Warlawk

So I've been away for a couple of years and am back playing much more casually now. While I was gone it seems that HC has taken AE farming out behind the shed and put two in the back of its head. So, in modern HC CoX is it better to farm in the wild? If so what missions do you find best for this purpose? The few that immediately came to mind would be the council earth portal mission, Battle Maiden and potentially the Behemoth Infernal mission for fire farming? Not a big fan of those tunnels though. Looking forward to any suggestions or tips!

Build Name T1 T2 T3 Thugs/Time Albert MF'n Einstein Planck, Heisenberg, Chester Shrodinger, Oppenheimer Hawking Thugs/Nature Balm Terrestris Wildfire x2Unnamed x2Unnamed Equinox Beasts/Nature Zen Dryad Summer, Shaggy, Nymeria Nala, Sarabi Ghost Bots/Time Zen Technocracy Iteration V, VI, and VII Iteration VIII and IX Iteration X Ninjas/Time Waifu No Jutsu Anatsu Harusame, Senjutsu Udon, Tokushu Somen Sushi-No-Mikoto, Hachiman Temaki Kage no Wasabi Demon/Dark Broken Oaths Mockery, Disdain, Spite Contempt, Scorn Arrogance Demon/Time Zen Hellcaller Huggles, Huggy Bear, Hugs N Cuddles Mommy Hugs, Daddy Hugs Hugs Jackson

MMs may not farm as quickly as specialized farming builds, but they can farm anywhere you want. I always found Maria Jenkins "Defeat Infernal and his Guards' to be a great farm for MM since it forces the enemies into narrow hallways where your AOE will just melt the crowd. EDIT: My thugs/time and his boyz!

Since the build is using a personal attack I figured I might get a little mileage out of the damage set bonus (+3% of no damage is still no damage 😛 ) and it was more for slotting the A/D and E/D than the rech on the enhancements themselves. Really as long as you have the Expedient pet aura in there you can drop in any two enhancements of your choice that provide A/D and E/D

See Statement #1! Seriously though while I'm happy to organize and consolidate the information, extensive testing of everything personally isn't in the cards. In addition to the things in the thread already I've tinkered with another dozen+ various projects on the test server that didn't produce results worth mentioning. My drive for actively testing is a bit low right at the moment, but I am happy to add any information anyone wants to submit to the thread so we have good comparisons. Frostweaver also hit a very valid point here in that it would not be a direct comparison though it sounds like Brigg has a 49 S&L Farm on the way for us soonTM !

Necro is a fairly versatile primary. It's got soul extraction to mule, extra control from the lich and the -tohit will give a nice little boost without specifically requiring any secondary to leverage it. There is also some built in healing so that leaves you less feeling like you're locked into a secondary with healing. EDIT: I am in agreement with STJ above that an AOE heal feels like a requirement to me. I get nervous not having one in a MM build. Cold, Dark, Nature, Rad, Thermal, Time and Traps should all do pretty well with it. You're already familiar with my thoughts on /time, so we'll just skip over that. Of those I would probably put Dark and Nature at the top of the list. The others will likely all perform well, but when things start to go bad they're going to be very bad very fast and very hard to recover from short of just completely disengaging and starting over fresh (hah, fresh zombies!).

A second round of testing came out 2,305,892 and 138,353,543 so it looks like it might be a very small improvement. Since the base number was 2,300,107 the gains are very small and could just be RNG variance.

Personal preference. I almost exclusively solo my masterminds and while that little damage bonus is nice it's not worth a power pick to me in most cases. I find I get much more mileage out of Distortion field, time stop or whatever. There are some builds where you could easily swap out the travel power or the attack power or something like that and pick it up without having any serious impact on the build, mostly just a matter of tailoring things to your own preferences.

Well, keep us posted on how your project comes along in getting that up and running. The current MRB team is focused on a windows program that has always been a windows program. They seem to make every reasonable effort to make it accessible to other OS, but that's not what it was developed for or written to accommodate. Throwing snark and an entitled attitude at people doing amazing work for free just because it isn't being developed in the direction that you personally want is pretty bad form man.

