Also worth noting, using the rad heal completely stops your damage output for its activation time, as opposed to TG which you guys have already covered as having a certain amount of effective dps. Not necessarily a big deal, but if you have to hit whatever heal you've got very often, I would prefer to be getting damage out of it.
True, but we've been flipping back and forth between comparing Rad and Dark on offensive benefit and defensive benefit. I think a more interesting analysis would focus on the sustainable effort possible from both sets. Let me throw this out for discussion purposes.
To defeat a level 50 even conning AV you need to be able to deliver 28272 points of damage on top of (or neutralizing) its 94.24 h/s regeneration. You also need to survive the AV. Its difficult to estimate the average damage output of an AV, but a handy rule of thumb is that most single target attacks deal about 0.15 DS/sec when handed to a critter, based on cycle time and AI issues. As a practical matter, most AVs have about 4 *usable* attacks when attacking a single player, and on average one of them is an AoE which tends to reduce the per-target damage per second by about 3 (on average AoEs are balanced around hitting about 3 targets, although this varies by attack). A rough estimate, then, is that an AV might average about (3 * 0.15 + 0.15/3) * 874.66 = 437.33 dps not counting tohit, and about 328 dps factoring in baseline tohit of 75%. At range, that number drops to (3 * 0.15 + 0.15/3) * 524.79 = 262.4 dps raw and about 196.8 dps at baseline tohit of 75%.
These numbers "feel" about right, in that they say that an unprotected level 50 player running no real defenses might be expected to live for about 4-5 seconds standing next to a level 50 AV and taking aggro, and about 6-8 seconds at range.
Those are big numbers. The question is, when Dark and Rad are built to mitigate that much damage, how much gas is left in the tank to actually kill the AV? Both of them likely be, when maximizing survivability to survive that much damage, doing some secondary damage or regeneration debuff on the AV to help offense, but ultimately you'll still have to generate some offense to defeat the AV. In terms of both endurance efficiency and available activation time, which set offers the best options past that point? I'm not exactly sure thinking about the numbers.
This gets back to why Ill/Rad is considered the best AV/GM combo. Perma-PA immediately solves an enormous problem right off the bat. Once you solve that problem, all you have to do is reduce AV/GM regeneration enough to make it a matter of attrition, and LR is strong enough to do that and simple enough to use. Dark is a much more complex set to analyze (as we've seen) and also requires two very tricky elements to function correctly. It needs to use Soul Absorption to get into the same sustainable endurance class as Rad, but SA is a PBAoE: more dangerous to use than AM. Second, it relies in part on the Dark Servant, and that's an unpredictable ally: it doesn't always use its powers efficiently, and it can get itself killed.
If anything, these calculations seem to muddy the waters a lot, but it still appears to me that /Rad is a much simpler set to build around and manage as an AV-killer, while Dark, even if its capable of eclipsing Rad in some situations, requires a lot of shepherding to get there. In other words, Rad seems to be good-enough, and more straight forward.
That's not to denigrate /Dark, which appears to be capable of equaling or even exceeding /Rad in some areas. There's no question its a *capable* AV-killing support set.
