Linea
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Posts posted by Linea
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Cost in this case means IOs, influence, temps, inspirations, player skill, attention, and ability to anticipate and be precognizant. Some builds you can AFK and talk all day while fighting, other builds 'You blink you die'. Most of my builds are some variation of very expensive combined with 'You blink you die'.
SR/: I would say SR is the highest performance, but also at the highest cost by a very large margin. Only the top 0.5% of players are going to be able to drive it the effectively. This had the absolute best performance ... but also failed completely 11 of 12 runs with me at the wheel. Difficult to drive is an understatement.
SD/: I consider the SD my top tank currently. It already has 2 builds, and I plan on a 3d Offensive Proc Build. Harder and more expensive than Inv, but better performance. I use this in 801.B and up.
INV/: I run the Inv most of the time, simply because it's effectively auto-pilot 90% of the time. I use this up to 801.A.
/ENA: I run this up to 801.9. I would absolutely love to see this on a tank and see how it compares. I'd probably put a tank version even with INV/, +/- a notch. Tank variant might be a notch better, but might also be a notch worse, as compared to INV/. We'll never know till it gets propagated to Tanks.
Rad/: I run this up to 801.7 ... it could probably go up to 801.9, but there are better options. This is endemic of Resist sets in general. Give them external defense buffs and they're running around perma-T9. But with zero defense buffs, the DDR imbalance starts winning out at 801.7 and up. This is just a baked in game bias. WITH Buffs it's better, without it's worse. "Are you feeling buffed today, punk? Are you?"
Note: It's rare for standard content to be more difficult than 801.2. It's also rare for the standard team not to have at least minimal defense buffs. Therefore in normal standard content, it should be rare for this to not perform substantially better than might be indicated here.
The resist armor issue in 801 is similar to def/res issues of running standard content with random pugs. Joe always built i-cap with minimal resists, meanwhile, I took the same build and built more standard defenses with moderate to high resists while assuming there would be at least a pair of maneuvers on an 8 man incarnate team. 9 out of 10 teams, I'd live and Joe would die. 1 out of 10 teams, I'd die horribly and Joe would live and laugh maniacally. Aka: most incarnate teams have at least minimal defense buffs. However, in 801.7 and up 'minimal defense buffs' starts becoming insufficient. The higher you go in 801, the more defense (and resist) buffs you need. But in standard content, you never reach anything near this difficulty level.
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The new EMP Arrow is a beast of it's own kind. ... I noticed it when I added it to some new 801 Mobs 😜
TA after the revamp is really well worth second look if you haven't already.
As for blast sets, I tend to recommend Fire, Ice, Water. Water being my overall favorite after Dual Pistols (I love DP but tend to not recommend it. DP is below average without a proc build, and proc builds are complicated).
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Here are both mine. One is 801 SLE emphasis, the other is Psi-Tank emphasis.
SD RadM Tank - Prototype 801 - Build i4 - [i26].mxd
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Anchor a Boss or higher. Even if they die, the toggle stays on the corpse usually till the end of the fight.
That won't help with KB happy team-mates. This is why most of use strongly dislike KB, and instead favor KD or the use of KB-to-KD IOs.
Some of the strongest debuffs are Anchors. You have to compromise something when you pick other versions.
Rad and Traps are the classic AV killers. If you're wanting easy-mode AV kills on TFs, those are the best choices.
I'm not sure how the TA revamp does vs AVs. You want perma stackable -500 regen if not -1000 regen to take out the hardest +4 AVs.
Time - doesn't have the -regen for AVs, but is a beast otherwise.
Poison - has horrible radius, I don't recall how it stacks on on -regen either, you'd have to look it up.
Traps - doesn't work well in fast moving teams. One of my personal favorites, just the same.
TA - the new TA is nice, but doesn't have the -to-hit magnitude of Time, Dark, Rad, Nature
For that playstyle, that's probably the choices.
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I try to run after work EST, Everlasting(home), Excelsior(May/June). I might try Torch in June/July. Any other time is rare.
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Additional 801 Team Recommendations
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Bring your best incarnate character. If you’re dead … you’re venge-bait.