They do indeed This is pretty much completely unneeded in most cases for farming. I think that one or two of the builds may have +5 recharge slotted into hasten but even that should be unnecessary once you have ageless to T4. Your damage will already be well into ED, ACC shouldn't be an issue on a farmer, end is a non-issue on a completed build and Rech should be more than sufficient for a gapless attack chain, especially once you consider buff recasting into the mix. In short, the only reason I can see to +5 most things in a farming build is to really drive home the point that "I have more money than God". I haven't tested but it might be worth looking at to see if the raw damage outdoes the debuff. EDIT: Tested the Rad/Fire with T3 Degenerative 75% chance for dot. Results 2,313,464 p minute 138,807,875 p hour. Very slightly above current numbers but within variance. Will probably try to test again a time or two when I have time.

So it looks like we now have the option to toggle on Protector Bots and see the effect their defense buff would have on the MM, which is very cool. Unfortunately, I don't think that the one probot bubble will actually give me 40% defense in game. Also, probots are still not allowed to slot defense set IOs which they can in game.

If you are planning on farming exclusively it won't matter in the least little bit. If you plan to do any sort of content outside of farming and may exemplar then attuned will be the go to for anything that isn't a purple or pvp IO. Personally, I just do attuned out of habit. That way should I ever decide to strip a character those IOs are useful to me for other characters.

I'm not up to digging through past threads and caretaking such a thread but I would be happy to contribute my MM builds to a project like that.

Sometimes... AE is just finicky like that. Everything will be set correctly and it just won't work right, still giving you level 50 numbers. When it does it to me I leave the TF then toggle both the XP and the Exemp XP settings a couple of times, then reset them to where they should be and apply. Completely close the client and relaunch. This usually fixes it, but there have been times it didn't and I just gave up, but then it worked correctly with no adjustment to settings when I log in the next day. I think it's just another example of CoH spaghetti code, I've never seen any concrete reason or foolproof solution to fixing it when it happens.

Yeah, it's not 100% clear on that because of then followed by clarification that separates the two. The main reason it seemed out of place is that the dual blades cones and Cross Punch have the same range and the DB cones were hitting the RWZ target dummies on both sides (3 total, center, left and right) while I couldn't get cross punch to hit a second target at all regardless of positioning.

This is an instance of two different uses of the same word. The macro to fire off my attacks in order is a macro on my logitech programmable mouse which sends keystrokes to the active window.

Very cool! Would love to see the build and your times and such when you get done. I don't *think* that the 48 bit is going to have any real effect on things, I'm not sure if it's just an earlier version of the farm and it wasn't synched on test or something but it's that way for me as well.

Quite specifically, as I laid out in my post, that's how I play on live. When I start a new character I get them into the 20s and then buy attuned sets for everything I need for the build up to level 50. In order to have any sort of valuable point of reference I wanted to recreate that same level of building while testing the tanker. Since most of the tanker players are more interested in laying out hypothetical situations than testing, I tested in a way that I would have a valid experience that would give me perspective to compare to what I am already familiar with. What I don't see however, is your personal testing results.

I was testing to verify that Attack Vitals triggers off the increased cone size for tanker Dual Blades (it does, yay!) and tested Cross Punch while I was at it. Facing the target dummies in RWZ the DB 180% cones were able to hit the dummies to both sides of the one I was standing in front of. Repositioning myself to account for the smaller cone of Cross Punch I was not able to get it to hit a second target regardless of my position. Testing on mobs in the zone it seems like it benefits from the improved arc but does not seem to be getting the range increase. This should probably be verified for the arc as well, I don't think I've ever actually taken a melee 50 degree arc since back before shut down, but testing on mobs that were constantly shuffling for position and such it certainly felt more generous than 50 degrees.

