Erydanus

I'm just going to make 1 suggestion: You should put the Gaussian proc in Concentration. It will trigger most of the time you use Concentration. Where you have the chance of reset-your-buildup proc is irrelevant because it's a global, but Mass Levitate will trigger it FREQUENTLY. So expect to have build up as part of your attack chain and expect to have double to quadruple buildups. If you are tight for that slot, you can take a slot out of stamina, you're overkilling it with 4 pieces of Performance Shifter; the 2.5% recovery bonus is just not going to make a difference on top of you having its proc and the three recovery procs in health. (The 3-piece hit point bonus could still be useful so I'm not going to suggest just going for 2 endmods and boosting them instead of a set here.)

Since Fortunatas start with a little more than 100 end, the +endurance accolades stack even more powerfully on them I see you have both Miracle & Numina recovery procs, but apparently the Panacea +endurance proc ends up yielding more endurance hard numbers wise than either. I wouldn't personally put the Gaussian Proc into Mind Link. First to be clear, it can only affect you so it's not like your team benefits. Secondly the build up only lasts like 5 seconds so if there's a chance you'll fire Mind Link and then the team will run in to fight and you won't be shooting something off already, it's going to waste. If you're normally dropping mind link in the middle of the frey right as you start using heavy hitters, well that's sensible then; but I don't think that's typical. If you put it in one of your leadership toggles, it will check to fire off each teammate affected by it and then confer that buff to you, albeit at random times. But apparently it will be firing very frequently so you'll just randomly get power ups from it; an appreciable net gain, but not controlled. Finally, if you put it in Aim it will, like Mind Link, fire off almost every time. Since you normally only use Aim before unleashing some hideous deathblast like Psychic Wail, that's where my personal choice is. PS: if you're combining inspirations to make blues that often, you should probably make some macros and have those buttons floating by the insp window in a spare tray. I don't know the command offhand but I know it's hella simple.

The normal recommendation for the chance to hide proc on mechanical reasons alone is always in the Assassin's Strike power of your set because if it's anywhere else there's a chance it might trigger as you're doing for an assassin's focus "fast strike" and discover that you've gone into stealth and are doing the slow traditional snipe-like long version of AS. Also I don't have #s for Psi Melee but I have to say the set feels powerful and I love the tier 9 which is its only AoE. Alas, despite being a newer set, it does give up it's melee cone, Psi Blade Sweep, on stalkers. We just get Mass Levitate, or as I think of it, the button that has a 50% chance of triggering the build up resetting proc. Between it and an AoE power in my epic, I'm resetting build-up very frequently. Remember, some Stalker Epics get good AoEs (and not just shitty cones): Blaze Mastery gets Fireball but no snipe; Weapon Mastery gets Exploding Shuriken but no snipe; and Mu Mastery gets Ball Lightning AND a snipe, Zapp.

I wouldn't bother with putting any -tohit on there, even for a defender it's only -6.25% tohit. Tohit is on schedule B so if you put a whole enhancement on that it's just be upping it from -6.25% to -7.5%. An additional 1.25% tohit debuff is worthless; just treat what you get as icing on the cake spelling out "Screw You $Target!". Use the space for end reduction; it's still not going to be a big number but it will measurably help you. (7.8 end -> 5.85 end for 33% end reduction). Darkest Night has 18.75% tohit debuff and I don't even think THAT is really worth a heavy investment in slotting for. But, if you stack darkest night and fearsome stare and various other dark powers with a smaller debuff including Twilight Grasp on a target then the cumulative effect is very noticeable. Twilight Grasp also has an unenhanceable -damage and -regen power so basically you want to spam it as much as you can anyway.

