Hyperstrike

You press it, hear the prerequisite YEEEEEEEEHAWWWWWW! And a Hazzard County Sheriff's car drops out of the sky, front bumper first.

This one is from Live with my regular MOSTF group on Protector. After a while, we got into the habit of photobombing the towers scene. So my Kheld got trapped in there right in front of Recluse at one point.

Couldn't decide how to comment this picture.

Glad you like it. Happy Tanking! The repost just shuffles the powers a bit to fix the Clobber issue.

Reposting my build because for some goofy reason, Clobber looks like it was taken illegally. Here it is with the powers shuffled. Totals (Defense, Resist, Regen, Recovery, etc are all a bit better. But, almost across the board, it's numerically superior. My build DOESN'T include any Incarnate beyond Cardiac. His does, which is some (but not all) of what causes his build to have superior numbers. My build is slightly more attack/damage-oriented. His "optimal" attack chain: Jawbreaker --> Crowd Control --> Bash --> Jawbreaker DPS: 103.6395 My "optimal" attack chain: Clobber --> Shatter --> Jawbreaker --> Crowd Control DPS: 147.1053 (152.7665 if you T4 Assault Core.) For 95% or so of content, the two builds will be functionally identical. For the remaining 5% or so, his will live longer, but mine will do more overall damage. And since dead enemies do no damage, that may mean there is no appreciable difference outside of basic metrics. As to cost, mine is DEFINITELY more expensive.

Note that in most cases, releasing and renewing your IP accomplishes nothing. Since you're not pulling an external IP. If you're having regular connectivity issues in-game, reboot your router, then reboot your machine.

Blaster: Can you help us kill this guy? FF Defender: I AM! Blaster: You haven't fired a shot! FF Defender: Shot? I'm the Defense person! Blaster: Everyone in the group was Incarnate soft-capped BEFORE you came on. FF Defender: But now you're at Defense HARD CAP! Controller: Don't argue with him. You're NEVER going to win this one... Blaster: *Sigh* FF Defender: ?? Controller: Never mind! Just...;bubble on! FF Defender: I MAKE YOU...AWESOME!

Serious? ME? NEVER!!! What "need"? And there is no such thing as "overkill". There is only "kill" with ever-greater confidence levels!

#TheSnarkIsTheLife!

DOES NOT COMPUTE!

I built what I refer to as an Un-Granite Stone setup. It's no "capped to a fare-thee-well" setup. But it's SLEN defense capped, and 43/80 FC Def/Res. Endurance Consumption to Recovery numbers are kinda ridiculous though.

For most content, you're going to find yourself rather squishy. I mean, you won't be a Blaster or anything. But at higher levels (and Incarnate content), it's going to be especially rough going.

I prefer to place the uniques as lower as I can in the build. This way they stay active throughout exemp play.

If you are not going to take Rage, just pick another Secondary. Tough Inv/SS? About as tough as you can get without factoring in anything beyond your Alpha. If you're worried about End Consumption, go with Cardiac instead of Resilient. Your Resists only come down about 1.5% or so.

Pfft. You want everything easy-street!

Funnily enough, was playing around with a Bane build tonight.

It looks like Crossfire is, indeed, going away. There's mGPU support, but I'm really not sure what form it takes. SLI is being deprecated in lieu of NVLink (a similar technology but provides more bandwidth between cards) The main limiting factors here are: Hardware Vendor Interest: With AMD, they pretty much aren't interested. And with NVIDIA, you're basically being offered the option, so long as you can afford the price tag. Game Vendor Implementation: The game vendors need to support this. This market is shrinking all the time, as it's more economical to spend developer time on making the game look and play good across most of the standard single GPU setups. Unit Cost vs Relative Performance: Basically the mid-range and high end cards are relatively expensive (the RTX 3090 is going to be a $1500 unit). And the performance, single-card is positively phenomenal (the performance jump between an RTX 2070 and a 3070 is nearly double). There's also the fact that performance increase for multi-GPU is NEVER 1-for-1. Depending on implementation, you get a modest bump in framerate, and actual quality bumps are essentially non-existent. NOBODY SANE is going to drop $3K just to gain a few frames over a $1500 solution. So, in the end, if your hardware supports it and you can afford it, you're still looking at a limited number of games where you'll see any appreciable real-world benefits.

I say we nerf the whole game so that everyone gets one damage causing power with a max damage of 2 points, and one armor power giving 1% def and 1% Resist. Fully enhanced. And if you can't beat the entire game using that, you just suck. Yeah! THE NERF IS THE LIFE!

