also don't recommend dropping Tenebrous Tentacles, because it is part of your control. It keeps foes in Tar Patch, and keeps them away from you. This is important layering with Fearsome Stare, because fear does not ensure a foe doesn't move, and sometimes one or the other will miss or a foe will have protection from one or the other. You're far safer when foes cannot reach you in melee range - having three powers to help play keep away (Tar Patch, Fearsome Stare and Tenebrous Tents) is a dramatic increase in safety even without the other benefits of TP and FS. Having cones means you can damage more foes at once. Even solo, you can pull multiple spawns with Darkest Night onto a Tar Patch, fear and immobilize them, and then defeat them all simultaneously with NF+TT. Defeating more foes at a time means better endurance efficiency and better XP/time (unless it takes you a long time to group them).

I have both, and I slot TT as an attack. With slotting and/or global recharge boosts such as Hasten or IOs, it is pretty trivial to stack TT even on bosses.

I have 100 levels of Dark/Dark, one Defender and one Corruptor, also mostly solo. I do not recommend Dark Pit. The duration to recharge ratio is too low for my tastes, by which I mean that it cannot be stacked with itself, even at very high recharge. If you want longer-lasting stun, or to stun a boss, you are forced to stack it with Howling Twilight. But Howling Twilight has an even worse duration/recharge ratio, and is tremendously expensive in endurance to use as a stun. I reserve HT for debuffing hard targets' regen rate, for rezzing allies when I team, and use it as a stun only in emergencies, when I am being overrrun and/or my other appropriate powers are recharging. Essentially, I find the other powers in the sets obviate the need to rely on such low duty cycle, mag 2 stuns the vast majority of the time.

If you do go with the Dark epic pool, Dark Pit becomes somewhat more attractive because you can now stack it with Oppressive Gloom. It still has poor recharge, of course, but now you can be sure to always stack it with OG when it does come up. However, there is a mild conflict with the Dark epic's PBAoE powers and Dark Blast's cone attacks. If you don't mind leaping back and forth to leverage both, you'll be fine.

I agree that Life Drain is very optional. I would take either it or Moonbeam, but probably not both. LD is a suitable improvement of your single-target attack chain, which is helpful, but it's not a great improvement, and it is shorter range than your other two blasts. Moonbeam isn't a good part of a single target chain, but it is nice for pulling, opening a fight with a bang, or picking off a damaged runner.

I soloed the above Dark/Psi to 50, and the character was level 44 before I9, so I only benefitted from Inventions after level 46 or so. When I say solo something, I generally mean I really soloed it. Before we had an XP switch, I wouldn't team before level 45 on a new character, and I generally max out the relationship bar on all my contacts.

When I hit level 18 or so, I bumped my mission setting to Unyielding. When I hit level 30 or so, I bumped it to Invincible and left it there. When that gave me an AV or Monster, I soloed them if I could and fed them a Shivan if I could not. With a few exceptions, a Shivan backed by Dark Miasma will eat even a +2 AV with a nice Chianti and some fava beans. (Back when I was doing this, playing on Invincible still got you +2 or +3 AVs.)

Given all that, I think I'm well versed in what it's like to solo a non-Sonic Attack, non-Kinetics Defender, and I disagree firmly with your subjective assertion that it's "absolutely ludicrous to claim that Dark/Psi has acceptable solo damage". All that tells me is that you don't find it acceptable, which is not a clear indicator of a problem.

I'm a power-gamer. Would I turn my nose up on a damage buff? Taken in a vacuum, I would not. That's a very different question than whether I feel a damage buff is required.

I understand the terms you are using. I simply cannot accept the logic you are using them to explain.

What's at issue is whether a Defender's damage is sufficient to solo. The example Defender for which you replied to Talen_Lee was Rad/Sonic, and he claimed he preferred to hunt bosses instead of minions. You claimed he would probably not want to do that if he was using some other attack set. The clear implication is that other attack sets lack the damage to perform that activity in a safe amount of time. My counter is that being able to beat down a +4 EB with Psi Blast and no meaningful -regen (no use of Howling Twilight) in no way suggests to me that Psi Blast would be inadequate for attacking bosses at a lower level.

