Seroster01

Title summarizes the fundamentals. Serpent Drummer has a mission (I believe it's the 4th in the chain) called "Defend Portal Corporation". Prior to the patch the portals were simply decorative mission objectives, not spawning anything & simply existing to be destroyed. Post patch they appear to be continually spawning Boss & LT level Rikti before I even see them, resulting in packs of 20+ bosses by the time I make it to any portal after the first, who subsequently insta-gib me, and I mean that literally. Engage>Dead, before I can even register my HP going down. As I lay there dead watching the portal it summoned probably 5-10 MORE boss Rikti over the course of a couple of minutes. It might be due to my difficulty scale (+1x8), but it's a mission I've solo'd on this setting dozens of times across my characters & if this is intentional it seems completely unnecessary & renders what was previously a solid mission basically un-completable. Spawning bosses after the portals are engaged might be ok, but if they're going to continually spawn things before we encounter them they should be minions & LTs.

There's a lot of discussion here about not using travel powers in combat; are these things that won't work in Hover/CJ? Like the fly protection unique looks prefect for Hover-based characters (basically all of mine, I love it for combat movment). IDK how useful the jumping unique is & I understand that SS has no equivalent to either, but Hover specifically seems like it could get a lot of benefit from grabbing at least a 2/3 set bonus worth for these.

I'd like to put in a request for an Accuracy/Endrdx DSO to be put on the list of new combos. There are A LOT of situations where I want a strong acc & endrdx boost for a power that either does no damage or has reached the ED caps (my /Time MMs could reallyuse it!). Thanks!

For reasons I don't really understand, IDF in particular is one of the few groups that gives my current WM/Bio a fair amount of trouble. BP are the only other group that seems to cause a decent amount of trouble, but it's much less. I haven't tried to solo much Cim content so IDK how well he'd hold up there but praetorian clocks haven't given me any trouble to speak of.

Some additional notes: I actually moved the stealth run IO to sprint so that I could drop a lvl 50+5 run speed IO into SS. That might be overkill, but between it & the Musculature alpha i hit the cap for running speed w/ both up. Depending on your primary you may not need to invest as heavily in endrdx & +recovery as i did; WM is very end-heavy. Hover is taken bc you need one of CJ/Stealth/ Hover to hit 40% def before Barrier & it's my personal preference for in-combat movement. You could replace it w/ one of the others if you like, which would allow you to devote most of those slots elsewhere (hover is slow & end intensive w/o some slots and/or build support). That's all I can think of atm.

I almost never export builds so IDK if this will look "good", but this is my current WM/Bio scrapper that's had about as easy of a time soloing stuff as any character I've made to date: (A) Empty (A) Empty (A) Empty (A) Empty (A) Empty (A) Panacea - +Hit Points/Endurance (11) Miracle - +Recovery (A) Performance Shifter - EndMod (13) Performance Shifter - Chance for +End (46) Endurance Modification IO Level 49: Speed Phase Level 50: Musculature Radial Paragon Level 50: Freedom Phalanx Reserve Level 50: Portal Jockey Level 50: The Atlas Medallion Level 50: Task Force Commander Level 10: Defensive Adaptation Level 10: Efficient Adaptation Level 10: Offensive Adaptation ------------ Some build clarifications: I use the PVP Def IOs both for their set bonuses & the fact that you can boost them & still retain their set bonuses at any level, ala purple IOs; this allows me to cap defenses & get decent endrdx +a LOTGF with only 4 slots in each power. I put the 50% crit proc into Shatter bc the way I have it slotted is about 50% proc chance & has a chance to proc on every mob in AOE. I might get on & talk more in a minute, but ye baby is awake now...

Green is powers taken, yellow is powers you CAN take but haven't, what you're calling purple i always considered Grey; they're "grayed out" because you haven't met the prerequisites needed to take them. In the case of your SS there you're not eligible bc you need to take more powers in the TP pool to qualify for the last 2 powers... there might also be level requirements but I'm not sure (level is the requirement for primary/secondary powersets & I feel like pools used to have level requirements but IDK if they still do.