Something that seems to be decidedly lacking in this thread is actual testing in game to see how it feels in play with an unfinished build. I've created an elec/claws tanker and set level to 22 because that's how I would play on live, life before SO/IOs is just miserable regardless of anything else. This build was fully twinked with ATOs, Winter sets end procs in health etc because that's how I play on live. I then went and got my radio, set to +0x5 and starting running random radio missions. I've leveled a lot of brutes and scrappers like this so that is my primary comparison point. Claws was selected for the good early attack chain and excellent early level AoE. I was popping inspirations as they dropped without too much attention, just like normal. Vs Freakshow I certainly found that their end drain was noteworthy when combined with the slower defeat speed of the tanker, I needed to keep an eye on my end bar with larger packs that contained multiple elec blast bastards just because they were alive longer to keep hitting those saps. Elec end drain resist was nice here and it never got to the point of running dry, but it was noticeable (compared to brute/scrapper). Vs Tsoo I found that any pull with two or more sorcerers really required attention because my damage was low enough (compared to brute/scrapper) that their heals were relevant. Sorcerers also got lots of mileage out of their ability to teleport out and back in since they didn't die instantly. Vs Lost When I saw a Lost mission pop up I started salivating. That went south pretty quickly. When you don't have enough damage to wipe them out in one rotation those rech debuffs hurt a lot. Lightning field put in work on this mission as I was standing there waiting for recharges watching my HP drop. Vs Council I found they were the usual loot pinatas we have all come to know and love to hate. Some of the bigger spawns did put out enough dakka to see my HP start dropping down towards the 1/3 mark before they started dying off to the damage aura and aoe. Vs Sky Raiders they were easy but... annoying. Porters and the various jetpack types were able to do what they are supposed to do. They lived long enough to port in and out, fly around and generally be a nuisance. Not tough, but it certainly made you actually feel the flavor of the faction when they don't just fall over dead in one rotation. Vs Arachnos it felt much the same as Vs Lost. The rech and other debuffs have more time to really make their impact felt and your toughness as a tanker gets a chance to shine. I did find that regularly I would need to wait a few moments for my heal to come off cooldown before moving on to the next group. Not like every pull or anything, but regularly enough to be noticeable. Spin and the damage aura felt fantastic with the area increase. Overall even crunching reds as often as I could I was still glad to have set aside some greens because I needed them. I'm not sure that playing with bosses on is a good plan because they don't drop fast and have a lot of opportunity to land those annoying effects (-rech, I'm looking at you!). Overall it felt good to play but noticeably slower than a brute or scrapper, it absolutely had a bit of the "I am Inevitable" vibe to it which was a lot of fun. The different factions felt much more distinct when you don't wipe them out as fast, which was cool. Lightning field did a lot of heavy lifting since targets were on the field longer. Under contrived best circumstance scenarios I have no doubt that Tankers will be relatively close in performance to Brutes, and that's OK because currently under those circumstances they are useless compared to Brutes. In general pickup group leveling play they feel quite different and are not in danger of eclipsing anyone except maybe defenders for damage. For the people railing against Tanker damage changes I challenge you to put your money where your mouth is and do something similar then post your experiences without hyperbole instead of just making up hypotheticals that will only ever exist on the forum because ideal circumstances just don't exist in game. I mean, come on... how many times have you had to sigh in frustration because the /kin was just at the edge of the group and missed all the scrappers/brutes with Fulcrum shift while they buffed the heck out of the defenders, corruptors and MMs? These changes affect theorycrafting far more than actual play. Give them an actual try instead of just yelling that the sky is falling.

You actually want them dropping so that you can convert them to reds. When you "turn off" an inspiration at the p2w vendor it doesn't actually change the drops it just refuses them, essentially it deletes the drop before it actually goes into your tray. You won't get more reds just because everything else is turned off, so you want them to actually drop so you can convert them into reds. Wakies and breakies seem to drop with slightly less frequently than the others so they don't convert as fast and have a tendency to clog up your tray. If you don't turn them off you run the risk of having to manually tinker with your tray, slowing things down. My personal settings are to turn off/refuse Wakies, Breakies and Larges. With those settings I never have to touch the tray, it is completely handled by the macro and cannot clog up with a mix of things that won't combine. I tried running with larges on for a while and the tray would clog (in that it was full and did not have any valid combinations) and require manual attention roughly 1 time per asteroid map. In keeping with Statement #1, I found it easiest for me to just shut off larges in addition to wakies and breakies.