Dark Defenders are pretty flexible. Most of the powers are good, many are good out of the box with minimal slotting (as uum noted, 2 recharge for tar patch and howling twilight and 2 end reducers for darkest night will carry you far) but at the same time it can benefit from heavy investment. Do you want to focus more on the damage side or the support side? My overall recommendation is that Dark Miasma benefits greatly from Frankenslotting, which means using Invention Set pieces for their values but not their set bonuses. This is particularly good in the 22-47 range. A very important thing to keep in mind is that if you start slotting your powers with sets, you often have to 6-slot them to get the full enhancement mix that would work best, and even then until you're 50 the sets you can use won't necessarily add up to the desired values even if you're using attuned sets. I recently got smacked hard by this realization because I 6-slotted a melee attack with an attuned PBAOE set and it was only 80% damage total at level 35 (and would only be 89% at 50, yikes), an actual downgrade from just slotting 1 Acc and 3 Damage generic IOs. On the other hand, with any 2 slots if you use 2 of the same pieces that are 3 parters you get excellent numbers. For instance in healing most sets have a Heal-Absorb/Endurance/Recharge piece. Using level 25 IOs each of those parameters is 16%, so if you put in 2 of them it adds up to 32% Heal-Absorb, 32% Endurance, 32% Recharge - the effect of 3 slots in just 2 slots. This is big bang for the buck when you are lower level and don't have the full slots! In the case of Twilight Grasp there are unfortunately only 2 accurate heal sets and there's more emphasis on end reduction than recharge but you could definitely cook up decent leveling slotting with them. For instance combine 2 accuracy/heal/something pieces from the accurate heal sets and 2 heal/recharge pieces from 2 regular sets and you should end up with roughly the equivalent of 1 Acc, 1 End, 2 Rech, 2 Heal all in just 4 slots. Shadowfall for instance is a tremendous buff to both defense and certain resistances. I adore slotting it in this formula in general, from 1 set Defense, Defense/Endurance, Defense/Endurance/Recharge, and from another set the same pieces but for RESISTANCE. That way you can have a piece bonus for both a defense set and a resist set, near capped values on the protections and a reasonable amount of end reduction. However you could cram a couple def/end and resist/end from different sets to get you going. Again about 4 slots in that power is pretty functional if you use mixed pieces. Fearsome stare is amazing. It benefits from having as much recharge as you can get into it because you want to spam it on every mob; you will need some accuracy; the rest not as much. Fear duration is not as important since it's beefy out of the box; it's about -18% tohit but because tohitdebuff is on the B schedule for enhancements (20% for an SO instead of 33%) a single enhancement only gets you a slight increase. Endurance cost is very low (8 end! So CHEAP!!) it's not worth slotting for it. A couple Acc/Fear/Rech to get you going and then maybe just shove a couple extra recharge generics in until you're happy with its spammability. Petrifying Gaze was nerfed at the same time controller holds were, it used to be so spammable a Dark defender could hold a boss. Now it's been nerfed so bad it's just a lt holder. It's definitely an optional power; since you have freeze ray and bitter freeze ray available you'll have to make your own call about getting it and getting it to stack with other holds, if you even think it's worthwhile. Black hole is reviled, you should skip it for reasons you can find if you pop over to the controller forum. Dark Servant is wonderful and if you only put 1 proc in your build consider feeding Fluffy a "Cloud Senses: Chance for Negative Energy" proc because it can trigger on every one of his powers - and in fact that proc can go into almost all of your powers too. (Though, in general, you can get pretty wild with proccing out Dark powers but proccing the set for damage is actually a completely separate topic beyond general functional slotting tips!) Fluffy has several powers he cycles through including a heal, a hold, an immobilize, and that annoying damage and tohit debuff aura that Tsoo Sorcerers have, Chill of the Night. A lot of people just slot him for the tohit debuff, I personally have a little accurate healing in mine as well; it's definitely a personal choice. Accuracy/Mez hamidon enhancements are also a possibility at 50.

I do think the single target was a good choice for TC though, controller immobilizes are mag 4 out of the box so unless you're fighting an immobilize resisting mob (like Vahzilok) it's a good way to instantly have containment even on a boss, and if you don't care about damage it's still good to root them in place so they can't run away with your anchor. The thing about Dimension Shift too is if a teammate is in trouble, say like that time on Hess I got surrounded by melee mobs, and Dimension Shift is tossed on them, what happens is that you effectively lock your teammate in a penalty box WITH THE HOSTILES. It actually killed my character faster because the ranged damage (and holds!) that were coming from outside the dimension shift were blocked. In that situation Black Hole would have been better because my character wouldn't have been phased along with the hostiles and I could have just run away and regrouped. I think being able to terminate the phase early was a desirable update but making it a zone which can be entered is not working as intended. If you were to phase a group that was new and the tank ran in even that wouldn't be great, the tank couldn't benefit from heals and support. What would actually work better is if these powers affected THE TEAM for like 10 seconds, letting people run away or at least regroup, toggle back up, cast a heal, have an alpha strike not affect them, and in general just have a moment to get ready to resume fighting.