I disagree that Bio is super squishy, though I'll say upfront that it takes a pretty sizeable investment to take full advantage of it. If you can afford the winter & scrapper IOs & do some smart slotting (divide the ATO that gives 5% S/L def as a 3-set into 2 powers for one), & pick up the Barrier destiny you can get softcapped to all the mainstream damage types (S/L/F/C/E/N). Layering that over some decent regen & a very good Absorption shield (my shield is about 1k when my max HP is around 1700-1800, lasts for 30s & recharges at about the same time) makes for a pretty tanky character. It is relatively weak to the old CDF problem, but that isn't out of the ordinary overall.

Ah, you're right of course. More to your point, I don't think I'd like it any better if the only change was making it easier to track. It would be nice of course, but one of the biggest problems w/ PM is that Insight is unreliable AND has pretty poor uptime. If GPB is going to continue to consume Insight then Insight itself needs some type of overhaul. My preferences would be for either significantly reducing/completely removing the lockout time for it, or some combination of those & a reliable way to proc it. I seem to have touched on this earlier in the thread, but I think something that could really help the set is for Concentration to grant Insight (ignoring the lockout if that mechanic is retained). Several other sets have their BU equivalent fill or proc that set's resources upon activation, not sure why Psy doesn't. Don't know how much this would actually increase uptime, but I think it would be a great help to be able to reliably cast a couple of Insight'd Mass Levs to start combat. Anyone else got some suggestions? We've talked a lot about what's wrong with the set in this thread, IDK that we've had a lot of suggestions on what we think would make it better.

I actually feel somewhat the opposite. Especially after sticking 2 purple damage procs into the power it seems to hit pretty hard... but it's slow & my bigger concern is that it consumes Insight. In most combat encounters I'd rather have Insight boosting multiple AOE damage attacks instead of giving a single extra hit to an already pretty strong ST attack, which gives me motivation to NOT use it. IMO this is the biggest fundamental design flaw in PM; Insight seems better used buffing multiple attacks than it does being consumed to cause an already strong ST attack to do more ST damage, which makes you not want to use an attack w/ potentially 2 strong procs & that seems intended to be the main source of DPS in its attack chain. OFC the issue is compounded by the issue of resistances, so it depends a lot on you're attacking. Due to the discussed resistance problem & the damage split for GPB, there's an unfortunate # of mob types that can make it feel like you're attacking w/ a psy-powered Funoodle... I've mostly given up on changes for PM in the short term, because every time I think about whether it's going to get changed soon I immediately think "Really, they should probably do something about EN first..." Since I haven't heard even a hint of anything to that effect, I'm mentally twiddling my thumbs on this issue...

Not really sure either, but I thought it was one of the last sets released on live, or one of those that was on the PTR right before shutdown... But this is based solely on a vague recollection of someone on these forums saying the Live devs didn't do a great job on it, so take that with a grain of salt.

But like I said, Leap will 1-shot almost minion it hits. Recharge doesn't matter when they're all dead instantly. Even if it didn't, following it up w/ Rending Flurry will DEFINITELY kill any minion they both hit, well before a 2nd Mass Lev is available. CC & mitigation aren't terribly important when you can insta-gib most of a mob group before they can even attack you. Secondarily, even sets w/ similar or better CC have significantly more damage than Psi. WM is chock full of Disorients, KD, & KU abilities, has more AOE & is still one of the top performing ST sets. It does Smashing, which is probably one of the only damage types worse than Psy, but it's ST DPS is around ~21% higher than PM's attack chain so that barely matters. Best that can be said for PM over WM Is Mass Lev is easier to hit more targets with than Pendulum, but it's not like Pendulum is difficult to aim & still hits a large # of targets with relative ease. Like I said before, anything Psy melee does, another melee set does as well or better & w/ more damage to boot. Thus my consternation, as it's like they penalized PM's damage output for having a "good" damage type, even though it's not that great of a damage type in PVE content... Edit: I said Pendulum, I meant Crowd Control...

