Erratic1

Since I did not quote you, I think you are confused.

I have a Mind/Savage Dom I started recently. Fun, though I can see no end of influence consumption in his future.

By definition, applying to most everyone is not a narrow way of looking at things...it covers most everyone. Personally, I would not be so hasty in replying so as to miss things like that, but you do what makes you happy as it is not meaningfully annoying to me.

Fortunately I wrote, "most everyone" (intentionally so as to avoid pedantry even though sensible reading should have covered most everyone had I only written, "everyone").

Pushed mine to 50 last weekend. It has its joyful moments, though you will definitely want to push your resistances up (and defense too). You may also want to grab an epic set with AoEs, as that is an area DM is weak in.

No. Lists and "house rules" are absurdities you've introduced. Most everyone else is able to go by common sense sociability rules regarding behavior in groups that were inculcated in childhood.

And the other seven people on the team who do mind? If you are not making others dance to your tune, seems clear to me you should not be taking actions which make it increase the likelihood of wiping.

Not really, as I am not here demanding that me having fun outweighs everyone else's complaints. In the abstract, perhaps. But we are talking about team play. The idea of a team is that you are working together towards a common goal. In pursuit of that, one should be prepared to accommodate others AND expect a certain amount of accommodation in exchange. If one person having "fun" annoys everyone else in the group...why did that person join the group? I have three dozen characters and play most ATs. I get to experience the wide range of what players do which is annoying. Most times it's small things and I tell myself, "Its not making that much difference" and carry on. As example, I really wish when I am playing my Tanker that Controllers would wait two or three seconds after I get to a group of foes for those foes to gather near me before Immobilizing them since that means I can keep aggro directed at me as opposed to the fringes of a slightly scattered group deciding they will take interest in the group's ranged attackers. Buy if the group is not having problems with fringe, ranged fire I tolerate it. I have a Kinetics Defender who has Repel. It is a lot of fun going, "Bowlng for Nazis!" and scattering groups like bowling pins. Know how often I do that in group play? Only when the group is being overwhelmed and knocking a bunch of opponents down will decrease incoming attacks. Otherwise I position myself with the ranged attackers to prevent stray melee from approaching because just knocking everything around for no other purpose than "fun" (a) does not accomplish the group goal and (b) annoys everyone else. Likewise on my Gravity Dominator I do not use Dimension Shift willy-nilly because it would be fun but rather when an unintended second spawn gets pulled. The last three letters are the key--it's your opinion. A group is more than just you.

I tend to enjoy the Kinetics heal overlapping me instead of empty space because someone else happens to knockback his anchor a fraction of a second before the Kinetics presses Transfusion. I certainly have fun when Soul Drain hits multiple foes as opposed to two or three because someone else was having "fun" scattering everything I took the time to get in the middle of. Most times I see people justifying their actions on the basis of fun it invariably is only their own fun they are talking about.

...and anyone who hates their area powers on long times hitting nothing because a second before their cast is done someone has scattered the group or anyone who requires an anchor for their AoE power and wants the area of effect to hit nearby targets (say like Transfusion or Fulcrum Shift) but finds their anchor similarly hurled away a fraction of a second before the power animates. I suppose one could see it as min-max to want a heal to hit party members instead of radiating over empty space. Not the usual way people refer to not dying, but if I squint real hard, I can kinda see it.

Unlike other people, I really dislike going with the same theme for primary and secondary. But Rad is one where I can see merits to it as Rad Armor addresses some of the downsides of Rad Melee. I do have both a Rad/SD and Rad/FA (brute). Both are endurance hungry until you deal with the issue. That really makes me wonder how Rad/Electric or Rad/Ice might fare.

What is the theme? Radiation is a very good, potentially too good powerset with not downsides. If having pulses of energy orbit you like in a diagram (inaccurate) of an atom doesn't bother you, it should work wonderfully. I have not played Energy Aura since live, but I had no complaints. Certainly it is less flashy than Radiation.

What are you trying to get out of the secondary and what is the concept?

If you can use a bow, why not an assault rifle? Or a more specialized beam rifle? Or pistols? And if those all work, what difference does type of ranged attack make?

Depends on how much Defense you already have. Even level mobs have a 50% chance to hit you. Going from 0% Defense to 3% defense reduces the damage you take over time by 6%. By contrast, if you were at 40% Defense then going to 43% means you're taking 70% of the damage over time you otherwise would have taken. In short, the closer you get to the soft cap of 45% the better off your life will be. Still, most people shoot to get to Defense cap by using IOs rather than taking every single Defense granting power--enhancement slots are plentiful, power slots in somewhat shorter supply. Even if your armor set is not defensive, you can get a long way by accumulating IO set bonuses. That all said, the indicated endurance usage does not look particularly high. If going with Invisibility, Combat Jumping, Maneuvers etc. fits a theme for you, go for it.