- 2 or 3 tanks. 7 and up I recommend at least 2 tanks. Aggro can be insane, and more than one tank can handle alone.
- 2 or 3 control. Control is awesome, but the higher difficulty you go the harder it is for a single controller to do the job.
- 2 or 3 buff/debuff. The higher you go, the harder they hit, the more you need to protect the entire team.
- 2 or 3 damage. If you go high enough in difficulty, the EBs become almost as durable as AVs. Don’t neglect your damage capabilities.
- How you stuff 12 roles into 8 slots is up to you. 😜
- I suggest using Caution, Strategy and Tactics.
- In the worst case, If you go in guns blazing you can end up facing 16 spawns from all directions. Under those circumstances buffs trump debuffs. Under more careful conditions the higher magnitude of debuffs can outweigh buffs.
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CoH enemies as a whole have a weakness to: Fear, Confuse, KD … this is no different.
- Control can, if employed precisely with care and coordination, eliminate 90% of the damage from 90% of the mobs.
- Control is extremely useful, but since 7 and up are EBs, matched coordinated or stacked controls get a greater emphasis.
- Control becomes even more difficult in 11 and up, you might need 3 controllers instead of 2.
- CoH incarnate enemies are primarily SLE damage, this is no different. Their To-Hit and Damage are both increased to at least Incarnate levels. They will hit you, and it will hurt.
- 801.A is (5k dps average, 10k spikes, 25k max spike) vs an aggro-capped unarmored target. Any and all Buffs/Debuffs will be useful.
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Bring your best incarnate character. If you’re dead … you’re venge-bait.
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What damage type is it?
You know when you're testing a new AE Arc, in test-mode, there's a button "Kill Target" linked to the /architect_killtarget command? I gave that command to the MoBs. 😜
Why?
Because PI Council Farms get boring.
It started long long ago in a galaxy far far away, as a way for me to differentiate armors that were all effectively lumped into a giant pile of 'good armor'. Then various crazy people started asking for more and different versions, some easier, some harder ... and we ended up with a few. Then along comes Homecoming, and over time things evolve ... and then we have 6 or 7 versions. Then along comes @CU_Krow who says they are "all too easy" ... so then are 10 or 11 versions. Then Krow says, "that's still too easy" ... and now there's 15 versions. D (13) has been completed 3 or 4 times now, but most teams never make it past 7. Unfortunately, most teams implode on 7
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The answer Linea gave was in context. I said any tank will tank the game and even Scrappers can tank. Linea answered the way we currently are an Empath can do it. Someone asked about the Empath. Linea posted the build.
Nightmare Shaman was also the one that asked about the empath.
And in context, I did also recommend not only ANY tank, which IS my recommendation, but also recommended more specifically:
QuoteI recommend: /EnA (Defense, Any AT), Rad (Resist-Cap, Brute and Tank), /Bio (Heal-Armor, Any AT) . . Defense Alternate for tanks: SD/ and Inv/ ... but really any armor will work for the official game content.
If you want even more specific, 'there can be only one', then I'd say Inv/ ... it's practically auto-pilot and top tier durable. I said that somewhere recently as well, but perhaps not this thread. Personally if *I* could have only one, I'd pick SD and dual-build or tri-build (Non-Psi high def/res, Psi-Tank, Proc Monster) ... and that's exactly what I've done and/or am doing. But I've also built the other armors as well. One of my next projects is probably looking at a better SD/ProcMonster, preferably in RadM. I'm good at the high def/res builds, I'm not nearly as good at the Proc Monster builds.
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Hold Aggro? *shrug* More of a scrapper in that regard.
You can armor most ATs, and most builds, but not quite all, well enough to solo most official content short of +4 AVs and i-Trials (and even Apex and Tinmage with several builds, Lambda gets more problematic but not impossible, and BAF and above are probably too much for the 'squishies', but as soon as I say that someone will have probably done it with an all-squishie min-size team.).
The tank version of that should be trivial, hence the 'play the tank you want' comment.
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14 hours ago, Sovera said:
... We are at a point where even a Scrapper can tank most things so you'll do fine if you pick something you enjoy...