No I'm talking about 20 pissed off Cimmerorans who are charging back down the long hill, focusing on the squishies while the tank is a couple spawns ahead and not pulling them along with him as he bullets through yet another spawn.

I really like RedLynne's very thoughtful first post. I think it's an excellent compromise. I also think it's time to take a step back and look at the meta of the game and not just with a microscope on this exact issue. There is a change that might seem unrelated but it has radically affected play and that is the elimination of most crashes, especially for Nukes. I don't think we need to worry about City of Statues because the game is already City of Nukes; I mean that sincerely. I've seen whole spawns in a +4 TF blown up by nukes completely trivializing anything any support character did. If a controller could use their AoE holds a bit more, I'm not sure it would even impact game balance but at least it would feel like we could have something to do, and maybe controllers would get a little more appreciation compared to another damage dealer. For that matter, and apologies for tacking this on, but I have to point out when Containment went in, Controller epic pools weren't adjusted. It wasn't until MANY MANY issues later that the devs one day said on the forums "holy crap, how did we not half the damage of controller epics so that containment merely brought them up to 96% of where they were originally when we added containment?" The forums collectively responded "but we did in fact point this out at the time." And lo, the nerf fell. (I think the power balance guy had changed in the meantime and he Made A Decision and could not be talked down; I remember a lot of us were really angry). Anyway it was a real pain in the ass when it happened and I already had a level 50; it didn't change what my character could do only how fast, and made what was fun play more grindy. Since Homecoming has a higher damage and faster play meta I'd like to suggest that change simply be reverted as well. I have to stress here we're talking about 1 single target blast and 1 AoE in most controller epic sets, not a bunch of powers; some of the epics have a 3rd attack but some of the epics only have 1. Considering melee types can run around sniping things in combat with their epics, I just don't think this will be a problem, controllers still have to establish containment to get the full damage value. If anything, doubling their epics will probably mean some of them will just toss out a quick blast before the blaster drops their nuke and at least do some damage. The truth is the players who would benefit most from the AoE hold nerf and the epic damage nerf being reverted would be soloers. It would however also increase controller contribution to teams in general. But it would be particularly valuable to soloers, and people who run a duo or trio with just a spouse or friend.

The tankers I've played with have all but 1 or 2 been utterly terrible. They play like brutes. They just run from mob to mob and take alphas and then run along. They don't hold aggro for more than 10 seconds. People in the support and damage backline are left mopping up crap like you wouldn't believe. Can you imagine an ITF at +4/x8 where the tanker is going up the hill to the giant robot area and they are THREE SPAWNS ahead of the majority of the team? The no crash of nukes (which was a bad choice in my option because it really skewed the meta) means people are also used to just bombing constantly and playing in kind of an avalanche mode. Overall though, I think a lot of what's going on is people have to fend for themselves as best they can and if that means slapping an aoe immob on a rando group so I can put my own toggle debuff on it, I'll do it. I don't love it but I have the option to solo if I want or put my own teams together. I may not like how the meta is right now but I like the game's back.

You do not actually have to flip the cards over. If you are watching your window that reports drops, if you open a pack and close the window without flipping the cards over, you'll see what you got listed right there. As soon as the pack's opened the goodies actually fall into your email. As soon as another pack is opened the same thing happens. In other words, you can just open pack over and over, and then close the card window without toggling any cards when you're done. I have, however, had the system glitch on me when I went a little bit too fast doing this and then had to wait a few minutes while it unjammed. I recommend giving it a second or two between each one.

I bet that was manually run by some GMs. Now on the other hand, I heard there was a multizone Rularu invasion once (but it predates the level scaling code so it went BADLY for the player base...) You know there is a hero zone that doesn't have a unique zone event other than Rikti flyovers and it's Founder's Falls. It would be cool if there was a zone event to prevent a breakout from Eden into FF culminating in a giant monster. Maybe a GM version of Terra...

