Carnifax

Phantasm isn't as bad as he used to be, behaviour-wise (if you want Still-borked-AI look at Warshade pets). DPS-wise PAs do a lot of your damage. On a Pylon run (which is probably best-case for PA effectiveness) they do ~65% of my total damage. Phanty is less than one single PA. In "normal" combat it's a bit more balanced thanks to NRG Torrent. If PAs do 100 damage Phanty does 45 and his decoy 10 (issue with that 10 is of course you don't know exactly how much gets healed back). https://www.carnifax.org/?uuid=b4c00875-42ae-4ce1-a799-d7951ba0972e is a parse of RWZ missions on my Ill/Dark. Jack is pretty solid now overall and quite well behaved. Gremlins are dodgy, I think one of their issues is stacking Jolting Chains triggering sporadic occasional knockback coupled with their desire to be in melee range. That said they still do a large chunk of my Elec/Poisons overall damage.

This. Its role shifted slightly in the last patch, which was irksome for my Fire/Nature corruptor because the 50/50 availability of a big Mez prot & resist power was the whole draw of Sorcery for them. But on my Ice/Traps it's become a nice "take at 49, slot with a resist unique" cherry on top of the Arcane Bolt / Enflame sundae.

Yup. Gold on an Ice/Trap controller. Also on a Water corruptor but more as a route to Enflame as an experiment.

I actually think this is a really good idea. I've merits pouring out my ears but WST is a good way to focus teams towards certain content. I'd love to see some mechanism where a story arc got a better reward and auto-exemped people for a week to encourage / suggest content for people to run. I'd also love to see some system where some chosen / curated AE stories became "live" for a week or two in the same sort of vein.

We're doing a goldside team at the mo too (we = Hounds of Love on Reunion). Honestly on a dedicated team any AT is good. Ours does have a large chunk of Domis and Corruptors but that was down to what people wanted to play coupled with theme (Wizard of Oz themed so quite a lot of Nature, Water and other elements). But if you are not soloing the content anything will do. Solo my Dark/Martial tank is struggling but that's more battling the blue bar than anything.

33%. For me RoP has become less useful overall but Arcane Bolt and Enflame became more useful (much more so for some chars). So as a set it's way more balanced. But yes if you're taking Sorcery purely for RoP it's less attractive now.

Ingame type /buildsave Now in Mids do File > Open Find the build.txt file /buildsave saved for you. Usually in [cohFolder]/accounts/[AccountName]/builds Now your build should (mostly) import. A few Enhancements might throw an error (Tech SOs still do) but just Ok through it.

Best Ice/Ice meleer is probably a Stalker. Assassin's replaces the terrible Greater Ice Sword. On the secondary you get a really good tier 9 instead of Hibernate (but you can also pick up Hib in the epics if you miss it).

I have a crime fighting sea urchin who was jealous of all the cred and attention Atlanteans and other sea based humanoid vertebrates get. So they must exist or there'd be no reason a 6 foot spiky, smelly greeny blue Echinoderm is running about the city beating up muggers.

Earth is probably best. Fissure is short range but will take a Forced Feedback. Mace Mastery gives you a Def shield, -Res highly proccable ranged attack and a ranged AOE which will take FF too (but needs a KB2KD). The drawback is the Mace redraw is a killer and there's no way to switch it off. I have it on my Illusion but bemoan the redraw every time I use it. You can chain them but it still sucks. Gives you the option of another pet too (one which is Fulcrumable) on a long recharge, but you're building for that anyway.

PermaPA isn't like perma-dom in that aiming for it but falling a few seconds shy isn't a disaster. You can cope with a few seconds without them. They do 60-70% of my damage (Ill/Dark/Scorp) and absorb a lot of aggro, which is the reason you still want to strive towards it but it's not as absolute as Perma Dom.

Great for ATs who do decent damage but don't get too much in the way of AoE. Especially if you get a pet too. So excellent for Domis. Not amazing on Controllers (even on my Ice/Traps it's not doing amazing work) but like arcane says decent DPA, just fire it off on a pet and leave it off to do its thing. In an AV fight same thing but on the AV. In fact the whole Sorcery set is quite good as a lot of "fire and forget" or "trigger occasionally when it goes yellow" powers.

Yup, my understanding is that the Purple Patch kicks in after the "normal" formula produces a final figure and is absolute. Could easily be wrong of course.

Not any more. The proc effect was moved from the pet patches to the aura itself in the last major patch. Specifically to get around the "spawns triggers twice as much as expected" behaviour. That being said I've been reexamining my logs and I think on low damage ATs procs are better than slotting for damage. But it's close. So for Controllers, Defenders & Masterminds procs are better than damage. High damage ATs damage is better to slot for.

