New efforts!

[Arcana]

I never see Fire/Dark controllers pop up much in conversation.  They always seemed--in theory--to have a lot of potential.

I'm not sure there's a controller combo that doesn't have a lot of potential.  There aren't any truly horrible combos in City of Heroes in my opinion, but there are some very problematic ones (Elec/Fire Blaster, I'm looking at you).  I would not hand an Emp/Arch defender to a beginner that likes to solo.  I don't think EM/Dark should be the first melee you play.  But I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a controller combo that's really much harder to play than any other for novice players, and all of them have at least something to like.  I think some are more powerful than others in certain contexts, but they all seem to excel somewhere.

[Arcana]

And controller base damage was very low.

If memory serves, the controller mod was 0.55.  That means the effective modifier with containment was 1.1.  So your net effective modifier was based on your ability to consistently leverage containment.  I think in practice effective controller modifier was somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.8.  Not bad, really: basically similar to the tanker mod - which in a design sense actually makes sense.

[worldweary]

My first character will be a something/storm controller then a defender.Lots of controllers and defenders :).
I do want to try a Arachnos Soldier.I never made one and teaming with them they always seemed to be really
good at everything.

[Angel Phoenix77]

I'm not sure there's a controller combo that doesn't have a lot of potential.  There aren't any truly horrible combos in City of Heroes in my opinion, but there are some very problematic ones (Elec/Fire Blaster, I'm looking at you).  I would not hand an Emp/Arch defender to a beginner that likes to solo.  I don't think EM/Dark should be the first melee you play.  But I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a controller combo that's really much harder to play than any other for novice players, and all of them have at least something to like.  I think some are more powerful than others in certain contexts, but they all seem to excel somewhere.

I would say ice/wind was near bad.

[LaughingAlex]

If memory serves, the controller mod was 0.55.  That means the effective modifier with containment was 1.1.  So your net effective modifier was based on your ability to consistently leverage containment.  I think in practice effective controller modifier was somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.8.  Not bad, really: basically similar to the tanker mod - which in a design sense actually makes sense.

You still had to hard control though, and had a low initiative(as in, you needed time to set up) which, yeah lowered the effective modifier from 1.1 down to corruptor levels.  But soft-control did not really contribute to your damage any.  If I recall terrify didn't contribute to containment much by itself.  It may have, but then in that way it's still just another power your using to set up containment when you already have an AoE immob.  But the faster a team killed mobs, ironicly, the exponentially less you could get containment out.  That was the core reason I generally played corruptors; I'd get scourge far more often than I could get containment in a lot of teams because they killed them far to quickly for me to benefit from containment even being very aggressive with it.

As for the comment about bad controller builds, try fire/sonic.  It may sound good in theory but the endurance drain was so horrendous as to be one of the worst things a newcomer could try.  Sonic resonance high endurance use was enough that you could completely shut down a no-stamina endurance recovery on toggles alone, let alone considering other powers.  But sonic resonance was a "everything was very, very good in the set" power set, making stamina a pain to take and limiting your freedom of build flexibility.  Inherent fitness was to me a big balance change purely because of set combinations such as fire/sonic.

Edit:  First paragraph, why I preferred to use corruptors over controllers :).

[Arcana]

You still had to hard control though, and had a low initiative(as in, you needed time to set up) which, yeah lowered the effective modifier from 1.1 down to corruptor levels.  But soft-control did not really contribute to your damage any.  If I recall terrify didn't contribute to containment much by itself.  It may have, but then in that way it's still just another power your using to set up containment when you already have an AoE immob.  But the faster a team killed mobs, ironicly, the exponentially less you could get containment out.  That was the core reason I generally played corruptors; I'd get scourge far more often than I could get containment in a lot of teams because they killed them far to quickly for me to benefit from containment even being very aggressive with it.

Containment was set up through hold, sleep, stun, and immobilize.  The immobilize in particular allowed controllers to set up containment on AVs that would otherwise be generally immune to sleep, hold, and stun most of the time (they were generally easy to immobilize).

