Erratic1
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Posts posted by Erratic1
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1 hour ago, Snarky said:
In armor Def>Res>Heal. A "blended" set like Invul gives you respectable Def number, that you might pump to nice levels, as well as respectable Res numbers. And Dull Pain. A Heal/+HP Buff that is so good. Invul also has good defense debuff resistance.
Straight Resistance armors. Tough to sell these babies. If you slap on Defense, (and they have no defense debuff resistance) all that investment can be gone in seconds.
I have moved from the camp that sees Def>Res>Heal to thinking a character isn't really suitably protected until they have covered two of the three in their build, regardless of what the armor set provides. Yeah, adding Defense to a resistance set does mean your Defense can be stripped, but you still will have all Resistance and it should be at high values. While Defense sets from with DDR, that merely constrains how much Def they lose.
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If you are playing a Defensive set you are aiming for 45% at a minimum, regardless of the set being positional or elemental focused. If you can reasonably push into the 50s, you should do so (because defense debuff is a thing), though some of that comes down to the particulars of the set and how much Defense Debuff Resistance the set comes with. You will also want to raise your resistances as well, but that is less efficient for you than getting your defenses up to snuff. Positional has fewer categories to work towards improving, but Elemental is not horrible to work with. I would not generally choose to skip one Defense armor set over another because one is elemental vs positional.
Resistance will want S/L/E/N/C/F covered at a minimum, T/P as you can (typically hard to max out). Historically S/L have been the absolute must haves at 90%, but frankly you're going to want to get all of them up into the 80+ range if you can. While you can only have 90% effective to damage, your resistance resists being debuff based on its value, so having 100% means not having to worry about being resistance debuffs. However that is not generally something to build towards on a Brute, just if you happen to go past 90% on your build there is benefit to be had there.
I cannot say I recall being taunted in PvE all that much (if at all). Mez resistance is typically tied to one of your armor set powers and is pretty binary (with certain powersets being an exception--say Fiery Aura).
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On 4/18/2024 at 9:29 PM, Ashford said:
That's kind of the issue with /DM. Sure, bio will make DM hit harder, but DM already has a penalty to damage in exchange for -hit and bio on a tanker does not need -to hit when bio already works best on a tanker since tankers have a high HP pool to almost gloss over bio's issues (to much time pressing defenseives when you could be pressing the damage buttons).
Three click powers:
Ablative Carapace-Base 90s recharge
DNA Siphon-Base 90s base recharge
Parasitic Aura-Base 270s recharge
How are you spending significant portions of combat clicking defensive powers? Comparatively, nobody ever calls Radiation Armor clicky and yet it has just as many click powers.
And as for not dealing damage when you are clicking those powers, sure Bio is not, "Its just own and works" like Willpower. But then it has a damage aura and a stance both of which are adding to your damage the entire time you're fighting. One suspects that whatever damage you are losing for taking animation time for a click power to engage is suitably compensated, especially if you are in a fight long enough to be clicking any of the powers multiple times.
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On 4/18/2024 at 10:04 PM, Ashford said:
yup and that's why I call it a toolkit resist set. It does it's job at mitigation but in a real fight as bio, the build will either fold like paper or the build will be dropping in damage as time spent doing damage will be on doing a defensive rotation that can not be sidestepped as most of the actual damage mitigation is button based so there will be a damage loss, which means mobs are not dying as fast as they should, which means taking in more damage, which means a higher likelyhood of once again, folding like paper.
You have three clicks, one of which is on a longish recharge. What rotation are you engaged in that is meaningfully taking time away from dealing damage?
As goes the longer recharge on Parastic Aura, I wrote elsewhere:
Quote- Surviving comes down to the following rule of the road: If you have just entered a large mob of enemies then you should pop Parasitic Aura. Failure to do this can lead to the abovementioned Sudden Onset Bio Defeat, even beyond the ability of your "Oh Shit!" buttons (Ablative Carapace and DNA Siphon) to save you.
Mind you, that is from a Brute perspective. Still, significantly boosting your Regen and Recovery and debuffing the damage of everything around you at the beginning of a fight is a straightforward proposition and you have 45s of use before its duration runs out.
Elsewhere in that post I noted:
Quote- Bio is a hybrid set. You will with not too much effort cap F/C/E/N defense. It may be possible to cap S/L defense but it is easier to cap S/L resistance. While you can get okay'ish S/L defense you do not have DDR, so putting effort into going beyond where you end up is of dubious value when facing things which debuff defense.
- As you do not have DDR you will have to rely on regen and absorption, which you have powers to help you with. How and when to use these powers are the key to avoiding Sudden Onset Bio Defeat.
- Some people say Bio is a clicky set. I suspect some of that comes from stance dancing and the other from not appreciating the proper time to use the set's regen/absorption powers. Stance dancing is up to you, but for my personal style of play I picked one stance and built around it. It is not that I cannot change stances just I am less optimized to be outside of my preferred stance.