I had exited my mission recently which was a train mission and was standing there in the area by the south skyway city train and took the next mish. It was a hunt for crey and I thought, "huh this probably comes with an ambush." I waited a moment and heard the drone fire and looked over to see a level 35 crey scientist vaporizing. Well oops. So uh that's a complication with the suggestion of have them come out of the door mission you just exited: sometimes it's mission complete that triggers an ambush, sometimes it's mission accept that triggers an ambush, sometimes it's mission SELECT that triggers an ambush. And also of course that if you tried to have baddies come off a train they'd just be vaporized. But I really would love an AMBUSH INCOMING! in the big cartoony text like you get RARE DROP! in just because I'd like to step away from any lowbies and also make sure my toggles are on and then clean up my mess. (Heck a lot of times when you get hunt missions you get an ambush and who doesn't like target delivery??)

It's not every Task Force it's every "Signature" TF, which are to be fair most of them. The ones that are considered misc like Katie Hannon, Moonfire, Hess, Imperious, and the shadow shard ones - those will scale fully. The ones from major heroes like Positron, Synapse, Yin will always be top level. All the villain strike forces are signature. The Paragon Wiki explains it though note it is in error in saying the split Posi TF won't act as signature (might be a HC change not sure). https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Task_Force I do feel your pain I got in the exact same situation with a +6 doc buzzsaw. I blew through about (actual estimate here) 120 charges of envenomed dagger and 6 team wipes but we did take her down.

Literally, no. Just no. There is no special end management problem for Controllers and if there was it wouldn't be from their T1s costing too much. Stamina is free at level 2 which ameliorates most of the problems that people did have with attack chains at teen-ish levels before. As a controller if you're worrying about damage I presume you're talking about soloing, and if that's the case you need to play smartly and NOT spam your DoTs onto targets until the previous DoTs have run fully. Cycling your hold and immobilize on two different targets and letting them fully cook gets you the full amount of damage you paid end for. At higher levels if you're running various buffs & debuffs and attacking as well of course you need to strategize how to manage your end, but as someone who has played so many different combinations of controllers on live and several here, it's just player skill we're talking about. Skill in being smart in your combat actions, and in your slotting. Just in general the idea that the T1s are "always skipped" by everyone in every pool is straight up ignorant. There's a general pattern to T1s and T2s and that is the T1s are faster but weaker which provides more attack chain filler while the T2s hit a little harder. But they also tend to add flavor to the sets and sometimes have special advantages - like blasters being able to use both of them when mezzed. We were actually discussing this the other night on Help giving advice to a new player and several people were talking about how the choice between T1 and T2 and both is meaningful to them. People may have a preference for the weaker/faster power at low levels but respec out of it later when they have more attack powers selected - or they may keep it for filler purposes when exemped. Brutes for example may take and put the T1 on auto for fury building (brawl works great for that too but I find myself actually interrupted by brawl auto firing) while scrappers do typically go for the slower attack. But again depending on the powerset maybe they will take both. Ultimately at low levels, as already mentioned, the biggest endurance cost is missed attacks. Accuracy wasting end is the culprit - it's one reason that the buffs you can get from Death from Below and Drowning in Blood are so useful as they can carry you to SO-Equivalent levels. It's not even the cost of running a couple toggles that drains people, it's having to attack extra times because they miss. (Using AoEs on single targets is also a big waste.) Which then leads to the next cause: too low damage making you have to attack again. Get enough accuracy (30%ish, let's assume you're not trying to run +4 when you're level 10 that would just be stupid) and then got a couple bread & butter attacks enhanced up to 80-90% damage and watch the end bar not chew up too fast. Speaking of controllers, you know how I slot their single target hold & immobilize up into the 30s? 1 Acc 3 Dmg. After that then I play with hold duration or procs as the character can afford and meets their theme but I slot those 2 powers for damage first.

Steven Sheridan gives a mission "Help the Founder's Falls Security Chief" https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Steven_Sheridan#Help_the_Founders.27_Falls_Security_Chief The issue is that the security chief tells you to defeat FORTY Crey in Founder's Falls, a zone in which they have a tiny presence. In fact, in the level-appropriate neighborhood that the mission directed me to, the only Crey I found were rooftop snipers. My suggestion is to reduce this particular hunt to 5 because the mobs are so spread out; the mission is clearly just a time waster. (Personally I dropped this one because after 15 minutes I was getting no where.) I figure reducing the target number shouldn't break anything and hopefully be an easy edit.