As to scourge, one of the things I used to think was that scourge provided more benefit than it turns out it actually did.  It wasn't until very late (like maybe in 2011) that I actually decided to settle a forum debate and analyze scourge.  Scourge, it turns out, provides something like 10-15% more damage on average across most gameplay situations.  Its actually less than containment.  The problem with scourge is overkill.  Doubling damage when the target has low health increases the probability that more of that damage will be mooted.  Consider a scale 1.0 slotted corruptor attack: it deals depending on slotting and buffs somewhere around 80-100 points of damage.  A scourged attack would then deal about 150-200 points of damage.  You only get the full value of that scourge if the target has more than that much health.  Level 50 minions have something like 430 health and Lts about 860.  Bosses have 2500ish health.  You can see its extremely unlikely that scourge will do a lot of extra damage to a minion, and its also likely to have limited benefit against Lts.  Its really against Bosses that scourge is likely to reach anything close to its full potential, and bosses represent only a fraction of the number of targets you'll likely face.

In actuality the analysis is more complicated than this, because when you reach these kinds of numbers averages get misleading: its really a question of whether scourge can reduce the number of attacks necessary to defeat a target, and by how much.  Typically, at normal slotting levels you tend to need about four attacks to land to defeat a minion, and *sometimes* scourge reduces that by one.  How often that happens determines the actual benefit of scourge.  Rinse and repeat for other kinds of targets, then average according to the frequency of occurrence.  Also, you have to factor in cases like the case where a target is down to a single attack of health remaining.  Such an attack cannot benefit from scourge at all, because the next attack kills it with or without scourge.  That tends to reduce the benefit of scourge statistically.

I believe containment synergizes a bit better than scourge.  Stacking corruptors often increases the likelihood of saturation and overkill.  But stacking controllers increases the likelihood of early containment which tends to increase the benefit of containment.  I didn't fully analyze this, because this is an order of magnitude more complicated situation, but I believe its demonstrable.

[MWRuger]

Controllers, defenders, tankers, scrappers are all great but the first characters I make will be blasters.

Even without I-24 enhancements they were the most fun and challenging for me to play. I soloed with them and got them good enough so that I could x4x8 reliably on most villain groups with some inspirations. I know that many feel them under powered, but for me, they were awesome!

[blacksly]

Your looking at superior crowd control and some good defensive and offensive debuffs.  I suspect though, that with controllers often you want offense when it came to your secondary.  You had very good survivability with crowd control for most situations.  So the extra defensive oomph was not necessary from your secondary as much as with corruptors/defenders.  And controller base damage was very low.  So /dark would seem weak.  It did have it's -resistance debuff, though.  I'd say any /dark controller was /dark for the same reason a controller picked /storm; you wanted to be even better at crowd control than normal.

I think that Fire/Dark looks like a very superior combo, even for Controllers. /Dark is very strong defensively, while Fire/ focuses more on the offense, so you allow Fire to run more aggressively and faster without losing safety. You also have an Endurance recovery boost that helps a lot with running Hot Feet while spamming Fire Cages, which is often a problem that slows many Fire/x builds.

[Twisted Toon]

My first 4 characters will be:

Illusion/Rad Controller - Arilou

Robots/Traps Mastermind - Cog Caster

Warshade - Agent Standin

and Fire/Em Blaster - Searing Rose

And then, maybe, I'll make a dual pistols Defender named Justa Cowgirl (founder of Justus Heroes (was on Justice server))

[MM3squints]

First 4

Ice/Time Troller (Main)
TW/Will Brute (farmer)
Mind (or Wind if that is available)/Fire Dom
Grav/Storm/Mako Troller

[Stitchified]

Controllers, defenders, tankers, scrappers are all great but the first characters I make will be blasters.

Even without I-24 enhancements they were the most fun and challenging for me to play. I soloed with them and got them good enough so that I could x4x8 reliably on most villain groups with some inspirations. I know that many feel them under powered, but for me, they were awesome!

I love using Teleport/Teleport For and then BAM! Instant Stun via Total Focus as an Energy/Energy Blaster... Fire/Fire and Ice/Ice Blasters and Tankers were fun to play as well.

[BadWolf]

My first four:

1) Claws/Regen Brute. I'd finally rerolled the Claws/Regen Wolverine knock-off I made at launch that wasn't working for me as a Scrapper as a Brute, and Fury made all the difference. I was loving him, and I think I played him right up until the last day.

2) Animal/Nature MM. Loved loved loved loved loved playing MMs. Had 50s in most powersets, never got a chance to level the new set.

