Champions Online — Builds I Like (Unluminous Man)

December 28, 2009 LHStaff General 7

unluminousEven though I have been put off by MMOs recently, I am still plugging away at Champions Online every so often and so I figured I would post another build I am currently enjoying. Unluminous Man is a “copy” of one of my favorite City of Heroes characters. In CoH, Unluminous is a powerful Dark/Dark/Dark Defender with a ton of dark, cold, slimy, tenticular tools with which to defeat evil doers. (By the way, if tenticular is a word, be very afraid.)  Since Cryptic saw fit to put a darkness set into CO, I figured it would be an interesting experiment to see how the same character concept worked out in the new game.

Unluminous Man is something of an experimental build. Most of my other builds have focused on having tons of layered defense and/or killing enemies quickly. For Unluminous, I wanted to see if I could create a character who could heal and/or drain himself out of trouble. This means drains, heals and yes, Regeneration. I have gotten this character to level 21 and so far, it is working fairly well, even though I am missing some important powers.

Powers

Shadow Bolt (Rank 1) — Nothing more than your simple energy builder here. There is a chance to cause fear, which gives a small overall reduction to incoming damage, but I have not noticed it much.

Shadow Embrace (Rank 2)— I find the darkness Shadow Blast to be a slow, lackluster power. So, I respecced out of it and went straight for the cone AoE Shadow Embrace. This power has a good area of effect and ticks damage fairly quickly. It isn’t the greatest damage power, but it cuts henchmen down in large numbers easily. It is a little clunky to use against master villains and higher because of its energy cost.

Also, this power has a great visual effect, with writhing black tentacles eminating from the character’s hands. My big disappointment is the fact that you cannot change the emanation point to the character’s head. I think the look of this black-clad figure with tentacles snaking out from under his hood would be the BEST. POWER. EVAR.

Regeneration (Rank 2)  — By far, the best passive defense for low-level characters is Regeneration. On Unluminous, the goal is stacking heals of various types as the primary means of defense and regen is one of the best. So, though I generally avoid Regeneration in my builds, Unluminous has it.

Lifedrain (Rank 2)  — Another mainstay of the character, Lifedrain allows me to heal while doing damage. Coupled with Regeneration, I can heal very quickly when the battle goes sour.

Crippling Coils (Rank 1)  — Darkness has a hold that takes a 2 second charge and up to 100 energy. Crippling Coils has no charge and costs 30 energy. Now, there are a few advantages to the darkness hold, but in practice I have found these advantages to be outweighed by the charge time and energy cost. Crippling Coils is a nice, quick-firing hold that takes one target out of the combat for several seconds — enough time to finish off someone else, or to charge a more lasting attack.

Ebon Void (Rank 1) — The darkness block enhancement is… ok. It has a standard damage reduction and a chance to reflect some damage back at the attacker. In practice, this damage is negligible on all but the biggest attacks; no one is going to kill themselves on your shield. There are better shields out there, but this one is good enough.

Force Eruption (Rank 1 & Gravitational Polarity)  — This power acts as a momentary “Get Out of Jail Free” card when I am overwhelmed. It knocks everyone down, allowing me to set up a Shadow Embrace, or Lifedrain. The Gravitational Polarity advantage is a damage buff, and has become standard on many of my characters.

Illumination (Rank 1) — This is an experimental power purchase from the new Celestial power set. It is a debuff you place on a foe that causes anyone attacking the target to get a small heal-over-time effect — another stacked heal for my build.

Stats

My super-stats are Endurance and Presence. Endurance gives me the energy I need to run full maintains of Lifedrain and Shadow Embrace. I am trying Presence as a  super-stat to give me big bonuses on my heals… hopefully. Currently, Lifedrain is the only power that benefits from the super Presence. The Illumination buff might benefit, but it is pretty small and so the effect is hard to see. I need to pick up some other heals to make the Presence pick worthwhile.

Tactics

Pretty simple actually — fly in, zap all the henchmen with Shadow Embrace. Any remaining henchmen and villains (or higher) can then be dealt with using another Shadow Embrace, or if I am in need of health, a combination of Illumination and Lifedrain.

If things go bad, I can use the Force Eruption to knock people down for a second while I drain some life, or I can turtle up with Ebon Void and hope that Regeneration can save me.

Thoughts

This is an experimental build and I am not yet sure how well it has worked out. Regeneration is very good at low levels and almost any situation where your health gets low can be handled with block turtling. I hate block turtling and so my goal is to build up enough layered healing so that I can stand in the middle of a pile of enemies and heal through their damage, blocking only the charged shots of the bosses. In this respect, Regeneration is good for probably 80% of the fights in the game. In the fights where the incoming damage is too heavy for Regen, I have Lifedrain which heals for 90-100 points each tick.

I took Illumination on a whim and unfortunately, it underperforms, providing a meager heal over time effect after you hit the affected target several times. The heal amount is in the low teens every couple of seconds and this just isn’t enough to notice under most conditions. If I could, I would drop this power for Bionic Shielding which has gotten a significant boost in the latest patch by having its recharge time cut in half.

I could still use one or two more stacked healing powers and I am wondering how Ego Sprites (with Slave Mentality) and Mindful Reinforcement would perform with a Presence of over 100. Alternately, I could just take a maintained healing power, but I like the idea of fire and forget heals that allow me to recover while fighting and so I will take a traditional heal only as a last resort.

Damage is another issue. The tentacles are adequate for most fights, but take a little too long to kill hard targets. Unluminous could use a big hitter. Still, the goal of this build isn’t powerful attacks, but having the capability of outlasting and outhealing opponents. I will have to see how the next 10 or so levels play out to determine if this is a viable strategy or not.

7 Comments

  1. I have been curious as to how viable the non generic builds in champs would turn out to be. In my brief experience it looked like the standard was, take some damage, take some defense, take a heal, become a generic tank mage type, possibly with a vague theme. I am curious to see how the petmaster, man with every pet, or Bricky the tank, the man who wanted to make a CoH tank, would play out. I think Unluminous falls into these kinds of builds. Hope it works out.

  2. Unfortunately, Champions Online didn’t turn out to have as many “off-builds” as I had hoped. Pretty much most builds are exactly as you say… attack, defense, heal.
    .
    I am not sure if the “build anything” implementation in CO has failed, or if I am just not getting it. I can build tons of effective characters and all of them are a little different, but they are all about the same.
    .
    Mostly, I think the execution is lackluster. Not terrible, just not good enough to carry the game. I could go into pages of commentary about why I think this is, but there is probably an article in there somewhere.

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