Seroster01

Given that my other thread got 0 responses (that weren't me) , let's try a smaller, more focused set of inquiries: What is the optimal Widow ST rotation & how much +Rech is needed for it? Is Spin even worth using with its end cost? What about Eviscerate? Trying to not be completely useless at AoE. Do people who have fully IOd out Widows have problems with Endurance? Cause I certainly do at 30. In a similar vein, how much End use/sec would y'all say is too much when fully kitted out? Basically trying to establish how many & which toggles I can run & still be functional. I've survived thus far without Aid Self, is it worth the power & enhancement slots needed to be useful? Ditto for Field Medic, but I'm not worried about the slots there, just getting the End recovery. Please don't feel pressured to give input on all of these questions. If folks have input on any individual piece that's all I want. That's all for now, hopefully this will lead to more discussion.

This is the part that left me confused; I saw where you referenced the Special Cases section, but I couldn't find said section in the sheet. I was reading it off of my cell phone & this isn't the first time I've had some trouble locating anything more than the rudimentary info in the spreadsheets I open with it (likely due to general lack of screen area if I want to read what's in them). I hadn't really thought about that till you brought this up, so I'll probably go look at it again now that I'm back from my trip & can look on my PC.

I'd gathered this was the case from other threads & the combination of how OP it's supposed to be & the general character aesthetics involved seem right up my normal alley... but for some reason I'm just not very interested in playing it. More inclined to play Fire/Bio or WM/Bio. I think if I make a TW/ it'll probably be /WP. I've got a very low-level TW/Elec scrapper & I didn't dig it quite like I thought I would, at least up to the level I played him. May try again later...

The second part of the title seems pretty self explanatory. Ad to the first part, I have a few questions that are primarily "Real Performance" questions. I've read the spreadsheet post & it left me with the distinct impression that several of the set's listed #s in the sheet weren't very indicative of true in-game performance due to buffs & Debuffs that were ignored for the tests). Question 1 is a general "How good is War Mace?" I always had a moderate interest in making a WM -something- back on live, but I never really around to it because I didn't feel keen to play it on a Tanker or Brute & I don't even remember it being a set available to Scrappers when I quit playing (doesn't mean it didn't happen, I just don't remember it...). The spreadsheet made it look pretty solid for ST, though it has the obvious downside of being a purely Smashing set. Are there any slotting shenanigans for WM? A more important question for me is how good is it at AOE? Crowd Control seems nice in terms of numerical tuning, but is it easy to get a decent # of mobs in the cone? Fire/Bio is one of the combos I'm most interested in & seemslike it'd probably end up a solid pairing, but my 2 questions for it: 1.) are there any pitfalls I'm not aware of that would make this a poor combo? 2.) how common is high fire resistance on mobs? Radiation & Psi melee are sets I find interesting but know basically nothing about. How does Psi melee perform, & how much impact does the "a relatively small # of things are resistant to Psi, but those things HEAVILY resist it" issue affect the set? Rad was apparently hard to model in ST for the spreadsheet, does anyone have knowledge or experience of how it performs in the AOE department? The last set I'm curious about is Staff. The power descriptions sound interesting to me. I'm a bit hazy on my recollection for staff on the spreadsheet but my vague impression is it didn't perform very well for the given scenario. Was this due to something that wasn't accounted for or difficult to model? & does it at least have decent AOE? Remembered 1 last line of questioning, Claws was towards the bottom of the lmlist of performers I think, but I've heard it's one of the better performing sets in-game. Did they leave Follow up out of the equation? What's Claws performance like in-game? And is does anyone know if it ends up better or worse than Widow claws? Thanks for any insight you folks can provide.

