Erratic1

I had been casting about for something to pair with Dark on a Blaster, and while I had looked at Plant, it just wasn't doing it for me. So made a guy to try out Atomic because of this thread, and at level 31 it has not been bad so far. Of course a lot to be determined in upper levels. Small annoyance in not having a third single target blast until level 26, but lower levels go by quickly.

Short update for anyone that cares. The character, while not a primary focus of mine, seems to be coming along nicely, hitting level 36 yesterday. He had been at 43% defense values before I respec'd out of Combat Jumping, which I did to more easily fit Toughness in. It is a temporary setback, since it was clear to me that IO sets will push him up above soft cap. I have grabbed only four IOs so far: Performance Shiter: Chance for + Endurance, Gauntleted Fist: Recharge/Chance for Absorb, Preventive Medicine: Chance for Absorb, and Reactive Defenses: Scaling Damage Resistance. I should probably snag Steadfast Protection: Resistance/+Def (All). Its the only one that may be worth just making from recipe and not bothering with Attunement on since not having it when exemplaring to beneath level 27 isnt really going to matter. With Performance Shifter, while endurance woes are not completely gone, thing are good enough that I can see waithing for Physical Perfection at level 44. It does mean I currently only switch Toughness on once I sink beneath 60% health. In the respec, I dropped Build Momentum. I had thought it would be useful in pulling to be able to run up to groups and start swinging, but the emergent tactic turned out to be Taunting, which gives enough time to build up momentum via an slow, initial attack like Defendive Sweep.

Do you really hate the concept of Endurance so much?

I have a level 50 Rad/Psi Tanker, and Psi is a perfectly fine secondary. However it is not an AoE set like say Titan Weapons.

I should probably leave well enough alone.... The description at Paragonwiki and the details at City of Data both suggest the power provides a small value absorption shield (7.5% of health) every few seconds (5 seconds) for the duration (30 seconds). In play it appears to give all the shielding at once and the shielding lasts for a minute. I am not complaining, as having an extra 50% life (if you slot recharge and bring Particle Shielding's recharge time down to a minute or less) is quite handy. Still, it looks like we Radiation Armor people are getting way too good of a deal here.

With two exceptions, a Brute will have access to Mez protection by level 10 (as opposed to level 6 for a Tanker). I am not thinking it is going to make much difference that one picks up protection on their third DFB run as opposed to their second. Most people aren't even bothering with slotting enhancements at that point aside from random SOs which happen to fit in somewhere.

Yes, Focused Accuracy is quite expensive. Of course it's quite useful too.

Yes, Recovery is the stat which represents endurance generation. At base, everyone starts with 100 endurance, which recovers from empty to full in 60 seconds. This means your base recovery is 100 end/60 sec, or 1.67 end/ sec. Everyone has Stamina as an inherent power, which increases recovery. At base it is a 25% increase. So now you are looking at 1.66*1.25=2.0833 end/sec. From there, characters diverge depending on how the slot, what powers they have access to and select, what IOs they slot, and what Incarnate abilities they choose. You, having taken Willpower as your secondary, have access to Quick Recovery, which adds another 30% at base to Recovery. Both Quick Recovery and Stamina can have slots added to increase their effectiveness. If you slot something like Performance Shifter: Chance ForcEndurance, understand you are not providing any modification to the underlying power but rather gaining an ongoing effect which periodically gives you endurance--you can still add slots which can be filled with an Endurance Modification Enhancement to increase the effectiveness of the underlying power. For the character who has no powers which increase Recovery (other than Stamina) or powers to provide endurance, I typically look to 3-slotting Stamina and filling the slots with Endurance Modification SOs as soon as possible and then slotting an Endurance Cost Reduction SO in any non-tier one attack power. Toggles with costs above 0.26 end/sec should also be considered candidates for Endurance Cost Reduction SOs as well,. However you do have Quick Recovery, which should provide you some flexibility compared to the situation detailed above. It gives a 30% modifier to recovery at base, which is more than Stamina does. Of course you can slot both if need be. I would encourage you to click Powers on your tray menu then Combat Abilities on the window which opens up. That will open a window which allows you to see your character statistics. Endurance Recovery and Endurance Consumption will both be listed in the Base subsection.

Glad I had not started down the Regeneration path. Will work on my resistances. I can sense I am going to need to steal influence from my other characters.

A quick plummet test from max height suggests for Tankers the scaling start from 60%. 465.2/1372.5=33.89% .3389 + 0.26 = .5989 or 59.89% Toss in Reactive Defense: Scaling Damage Resistance and that gives 3-13% more. Tough seems like a no-brainer to want to add on top of that.

I'm mad, not raving insane. I did not take Weave. ;D

Having gotten my first post-shutdown character, a Rad/Psi Tanker to 50, I should have been busy grinding out incarnate goodies for her. But putting sanity aside, I decided to not only attempt an SR Tanker, but one using Titan Weapons. While I suspect I will be bitten in the rear later in upper levels, it's been much better than expected (apologies though to that one team from this past Saturday) up through level 32. Titan Weapon is endurance hungry, so I was forced to double slot all attacks but the first two for endurance cost reduction (and the second one has one endurance reduction slotted) since not all teams have someone who buffs recovery. Solo, defenses all sit at a hair more than 40%. Melee Defense will leap up well over 45% when Defensive Sweep is used. Typically party buffs result in Ranged and AoE Defenses rising past 45% as well. Capping is trivially within reach. But what then? Chasing resistance buffs via IOs seems a pursuit with minimal payback. If the idea is he will not get hit often, building Regeneration seems like the way to go. On top of that I was thinking of grabbing the scaling resist IO and have slotted the ATO absorb proc enhancement.