An armored empath can tank all the official game content except the i-trials, which have cheaty AV mechanics. Play what you want.
I recommend: /EnA (Defense, Any AT), Rad (Resist-Cap, Brute and Tank), /Bio (Heal-Armor, Any AT) . . Defense Alternate for tanks: SD/ and Inv/ ... but really any armor will work for the official game content.
Infinitum, Hyperstrike, Sovera, Myshkin, and many others all have great builds. The named ones are just the one's I've stolen from most recently. 😜
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Note: all of the following assumes amps, dampenders, basebuffs, demonic, and/or wedding bed.
In working on an 801 tank (see link in sig), SR failed 11 of 12 runs, and the 12'th run was a thing of beauty surpassing all other builds. AKA: it's hard as hell to pull off, but if you the player perform flawlessly, the the peak performance of SR can be fantastic, well beyond what most would ever suspect. At the same time, you should expect to fall short of that goal 11 out of 12 times. There's a reason I recommend Inv/ first, and SD/ second, and normally don't include SR.
I've lost the charcter to test server wipes, so I can't promise this is exact, but it looks correct to my recollection:
SR DM Tank - Prototype 801 - DN 2i - [i25].mxd
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The teleport bug has been there for a while .... NOW that someone mentioned it, I remember it going back a fair ways ... I just thought it was my macros, binds, random maps, or related to the known powexeclocation bugs ... and since it always happened in neck deep in combat, I never investigated it, just shrugged it off and kept on fighting.
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Accuracy and Defense interact, but are not the same, so ... yes.
Yes, a +4 AV will hit you more than a +4 minion. Can't swear your numbers are 100% accurate without digging up an ancient spreadsheet I have somewhere.
This is why defense-cap builds balance roughly with resist-cap builds ... assuming 50+1 vs 54 content, in the standard game, and max dps levels of official content. Resist builds typically have more HP/S (regen or healing), and cap at 90% (10% incoming damage) .. while defense has less HP/S and cap at a rough average of 8%. Now, if you don't resist-cap this doesn't work, if you're running +0 there is also an imbalance, and if you're debuffed below -35% defense vs +4s there is also another imbalance. But in the end, the parity of resist-cap (tank brute) vs defense-cap is actually much closer than most people realize, despite the baked in imbalances in the game. (Roughly, Conceptually Speaking)
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Gaint Congratulations and Many Many Thanks to the first team to complete 801.C and 801.D.
801.C (Excelsior): Brandis, Fubar-Licious, Jezebel Delias, Krazy Kilowatt, MidnightBloom, Miss Super Anarchy, Micro Atomic
801.D (Excelsior): Brandis, Jezebel Delias, Fubar the Hunter, R3d H3rring, Charmed to Meet You, Heat Loss, Celestial Shot
You were all Awesome!
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... They had some tuning issues like too many ambushes. ...
This is intentional. The faster you move through the maps the more resistance you'll catch. The fact that 7 and up actually kick you out the front door, I find that is unintentionally working as intended.
Each tier of 801 has 3 missions of increasing difficulty. Each successive tier has more difficult mobs. If you are a small weak squishy team without buffs, you may want to skip up the ladder 0, 3, 7 sticking to the easiest mission per tier, these can probably be run safely by 3-man teams. Avoid A and up entirely, they don't play by any rules.
- Charging in and nuking rooms will trigger ambushes, and potentially lots of them, as well as aggroing up to four or five mobs that are already in the room to start with.
- Ambushes mean the team has to figure out what to do when the tank is overwhelmed. If the team as a whole is too weak or too small, then stick to the easiest mission of each tier (0,3,7).
- The hardest mission of each tier is intended for a stronger team of incarnates, it's intended that the team have some way to deal with multiple groups of enemies.
- Team-wide Buffs are strongly encouraged, as is Control.
- The one EB per mission that can cage a tank, means the team has to figure out what to do when the tank is taken out, even if for only 30 seconds.