- I suspect from your phrasing you are looking at living in Offensive Stance. Know that it applies a resistance penalty to all of your resistance values. This should mean little to F/C/E/N defense values but you will need to rely more heavily on regen/absorption.
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On 4/16/2024 at 5:17 PM, Sovera said:
I went to look at why the Stone/Fire Melee had breezed through Manticore and the only thing I saw was the softcapped defense to psi... Well, softcapped defense to everything I guess. I had 38% defense to energy and once debuffed Ablative was of no help.
Yeah, psi is somewhat dangerous to my SS/Bio Brute. It is the reason when facing Carnival of Shadows the bosses have to be taken out pronto (especially if you're running +4x8). I am surprised that your Defense values were so low, unless you were running pre-IO.
On 4/16/2024 at 5:17 PM, Sovera said:Bio lives up to the idea of being pretty strong offensive and against generic enemies but folding against debuffs. A bit like Willpower I guess. It did make me feel like a Scrapper. Or at least a Brute. Very strong trip up to 45 and Manticore at least.
It is strong from beginning to end and some debuffs you do laugh at. "Oh, you're going after my endurance?"--but that is from the standpoint of playing it as a Brute designed to operate in Efficient Stance. My Bio/Rad Tanker is (somewhat obviously) designed to operate in Offensive, so things may work out differently there (I should play him more, but he's my villain side character and I do not play him as much).
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17 minutes ago, Troo said:
This is not wrong is it?
Even if it is, do you wanna be right?
* If you're not old enough to get the reference, too bad for you.
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Just now, Frostbiter said:
I know this is an open forum, you still brought it up a second time by yourself, out of context. Which is why I still don't believe you.
So many confrontational ways to respond to this, but you know I will just make this short and simply:
FINE. BELIEVE WHATEVER DELUSIONAL THING YOU WANT.
I have three times tried to explain how you are wrong, and I am fine with you having a persecution complex. I am not falling into the following with you:
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2 minutes ago, Frostbiter said:
Fair enough. Thank you.
I'm aware of what I asked and who I asked it of. It wasn't you.
@Snarky give me strength...
You do realize anyone can provide an answer to a question on an open forum?
If you only want one person to answer a question you can send direct, private messages.
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16 minutes ago, biostem said:
The question is how to you provide for such circumstances while not unduly burdening newer active players who simply want some of the shorter or more desirable names? Maybe give each player a number of tokens that flags certain characters as immune to the name policy...
Or you could weight the freeing up of names based both on how long the holder has been absent and both how new the account trying for the name is and how many names the account has tied to it. So new players would get a jump on getting a name but only to a point.
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2 minutes ago, Frostbiter said:
I don't believe you. You went out of your way to mention it.
You asked a question. Here, let me remind you, as apparently in your rush to accuse me of lying you have forgotten:
QuoteHow desirable is the name Frostbiter? Even I have to admit it's not the best name I could have come up with. It was my first hero on the Live servers that I made to just try the game out and it stuck. Be honest, how desirable is it really?
THAT IS YOU ASKING A QUESTION.
I gave an answer with explanation of the initial question: How desirable is the name Frostbiter?
I then delved into how even with it (quoting you here), "...not [being] the best name I could have come up with..." it is still something someone would likely try and be willing to settle on.
Had I some secret agenda to be hostile to you, why would I have thumbs upped your explanatory post?
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6 minutes ago, macskull said:
This argument assumes that if a player isn't actively playing the game, they are no longer interested in the game or their characters. Sure, there are going to be people who play for a while and leave and never come back, but there are also going to be players who are away from the game for extended periods of time for other reasons, sometimes through no fault of their own. Who are we to decide whether the reason for their absence is enough that we should release their character names?
I am an active (on again/off again) player and upthread I displayed the character slot of a character I have not touched in 4.8 years. I do not think my activity on a subset of characters should immunize that character from having its name stripped in favor of someone who wants it because if I truly, really wanted to keep the name, I could login on it ever so often like I do with my character who holds lead on the SG I inherited when my friends stopped playing.
I agree, one should not be stripped of a character name quickly for a life circumstance change, deployment on military duty, etc. So oddly, I would argue greater protection for someone whose account has remained completely untouched (up to a limit) than for characters on account like mine, because it is so very obvious that I am not using the name.
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14 minutes ago, Frostbiter said:
If you think I did something wrong with trying to get my name on all the servers, know that that isn't what happened.