I suspect there were more virtuous people found in Sodom than Energy Blasters to be found who have multi-slotted to convert knockback to knockdown. Fortunately nobody is facing destruction or being turned into a pillar of salt.

Energy Blast looks and laughs.

Thank you for the laugh this provoked as I imagined what it looked like. Of course, with a bit of practice it could be turned into a technique for sending healing where you want it. 😁😁😁

How nice that you can simply team with whom you choose! Sadly, there is no pick up group filter which allows the rest of us to specify, "No people who recklessly blow apart every group they see." Hmmm...maybe a petition should be started for this? The point was the utterly baseless claim that nobody could object to single target knockback. I gave a specific example that I have personally experienced. If you want to make an on point response, deal with the situation described. To be fair, I, as the Kinetics Defender did not have a problem with knockback, the melee people expecting to be healed did. I was going to be fine regardless. My typical solution to dealing with knockback is to refuse to deal with it. If I am playing melee and targets get knocked away from me, I find other targets to deal with, leaving the previous target to the knockback user to deal with. I figure we are both happy that way. Night before last I was running a tanker in a group with someone who continuously knocked groups away from me, so I started leaving pills when that happened and moving onto the next spawn. It was a source of joy to finish off the next group of mobs (on a Tanker) before the team finished killing the previous spawn which was a quarter to a third down in health when I bailed. On ranged dps characters I mostly do not care about knockback. Sure, it would be nice for my AoEs to hit more targets than scattered groups of one, two, or three, but so long as I am not dying, I am not overly picky. One might think I would have trouble with knockback on the single Controller I play, but she plays much more as a buffer (Time Manipulation) and to the extent that grouped opponents are nice, her effects--slow and knockdown--are area based, so mobs tend to be constrained regardless of being knocked around by area denial. It's not that I do not have knockback using characters, but I try to consider others on my team and what is efficient. I do not blow apart spawns because "it makes me feel good". I use knockback to keep foes away from other players or force enemy grouping so area damage hits more things. But to each their own.

Bravo!

I think part of the reason they do not get as much +Damage from Blood Thirst as compared to Build Up is that spending the stacks of Frenzy will give you extra damage. Brute Blood Thirst gives 33% Damage according to the tooltip. If each stack of Blood Thirst is boosting a spender's damage by 10%, all total you would be at 83% Damage.

I have two Savage Melee characters currently--a Savage Melee/Invincibility brute and a Savage Melee/Bio Armor scrapper. I am not sure why the difference exists between what Paragonwiki has and what is in game, but if it was a late design change, I think the developers were a bit too cautious and did not think through the implicit tradeoffs of the set. Savage Melee has quick animations in part because Blood Frenzy stacks reduce your recharge time. At maximum stacks you are looking at a 20% recharge reduction. Moreover Blood Frenzy stacks also reduce your endurance cost. If you monitor the changes the scaling is oddly not quite linear, but seems to cap out around 25% endurance cost modifier. So you get 1-1/1.2=17% more attacks in a fixed period of time at a 1-1/1.25=20% savings. Basically you get the increased attack rate at no extra endurance charge so long as you maintain the stacks (technically you save 6.4%). The above is nifty enough but that does not really, on its own, stack up to what most other attack powersets bring to the table. But you also can spend your stacks to empower a couple of your attacks, gaining increased damage and depending on power increased area of effect or increased bleed duration. However doing so locks out your ability to gain stacks. I need to check to see if when exhausted you can pop Blood Thirst and get stacks. If so, that means you might want to build to five stacks, spend, then pop Blood Thirst and not spend (unless you just really need to use your other spender, since the first is likely to be on cooldown). The problems are: (1) The recharge reduction is tiny and so the corresponding boost in damage is as well. Moreover, it does not scale with outside recharge reduction. If you had perma-Hasten for 70% then full stacks of Blood Frenzy take you to 90% so you'd go from 1-1/1.7=41% more attacks to 1-1/1.9=47% more attacks. This is an artifact of the method of calculation so applies to adding more of any effect--damage boost, endurance cost reduction, etc. But most other effects that other powersets have are not likely to have anything that adds to them. Recharge reduction is baked into every damage IO set and Hasten is quite commonly taken. (2) The extra damage applies to one power and then you are locked out for a duration. Psi Melee at least gives you a period of enhanced damage where you can get in several attacks from the powerset in exchange for its empowerment being locked out. I think a better mechanism, which would have fit with the notion that the user of savage and driven by blood in the air, would have been to either give some benefit for the number of foes nearby with DoTs on them, or perhaps less computationally expensive, give a benefit for hitting targets who have DoTs to represent the empowerment a savage meleer feels from all that blood in the air. That all said, it's not a bad set. Not great, but not on the avoid list.