I will preface the following by saying I'm not SUPER familiar with the i24 IO balancing that took place late when the servers were still live, or much of the "i25" changes in general. That being said, what I say about typed defense seems to still be an issue cause I've heard other folks on these forums discuss it. To the actual question: WP was in a tough spot for something like this last I played, because it's built around having multiple/redundant types of protection, but all of them are all individually low-impact. This works well in most content because having multiple layers of mitigation generally increases the value of each. Theres a couple of problems with trying to cap both resistance & defense for WP. The first is that it has uneven resistance levels depending on the type. WPs resistance abilities are primarily concentrated on high-ish levels for S/L (not super useful for Fire Farms) w/ relatively low levels of resistance for all the other types. On the other hand, it has higher levels of defense for the more "exotic" damage types, but due to this concept the WPs defenses are type-based defense instead of positional. The first makes it hard to get high levels of fire resistance like you'd want, and the latter makes it hard to efficiently maximize your defenses with IOs because typed-defense bonus values are relatively low AND relatively scarce compare to positional bonuses, in addition to being much narrower in what's affected by them. My suggestion, if your primary concern is Fire Farms (due to the combination of the issues listed above & WP having low resistance to Defense Debuffs) would probably be to hyper-focus boosting resistance & defense specifically for fire/cold (these typea are always paired in set bonuses AFAIK). Slot both the 3% def to all enh, and if it's convenient I'd probably suggest trying to get solid S/L resistance too, cause those still seem to be hugely impactful for the more common mob types & there seems to be a lot of set bonuses for it anyway. Take whatever max health bonuses that you can along the way, as a lot of WPs survivability comes from its regeneration abilities & having higher max HP will increase the effectiveness of those regenerative abilities because they're based on % of max HP. In addition to higher HP pools make it easier to survive spike damage & both factors again contribute to the "multiple layers" reinforcement. If you're looking to build for a more generalized build than just farming fire maps I'd drop the focus on building most typed defenses & just focus on boosting your various resistances & S/L defense if it's convenient. Resistance set bonuses got a large boost in the later periods of the game, and being focused on Resistance means you'd be less impacted by the old issue of Cascading Defense Failure. AFAIK WP has little to no Defense Debuff Resistance, and as such gets its defenses stripped very easily if you're fighting the wrong mob types. CDFs wouldn't be any real concern on Fire Farm maps, but it's a very common issue vs a lot of normal end-game mob types. The little bit of playing around in Pines that I had time for made it seem like it'd still be really hard to boost ALL of these values to cap on a WP toon, but if you focus on the more impactful ones you can probably boost those high-impact values to levels that would make you exceptionally hard to kill.

It's probably just because I'm pretty out of the loop on all of this, but I don't really understand what you're asking for? Are you saying it's not worth it to craft IOs because of the crafting fee? If that's your issue, you should probably just change your spending habits? From what I hear the market manipulation tools built into these servers means that its usually cheaper to buy rare IOs than to craft them bc of Enhancement Converter shenanigans. Since this is done to keep IO costs low & (along with other systems) seems to have succeeded, what would really be gained from removing the fee? If that's not the issue, what would removing crafting fees accomplish? These may all be dumb questions, I just don't have any real understanding of what removing crafting fees would accomplish.

I wasn't sure about how good Res set bonuses are considered now. I've only had a very little bit of time for horsing around in Pines (came down to TX to see my grandparents), but from what I saw the +Res set bonuses seem to have been buffed A LOT. Like, 2-3x what I remembered them being when I last played on live. Seems like this was done at the very end of live, so I'm not sure if the buffs were considered significant enough to pull slotting for +Res out of the scrap heap...

Where does Demons fall in this spectrum? It sounds like the Prince is relatively powerful, but the write up above didn't really say where the damage was concentrated for the set. I saw the other thread in these forums about slotting damage procs, and it sounded like slotting the Prince with them seemed pretty powerful. Not sure if that's even a good idea, but it seemed pretty interesting to me. On the subject of Slotting, how do MMs usually slot? I don't think I've put much time into one since IOs were a thing. I had a Thugs MM (/dark I think) I played a lot which I think had IOs, but I didn't have a very firm grasp of IOs at the time, or a lot of influence to devote to them. In particular, I can't remember much of anything about the pet IO sets. Sounds like there's some pretty solid uniques for the archetype, are there any solid sets? Is it realistic and/or is there a decent return on investment to push defense or resistance set bonuses with some of these secondaries so that the MM doesn't get insta-gibbed? Last general question for anyone who wants to answer, what's peoples opinions on which would work better for Demons, /Thermal or /Sonic? (Those are both available aren't they?) I always wanted a Sonic support character, but I never really found a supporting set I liked in any of my attempts to make one, regardless of class. Seemed I always have a rough time in CoH without some variety of self-heal. On the subject of these 2 sets, I can vaguely remember that they made all the "shield-style" buffs AOE to simplify group buffing, but I can't remember if that applied it to the caster or not. That one's probably an easy answer, but my computer is in another state so I can't check for myself atm. Thanks for answering all my random questions! ;D

I quit playing Live around 1-2 years before shutdown, & as such it seems I missed quite a few changes to IOs & such in the later stages of the game, while at the same they added many more layers to the Incarnate system & several new power sets were introduced. Given that & adding in the FURTHER changes from i25, I'm curious about how the sets compare to each other (mostly the pet sets). The 2 MM sets I'm most interested in hearing about are Demons & Time. From what I hear it seems that those 2 sets don't have much synergy, but are there other sets that pair well with one or the other? I always wanted a Demon MM but I'm not sure how well the set works in practice. Last I was playing, robots were typically considered the best overall set, due to being ranged, very survivable, and having both a solid damage type & very solid AOE for an MM. That was probably followed by Thugs, due to having very good LT mobs & a solid Boss pet (though their Boss pet always had very questionable AI.) Ninja's were looked down upon because they weren't very good at AOE while ALSO having pretty questionable AI & pathing, but did very good ST DPS if well-managed. Undead were considered too easy to kill to be very useful (I think it was due to having a weakness to S/L). Mercs were considered just bad overall as far as I can remember. Did any of this change significantly? How do Demons & Animals compare to those? The only other question I can think of is have there been any changes to IOs that have significantly affected MMs, or new strategies on how to build them? Thanks for answering any of these!

