Midnight Mystique

I have been playing both a stalker and brute on and off as all the changes went through (Sonic Melee/Regen on both, mostly cause regen is a nice, nuetral easy to play secondary). I played both up to L12 just to get a feel for low-level play, then bumped them to 31 which is about where I have a fairly solid build with all my main melee powers slotted up and enough defenses in the secondary to make play decent. It also allows me to slot up medium range IO sets (crushing impact, etc), then I mostly ran paper missions as I feel those give me a good estimate of how the characters play in general. I have found that if a character doesn't play well in the low 30's I am going to be disappointed in the 40's and 50's. I can't really comment on the early game now, to many changes to the set. I found the 1-12 trip no harder than usual, but no easier either. The 31+ play was not bad, but not really memorable either. As many folks have already said, the animations are all over the place, preventing me from feeling like the set has a common theme. The damage, while not sucky is lack luster. Esthetics wise the set is lacking. Between the mix of arm strikes and what looks like screams/mind blasts its hard to fit it to a theme, which reduces my interest in the set. The animations don't excite me, nor do the sounds. All of that reduces my enjoyment in playing the characters. I design and play characters both for effectiveness in play and fun in play style, so this is one strike against the set for me. After some thought about the damage I realized that the sonic melee set is very comparable to another set already on the main servers - Ice melee. Its a good set to compare against, Ice melee is probably in the top half of effectiveness (at least I feel that way), its damage it neither resisted heavily nor are there a ton of mobs vulnerable to it. It has the same number of single target melee attacks, a cone and a pbaoe just like sonic melee. Note that I did the comparasin without factoring in attune - mostly because it is extremely difficult to factor it in. Even the stalker version is a nice match - sonic melee gives up Sandman's Whisper just like ice gives up greater ice sword for AS. Ran a bunch of numbers on paper, not feeling like repeating them but the result is that sonic melee comes off short or at best even in all cases. Frozen fists, ice sword, Greater Ice Sword and Freezing touch do better damage and have better DPA' s than their sonic melee counterparts, although earsplitter and freezing tough are very close. Having attune active MIGHT balance things but attune adds an additional 1.67s (plus arcanatime) to the attack chain, potentially reducing the overall DPA. Sonic clap FEELS like it should be better than frost, but frost does twice the damage and even with a much longer cast time still has a higher DPA - I am not factoring in the larger target cap here, frost is a smaller enough cone that both powers are likely to only hit 5 targets - in which case frost wins with more damage. Deafening wave at 15' radius might actually be reasonably balanced against Frozen Aura's 10'r, but FA still has a higher DPA. Then you get into secondary effects - the Sonic Melee secondary effects are all over the place, which makes it hard to just how useful they are, where the slows in all ice attacks and the hold in freezing touch are very reliable. As it stand I will be unlikely to play any sonic melee characters until the set is cleaned up, either to make it more effective or more pleasing to the eye/ear. Some things that might help the set (mostly echoing things other folks have said): Sonic Thrust - bump this up to a 3 or 4 second recharge with the appropriate damage boost. Fast recharge, low damage attacks just don't cut it in a world of 80%-100% global recharge Strident Echo - same deal as sonic thrust - 7 or 8 second recharge with the app. dam boost would make both these early powers possible worth keeping. Sonic Clap - its a cool attack, with one of the few decent animations but does to little damage and hits to few targets for its area. Needs to be improved Sandman's Whisper - bump up to a 10 second recharge to make it a true tier 3 attack. The sleep is crap but since it has a decent damage resist debuff I can live with it.

Just ran a quick check - as Kai Moon reported, attune is only a click on scrappers. On brutes and stalkers it is a toggle that basically reapplies the initial hit over and over again. (to the point where my stalker can kill a boss with it from hide, then use the 3 stacks of assassin's focus it generates to get an autocrit from AS - pretty cool except for the end drain).