(1) Electric attacks drain endurance, not energy attacks. Energy attacks disorient. (2) The exhaustion of Savage Melee is nothing like a T9 exhaustion. Savage Melee exhaustion merely means you cannot gain Blood Frenzy stacks. Moreover, it is not invoked whenever you use a spender but only when you use a spender while at maximum (5) stacks. (3) Blood Frenzy stacks do not add damage. They do reduced endurance cost and recharge time of your powers. Spending the stacks increases damage and depending on the spending power increases area of effect or bleed duration.

Clearly you have never been the Kinetics Defender using Transfusion whose anchor got knocked away from the people needing healing.

There is an understandable tendency to focus on "best" and "powerful" builds on the forums and in game. Twice this past weekend I noticed requests for "Best Tanker build", which lead to the inevitable discussion of what the person in question meant by "best". However that discussion is not what this thread is about. Of late I have been working on two melee builds which are very much not Flavor of the Month and do not qualify as particularly powerful. They are solid, but will never grab headlines. In combination with the above experience, I thought I would start a thread where people speak about their hidden gems powerset combos. Unlike "powerful", where it is going to be pretty widely agreed by anyone with experience with the powerset combo that it is indeed ahead of other combos, what qualifies as a hidden gem is going to be more in the eye of the beholder. Even so, let me put forth a criteria for determining what is a hidden gem.... Take two reasonably solid powersets and put them together. You likely have a solid performer because both pieces do their job. But a hidden gem emerges when the two sets work in concert to get you better performance than you might have otherwise expected, but not such good performance that you're left wondering why everyone isn't playing it. Or perhaps the hidden gem aspect emerges from working within the confines of of the mechanics of one powerset, thereby alleviating what would otherwise been a problem for the other. I will get the ball rolling with an example (one of the aforementioned melee builds): Electric Armor/Fiery Melee If you check the FotM thread where the frequency of powerset combos at level 50 are presented, you will find that for Tankers Electric Armor sneaks into the top 10 most frequently played sets when paird with Electrical Melee. After that, it is not seen again until ranks 37, paired with Titan Weapon (obviously piggy-backing its endurance hunger to Electric Armor's ability to refil an endurance bar), and rank 38, paired with Super Strength. After that there is rank 67 (Radiation Melee), rank 88 (Energy Melee), rank 114 (Dark Melee...I could probably write about the hidden gem nature of this one), and finally, the subject of this example at rank 123 (Fiery Melee). In the realm of players level 3 to 49 Electric Armor/Fiery Melee is even further down, at rank 202. Why would one pair Electric Armor with Fiery Melee? If you're not enamored with thermocouples, thematically, it does not necessarily seem like fertile ground unless you happen to think of stars--giant balls of ionized nuclei which generate intense heat. Mechanically, Electric Armor is a very solid resistance set whose only serious weakness comes in the form of Toxic damage. Moreover it comes with both ways to recover endurance and heal--and the heal lowers your endurance costs for 30 seconds by a whopping 59.6%! Add to that a minor boost to Recharge and you're looking at the powerset that was Radiation Armor before there was Radiation Armor. I bet Electric Armor would like to take Radiation Armor down a dark alley and beat it senseless for copying most of Electric Armor's goodies and having resistance to Toxic. Fiery Melee's mechanical pull is setting things on fire for extra damage. What is the synergy? Did I mention you are continuously damaging anything that is near you via Lightning Field, setting things on fire, and endlessly making quicker than normal attacks? And they are going to give Tankers (a) more damage and (b) bigger area of effects?!?!? Muhahahaha!!!! The powerset combo does not match the iconic, take incredible blows without flinching and backhand opponents through walls even if you do take incredible blows and melt your opponents. It is not stand there and watch things melt for stupidly getting close to you--your damage aura helps put things down but you have to take action if you want to defeat foes in a timely fashion. You do not control your foes and thereby prevent them from attacking you or those around you (though once you've gotten their attention they are not likely to look elsewhere). Electric Armor and Fiery Melee are not two solid powersets that just happen to be solid together but rather they rise in combination to be more than the sum of their parts. So tell me, what are your hidden gems?