F#¢&ing City of Heroes Builds

My most glaring shortcoming in this game is my failure to plan my builds.  The most over rated aspect of this game is build optimization, in my not so humble opinion.  Players spend hours examining Mid's planner and scanning the Forums for build guides.  Now I'm not trying to tell people how to have fun, but the chat channels regularly feature 'lively discussions' on builds that frequently border on arguments.  My most glaring memory of this happened a couple months ago.

I made the fairly innocuous statement "I don't like pets".  And I don't!  For balance purposes the pets AI has got to be howling stupid, otherwise pets would be way over powered and 3/4 of the player base would play masterminds.  Fusionette is an extreme example of this pet stupidity, the missions she is in are chaotic since she regularly aggros the entire map.

Now to be fair, the 'lively discussion' I was having was about the Dark Servant.  The Dark Servant is a really good pet, it doesn't provide a lot of damage, but that's not exactly a bad thing since its harder for it to aggro the map.  What DS has is a lot of support powers: debuffs, holds and heals.  I did not explain my position well in game, but re-stated here Dark Miasma is such a cool power set that there are severe trade-offs or opportunity costs when one aggressively slots dark servant.  Now a build without a 6-slotted DS might be slightly sup-optimum, but sub-optimum is absolutely not the same thing as ineffective.

Speaking of ineffective...

My current levelling project is a Time Manipulation/Dual Pistols defender.  In the early levels when no villain group features mobs with defense or damage resistance this set worked fine with non-invention based slotting, but my aversion to build planning really cost me later on. 

Invention origin  (IOs) enhancements are the best available in game.  They require more work in the form of collecting and crafting than origin based enhancements.  Usually Single Origin enhancements (SOs) are adequate to get a toon to level 50, so that's what I usually do, using the march to 50 as a test drive to see if I want to continue playing this toon as an incarnate.

Dual Pistols the way I want to use them do 'lethal' type damage.  One of the powers allows you to switch ammunition types to mix and match against the villain group, and while I would consider doing that as a blaster, but as a defender, I would much rather concentrate on support.  The downside of that decision has been made clear to me now.  This toon will gain levels really slowly unless I group, and while in a group I would probably help less than an average replacement player.

The problem is that at around my current level (31), mobs really start to ramp up their damage resistance, and lethal is among the most resisted types you can find.  In game play, I needed to constantly trigger my control and heal powers just to survive while spamming attacks as quick as they could recharge.    Consequently, I was always short of endurance and playing was not a fun experience.  IF I would of planned my build, I would of known this much sooner and already have taken these steps, instead I spent a couple hours better spent playing crafting inventions.

IO's provide 2 advantages, versatility and set bonuses.

Set Bonuses

By getting 'invention sets' slotted into a power, global bonus buff's occur, like a slight bump in defense or accuracy.  Now individually these set bonuses don't amount to much but a level 50 toon gets 24 powers to spread these over, and collectively they really add up.  Since I am still test driving this Time/DP toon, I went with the cheaper IO's which have weaker set bonuses; both in what they buff and the amount that they buff.  They still help (especially the endurance recovery items) but my primary goal for the invention set was....

Versatility

A SO enhancement will improve one aspect of a power: accuracy, damage, recharge time, etc.  You can mix or match these enhancements within a power, but generally some attribute gets ignored.   Inventions won't ignore that attribute.  My attack powers at this stage of the build are 4 slotted.  With SOs I had double accuracy and double damage, which gave me approximate values of 66% improvement each.   Current IO slotting gives me approximate values of 22.5% accuracy, 95% damage, 40% endurance reduction and 40% recharge.   Not happy with the accuracy long term, but test runs proved to me that right now 22.5 is adequate.  Those same test runs absolutely proved that the damage and end redux improvements more than offset the accuracy.  Hooray for me.