The key information here is that the chance of a proc going off in a power is based on the activation time and recharge rate of the power, the longer the activation and recharge, the higher the chance of a proc going off. However, the formula (which I don't know off the top of my head) only counts recharge reduction slotted in the power, not global recharge reduction. So recharge reduction slotted in the power, either as a recharge reduction enhancement or enhancement from an IO set, reduces the chance for a proc to go off but global recharge from set bonuses, hasten, external buffs (speed boost) and the like do not. The alpha incarnate slot works by effectively adding an enhancement to all powers, so if you slot an agility alpha or a spiritual it is effectively the same as adding an extra recharge reduction enhancement to all powers, which then reduces the chance of a proc going off. If you want to add global recharge reduction through incarnate powers your best bet is an ageless destiny, as that increases global values just like set bonuses or hasten.

I am using Mids Reborn Hero Designer, get the latest installer from https://midsreborn.com, Make sure you update it to the lastest version and database, I listed the app/db version I am running in my previous response.

Another thing to do to buff up your acc if you can spare about 8k inf for a new character is to talk to the S.T.A.R.T. vendor before you level past 1 and buy 8 hours worth of the 'offense amplifier' power. You will find it under Temporary powers -> buffs. It gives you 15% damage, 15% recharge and 10% to hit that last for 1 hour in game time per charge, you can buy up to 8 charges. It costs (LvL*Lvl) * 1000 inf, so at level 1 it costs 1000 inf per hour, goes up a lot faster after that (4k per hour at level 2, etc). That 8 hours is in game play time - it doesn't tick down when the char is logged out. It can easily last you into your high 20's/low 30's. If you can afford another 16k its well worth it to buy 8 hours each of the other two buffs - defensive amplifier and survival amplifier. The first gives you 4 points of status effect protection to EVERYTHING, plus 5% def and 7.5% resistance to all. The second gives you a nice HP, regen and recovery boost. Obviously a newly made character won't have any influence, but you can email inf to your global and any char on your account can claim it.

What happens when you click on it? I get a 'save file' window with the file name in it. I have never gotten a mids save file to open directly to mids, so I just save them to disk then manually open them. The file I attached is from Mids Reborn v3.7.14 using the homecoming DB v 2025.6.1082. I suppose I could try to message a copy to you, never done that before.

I don't actually have a street justice/invuln scrapper, although I do have a invuln/stj tank but he is still in the high 30's so I threw together a quick example of how I might build an stj/invuln scrapper. I included some alternate slotting in some of the powers. Other notes on the build 1) I don't do procced out builds, although I do throw in a proc here or there if I can manage it. 2) I put scrappers strike in sweeping cross because I like the set bonuses (and enhancement bonuses) better than all other non-purple melee AOE sets. You can swap it out for armageddon if you wish but that will cost you twice as much inf (archetype IO's generally cost 8-9 million each on the market and you can get enhancement catalysts to upgrade them to the superior version for less than mill each, where armageddon is going to cost you from 16-20 million a piece - same goes for all other purples) 3) I slotted spinning strike with ragnarock and an FF+rech, but you can replace that with a full set of bombardment if you don't want to spend on the purple set. Bombardment gives you E/NE resistances, ragnarock gives you F/C res and toxic/psionic if you want to drop the FF+rech and 6 slot the set 4) I put critical strikes in shin breaker to try and take advantage of the slightly higher recharge to trigger the crit proc but you can swap its slotting with either rib cracker or heavy blow. 5) When slotting for typed def in resistance powers there are 2 sets that give you the best benefits. Reactive armor gives you 1.25% E/NE def at 3 pieces and 1.25% S/L def at 4. Aegis gives you 3.13% F/C def at 3 pieces. You can swap these around as needed depending on which def you want to increase. 6) I set Invulnerability to 3 targets to get an average. That slightly better than softcaps you to S/L and gives you 35-37% to F/C/E/NE. 7) Hasten isn't perma, but dull pain is when hasten is up. Its not a perfect, all softcapped build and you might not want to go with Psionic Mastery for an epic pool but I like the extra end reduction you get from harmonic mind and the psionic damage is nice against things that are highly resistant to smashing. StJusticeInvulnScrapper.mbd

As erratic1 noted, it replaces instant healing. Its a toggle that provides regen, so you could easily keep your current slotting and frankenslot it with 2 heal/ends and a heal. That would max out the regen and give you a decent amount of end reduction. Basically slot it like you would integration (which is looks like you severely over slotted to me, but I never put more than 3 slots in integration) It doesn't need recharge. Now I have been slotting a 5 piece panacea in it (everything but the proc) mostly for the set bonuses. I tend to slot the panacea proc in health and 6 slot preventative medicine in reconstruction (which maxes the heal and gives me a nice amount of end reduction/recharge). Keep in mind that with reactive regeneration and integration combined you are going to have a constant level of regen that is fairly high, so you might not need to use second wind as much as before which would allow you to move some slots from there to RR.