Preliminary questions from my old hardware buying guide: OEM – Original Equipment Manufacturer (A company that originally manufactured a product.) VAR – Value-Added Reseller (A company that adds features to a product and resells it.) Systems Integrator – (A company that specializes in bringing various components/subsystems together into a whole and insures those systems function properly together) SLI – Scalable Link Interface – A proprietary technology used by nVidia to link two or more video cards and gain performance/features through parallel processing. Crossfire – A proprietary technology used by AMD/ATI to link two or more video cards and gain performance/features through parallel processing. (A technology competing with SLI.) USB – Universal Serial Bus (A technology used for linking various devices cameras, computers, printers, etc together.) IDE: Integrated Drive Electronics (also PATA: Parallel ATA) – A legacy technology for attaching drives to a computer. Now superceded by SATA. SATA: Serial ATA (The successor technology to IDE for attaching drives to a computer.) CPU – Central Processing Unit (the chip running the computer) GPU – Graphics Processing Unit (Your video card. More specifically the main processing chip on the card.) PPU – Physics Processing Unit (A processor dedicated to doing physics calculations.) (Mostly obsolete as modern GPUs handle physics on-board.) PSU – Power Supply Unit SSD – Solid State Drive (A “hard drive” that uses flash memory as a storage medium instead of spinning platters.) RAM – Random Access Memory (Non-storage memory used by the system.) Mainly expressed in GB (Gigabytes) nowadays. VRAM – Video RAM Video cards nowadays come with their on-board memory (mostly). Usually expressed in MB (Megabytes) or GB (Gigabytes) nowadays. MB – Megabyte (For hard drives: 1 million bytes, For RAM: 1.024 million bytes) GB – Gigabyte (For hard drives: 1 billion bytes, For RAM: 1.024 billion bytes) Hertz – Number of cycles per second. Used in timing and speed expressions for memory and various processing units (See GPU, CPU, PPU, etc) and other devices in a computer. Most commonly expressed as: Mhz – Megahertz (1 million cycles per second) Ghz – Gigahertz (1 billion cycles per second) OEM – Original Equipment Manufacturer (A company that originally manufactured a product.) VAR – Value-Added Reseller (A company that adds features to a product and resells it.) Systems Integrator – (A company that specializes in bringing various components/subsystems together into a whole and insures those systems function properly together) SLI – Scalable Link Interface – A proprietary technology used by nVidia to link two or more video cards and gain performance/features through parallel processing.(Note: This technology is not as widespread as it used to be, due to the rising costs of cards and the performance jumps between generations.) Crossfire – A proprietary technology used by AMD/ATI to link two or more video cards and gain performance/features through parallel processing. (A technology competing with SLI.) (Note: Similar to SLI, Crossfire is used more rarely.) USB – Universal Serial Bus (A technology used for linking various devices cameras, computers, printers, etc together.) IDE: Integrated Drive Electronics (also PATA: Parallel ATA) – A legacy technology for attaching drives to a computer. Now superceded by SATA. SATA: Serial ATA (The successor technology to IDE for attaching drives to a computer.) PCI-E: PCI Express A communications backplane for various I/O devices (drive controllers, video cards, etc) on modern motherboards. M.2: One of the specs for motherboard-mounted Solid State drives. Form factor is more like a memory stick (with the interface on one end) than a traditional drive "box". The reason I ask for "real numbers" is that "as low as possible" is a QUALITATIVE judgement. I'm going to be building a new system around the end of the year. ALAP for me would be $2000 or so. Upper end of my acceptable budget will be closer to $3000. But if I was doing "no compromises", you'd see an absolutely STUPID 5-digit build. Where, for you, ALAP might be $600. And your upper acceptable mark might be $750.

Inv/SS Going to recommend you avoid Stone Armor. It's been essentially obsoleted in the modern game, and is an example of the worst aspects in Tanking. If you want to play Stone Armor, I recommend doing so after you're more familiar with other Armor setups first. To avoid souring you on Tanks as an entire AT.

Honestly I find that FF gives me a lot of leeway to focus on my opposing Primary/Secondary and pool powers. There's only a few truly "necessary" powers with a "take it or leave it" quality to the remainders. My DP/FF Corr is a tankmage. My Bots/FF MM is a pseudotank with lots of AoE.

Welcome back! We've been keeping the enemy mobs warmed up for you *Cue fire blasters lighting up...* *Screams*

As the Alpha slot is, essentially, just a giant IO boost, I generally will T4 it on all toons. It's the only Incarnate slot I use for calculating steady-state performance of a build.

I have to justify it against my job. At the upper end, an R7 3700x, an R9 3900x and an R9 3950x with an identical RTX 2080 all deliver approximately the same performance in most games. And Threadripper chips, while tossing a ridiculous 64 cores at me, is slower on a per-core basis. And, in the end, performance is going to be roughly equivalent. The $1500 RTX 3090 is just ridiculous. It might be nice and all. But does nothing for my main usage as a work machine. Though, the $500 RTX 3070 is actually an attractive deal. Might see if I'm willing to stretch for it. So. Drop $2000-2500 on a system or drop $5000-6000 and get the same performance? Uh.... And while I'm doing multiple, simultaneous virtualized systems,

Yeah. It's a cool piece of kit. And I'll be jealous as hell. But my Cheapass gene won out over my Hardware Fiend long ago. I wouldn't say "no" if someone OFFERED one to me for free or for $5-600 But I can't justify spending $1500 on a video card. Even if I CAN afford it. Just the same way I'm looking at Ryzen 7 3800XT or Ryzen 9 3900X instead of the Threadripper 3990X. CAN I drop $4K on a CPU? Sure! Wouldn't even miss the cash. But can I get such a system to make ECONOMICAL sense? Nope...