To expand on the missions in each tier: I use simplier easier maps on the first, and the most complex difficult maps on the last. As to Ambushes: The first mission has zero or one ambush, the second mission has a one-trigger and a two-trigger, the third has a pair of three-triggers. I have considered spreading the last out into a one trigger, two trigger, three trigger, but that really won't help much if you charge in and nuke the room with judgements. Also spawn points and geometry are limited, it's really hard to design that room if I have to give up yet another spawn point just to spread out the ambushes. Charging in Leroy Style and Nuking one of those rooms is just asking for a team-wipe even without the ambushes.
PS: Published D, E, and F. Don't even attempt them.
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The following should be AFK-able in both SL and Fire farms. Std def with 1 target, i-cap defense saturated ... I kept as much Energy resist as I could, but supplement with Kinetic Dampeners if needed. WEAK TO PSIONIC. I stripped most of the psionic to seal up def/res in SLFC (I had already stripped psionic in favor of SLE).
You can likely improve it even further.
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For an SL specific build, I'd say Inv/. I parked Skylark AFK in 709 and Briggs S&L ... she could have stood there for hours taking no damage. ... Then I toggled off everything except 'Temp Invul' .... and they still couldn't kill her.
She did ok in Briggs regular Fire Farm as well, but you can't AFK. You can Alternate Hybrid Core T4 to seal up Fire resists, with Dull Pain 60s (halfway) into the gap between hybrids. You could Rebuild for more Fire Resist, she's built for 801. You could put Rebirth on you or your wife to cover when he goes afk too long. I'd probably recommend rebuilding for SL/Fire farms. Shouldn't be too hard to manage, then he can just AFK no matter what, take a nap, come back and still be alive. 8-p Sorry I don't have a rebuild like that atm, but it should be possible, famous last words.
PS: You might want to test any build on the test server, with the missions you normally run .... that might save you some frustration.
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It's mostly just Lucy's build won't benefit much from it. Unless it procs off contaminated damage? If it's only the actual AoEs, those are a bit sparse to be effective at applying the debuffs.
A build like Asja that's almost all AoE all the time when inside piles could really stack the debuffs on. But Asja is already running mid-70s to mid-80s defense, so if I did anything on her it'd be the -damage, and that's the worst possible proc, you're lucky to get -10 damage even with her AoE centric capabilities. If I rebuilt her with darkest night, the stacking -damage would probably then make it worth it. But I'm really not sure I'll ever rebuild her as a Darkest Night build, I really like her build as-is, decent damage, great defense, moderate resists. I don't remember if there's an interface proc for draining endurance, but that's another one I might at least experiment with on Asja's build. She's really good at draining targets in any of the longer larger fights.
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WARNING: Do not attempt 801.7 and above unless you have tried the lower difficulties and found them too easy. I suggest starting with 801.2.
Published 3 more maps: 801.A-Short, 801.B, 801.C
A shorter version of A that should be a little more accessible to more teams. And a pair of more difficult versions for those crazy people that thought A was too easy.
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I generally do use Void Judgement.
I generally don't use Diamagnetic, but I have.
I generally don't use paralytic, but have done that as well too.
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Instead of nuking rune to make us pick other less useful or non-existent options, give us more options to fill the same hole in different and interesting ways. Then let us choose.
I'd rather see a slightly less effective rune with the longer duration, as I posted before.
I'd also like to see the other origin pools buffed. It should be a hard choice, which one I prefer.
I'd like to see other mez protection options in other/new origin pools. Something like /Martial's mez clicky for blasters comes to mind as one example. That one would be perfect for low end builds. I'd like to see even other options as well.
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EnM would have been either an @Infinitum build or @Hyperstrike Build. They both contributed builds and ideas. I personally don't do EnM.
- I would suggest Inv/ with RadM or DM. The more Psionic resilient builds of Infinitum and Hyperstrike will make the better overall builds. DM is less fiddly than RadM, adds to-hit buffs and endurance management, but at the cost of lower AoE and lower Self-Healing.
- SD has better peak performance and better psionic performance, but requires more player resources, and possibly temp powers and extras. I plan on making a Psionic variant of SD, but I also dont' mind the extra expense in both temps and player resources. I'm ok with burning 10m/hr on temps, you might not want to be. Therefore, I primarily recommend Inv/.
