Author Topic: Best Controller  (Read 41549 times)

Arcana

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #20 on: September 17, 2014, 01:11:18 AM »
I had an Ill/Rad and it was very good.. one of the best combinations for controllers in the game.

I think it was very very strongly rivaled by Ill/Dark and I would say that Ill/Dark might be slightly better in some respects. Everthing you get from Illusion and -regen, stun, -tohit,-res, a team defense buff. a +regen/Recovert tool AND an extra pet in Dark Servant.. very very good build.. worked very well.. got him to level 50 before the shutdown.

I think  Ill/Dark is stronger where Ill/Rad is weaker: against a lot of weaker enemies.  Against fewer stronger ones (up to and including AV fights) I think Ill/Rad is better.  Ill/Dark's Achilles heel would probably be environments ironically similar to the ones it generates: where its hard to hit targets.  Ill/Rad doesn't rely as much on having high tohit.

I was wondering if Ill/Dark was eventually going to steal the crown from Ill/Rad in terms of popularity, but I don't think the combo lasted long enough for enough players to become familiar with it.  I think it had a chance of getting up there with Ill/Rad and Fire/Kin as a go-to controller combo.

Codewalker

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #21 on: September 17, 2014, 02:21:58 AM »
Ill/Rad would have still been the king for AV/Giant Monster soloing just because of Lingering Radiation. HT's base recharge is twice as long. With Rad, if you have perma PA, you easily have perma Lingering (and probably double stacked at times), so the hard targets aren't going to be doing much regenerating at all.

Reiraku

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #22 on: September 17, 2014, 03:14:20 AM »
Best was pre-containment Grav/FF solo.

... what?

Arcana

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #23 on: September 17, 2014, 05:39:34 AM »
Ill/Rad would have still been the king for AV/Giant Monster soloing just because of Lingering Radiation. HT's base recharge is twice as long. With Rad, if you have perma PA, you easily have perma Lingering (and probably double stacked at times), so the hard targets aren't going to be doing much regenerating at all.

Not to mention the fact they aren't going to be shooting at you most of the time either.  If I have to kill one single thing, Ill/Rad is my controller of choice.

On the other hand, if I was going to try the RWZ challenge, Ill/Dark might be the better choice.  Ill/Rad is actually not the best choice for that in my opinion.  The pets get confused when confronted with so many targets, its hard to keep a lot of +5s continuously controlled with Illusion, regeneration debuffs are not as game-changing there.

One of my best Ill/Rad stories happened late one night when I saw a few players in Croatoa trying to get enough players to take down the Jack/Eochai pair.  They spent twenty minutes trying, and when I got there they were deciding to give up because they knew they could get the badge anymore: the two had spent too much time fighting each other, so they would not be able to deal enough damage to get credit.  I told the four of them to not worry, I would get the badge for them if they trusted me.  I told them to start wailing on the two of them while I debuffed the pair and kept spamming heals on them to keep them alive.  I let them attack both for about ten minutes, and then when I calculated they did enough damage and the counters had reset I told them they would be killing Eochai now, then started using LR.  All of a sudden, their damage took him out in like a minute or two and bang: badge.  Then I told them to focus on Jack next, and soon enough Jack went down, and they got the second badge.

The amazing thing about Ill/Rad was not just that it could take the two GMs down.  It was that I had total control over the process.  If I wanted them to stay alive, they stayed alive.  When I decided it was time for them to go down, they went down.  In the meantime, the GMs simply could not kill those players as long as I decided to keep them alive.

Now that's a controller.

Arcana

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #24 on: September 17, 2014, 05:40:10 AM »
Best was pre-containment Grav/FF solo.
You mean pre-Singularity, right?

Reiraku

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #25 on: September 17, 2014, 05:43:59 AM »
You mean pre-Singularity, right?

Fold Space was an awesome power. I miss it so...

Ankhammon

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #26 on: September 17, 2014, 04:18:50 PM »
Fold Space was an awesome power. I miss it so...