I do not think you did something wrong. You explained the tie to your forum name, which casts things in a different light, but even if it hadn't...there is nothing wrong with you fulfilling a desire to uniquely have the name. I am just noting the name space for obvious names for various character concepts is limited, so people are going to hit on the central set of names and the easy variations quite quickly. So 'Frostbiter' is not really something so unusual as for it not to be a name someone would likely seek to get at some point. I attempted to illustrate how people latch onto increasingly non-obvious names by referencing my character Ghosthammer.
What with the history of Black superheroes (and now villains--Black Manta was not originally Black, but someone decided to lean heavily into the trope), I really wish I had been able to get the name 'Black Ice'. 'Black <anything simple>' though is probably completely camped at this point.
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24 minutes ago, Frostbiter said:
How desirable is the name Frostbiter? Even I have to admit it's not the best name I could have come up with. It was my first hero on the Live servers that I made to just try the game out and it stuck. Be honest, how desirable is it really?
When the namespace gets suitably colonized, variations of the simpliest form of any name are going to be explored. 'Frostbite' is a pretty obvious name. As example, I would expect 'Frosbites', 'Frostbitten', 'Frostbit' all to have been taken.
This is my character 'Ghosthammer'. You might expect that to be a pretty rare name.
I can tell you there is at least one server where the name was taken by someone other than me--which I discovered when I tried to transfer him to another server to play with friends there. But hey, neither that other person nor I attempted to lockdown the name on every server, so if anyone wants to have their own, they can try on three other servers.
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1 hour ago, ZemX said:
If you're referring to the post linked by @PeregrineFalcon earlier in this thread, what it actually says is that they grabbed "a large number of desirable names" and then later got mistaken for "famous" live players. The thing is, "desirable" names are desirable because they are simple and thematic. Maybe you've heard of Superman? Batman? Wonder Woman? If someone grabs "Arcanaville" who isn't actually Arcanaville from the old forums then I'd be suspicious. But as @Troo's post illustrates, I am not surprised if names as simple as Gy, Guy, Gee, and Tru were taken, entirely independently by people who just thought them up on their own.
Back on live and I had both Graviton (my first, post-beta, character) and Vae Victis.
Never thougt to use my forum name as the name of a character. Hmm, possibly would make a good villain name.
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3 minutes ago, Xaddy said:
Well, either I wasn't reported, or I was deemed not-guilty.
Or the report provoked a sigh, roll of the eyes, and dismissal.
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Not going to be upset if the name goes back into circulation. Its been cose to 5 years since it was last played?
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9 minutes ago, Frostbiter said:
Why would someone else need a name that I clearly use as my own and have since 2005?
Amazingly, my first name is shared by tens if not hundreds of thousands of people. That does not make it any less my name.
My father and I shared the same first and last name. He generally went by the diminutive form and I by the full form to distinguish ourselves. I know he once, in business, had to call someone in the same profession who had the same name. Given the relative rarity of my surname, that was pretty amazing. And yet for all those people who do have both the same first and last name, I am pretty sure we each feel it is our name and don't feel such an ownership stake as to need to own it in every context.
I am just not seeing why you are feel such ownership of what happens on servers you don't play on. But hey, maybe you do actually play on all servers. In any case, you don't have to justify to me. I just see it as oddly possessive.
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17 hours ago, Frostbiter said:
I had the misfortune of only getting my namesake on two out of the five servers.
Not a complaint, but why on Earth would you want/need the same name across every server?
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5 hours ago, Groundworm said:
Primary power set, I've heard good things about battle axe and I'm curious about titan weapons. Secondary power set, I've also heard good things about bio armor and rad armor, but I find it hard to build thematically around those two. Generally, is it safer to build around defense or resistance? Which primary/secondary powersets might serve my purposesr?
Okay, now that I've given you the skinny, if you are stll on board with playing a Brute...
- A theme also involves one of the origins. For my most recent scrapper, I wanted to play Ninjitsu for the crit from stealth ability, and I had enjoyed War Mace on a previous WM/Shield character. But a ninja with a hammer? How to reconcile that? Ninjitsu already is verging on spiritual and hence magical territory. So I made him into a collector of mystic artifacts, less for the sake of it than as a means to flummox non-magical types with unexpected abilities. Ghosthammer is a thug, but a thug who became a henchman for an actual magical villain, learned the ropes, and then disposed of his former master in favor of pursuing his own ends. My Rad/Shield scrapper? He's got an atomic shield inherited from his hero grandfather and has the Technology origin. Bio? Are you a mutant? Perhaps you were modified by Science.
- You can build about either Defense or Resistance, but there are tradeoffs. Defense has the upside of not only preventing damage but also secondary effects like endurance drain as those require being hit to occur. Resistance has the perk of not having a lot of effects which lower its effectiveness, leading to a cascade to failure and massive damage coming in. It also resists said effects. Then there are mixed and layered sets like Bio, Rad, and arguably Invulnerability which mix and match between the two and bolster via other means (healing and absorb shields). While any armor and be paired with any offensive set and a workable character made, choosing a combo where the two sets support the other's shortcomings is where you get start to push things to the next level. Got an offensive set which is hungry for endurance? Pair with an armor set which provides endurance. Don't have a heal in your armor set? Grab an offensive set with healing.