It is utterly irrelevant whether or not Dark Miasma's mitigation was required to defeat the EB (something I doubt - I strongly suspect a Rad/Psi or possibly even a Kin/Psi could do it as well.) All that matters is that, given that mitigation I was able to deal enough damage to defeat a +4 Elite Boss. The whole point is that I don't need the same kind of focused mitigation to survive normal solo spawns as I do for a +4 EB.

You're implicitly arguing that the damage that allowed me to defeat a +4 Elite Boss is not enough for non Dark Miasmist to survive a normal solo spawn, which is ludicrous in the general case, and easily disproven by reviewing posts by several respondents to this thread. One does not need Dark Miasma's mitigation to survive the "typical" spawn. If Psi Blast has the damage to defeat a +4 Elite Boss in 8 minutes of beating on it (I have now timed it using no inspirations, no vet powers and no epic powers, but an IO build), I find it inconceivable anything as mundane as +2 minions and LTs are any match for such a character unless they can readily mez, which is a completely different threat profile for any Defender.

This is totally ridiculous.

If a given Defender can solo a +4 EB, it can also solo normal content. The point of the example is the damage the Defender can produce. This was in direct response to your claim that a Rad/Son would likely only be fighting Rikti bosses because it was using Sonic Attack, which is known to be the premier damage dealer among Defender sets. The counterpoint is that even a Defender with a different attack set can take down a very hard target.

Are you missing the part where I defeated the EB?

Are you assuming it took me like an hour or something?

If I can survive the concentrated fire of a +4 EB while I defeat it, how does that fail to be relevant to how fast I would defeat far less durable foes?

I don't even understand how we can be having this argument.

I read this and I see absolutely no sense at all.

If I can both stand before and defeat a +4 EB, how is this unrelated to my ability to stand before and defeat far lesser opponents, even in greater numbers?

I can only boggle at how you can dismiss an example of high damage output as "not relevant" in a discussion about damage capability. I had to be able to dish out significant damage to defeat an +4 EB in non-geological timeframes. Especially when the foe is mobile and runs away at low HP.

"Good" is a meaningless term, and it diverts attention from the thread's claims, which is that Defenders are poor soloers.

One of the consistent claims in this thread is that a Defender cannot deal enough damage to defeat a foe in the time their mitigation can buy them.
I very much contest this for any effective DPS capable of defeating a +4 EB even in the vicinity of 5-10 minutes. I think claiming otherwise significantly weakens any validity of your position by making your bar for "good" look very high.

As an aside: Have you seen a "Granite Tanker" try to solo an Assault Suit? Let's look at a Stone Tanker in Granite's major benefits.

1. +DR
2. +Defense
3. +Regen
4. Lots of HP

A Rikti Assualt Suit can literally nullify benefit (2) on a melee opponent. Once a laser hit lands it means that the suit will probably cause cascade defense breakdown because Granite does not provide -Def resistance. This leads to the nullification of benefit (1) with the fusion blasts, which also deliver significant -RES. So basically a solo Stone Tanker running Granite in the face of these things can easily end up dead.

1) This was in response to whether someone could hunt hard targets with something other than Sonic. The answer is an obvious "yes".
2) Dark Miasma's defensive abilities are heavily skewed towards -toHit debuffs, which are heavily attenuated against a +4 EB. Defense buffs for self, damage debuffs and a self heal are favored here. That suggests to me that Force Fields or Kinetics might be able to do the same, especially with IO builds (which most ATs need in the general case to toe-to-toe with this foe).
3) The fact that it's an unrealistic scenario is the point. The ability to beat down a +4 EB is clearly indicative of capability to beat down far more normal foes.

Let me do a little highlighting for you.

In other words, your sentence structure didn't make completely unambiguous how the words "single target" related to the rest of what you were saying.

Try thinking about the possibility that you weren't actually clear instead of jumping down the throat of someone because they don't agree with you.

I have no idea why you felt the need to stress the word "solo", since I don't see what relevance soloing has to the need to lock down a spawn. Even solo characters face spawns of 3 or more foes.

Ah. That's not what I think of as "100% lockdown". You have to do something with the rest of a spawn while you defeat the one you have locked down.

I've soloed +4 EB Rikti Suits in the RWZ with Dark/Psi.

Edit: I've done it with Dark/Dark too, which is actually probably more impressive. Psi popped in my head as a reply just as a strong single-target oriented set, making it more comparable with /Sonic.