I've never heard of this... or old mannishness is causing memory loss.
What'd I miss?  :o
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Reiraku

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #27 on: September 17, 2014, 05:56:44 PM »
I've never heard of this... or old mannishness is causing memory loss.
What'd I miss?  :o

VERY early in the game (as in pre-launch) Gravity's tier-9 power was called Fold Space, which functioned as a team recall teleport. It was changed to Singularity just after launch.

Ankhammon

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #28 on: September 17, 2014, 06:02:21 PM »
VERY early in the game (as in pre-launch) Gravity's tier-9 power was called Fold Space, which functioned as a team recall teleport. It was changed to Singularity just after launch.

Well some things happened before my time in CoH. ;)

I got here just in time for the smoke grenade nerf.
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Codewalker

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #29 on: September 17, 2014, 06:07:48 PM »
If you ever used Assemble the Team, it's the same power, just on a longer recharge. Personally, I prefer the pet. :)

IIRC, Singularity's internal power ID was still Fold_Space, so that it wouldn't break characters when they changed it.

Yep: http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/powers/power.php?id=Controller_Control.Gravity_Control.Fold_Space

Arcana

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #30 on: September 17, 2014, 06:41:39 PM »
If you ever used Assemble the Team, it's the same power, just on a longer recharge. Personally, I prefer the pet. :)

IIRC, Singularity's internal power ID was still Fold_Space, so that it wouldn't break characters when they changed it.

Yep: http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/powers/power.php?id=Controller_Control.Gravity_Control.Fold_Space

Yep, lots of powers are like that, because (I know you know this) the names we see are just text descriptions, but the internal IDs of powers cannot be changed without breaking everything that uses them.  Because that would break beta testers including dev testers if they did that during beta, and changing it just before going live would create the potential for typographical errors to reach live, many powers have internal names completely different from what the players know the powers as.

More interestingly, that's also why the devs kept calling /Devices "Gadgets."  That's what the set was called in beta, and because you can't change the IDs of anything without breaking everything that uses it that's what Devices was called internally until the day the game was shut down.  Because Geko and Castle and Black Scorpion and all the other powers team members looked at spreadsheets every day that said "Gadgets" and not "Devices" that name tended to imprint on them.  They would often post about "Gadgets" prompting players that didn't know the history to go "huh, what's that?"

Teikiatsu

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #31 on: September 17, 2014, 09:35:30 PM »
Best was pre-containment Grav/FF solo.

... what?

That was my very first troller, sigh...
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Reiraku

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #32 on: September 17, 2014, 09:37:44 PM »
That was my very first troller, sigh...

Mine too. I feel your pain.

blacksly

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #33 on: September 17, 2014, 11:44:56 PM »
Ill/Rad would have still been the king for AV/Giant Monster soloing just because of Lingering Radiation. HT's base recharge is twice as long. With Rad, if you have perma PA, you easily have perma Lingering (and probably double stacked at times), so the hard targets aren't going to be doing much regenerating at all.

In general, /Dark is better for AV/GM soloing because when -ToHit fails, it still has gobs of -Damage so you don't have to worry about capping Ranged Defense, and it can still put out a lot of -Regen (Twilight Grasp is usually stacked to 150-200% plus another 50% from Fluffy, plus HT's occasional 500%, so that it almost matches Rad for -Regen). However, specifically for Illusion primary, you don't care about -ToHit and -Damage, but +Recharge is huge to allow easier perma-PA. With Illusion against AVs, you're better off with /Rad (but not that far behind with /Dark), but with anyone else, /Dark will do better.

hejtmane

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #34 on: September 17, 2014, 11:50:01 PM »
My only no 50 scrapper was ill/rad i toyed with making another controller and was looking at ill/dark

I know with my Ill/rad I was on a couple TF's where people accidentally pulled Dr Aeon before people where ready and the entire team but me wiped and I held off Aeon long enough for people to res or run back with PA and debuffs. Way before /dark was ever around it was a cool set.