Is this correct? Far as I knew the Purple Patch modifiers kick in after the total figure is calculated and nothing can affect them. Where the Unresistable bit is useful is vs AVs so they don't strip 85% of the debuff away regardless.

Procs are essentially the same as proccing something like Burning Aura or another toggle (the procs trigger off the toggle now, not the pseudopet). I parsed it out on my Ice/Traps/Sorcery/Fold Spacer. The slots were better off elsewhere proc-wise. I ended up with 2 non-proc Bombardment (Dam & Acc/Dam/Recharge) plus one Acc/Dam IO which got me 50% acc and 100% dam. So 2 extra slots and all set, suited me well. Now granted that is on a "I'll put this on my Pet and forget about it" build. If you were very aggressively applying it in the middle of the spawns all of the time it would be better (because the "0 second" check would have more valid tartgets). Traps is too busy for me to do that so Jack gets lit up.

Gremlins are the stupidest pets in the game though (but also a decent chunk of my overall damage). They really are idiots.

I went with Elec on mine (Elec/Poison/Earth) for a couple of reasons. Two auras is nice to have. Solo Elecs sleep patch plays well with Poisons debuffs. Procced up Poison Gas Trap helps with damage as well as having a big old chunk of -Recovery for sapping. Plus overall theme was reasonably easy as a sentient computer virus. Ended up being a fun journey with a layered control approach. Never going to be S class amazing but solid, melee friendly and has lots of mez / control tricks.

Rune is fixed recharge now, so 60 of 180 as shown here : https://cod.uberguy.net./html/power.html?power=pool.sorcery.rune_of_protection&at=controller So switch that Recharge IO for a Resist IO or one of the resist uniques (frees up a slot for you).

I tend to wormhole group 2 into group 1. That way they're now stunned and likely in a whole world of debuff and general aoe pain. I'd generally only do that once I knew the team a little though, whether it be friends or just a team I know can handle it.

Right then, to see how things parse out I brought Carni out for a couple of pylons (Ill/Dark/Scorp controller). https://www.carnifax.org/?uuid=d3861b32-3826-4af8-983f-fb134412e859 And the last entry there (combat_1622220508000_2021-05-28 16_48_28.0_Carnifax.txt). Total combat time 205 seconds (3:25) so plugging that into the formula give me a calculated DPS of 314.8. Parser thought 301 DPS so not wildly out. Actually wildly out would be easier to figure out. I'm thinking that since I'm Illusion "healback" from PAs and Spectral is accounting for the difference. Edit: Actually Decoy Phant did 10% of my overall damage and a lot of that would be healed back. Incarnates autos (none cast manually) : Hybrid Control Embodiment, Interface : Reactive Core Flawless, Alpha : Agility Core Paragon. No other temps or insps (Soul Absorb saved by blue bar a few times). Total damage recorded vs the Pylon 61725. I don'tr have Howling maxed out for recharge, that'd probably help out more.

One interesting point about Swap Ammo, even if you Swap so as to switch off the Knockback Forced Feedback procs still have the same chance to trigger. So if you can manage to squeeze it into Empty Clips and Bullet Rain you'll get a decent number of triggers from it even if you're running Incendiary 95% of the time. On the "mez shutting off offensive toggles" thing yes it is very annoying, especially "micro-mezzes" where you get stunned or slept for a second or two. Poison, Nature, Rad and Time suffer from it badly. You've some options. Defense is good because if the mez misses it can't mez you (Time is quids in there). RoP will give 1/3 coverage and can be used when mezzed. You'll still need to reactivate the toggle though. I'm hoping the devs change these to "surpress when mezzed" instead at some point.

Pretty sure Traps break stealth / attract aggro one they go off. Although with FFG seeming acting oddly with the Stealth power (seems to cancel the new Invisible part of it, my Def numbers are all over the place with my stealthy Ice/Traps) it's hard to know for sure. I'll need to do more tests with the Stealth Radius combat attrib to be sure.

It's a very, very niche power which risks ruining things for your other ranged & ranged support teammates. I've had people block Howling Twilight with it. And nukes. And AoE mezzes. It's not totally useless, since it doesn't need slots it can be picked up as a 1 shot panic button. I'll use it as a breather for 5 seconds if a team loses its shape or an ambush kicks in but once people pivot to the new threat it's unneeded and too disruptive for my liking. I mean I was on a Manti semi-PuG which ended up very control heavy but there was a Grav Domi who kept using it. All they were really doing was protecting the enemy from the AoE mezzes & ranged buffs / debuffs we were throwing out.

Actually it means "You've hit the right answer" Although since Numberwang is made up, obtuse and people hit the right answer randomly I'm not sure it's a compliment either