I'll look at Pines when I get back to my PC tomorrow (it's in a different state, since I'm visiting my grandparents right now). Was mostly curious if any of them were considered the to be a particularly "optimal" choice, since I don't think I even know what type/variety of powers they give.

For a bit of clarification, I knew about the Sentinel getting a version of it in Dark Blast (that's what really makes me want to play one). What I was talking about is the thing that inspired me to want it in a normal set was seeing a version of it in what I'm pretty sure was Ghost Widow's PPP for one of the other classes that I played back on live. The brute or scrapper set I think. Maybe for SoAs? Could also be it was just in one of the APPs, IDK. But anyway, I haven't really looked at Sentinel APPs, so IDK what's in them. Are any of them considered a cut above the rest?

Forgot another question, is there a suggestion for what Incarnate stuff to pick for a widow? Mostly curious about the Alpha slot power/enhancement.

Nah, I've always wanted a Dark Blast character with a Fireball-like power (I think Ghost Widow PPP has one in it?). Sentinel DB finally gives us that, so I really want to make a character around it.

So I really want to make a Dark Blast sentinel & pair it with a defense-based set. The problem is I can't decide on which defense set. SR seems like my preferred choice because AFAIK it's got the highest level of Defense Debuff Resistance by quite a bit, meaning there's a low chance of CDF & the addition of dark's --tohight is going to make it very hard to hit. The downsides as I understand it are that the set is almost completely a one-trick pony. No real resistance buffs, no regeneration bonuses or heals, etc. The version I'm used to also doesn't have any recovery buffs that I can think of, but it seems like I recall the Sent version having some +rec rolled in somewhere. The other 2 sets that seem pertinent are Energy Aura & Ninjutsu. I'll be upfront on these that I have almost no experience & only a very vague understanding of either of them. IIRC sentinel Ninjutsu has both a click-heal & a click-endurance recovery power that don't require mob-siphoning to be effective, which seems pretty nice. The rest of the "bonus" powers seem kinda meh to me. Energy aura I barely know about, as I don't think I've ever played it & I certainly can't remember much about it now that I'm not in front of my PC to look at it. Anyone got suggestions/build tips for one of these? If I've missed any defense sets that are better options LMK. Again, I'm not in front of my computer (traveling right now) so I could be missing something or be mistaken on what sets & powers do what.

As per title I have a series of high-level-overview Widow questions. On Live servers I made a very IO'd out Crab spider that was ridiculously hard to kill, ran double leadership, and had tons of def & res debuffing AOE attacks built into his kit. He was exceptionally valuable in group content & for soloing large groups of mobs, but had very meh single target power on his own. I'd always wanted to make a Widow build with similar levels of resource investment, but I never got around to making one before the servers shut down. Now I have a 2nd chance, but I'm not super familiar with the Widow's ins & outs, and info about both late-live & i25 content seems just about impossible to find on the net. So without further ado: I've seen in several threads here that Widow claws are one of the best DPS chains in the game. Is this strictly for ST? Cause that's great & all, but A LOT of CoX's combat revolves around swiftly killing large groups of minions. As such I'd like to know how well they do in AOE scenarios, and what powers & rotations look like for those situations. How does the Night Widow vs. Fortuna choice affect the first question (and in general really), and how much of an impact is it when comparing the optimal choice to the other? Kind of a tangential question, but it seems IO have undergone significant adjustments since the last time I played. Im not sure if this occurred after I quit playing live or if it's the i25 stuff. In particular, it seems like Resistance bonuses were significantly increased, enough that it allows stacking of resistance bonuses to levels that aren't essentially insignificant (resistance set bonuses were so small that they were just about useless last I was playing). Question part A: is getting a significant amount of Resistance from set bonuses worth chasing? Part B: are there any particular sets or unique IOS that are very important to work into the build? (I'm definitely going to use both the 3% defs). I don't think AT sets were in the game last I played & I know there's 2 of them. Is one better than the other? Should I try to work both into the build? Part C: What sets should I Attune vs. Boost, and which powers should those each of those generally go in? Last general question I have is about the old Cascading Defense Failures (CDF) problem. Have there been any changes to reduce the impact of CDFs, either in general or for SoA's specifically? Even on my Crab CDFs were a huge problem for the small amount of Incarnate stuff I did, and I'm pretty sure he had significantly better base resitances (but didn't make much use of IOs for this cause they weren't worth chasing at the time). If folks can answer some or all of these I'd be very grateful!