Now you ever want to have fun join a mission with 4 Ill/ whatever secondary controllers

Arcana

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #35 on: September 18, 2014, 02:19:18 AM »
In general, /Dark is better for AV/GM soloing because when -ToHit fails, it still has gobs of -Damage so you don't have to worry about capping Ranged Defense, and it can still put out a lot of -Regen (Twilight Grasp is usually stacked to 150-200% plus another 50% from Fluffy, plus HT's occasional 500%, so that it almost matches Rad for -Regen). However, specifically for Illusion primary, you don't care about -ToHit and -Damage, but +Recharge is huge to allow easier perma-PA. With Illusion against AVs, you're better off with /Rad (but not that far behind with /Dark), but with anyone else, /Dark will do better.

AVs resisted regeneration debuffs.  The resistance scaled with level, but at level 50 it was 82% (at level 55 it was I think 85%).  Even Lingering Radiation's -500% regen debuff was reduced to only -90% when facing a level 50 AV (and you were level 50 so no purple patch combat modifiers were in play).  Radiation was *far* stronger than Dark against most AVs for this reason.  I know a lot of Dark debuffers that couldn't figure out why their in-game performance was far lower than what they thought it should be, because they failed  to take regen debuff resistance into account (note: I don't remember off the top of my head when regen debuff resistance was added to AVs, but it had been there for a long time by shutdown).

Rad could stack LR and shut down AV regen.  Even at very high recharge Dark might do half as well against high level AVs.

Oh yeah, AVs also resisted tohit debuffs to the same degree.  I think there's no question Ill/Rad beats Anything/Dark on most high level AVs.

(Also, most AVs had at least some damage resistance, and by a quirk of game mechanics damage resistance acted to resist damage debuffs.  So if you were fighting an AV that had high resistance to the kind of damage they themselves liked to pump out - which was very common - they could also make it difficult to debuff their outgoing damage by as much as you think you could).

Ankhammon

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #36 on: September 18, 2014, 03:03:15 AM »

(Also, most AVs had at least some damage resistance, and by a quirk of game mechanics damage resistance acted to resist damage debuffs.  So if you were fighting an AV that had high resistance to the kind of damage they themselves liked to pump out - which was very common - they could also make it difficult to debuff their outgoing damage by as much as you think you could).
 

Arcana,

If you have the time, would you elaborate on the -Dam to resist thing? That's something I've just about completely forgotten over the years and was having difficulty finding the info on.

For instance, if you were fighting an AV states and he had unstoppable going he would have a smash Damage resistance of 90%? If you could throw 100% -Dam on him, it would hit reduce his damage by 10%?

I'm sure I'm not correct, cuz that would be too simple a formula.
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HEATSTROKE

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #37 on: September 18, 2014, 03:08:24 AM »
 

Arcana,

If you have the time, would you elaborate on the -Dam to resist thing? That's something I've just about completely forgotten over the years and was having difficulty finding the info on.


You asked Arcana to elaborate ???!!!!!!!!

oh boy.. this will be good..

Ultraamann

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #38 on: September 18, 2014, 03:26:09 AM »
Earth/Storm ftw!

Fossilizing and Snow Storming and Stone Cageing and Steamy Misting and Quicksanding and Freezing Raining and Stalagmiting and Hurricaning and Earthquaking and Thunderclapping and Volcanic Gassing and Zippy the Mega-Tornado chucking things around and Pooey the Wonder Pet smashing and great epic Lightning Storms zapping everything.. throw in a little Stone Epic for Boulder Hurling and Seismic Smashing...

EarthWindandIre was by far and away my favorite troller to play.  Felt like I could lock down the entire screen (or freeze it up graphically lol)

HEATSTROKE

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Re: Best Controller
« Reply #39 on: September 18, 2014, 03:38:56 AM »
 at the end of the game. I was playing Dominators much more than Controllers..