- SR can peak even higher, but it's impractically expensive in player resources, temps, and so on. Unless you are the twitch king, you are going to blink and die, frequently. In my testing I died at least 10 times in less than 5 minutes each before I finally managed the 30+m run in 801.A. It was very frustrating. Furthermore, the Rune changes will impact the SR the most, making it even more likely to blink and die. The SD is performing well enough, with a lower peak, but also much less frustration.
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I do the following, in the order listed.
- Fire Farm, or SL Farm - This is a pretty basic level of durability
- Cimmie Test - aggro three groups of +4 cimmies, making sure to keep the 6 bosses aggroed, then grab your ankles for 10 minutes. No offensive powers allowed, only defensive.
- Solo +4x8 ITF - This gets a little hairy on the dps check to kill a +4 AV that runs like a madman, so I don't worry too much if that is the only failure point. So far it hasn't caused any complete failures, but I have had to use reds on a few low damage builds that didn't have either a taunt nor immobilize.
- Complete a Solo +4x8 AE 801.2 in the time given (2 hours). - Just search 801.2 in AE. If you want harder or easier ones you can search 801 instead for the complete series.
Most of my builds regardless of AT can do all of the above.
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Lucy Medrano
+4x16: Nuking a Room full of Unlimited Aggro. Some combinations are worse than others, and pulling half of two groups can get overlapping doubled debuffs that don't normally happen in a single group.-
Build: SD RadM Tank - Prototype 801 - Build i4 - [i26]
- This build is both more durable and less durable at the same time, and requires considerably more player resources and concentration as compared to the Inv.
- 9 and down, I'm gonna give the star to the Inv. It's just so steady state, and overall in one run of a 9 I used a whole total of 2 medium lucks.
- A and up, the debuffs and dps are just so brutal I'm gonna give the star to the SD. The Inv is overall steadier and easier to drive, but inside heavy debuffs situations it burns through inspirations faster, and can have a solo uptime of less than 2 minutes. The SD is much harder to drive, much fiddlier, but it's uptime is 6+m even inside heavy debuffs.
- 801.A and up, if you are very unlucky, The Inv might burn through an inspirations a minute, compared to 1 or 2 inspirations every 6 minutes for the SD.
- Overall Steadiness to the Inv vs Peak Performance to the SD
- Solo/Self_Sufficient goes to the SD, but with enough team buffs, the Inv will be the most comfortable and steady, due to steady state resist, Better HP, and a Self Heal
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Primary Hole is Resists
- Hybrid/OwtS/Hybrid/Demonic ... Hybrid/OwtS/Hybrid/Wedding_Band ...
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Secondary Hole is Endurance
- OwtS Crash is very painful
- Even with Cardiac Core T4 Endurance is painful.
- Sappers are Deadly, keep that defense up in the 50s.
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Tertiary Hole is DDR
- When DDR drops, cascade happens but usually slowly. However, Cascade does still happen, ... and it's deadly when it does.
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When Defense starts dropping below 57 to 59 … start monitoring.
- Demonic, Purple Candy, Combat Armor (Accolade), as well as Team Buffs
- When Defense drops below 50, then Sappers can drain you in a blink.
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Combat Monitor
- Stealth
- DDR
- Last Chance to Hit
- Melee Defense
- Ranged Defense
- Aoe Defense
- Stun Protection
- Smashing Resist
- Energy Resist
- Fire Resist
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Build: SD RadM Tank - Prototype 801 - Build i4 - [i26]
Is Forecefield Worth Taking as a Primary Anymore?
in Defender
Posted · Edited by Linea
FF makes a nice Sentinel, and potentially more durable, but less damage. I tend to prefer Huntsman in that role, but I have FF in the role as well.
FF Water Dark - Soul Drain - Overwatch 1 - [i25].mxd FF Water - Budget Build 2 - [i26].mxd
FF DP - Hound 9a - [i26].mxd FF DP Defender - Dark Beta 1b - [i25].mxd FF DP Scorpion Def - STF SLE 1c - [i25].mxd