Aha I thought you were in the warehouse like structure still in the vanguard camp ground.

Wow thanks for the info Trickshooter. I myself had not noticed this bug as I am using it on a controller and my single target immobilize has -knock protection in it; my in-game power description says 1.32 knockback. Hawkmoon269 just FYI it's a 25% chance of proccing the knock effect. You could also slip a knockback to knockdown converter until it (if ever) gets adjusted to not do that. I think it's still a good power even if it's 25% chance of sending your target flying a small distance.

That seems likely - when Serge's mission was created, the Tsoo did not go all the way to 50, I think they stopped at 25 or 30. It was with CoV that the next tier of the level range was added, along with some new varieties, and even then I don't think they went to 50.

Just a random thought: while you're doing that, is there any possibility the issue was that you were personally too close to the base and it didn't count as being out in the warzone? The way you're describing it you were still within the perimeter of the camp and for some reason this post is jogging a hint of a vague recollection. Edit: note: Vanguard base area is an extension to the original Rikti Crash Site, which is why I'm thinking it might not count as "being in the zone" for kills.

Yeah I noticed the high recharge so I dropped Analyze Weakness chance of +tohit in the initial slot (I just got the power) since it seemed like an auto-proc. I thought I could use it as an opener to soften everything up a bit since it'll be -15 def for them and +10 to hit for me, then go into my usual chains. (Dual Blades, I have the critical strikes proc in a lynchpin of my attack chains). Seems like just treating it as a bonus nuke is a good approach.

How is [scrapper] ground zero usually slotted? It's such a mishmash of a power. I could slot it as a normal pbaoe with damage, I could load it with damage procs, I could slot it for -defense (not sure that's really valuable but at -15% to begin with it's not so trivial some -def wouldn't make a difference). I'm not going to slot it for heals, of course.

Based on the feel alone, Dual Blades. Hands down. The animations were specifically designed to make it feel very fast, with the attack animations flowing from hit to hit forming a continuous chain of strikes once you get just a bit of recharge reduction in to keep the chain paced. I have a claws scrapper and that is very fast too but DB has the feel of just being in a state of continuous Swedish Chef bork! Bork! BORK! I believe people have sussed out better DPS paths than the combos but I like to at least use the first 2, Empower and Weaken. They both share the same first and second move and just vary by finisher so it's a simple A B C A B D rotation for much of the lower levels. I put an Avalanche: Chance of Knockdown in Typhoon's Edge which basically makes the Weaken combo act like it's also the finisher for Sweep. (At low levels I used the prestige enhancement from P2W for this instead.) You'll need to grab Nimble Slice, the tier 1 attack, which you might be tempted to skip for Power Slice, the tier 2 attack. But Power Slice isn't necessary for a combo until you have the level 32 attack. If you get Nimble Slash, Ablating Strike, and Typhoon's Edge by 6 that's your first combo, and at 8 you get Blinding Feint which is your build up combo. So basically you'll have 2 combos to chain very quickly after character creation. You get Vengeful Slice at 18 which is an amazing corkscrew uppercut move with built in knockdown; it makes a great bridge between the two combos and a nice place to get some extra damage against a foe that needs an extra hit. As the set has two cones and a PBAoE, it is very aoe friendly. It probably pairs best with a secondary set that has some extra recovery in it; I took Radiation kind of just to try it and found the taunt aura extremely helpful at keeping mobs packed around me for maximum Cuisinart action.

Exactly this, which is why I don't like it when people say "ED kicks in after 3 of the same enhancement" - it doesn't, it's by %. It just happens that 3 SOs will land you at the ED sweet spot, which is about 95% for most powers, but for those that are on the 20% per SO scale (Defense, Damage Resistance being the most common) it's 56%. With the way set IOs work, I think it's important for people to just remember 95% and 56% as the break points. (There are actually other scales than this too... take a look at Knockback enhancements sometime...)

Oh I was thinking bout this because the accolade passives threw off the numbers for something I was testing. It would be nice to trigger them manually when desired - I actually don't understand why they're all granted by default. It's also annoyingly spammy when you first create a test character.

You can go to First/Night Ward and hang out there.