3) Dark/Dark Controller. Again, a common theme here is "new set with tons of potential I didn't get a chance to really play!"

4) Fire/Dark Brute. And sometimes it's just about the smashy smashy burny burny.

[HEATSTROKE]

when I was talking about favorites I was talking Tanks and Brutes because that was the general topic of conversation.. I liked everything in game except for Scrappers and Stalkers.. never found a Stalker I could appreciate.. and Scrappers in general just were boring.. I preferred Brutes..

[brothermutant]

I'm not sure there's a controller combo that doesn't have a lot of potential.  There aren't any truly horrible combos in City of Heroes in my opinion, but there are some very problematic ones (Elec/Fire Blaster, I'm looking at you).  I would not hand an Emp/Arch defender to a beginner that likes to solo.  I don't think EM/Dark should be the first melee you play.  But I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a controller combo that's really much harder to play than any other for novice players, and all of them have at least something to like.  I think some are more powerful than others in certain contexts, but they all seem to excel somewhere.

Oh yeah? Try a Grav/FF toon. Was my FIRST toon ever on CoH and I leveled him the hard way to like 40+, PLed to 50 FINALLY. He did horrible damage, so much so that I used the Epic Pool to give him that little extra bump to his damage rotation. Can't remember what I settled on though I recall Earth and Ice Epics were two that I tried, probably Psi if it was an option (for thematic reasons...this was supposed to be a Telekinetic toon and Grav/FF made the most sense at the time).

Later, I rerolled a new toon using Grav (actually liked the set and the pet, just was underwhelming as a damage dealer/soloer) and paired Grav with Storms (ok choice IMHO) and with Time (Way more fun than I thought it would be, very tough to kill and great at CC).

[pinballdave]

Fire/Dark is high on my list too.  Being able to get Fire Ball, Rain of Fire, Fire Breath, Tar Patch and Darkest Night all by level 10--that's one heck of an AoE monster at low levels.

Call me a heretic (heretic!), but I took Howling Twilight before Darkest Night. The big stun, the big debuff, made it irresistible as an alpha-strike. I also took twilight grasp in there early. Your corruptor was an adept boss killer with TG and HT -regen. Stunned groups standing in tar while the fire aoe billowed was a death-dealing machine.

[Arcana]

Oh yeah? Try a Grav/FF toon. Was my FIRST toon ever on CoH and I leveled him the hard way to like 40+, PLed to 50 FINALLY. He did horrible damage, so much so that I used the Epic Pool to give him that little extra bump to his damage rotation. Can't remember what I settled on though I recall Earth and Ice Epics were two that I tried, probably Psi if it was an option (for thematic reasons...this was supposed to be a Telekinetic toon and Grav/FF made the most sense at the time).

Later, I rerolled a new toon using Grav (actually liked the set and the pet, just was underwhelming as a damage dealer/soloer) and paired Grav with Storms (ok choice IMHO) and with Time (Way more fun than I thought it would be, very tough to kill and great at CC).

There were times when Grav/FF would have been extremely problematic to play, particularly at release.  But with damage added to repulsion bomb (and of course the addition of the Singularity) I wouldn't say it was particularly difficult to play.  Slower, but not difficult.  And of course for novice players it had propel, which has both decent damage and is totally hilarious besides.

I'd still take Grav/FF over FF/Arch.  You'd be doing more damage and its practically impossible for a novice to die piloting gravity.  A novice can die piloting FF/Arch.

[Aggelakis]

I also took twilight grasp in there early. Your corruptor was an adept boss killer with TG and HT -regen.

TG was your forced level 1 pick on a support secondary, so yeah, you definitely took it early. ;)

[pinballdave]

My top 4 to re-roll:

1. Storm/water defender - delicious
2. Illusion/time controller - chronoshift + hasten make permahasten and near perma-PA attainable.
3. Bots/Nature affinity mastermind - kind of odd conceptually, but NA does really well to keep the bots up. (Silent Running)
4. Fire/dark corruptor see above

[pinballdave]

TG was your forced level 1 pick on a support secondary, so yeah, you definitely took it early. ;)

I still confuse the progressions corruptor > mastermind > defender.

[Angel Phoenix77]

I have to say, it is cool seeing what everyone would be rerolling when we get our home back :)