- Battle Axe and Titan Weapons both will pair nicely with either Bio or Radiation Armor. Want a theme? Titan Weapon + Radiation Armor, take the Technology origin, and costume yourself as a mech. Or as a cyborg if you want to have some human bits showing. Or perhaps you're a bioengineered soldier from a post-apocalyptic alternate universe to explain your Science origin based Battle Axe/Bio character.
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4 hours ago, Groundworm said:
I realize this is vague, but I'm looking for a toon that is a capable mix of damage output and survival. I've heard brutes have that going for them. I'm working on leveling my rad/shield brute, who feels lackluster in damage output and also kinda squishy.
Oh gosh...Rad/Shield has high endurance demands (Rad) and no way to generate it inherently (Shield). That is your central problem. Shield is great in terms of survivability, once you push your defenses up, particularly by purchasing the two +3% Def IO enhancements. As memory serves, there is some limited endurance boosting and healing you can get via procs in the right spots in Rad Melee. In fact, I have a Rad/Shield Scrapper--Shield Charge is more potent on a Scrapper than a Brute because of the nature of the pseudo-pet it is implemented as.
You want survivability and damage, go Tanker.
Brute starts off great, not needing damage enhancements slotted to deal out damage early on. But then you plateau, especially as you have to start pumping enhancements into armor powers so you can survive. Tankers easily max out their survability and then can turn their efforts to improving their damage output. Moreover, they have enhanced area with their area attacks, able to hit more targets. And since you're going to survive, if you do make a Shield Tanker, you have more guys around you further increasing your damage via Against All Odds.
Oh, and I did I mention being wanted by teams?
Yeah, you came to the Brute forum and are being told to play a Tanker. It's a regular occurrence for good reasons (heavily denied when the matter comes up by the usual suspects doing so).
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26 minutes ago, Ironblade said:
Don't get me started. My girlfriend keeps finding the weirdest potato chips. The most recent find was 'Basil Pesto Potato Chips'. I can't even.
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5 hours ago, Herotu said:
This video has an American delighted by beans on toast.
Also: "Biscuits and Gravy for Breakfast" - Everything about that sentence is wrong, even if the biscuits aren't really biscuits.
Do I really need to link all the incredibly common videos of Brits actually trying biscuits and gravy (or really any American cuisine) and loving it? I am sure there is at least an order of magnitude difference in such things despite there being five times as many Americans who could try British cuisine than vice versa.
Edit: Guess I should give you a link to Brits just short of losing their mind over biscuits and gravy:
Pretty sure the entire reason the British Empire existed was the desperate search for actually good food to eat.
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I am not taking food naming instructions from people who are delighted by beans on toast.
ABSOLUTELY NOT!
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13 hours ago, Lanark1027 said:
Similar in end usage as well? I'd be a little worried about making a WM/Dark (as an example) since those are both kind of end heavy. I'm sure Cardiac could make it work but might be a rough levelling experience.
While it is probably not as ugly as say Rad Melee/Dark Armor, I will admit on my WM/Nin Scrapper, endurance was a bit of a problem until he got Nin power which gives you endurance.
Dark Armor does about the opposite of providing endurance, drinking it instead. You have a couple of options:
- You can rely on the Epic Energy Mastery set to get you by until Incarnates come along. Before either, you will likely be a bit mana starved. You do not have to stick with Energy Mastery, it is just there to get you to where you're going (Tar Patch in Dark Mastery is a tempting choice unless you are truly sold on Energy Mastery).
- You can start slotting set IOs early with an eye toward Endurance Cost reduction. I would suggest going for the 2 pc Unbreakable Guard bonus in as many powers as you can--which with the Rule of Five, can get you to 12.5% global endurance cost reduction. Heck, make it easy on yourself and do not even worry about slotting more of than two of the set in any given power until later. You can also aim for the 5 pc bonus on from Reactive Defenses slotting into Weave and the 5 pc bonus from Preventive Medicine slotted into Dark Regeneration. Theft of Essence in the final slot of Dark Regeneration can also help. Also do not forget the endurance boosts from Performance Shifter, Numina's, and Miracle.
A less cranky and bitter me would probably work on a build for you.
Defense/resistance/mez
in Brute
Posted
Given DDR I probably would not chase, it, just take what comes naturally. Been a while since I last did a straight up Resistance build (as opposed to Hybrid or Defense).
I got into Brutes after playing my first, a DM/Elec and it was pretty survivable, but go figure with two heals and two endurance recovery methods. Maybe +Rchg/Healing is the way to go with Resist sets?