Well, part of the reason that I automate as much as I do with just running a straightforward macro like this is medical. I suffer severe chronic vertigo and when I'm spinning it's often tough to maintain focus well enough to run traditional missions so I started tinkering with farming and ended up making a project out of it. I know a lot of people who farm when they're not feeling well, or watching a movie or other such distracted distracted states. I absolutely welcome the peak efficiency type tips and am happy to see them in the thread but part of the goal was to establish a baseline of numbers that are realistic for anyone to attain. Snapshot perfect rotations with error margins in the milliseconds just isn't a good representation of how most people are going to farm. It's great for pylon time tests and such, but most people just don't give a damn. It can be really frustrating to see someone pull AREALLYBIGNUMBER and then when you actually run the build you can't get close to that. Using the mouse macro to just repeat right down the numberline should produce a fairly attainable expectation for farming and leave room for people to improve as they find the farmer that they enjoy and really perfect the playstyle. For instance, as you said Claws has more potential than indicated by these numbers by leveraging Spin better. I think that Savage Melee might actually have the highest potential for someone interested in really micromanaging the blood stacks and developing their expertise with the set. TL;DR, I love seeing the really precise tips and information and knowledge is power, but that wasn't specifically my goal here.

If only I looked that young and vital

The Rad only uses 9 of 10 slots, in order as follows Hasten Ageless Destiny Fiery Embrace Ionize Blank Ball Lightning Burn Fences Atom Smasher Ion Judgement This order interacts with my macro in that Ion is last so if I click the macro but do not repeat it will end on the judgement and I can be sure to fire it regardless of its position on the list because it will be the last power clicked. Frostweaver did a pretty good summary there of how the macros work. Mine is very simple and straightforward. Press 1, wait 100ms, press 2, wait 100 MS etc for 1 through 10 and then repeat. This is the same mouse I use and it's a great little guy! I do wish it was a bit physically larger like the G700 that I had before because I have large hands... but other than that (and that's clearly user error! ) I have absolutely no complaints. I love that it has a third primary click/button, it was strange at first but I really came to like having it. So it has Left Click, Right Click, and a thinner More-to-the-right Click. I've actually bound that to Ctrl+0 to activate 0 tray 3 and starting putting my heal there for all of my characters. I use another for buffs that I always fire in pair such as Power Boost and Farsight, it will cast tray3 slot8, delay 2 seconds, then cast Tray3 slot9. I actually have two of these. I use one to trigger my travel power toggle macro. (Will include below) I use three more to send numpad keystrokes in conjunction with the Mastermind Numpad controls listed in my signature so I have my most commonly used pet commands at the touch of a thumb! With a programmable mouse and CoH's bind/macro system you can do a LOT to make things convenient for yourself. EDIT: Ageless is a clickie so no need to worry about detoggling that, I have it on my bar to be triggered along with everything else, but I would love a trick for including Assault in the order without detoggling as well! EDIT2: I found a way, experimenting with it a bit now. At the most basic level /Macro Atom "Powexecname Atom Smasher$$powexec_toggleon Assault Core Embodiment" The first press will toggle on Assault, any subsequent presses will use Atom Smasher. I'm going to experiment a little with combining this into one of the existing bind files along with the inspiration functions. @Frostweaver EDIT3: Ok, so it works as part of the bind files, purely as example because I had an empty slot there on the rad melee I used 5 and changed the bind to /bind 5 "powexec_slot 5$$powexec_toggleon Assault Core Embodiment$$powexec_tray 5 6$$powexec_tray 4 6$$powexec_tray 3 6$$powexec_tray 2 6$$powexec_tray 1 6" It will combine and eat reds as normal, if Assault is available to be started it will toggle it on and if none of those things happen, it will trigger the power in slot 5.

I'm sure this is correct. Even using a mouse macro just changing up the order I have them on the bar can impact performance. For those who are manually hitting their powers a proper rotation would be a great resource. Done. No logs exist for the old Rad Melee build but it's going to be in the same ballpark as others with similar earnings. I don't have them broken down by individual run time as I test using the full 5 mission block, only using 1 mission while punching Lore and Hybrid in particular would give skewed frontloaded results, I've seen first mission finishes topping out up in the 2.8 to 2.9 mil inf/minute range and then it will normalize over time. As far as I can tell it will only work with the "Safe Mode" selection from the launcher. I think I've messed that up and tried to just run the 64bit by habit almost every time I've tried to test.