I agree with Psyonico on shield, it softcaps almost as easily as SR (42% to all positions with 3 SO's in deflection, battle agility and weave; 1 SO in phalanx fighting and a steadfast prot +def/glad armor +def in tough) and offers a lot more offensive punch with the damage boost from against all odds and the extra attack in shield charge. I am not as comfortable with electric armor but if you prefer resistance to def its probably the least clicky option (put energize on autofire, use powersink if you run low on end). In that vein invulnerability is also a choice. The only real click that matters is dull pain and that can be put on autofire as you likely won't need to hold it back for the extra heal. Its a lot more complicated to build than SR, Shield or Electric.

Willpower and SR are pretty much the lowest clicky primaries that tanks get, with willpower's only click being its tier 9 and SR's having that plus practiced brawler (status protection click) which can easily be put on auto fire and left alone. Of those two SR is the simplest to build as you can hit the softcap with just the set powers and weave slotted with SO's. The drawback is you pretty much have to take everything but elude. With empathy backup you even cover the one hole in SR - lack of self heal. Willpower is a solid set but its very middle of the road and it a lot harder to build for survivability.

No, in the last RC they restored the base damage on all PBAOE's so it was the same as before the update regardless of the radius increases. I went through all the affected PBAOE's on the beta server just before release and verified the changes. The only thing the new radius increases affected are proc chances which are re-calculated based on the new radius. Cones already had their damage restored in prior builds on beta. The only other nerf is decreased damage for targets above the standard caps, and that was fairly huge as anything above 6 targets on a cone and 10 targets on a pbaoe take 1/3 damage (so targets 7-10 on cones and 11-16 on pbaoe's). OK - they also reduced the damage boost provided by power set buffs, so things like build up and rage would give less boost, don't remember the exact numbers though.

Just started a claws/psi scrapper and looking ahead to slotting aura of insanity. L50 slotting is easy to figure out, just stick a couple of endoplasms in it to enhance ACC and all mez options and then whatever else sounds good but while levelling its not as obvious. Should I just stick ACC in it? At level 28/30 which is when I can fit it in I am pretty tight on slots, so if I can get by on a single ACC IO I can live with that. On the other hand, if a hold or confuse enhancement would pay off I can spare a couple of extra slots. Is it worth slotting for damage?

Vines is also confused - the power description claims it is a "Ranged (Location AoE)" much like carrion creepers however clicking on the power without a target does not produce a targeting circle (unlike carrion creepers) and it basically behaves like a targeted AOE power. I posted a similar note on the electric control feedback thread on tesla coil, it has the same problem. Either your power descriptions are out of date and need to be changed, or your powers are further bugged. EDIT: I tested this on my L50+ plant/fire dom that I copied over from everlasting after respecing into a build that had spirit tree and spore burst. I only ran tests against even level mobs and turned off bosses, mostly to keep things simple, but as far as I can tell except for the targeting issue vines appears to hold a large group (ran at +0/x4) and I did see plenty of domination messages once I had domination up. On this build my vines is slotted with a 5 piece unbreakable constraint and reports the following in the power description: 3.00 magnitude hold for 22.64s(11.92s) on target Against up to 16 targets, only at initial summoning time If the base hold is supposed to be 14.9 seconds that is NOT what I am seeing reported.

Currently Tesla Coil's power description says its a "Target (Location AoE)" just like static field but when clicked it acts like a standard targeted AOE - you don't get a targeting circle (unlike static field) and it won't fire off unless you have a mob currently targeted. Its is a typo in the description or a bug in the power?

There are already 2 'hold' field powers in the game: Shadow field in darkness control and volcanic gasses in earth control. I have only a small amount of experience with shadow field and none with volcanic gasses so I guess the question is - how does the new GDF compare to those two powers? If it is NOT getting the adaptive recharge feature then it at least needs to be as useful a control as SF/VG. If not, then this is an overall nerf of the power, not an improvement. Anyone play enough of all three to give good feedback on that?