The 2 strongest characters I've made in my CoH time are both SM/Bio; ones a Brute & the other is a Stalker. The Stalker is significantly better at ST damage because Hemorrhage from hide is just nuts & w/ the Hide proc ATO you can stick a hiden Hemo on a mob every few seconds. The Brute is better at basically everything else, and it's not like his ST is bad, it's just not as ridiculous. Survivability is the biggest difference, and it's a very significant step up, but that's to be expected with a Brute vs. a Stalker. The important bit is to stick at least 4 damage procs & the -Res proc into Leap. On my Brute I did all 5 available damage procs & the -res, and on my stalker I did a +5 Armageddon: Damage, but others have suggested putting some accuracy and/or -rech into that slot is more to their preference. I can't remember the names of anything, but the rotation is the 5-1-2-5 or 5-1-2-1-5 (where the # is the tier of power) depending on your recharge speed. I have a hard time playing other melee sets now because SM has spoiled me...

My point was more that the damage output is pretty poor to start with (the only sets that have lower base DPS are Elec w/ a better damage type & the 2 sets that have a perma-buildup mechanic), then it has a damage type that's oddly weaker than most competing sets, AND THEN, on top of those things, it also doesn't do anything particularly well when compared to other sets. That's a trifecta of blah, and AFAIK it doesn't even have any pure-Psy attacks to bypass the more common defenses. GPB is nice & all, but the animation delay is so long that in groups, mobs will frequently die from team damage before the hit comes in from GPB. The <10s difference in CD (with a full lvl 50 build) between Leap & Mass Lev doesn't seem like a particularly big deal when compared to the 5 ft larger radius & almost 2x the damage of multiple types due to Leap having ~90% chance to Proc anything put in it. Recharge doesn't matter all that much when the alpha strike from Leap 1-shots almost any minion it hits. What it feels like the set really needs is either a shortening of animation and/or recharge times, primarily on GPB (ideally it would do somewhat lower damage but result in a net gain in DPA) or more to my preference, a significant overhaul of mob resistances to make Psy actually a solid damage type (an idea I'd file under "unlikely to ever happen"). Other things I'd settle for are a better functioning Insight having no lockout and/or not be consumed by GPB, having Concentration grant Insight even if it's on CD, or even shifting a larger portion of damage done to S/L (which is far more COMMONLY resisted but doesn't seem to be quite as heavily resisted). Anyway I'm just kinda frustrated cause there's a lot of stuff I like about the set, but it just seems like when you take everything together it's probably the worst Scrapper set we have available...

I've made a Psy/EnA Scrapper that's up to 28 right now & while I like the animations & "feel" of him pretty well, I already feel like his damage is going to be lackluster later in the game. Both my current in-game experience & the info on the Scrapper spreadsheet lead me to believe that it has relatively low ST DPS & doesn't seem to do any one thing particularly better than any of the other melee options. Tack on that Insight has pretty poor functionality & Psy being a great damage type vs. player characters but not that great vs NPCs & we've got a set that seems particularly underperforming relative to its competition. This lead me to pondering why the set is so lackluster. Mass levitate looks nice, but it doesn't seem appreciably better than, say, Footstomp on an SS Brute. I'd say it's just outright worse than a properly slotted Savage Leap, and Sav. Melee has both more AOE than PM & much higher ST damage to boot! Nothing else in the set seems particularly noteworthy, certainly nothing that would warrant it being the 2nd lowest performer in ST DPS AND having a mediocre damage type. Anyone got some insight here? Have I missed something that makes it all worth it? Should we start a feedback thread to ask for buffs and/or explanations as to why it's in this state? I really want to like it, but there just doesn't seem be a good reason to pick it over another option other than I like the way it looks (& that can only go so far.) OFC Energy Melee is probably in worse shape & it doesn't seem to high on the list of things to be fixed either, so this may be fruitless... Looking forward to some feedback here.