I get endless joy out of using Mass Levitation on my Rad/Psi tanker. Nothing like repeatedly tossing groups into the air.

I believe all of the Radiation Melee powers are listed as AOE due to the Contamination effect. My guess here is that the siphon effect has a chance to proc off any enemy that receives damage due to Contamination being on your target and it hitting the nearby mobs. Yes, it does. Reported that here. What I cannot figure out is how Hopeling is getting enough procs to sustain endurance with it, because I certainly never have. When it goes off for me it usually pays back the cost of using Radiation Siphon and sometimes I may get that two or three times that amount. I suppose if I had it slotted for recharge and it cycles more often. . . .

I have rarely seen Theft of Essence proc more than once on use, and never seen it hit more than three targets at once (and never more than half the available targets at that). Most time I get it to cover the cost of using Radiation Siphon.

I slotted the KB->KD converter in my KM scrapper's Repulsing Torrent and so he has two AoEs which knock groups down--Repulsing Torrent and Burst. Of course that is on the primary side but the base recharge time for the powers is 12s (RT) and 15s (Burst).

The slots augment the base working of the power. If you were looking at regen gain while at full health. . . well, gaining 20% by slotting an enhancement to regen which is 5% of your health moves that up to 6% of your health (per 1.25 seconds)--not a lot. But the power tells you, "The lower your current health is, the greater the regeneration bonus you'll receive from Gamma Boost. The higher your current health is, the greater the recovery bonus you'll receive from Gamma Boost." You do not gain much regen while at full health. Instead you get Recovery. As your health goes down the boost to your Recovery fades and the strenght of the Regen you gain is boosted. The above is with one Healing SO and 3 Endurance Modification SOs slotted. At 32% loss of Health I am gaining an additional 56% of my base regen from Gamma Boost. When I wake tomorrow I will try replacing the Healing SO and see how that impacts the numbers.

Okay, standing around at full health I have from Gamma Boost: 0.61 hp/sec Regen 1.18 end/sec Recovery My character has 2155.2 hp and 105 endurance. So 0.61hp/sec is 0.61/2155.2=0.000283%/sec and the Combat Attribute display says 0.0003%, which what that rounds to at four digits. Dropping off a building I hit the ground and end up at 1468.1hp and regen from Gamma Boost leaps up to 5.03 hp/sec and Gamma Boost recovery shrinks to 0.76 end/sec So definitely the power does as it claims in terms of boosting recovery while you're healthy and boosting regen as your health declines. SOs show modification to the base values provided by Gamma Boost. Not sure what is going on with IOs but perhaps the modification at full health is so low as to not be seen to the Regen value (though it should show in the Enhancment slotting screen).

Recovery seems to be missing. I should test when I get home. Given the wealth of healing/absorption in Radiation Armor, I never looked at Gamma Boost as anything other than an auxiliary Stamina clone, and in that regard it seems to work well as it allows running Focused Accuracy non-stop on my Tanker and I never remotely think of running out when playing her.

I shamelessly abuse Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20140824072942/http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/powers/

I could certainly be misreading, in which case I whole-heartedly agree with you. :)

Of the ones listed I'd lean Inv or WP, but given any way of going something not on the list, I would (well, and did).

I have not found this to be true. For example, getting my /Fire stalker to a reasonable level of S/L defense (way short of the softcap, and for a fraction of the budget of a level 50 build) paid off far more than extra resists did. You'd think it should work the way you say, due to the increasing returns on defensive stats. But defensive set bonuses are available in larger quantities, relatively speaking: since enemy tohit is 50% base, defense is point-for-point twice as good as resistance. Kinetic Combat gives +3.75% S/L defense for four pieces and can be had at a reasonable price, but there are no sets that give +7.5% S/L resist. Also, even a moderate amount of defense gives you the option to pop 1-2 Lucks and be invincible for 60 seconds, while popping oranges is much less effective and rapidly runs into the resist cap. A character who is in his teens and not borrowing funds from previously existing characters is doing what to get his defense up? Buying from the AH? With what? It is cheaper and easier to slot DOs and SOs in powers and acquire pool powers (as they unlock by playing the game) than toss out a couple of million for IOs. 5 million influence is pocket lint for a level 50 character, but sub-30 (and again not having influence lying around from other characters) it's quite a bit more meaningful. And picking up a 3% or 5% one-time boost for what it would cost to otherwise fully result your character strikes me as less beneficial than filling out you powerset powers with slots and SOs and picking up pool powers.

Did you test it at low health (say by leaping from a tall building) ? The formula from City of Data suggests that at full health the regen bonus would be 5%. However at 50% health you should be seeing a 55% boost.

The answer is you supplement where your set focuses first. The OP is playing a Defense based set, so until hitting cap the easiest and biggest gains are from upping Defense. Were he playing resistance, short of wallowing in influence, augmenting resistance would be the bigger payoff initially. On funky-weird hybrid sets it would depend on the exact values the set provides, but short of absurdly low values on the Defense side, most likely Defense first.