Hyperstrike

You poor, depraved individual!

Yep. I feel I should flop back in bed, smoking a cigarette...

As the announcement says. Convert over to the HC launcher at your earliest opportunity. It works great, and is easier to monitor multiple versions of the game with.

*Tosses Harwaiians into the volcanoes to appease the gods for the abomination that is ruining a pizza with pineapple*

Yeah. Having all program drives on speedy PCIe is great. And if you're doing RAID, you're not really seeing massive improvement in performance, but you DO see significant reductions in queue depth on the drives. Which improves latency of your disk subsystem somewhat.

This is actually why I'm going with an ASRock board on my next build. Most board builders have additional M.2 drives steal from the SATA port controllers. ASRock has made a slightly different decision. Basically if you have a board that can run 3x M.2 drives, it basically steals the lanes from PCIe5 instead. As multi-GPU is falling out of favor (due to pricing and diminishing returns as cards get more capable), you don't see a lot of people doing things like SLI anymore. And, on my next box, storage space is important. And I'd rather not have to invest in a third party controller card.

BUFF BUFFS!

Yeah. That's the thing that always bugged me about some people claiming to be "unkillable". EVERYTHING in this game is killable. Yet, every now and again, I get someone "But no! Because I KNOW! I've done X, Y, Z, etc! And none of them killed me!"

It really depends. At low/no Defense, the difference is negligble. On something like SR, it's going to be more significant, as every point of Defense is worth more than the last. And you have multiple defensive armors chipping in the fractionals here and there.

I refer to the phenomenon as "eggshelling". Nice tough exterior. But once cracked...

Super Reflexes ---------------------------------------- "I'm in my happy place!" "I'm in my happy place!" "I'm in my happy place!" *FACEPLANT*

Buff it yourself! It's called an Endgame build. And up until about the mid 30's, a more traditional mixed Res/Def build (taking CJ, Weave and Maneuvers) results in a decently tough setup. But once you hit RWZ levels, you start eggshelling due to lack of DDR. So that's about the point you start respec'ing for a Max Resist build.

Again, that 2.5% isn't +2.5% better Defense. It's +0.25% (+2.5% base enhancement). 100% is unslotted. x1.0 56% enhanced (SOs) is x1.56 58.5% enhanced (IOs) is x1.58 Again, if 100% is 10 Defense SOs become 15.6% Defense IOs become 15.85% Defense. You're gaining .25% to your ACTUAL defense numbers. If you don't believe what I'm saying, the two builds above are Inv/Ax with only T1 attack and WEAVE. And keep in mind that Mids rounds UP to the nearest 0.1% Defense Base of 5% Defense. On SOs, 7.8% On IOs, 7.9% To get +2.5% Defense you'd have to start with a power that, unaugmented, delivered 100% Defense. So YES! It *IS* every bit as insignificant as I'm making it sound. It's not "nothing". But it isn't what you're making it out to be.

Remember, it's not 2.5% better defense. (Going from 25.0% to 27.5% defense.) It's +2.5% base enhancement. If unenhanced is 10% Defense, and SOs bump you to 15.6, 2.5% is going to bump to to 15.85%. Improvement? Yes! Significant? Not really.

All it would do is shift the entire scale sideways a bit. As a whole. As everything would simply bump a miniscule 2.5%. Actual differential would hardly be noticeable and there would be no rank changes.

The objective of this test is not "Tanker efficiency". Tanker efficiency is a melange of characteristics including toughness and damage output. What's being measured here is just raw toughness at a very basic, barely enhanced level. "Stand there and take it, until you can't." As was noted, for most the very HEAVILY optimized toughness Tanks, this test won't actually measure anything. As, outside of certain mobs, these setups will set them well above the immortality line (where the enemy can't manage to do enough damage to kill you before you recover)..

With Mids, grab my Invulnerability framework for a tank, tack in Ax, IO the secondary and you're golden. In the mean time, here's a build that's currently legal, but there are changes coming to Ax that're gonna alter things down the road.

Remember these are bare SO builds. With no optimization whatsoever. Also, because they're not attacking with their secondary, they get no power synergies. All by itself, bare Rad armor is pretty squishy.

IOs killed it? In late game? When PCs are supposed to be genuinely powerful? Post-Incarnate? When you're acknowledged to be OP? At 10th-15th level? Nah man. At intermediate levels, if you can afford it, you can equip for Mez protection. But you should also be learning the skills for Mez avoidance as well. And "I don't want to!" isn't an acceptable answer. As for the Amplifier. You're spending Inf. Not actual cash. So please stop trying to grab a visceral reaction to the joking P2W moniker. It's there as a convenience. And it's not meant to be a default state. It also helps suck inf out of the system, acting as a brake on inflation. Can't afford it, invest a bit of personal time writing a macro to combine inspies into breakfrees. You want an explanation? Ranged ATs can do most of their damage without ever coming into the range of melee Mez. And, by staying at range, they can avoid large chunks of damage, as well as Mez. Melee AT, quite simply, CANNOT. As soon as I can throw a KO Blow, or snipe a Foot Stomp, come talk to me.

Uhm. Look again. Most melee types don't get their mez protection right out the gate (BioArmor's one of the rare few). They get it at RELATIVELY low levels. But it's NOT automatic. As for not seeing it as game-breaking. This is because you WANT IT. It has nothing to do with actual game balance. This is you simply asserting personal preference and acting as if it is factual and quantifiable. If you can present the MATH for why current levels of mez avoidance and other forms of mez resistance/abatement aren't enough, you might have a case. If you hate mez that much, play an AT that actually has rapid access to mez protection!

"Necessary, no." End of discussion then. There are viable options for avoiding/resisting mez/etc already in the game. And yes, they are egalitarian. So you're now comparing a buff that can be obtained by anyone to a blast-centric Epic set not acquirable until the mid 30's. Not sure how you wrangle "balance" out of that. Probably because what's being expressed isn't "balance", but personal preference.

In the same way that not paying attention to a chess game and missing both check and mate is "bad". Yes, it SUCKS at times. But whose fault is it?

Additionally, there are macros that can be built to convert other inspies into BFs.

No. The argument you're hearing is "You ALREADY have Mez-reduction/avoidance tools. USE THEM." The only argument against that which we've heard is "I don't WANNA!"

If you're playing around at lowbie levels, it's cheaper to fill up to a full 8 hours at very low levels. If you've waited into your 20's or early 30's, it's more expensive. But a bit of judiciously vague, indifferent marketing can easily net you plenty of inf for that.